michaelzimmer.org

The city of Chicago has started to integrate its network of CCTV surveillance cameras to its 911 call center, creating a robust infrastructure to allow dispatchers to visually observe, in real time, the location of many 911 calls throughout the city. According to the city’s press release:

When a 911 call is received, the CAD system scans the OVS network to find any safety camera within 150 feet of the address of the call.

Within seconds, real time video of the location appears on the call taker’s screen.

This story in the NY Times notes the typical privacy concerns with this kind of public surveillance infrastructure:

[O]pponents of Mr. Daley’s use of public surveillance cameras described the new system as a potential Big Brother intrusion on privacy rights.

“If a 911 caller reports that someone left a backpack on the sidewalk, will the camera image of someone who appears to be of Arab or South Asian descent make police decide that person is suspicious?” asked Ed Yohnka of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

“There seems to be this incredibly voracious appetite on the part of the city to link up cameras to the 911 system,” Mr. Yohnka said. “But there are just no longitudinal statistics that prove that surveillance cameras reduce crime. They just displace crime.”

Nothing too surprising in the discourse surrounding this system, except for this quote in the Times article:

Some experts, including Albert Alschuler, a law professor at Northwestern University, say the surveillance cameras and updated 911 system do not violate privacy rights because the cameras are installed in public locations.

Huh? I’m not familiar with Prof. Alschuler’s work, or what kind of “expert” he is, but I’m quite surprised that he would take such a binary approach to privacy, and not recognize that a right to privacy in public often exists (within social and contextual norms, if not the law).

Wyatt Ditzler, one of our PhD students, provides further comments on this story, noting a concern over who has access to the system and the retention policies of the video captured. Ditzler also provides a “slight joke,” suggesting that “Perhaps video surveillance, open to the public, covering all governmental offices is in order.” Many have actually called for this form mutual surveillance and full disclosure to everyone, such as in Brin’s Transparent Society. The problem with this vision of society, as Bruce Schneier has pointed out, is that it fails to account for dissimilarities in power relations. Law enforcement can do a lot more to affect my life if they know all my secrets, than I can do to affect theirs.

Privacy, Privacy in Public, Surveillance

Following up, the DVD for the hit action/thriller movie “Eagle Eye” has been released. The second disc of the 2-disc special edition includes the commentary “Is My Cellphone Spying on Me?”, featuring reflections on technology and surveillance by the actors and producers of the film, Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Clearinghouse, and myself.

And, yes, I talk to fast when I get excited about a topic.

Cellphones, Privacy, Surveillance

If you share my appreciation for the ctrl[space]: Rhetorics of Surveillance exhibit and book, linking surveillance, theory, and art, you might be interested in this call for papers for a special issue of Surveillance & Society on “Performance, New Media, and Surveillance”:

Special Issue of Surveillance & Society | www.surveillance-and-society.org

Performance, New Media, and Surveillance | guest editorsJohn E. McGrath and Robert W. Sweeny

The relationship between the visual arts and surveillance has been explored through large scale exhibitions (e.g.: CTRL [Space], ZKM), and texts such as Loving Big Brother (McGrath, 2004) have introduced questions of performance and performativity into the surveillance debate. However, as the technological possibilities available to artists grow, and the social impact of surveillance is increasingly recognized, there is a need for a thorough examination of the uses of surveillance in the visual arts, particularly in the genres of new media and performance art, where issues regarding technological engagement and embodiment come to the fore. The editors of this special volume of Surveillance and Society are seeking papers that examine the complexities of surveillance in new media and performance art. We intent to acknowledge various issues including but not limited to:

• (Re)Examination of New Media and Performance Art through surveillance themes and theories.
• Modes of spectatorship and participation in New Media and Performance Art that are complicated through surveillance technologies.
• Examples from technological and live artistic practices that present novel forms of interaction and engagement.
• Analysis of the gaze in its various forms (male, actuarial, scopic) as related to New Media and/or Performance Art.
• Discussions regarding visualities produced in the spaces of surveillance, including the visual culture of technologies that measure gait, map surveilled populations, and monitor public spaces.
• Examinations and articulations of surveillance space (including data space) through artistic practice.
• Explorations of the performative nature or surveillance society and space.
• Political, resistant and utopian currents in surveillance art practice.

We are also open to related subjects not outlined above. Projects by artists working in new media would be of particular interest, particularly those that make use of the digital nature of the Journal of Surveillance and Society. These might include media and methods such as hypertext, digital video, animation, videogames, and social/tactical/locative media.

Please contact the guest editors, John E. McGrath johnemcgrath@yahoo.com or Robert W. Sweeny sweeny@iup.edu in advance to discuss proposed topics.

All papers must be completed and submitted electronically, no later than March 31st, 2009, but after January 1st 2009 when the new Open Journal System-powered website will be fully operational.

The issue will be published October 31st, 2009.

CFP, Surveillance

UW-Milwaukee has issued a nice press release regarding my contribution to the DVD bonus material for the action/thriller movie “Eagle Eye,” which features sophisticated surveillance technologies as one of its plot devices.

The closing paragraph pretty much sums up where we are on the project:

At this point, with “Eagle Eye” flying high at the box office, Zimmer isn’t sure when the DVD will come out or how much of his interview will be on the final version. Still, he says, it was a fun experience and an opportunity to educate the public about some of the issues the movie focuses on. ”My hope is that movies like this can raise awareness of the privacy and surveillance implications of new technology, and prompt a dialogue. We need to find ways to benefit from these emerging technologies without threatening the liberties we enjoy.”

I’m hoping to get a stand-alone copy of the interview to distribute for educational purposes. I’ll keep everyone posted….

Privacy, Surveillance

The Information Warfare Monitor, a joint project of the Advanced Network Research Group, part of the Cambridge Security Programme, The SecDev Group and the Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, has released major investigative report, Breaching Trust: An analysis of surveillance and security practices on China’s TOM-Skype platform (PDF of full report), detailing a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words on the popular Skype platform. The NYTimes writes about it here.

The major findings of the report include:

• The full text chat messages of TOM-Skype users, along with Skype users who have communicated with TOM-Skype users, are regularly scanned for sensitive keywords, and if present, the resulting data are uploaded and stored on servers in China.
• These text messages, along with millions of records containing personal information, are stored on insecure publicly-accessible web servers together with the encryption key required to decrypt the data.
• The captured messages contain specific keywords relating to sensitive political topics such as Taiwan independence, the Falun Gong, and political opposition to the Communist Party of China.
• Our analysis suggests that the surveillance is not solely keyword-driven. Many of the captured messages contain words that are too common for extensive logging, suggesting that there may be criteria, such as specific usernames, that determine whether messages are captured by the system.

This passage from the report’s foreword sums up the scope of this discovery:

While there have been other recent revelations of corporate complicity in China’s censorship and  surveillance regime – the Yahoo case involving Shi Tao and others comes to mind  — the facts laid out in Breaching Trust are of such massive proportions that these other cases pale in comparison.

The lessons to be drawn from this case are numerous and issues of corporate social responsibility will be raised. If there was any doubt that your electronic communications – even secure chat – can leave a trace, Breaching Trust will put that case to rest.  This is a wake up call to everyone who has ever put their (blind) faith in the assurances offered up by network intermediaries like Skype. Declarations and privacy policies are no substitute for the type of due diligence that the research put forth here represents.

Skype, Surveillance

During my studies in privacy and surveillance theory, I’ve gained an interest in technologies of obfuscation and resistance. Especially simple ones that nearly any average citizen can implement.

TrackMeNot is a great example: a simple Firefox extension that periodically issues randomized search queries to popular search engines, thereby hiding users’ actual search trails in a cloud of ‘ghost’ queries, significantly increasing the difficulty of aggregating such data into accurate or identifying user profiles. While it might not fully protect one’s privacy or create a veil of full anonymity, TrackMeNot acts as an expression of resistance, and draws attention to the practice of search query data retention.

I recently came across another example: DIY anti-CCTV glasses: attach infra-red LEDs to a pair of sunglasses, and you become a blur of white light to many CCTV cameras. There’s a great video showing how to do it here.

Commenters at BoingBoing and Schneier have doubted the full efficacy of such a technique, but, as is often the case, technologies of obfuscation and restistence aren’t meant to be 100% fool-proof. Rather, they are meant to tip the balance of power back — even if only somewhat — into the hands of average citizens, and bring attention to the controversal aspects of the growing ubiquity and normalization of everyday surveillance and privacy invasions.

Privacy, Surveillance