How Britain Exported Next-Generation Surveillance
medium.com
medium.com
Mobile phones: location tracking (they keep the cell IDs your phone is connecting to, with a time-stamp), texts, calls meta-data, calls audio.
CCTV: ANPR, face recognition
Internet: everything
Payments: everything except cash (I'm surprised cash is still legal)
The list goes on.. Public transport, hotels reservations, etc.
Don't worry. American corporations are thinking far ahead.
"Branding Nigeria: MasterCard-backed I.D. is also a debit card and a passport" [1]
[1] http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/25/business/branding-nigeria-...
The Eternal Value of Privacy
http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securi...
On one level, my gut instinct is "mass surveillance of innocent people is wrong"... But the moment I think of it from the law enforcement point of view, I realise how desperately I'd want that bulk data and how damn useful it would be.
I can easily see myself, in another lifetime, being the one who said "Hey, you know if we stick a camera here, I can get a computer to read the number plates and beep if it sees a car we need to stop." - That's nothing other than a great use of technology to do what a human could do, but much more efficiently. A good hack, nothing not to like about it at all.
At first it'd seem only reasonable to use that technology ONLY to flag vehicles that were known to be of interest at the time. Keeping dates/times/plates of innocent vehicles might not be right. But then again... How seductive to sling all that data into a database. How powerful, how efficient, how god damned _useful_ it would be to be able to go back in time and, for any given number plate, rule a vehicle's presence in or out of suspicion. OK, clearly a possibility of "wrong place, wrong time" for the unlucky, but an equal chance of such historical information actually verifying an alibi, proving that a person of interest is as innocent as they claim.
The extent to which you could get a whole lot of law enforcement done, purely with a big database and some well-written SQL queries... It's seductive. If I were law enforcement, I'd want that /so/ bad.
I wasn't a fan of "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide" before the Snowden revelations, or after. But today I find myself realising just how useful the results of such surveillance /could/ be. I wonder if I've just given in, taken the cowardly way out and somehow convinced myself to be comfortable with the idea of such intrusion because it's obviously never going to end, or whether my mind on the subject has been genuinely changed.
Quite a quandary. Still not sure where I stand on the issue now.
It's just doing "what a human could do, but much more efficiently" - I could go and stand by the roads and watch and take notes myself, so why is this obviously public information, collected by taxpayer funds, locked in closed databases?
Except it's not what a human could do; I couldn't practically do that; for one thing I can't be in more than one place at a time, and for another I can't dedicate my life to writing down registration plates with no breaks, no income, and no sleep. Similarly, the police could not do it on bulk scale - they can't fund enough people to track every major road junction.
Adding up ten numbers is something a person could do and a computer could do quicker. Adding up ten million numbers is something it feels like a person could do, at first thought, but they really couldn't. Not in a useful time, not without too much error. "Quantity has a quality all it's own", and all that.
80% of sexual abuse of minors happens within existing social contexts, that is "family and friends".
It would be useful to place cameras in every single private room and have them be automatically monitored and the live feed passed to some on-staff LEO when software considers anything suspect.
Are you at peace with that? If so, why? If not, why not?
(Yes, it's an extreme example. Both in terms of privacy intrusion and in the potential of helping law enforcement with a 'worthy cause'. It's why I think this example is particularly helpful to consider one's position)
A video recording taken inside someone's private home is a world away from a single data point of a car's number plate being noted in a public location at a given date and time.
You've actually made public surveillance sound entirely reasonable. This is not the answer I was hoping for! :)
A video camera in a private home would have a far higher chance of catching crimes in progress than a number plate camera ever did.
So he hasn't done anything to make public surveillance sound entirely reasonable but you're just getting out of it what you want to hear.
The scale:
- kill everybody (crimerate: 0)
- lock everybody up (only crimes committed in prison: probably pretty high)
- total surveillance (crimerate: pretty much what it is today but with a higher rate of solved crimes)
- moderate surveillance (crimerate: pretty much what it is today but with a lower rate of solved crimes)
- no surveillance (crimerate: pretty much what it is today but with an even lower rate of solved crimes, good old policework required to solve a crime, or stupidity on the part o the criminal (probably the majority))
I don't see much difference between total surveillance and no surveillance at all when it comes to the actual crime rate, only to the number of crimes solved and in what way they'll be solved.
Assuming that the majority of the crimes is committed by 'first offenders' is probably a mistake on my part so once all the criminals are safely locked up we can get rid of the surveillance, right?
Surveillance never was about crime. That's just how it is slowly pushed so you can't object against it, after all, who in their right mind wants more crime?
On the flip side, you're also ignoring the opportunity for abuse of surveillance, which it may make sense to consider additional crime.
Most people are decent and most criminals are not smart enough to evaluate their chances of getting caught rationally, if they did then the prisons wouldn't be as full as they are.
The chances of getting caught if you're committing a crime are plenty high as it is, and yet we still have repeat offenders. As rule criminals are not capable of seeing the consequences of their actions, don't know the penalties for the crimes they commit and are frequently not even in control of what they're doing.
It's a complex situation, but surveillance does not seem - to me - to be a major factor. If it were then the crimerate in London would be around 0 today.
Like mandatory schooling, starting at school level, going through to public/national mandatory TV time. Lets say 10 minutes a day in public/national TV in prime time. Where 5 could be spent on science and teaching and another 5 on social schooling. Quick facts and information.
And not something like in Europe right now, where everyone is possible predator. Just proper education created by top specialists, not direct blaming and scaring, but using psychological tricks to make people understand what is wrong and where to look for help. There are countries that figured this out, where violence is not tolerated, like Sweden, Norway...
Imagine if UPS placed cameras giving a 360 degree view on all of their vehicles, ran it through license place recognition to give a database of observations each having plate number, time, and location, and then allowed lookups or algorithms to be run for a price or subscription fee.
Any company with a large network of vehicles could do this, or it could be done less effectively but more cheaply with cameras on property. It would be easy to pool the data or sell it to anyone. In some ways it is similar to doing large scale face recognition, except it is much easier with current technology.
The UK is one of the most surveilled nations on earth, yet has one of the highest crime rates in western Europe.
If you want to truly impact crime rates, then put resources into fixing social problems.
But what you need to consider is not responsible use of the collected data, but the flipside, irresponsible, illegal use of the data by individuals who have access.
I used to care, years ago - but there is no escaping it. The real question is how can we deal with such pervasive monitoring? I don't think anyone has a real answer, or has even tried to answer it (note that I'm not talking about pervasive monitoring by just one actor like the state, since what we will experience will be monitoring of all, by all).
In one episode, crew and officers were being transported while they slept to a pocket dimension and having their organs rearranged by sinister aliens. You would think at the very least, that would set off some alarms. But the computer never seems to keep track of people's whereabouts unless someone asks (for drama's sake, obviously, but still) or even that the first officer apparently was missing a kidney they had only twelve hours ago.
I don't remember getting a sense that the computer was actively keeping track on everyone's position, and constantly recording their movements, keystrokes and conversations.
It doesn't matter what we think the policy is if we can't control the "root" of the system, and we can't be sure we control the "root" without being able to check on people (ourselves) to make sure they haven't somehow wrested control from us.
"Trusting trust" gets even more crucial once nanotech starts to hit.
I don't like it but as far as my analysis has proceeded I can only imagine a humane-but-totalistic system being workable, and the best most widely-known image of such is (I think) Star Trek. ;-)
Already, you can begin to see pushback from other (many themselves) government and some companies like Apple, who both may be genuinely bothered by government intrusion and see "privacy" as a near-long-term necessity for selling products domestically but more importantly globally. It's true that Facebook is creepy, but it's also true that people have known that Facebook is creepy for years now and young people are leaving in droves.
Of course, nearly ubiquitous surveillance would be much more likely. Probably not all of our worst nightmares, but more than enough.
I personally believe (I even wrote a terrible paper about it that will never see the light of day) that the biggest and most pervasive threat to freedom in regards to privacy will lie in the intersection of (not strong but good enough) AI, social media, and the internet of things. Essentially, we're coming to a point at which our devices will be designed to interact with us emotionally, as well as socially, and as a result people will be trained to form deep emotional relationships with products as well as people. Imagine having a deep intellectual conversation with someone online, only that someone is a refrigerator, or a car. Imagine most of the friends you've grown up with are products, because most of your interaction is online.
Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't, but almost certainly it won't happen the way we currently predict. The future right after the moon landings isn't the one anyone would have predicted. We were supposed to be drinking Coca-Colas on Mars by now.
Although if it did happen, then i'm still not entirely certain the 'humane-but-totalistic' model necessarily works. In theory, yes, but in practice, if everyone knew everything about everyone else, this wouldn't necessarily balance power between the weak and the strong (and imbalance which exists in the real work, but not Star Trek) but would enable the strong to more easily dominate the weak. Because such systems can't be perfect, there must always be ways to exploit information asymmetry. Governments, corporations and criminals will always be more able to rig the system than will the common person.
I like Star Trek, but because it presents a Utopian ideal, i'm skeptical of using it as a springboard for describing actual potential future societies, because humans just don't work that way. Every other species on in the franchise was more human than the humans (purposely, because they were there to be mirrors on the 'unevolved' aspects of human nature.)
It is definitely neither cynicism nor wish-fulfillment that makes me think the future system (assuming we don't simply destroy ourselves or degenerate into some N. Korean nightmare) has to be totalistic, and that it will be humane.
I think it has to be "total" in the sense that in order to apply and enforce whatever policy we have, including policy around who gets to access and use surveillance data, somebody somewhere has to be looking at all the data and searching for violations.
Flipping it over, I don't see how any government can say to its people "Hey, we know for sure that no one is spying on you. (Except us.)" without spying on everyone to make sure.
So I don't see how we can avoid the technology forcing the "political, economic or societal forces" to adapt, rather than the other way around. At best most people would be content with some privacy-protecting measures that other people would simply find ways to circumvent, and since the circumventors have greater ability to act without the contented people even knowing about it, how would you stop them?
Effectively the U.S. agencies and their allies are already merging into one large "trustworthy" (for some measure of trust, for some subset of humans) information processing system.
Now, if we accept that somebody is going to have the panopticon the immediate concern becomes the nature of our rulers. I think the future cyber-totalitarian regime will be humane, but only because I have hope that humans are intrinsically good.
I have no hope that we can roll back or even curb the capabilities of our technology but I feel confident that we can enshrine and effect our highest values within the system we are so vigorously constructing.
[1] http://www.redlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html
1984! What a coincidence.
Surveillance on the other hand is easy. Everyone volunteers to carry a tracking and bugging device with them at all times and pays a monthly fee for the privilege. It is called a mobile telephone.
I've been getting around on public transit for quite a long time, but have been thinking of getting a car.
Now I've decided not to.
I'm a generally law-abiding citizen, but I simply do not wish to be tracked. How would you feel were someone to follow you around everywhere you went? Even if they kept their distance, never spoke to you our overtly harmed you in any way, it would be very disturbing.
Not to mention the huge incentives (>50% discount) for using a traceable RFID card as your "ticket" instead of paying with cash.
[0] http://boingboing.net/2009/08/31/london-bus-with-16-c.html from 2009 - newer buses, e.g. the 2012 "new" routemaster may well have more.
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon... from 2007.
As I recall it wasn't doing actual facial recognition, but object / shape recognition, and comparing the objects in an area over time. So you'd have the outline of a person sitting on a bench and if they're still there after all destinations served by that platform (obviously depending on the line) have had at least one train, it'd be flagged up as suspicious as apparently some jumpers like to contemplate first.
Of course there must be a fair few false positives - people waiting to meet friends to either travel together or head out maybe etc, heck - I've even met someone to buy a laptop on a tube platform before... and I don't know how well it would cope if the person moved about between trains - but that didn't seem to matter much for their use case, and I'm sure they must have better tech in place by now.
Sorry I can't be more precise with a source, but I'll let you know if I find anything helpful.
I'm never leaving my house ever again.
Now sit down here like a good little citizen and watch this lovely entertaining "programming" we have for you - and don't forget to buy some of the products we show you too - you know you need them really. ;)
Then you can ride the exact same route every day at exactly the same time wearing the same high visibility clothing that you wear every day, decorated 'Christmas tree' style in flashing lights. Just to make things easier for those that might track you, cruise along at 10-20 miles per hour, obeying the Highway Code every inch of the way.
Ah, but what about the mobile phone? You don't need that turned on whilst cycling. In fact, if you are used to babysitting the battery it makes sense to turn it off just for practicality reasons.
Ah, but what about the CCTV? Look at the route options, there is bound to be a park or canal tow path to take and, as well as a nice car-free ride you get to expose yourself to far fewer CCTV operators, although total CCTV absence is unlikely. Even then though, options are pretty good. You might take that 'winter warmer' coat off part way through your route. Or that bright yellow jacket is kind of ubiquitous, 'hard to spot' amongst the hordes of other cyclists with the same jacket. You can also legitimately completely cover your face with mask, sunglasses and helmet.
Even listening for a cyclist is not exactly easy, particularly if you don't let that tell-tell freewheel announce your presence (keep pedalling).
In not one film in the entire history of Hollywood has the bad guy/good guy evaded getting caught due to the simple tactic of riding a bicycle at a leisurely pace. So there just isn't even the group-think out there to suspect the cyclist.
Nobody expects the cyclist!
Also, I didn't claim that surveillance was the primary reason for oyster cards, but there is no doubt it also functions as an effective large surveillance network.
As for other cities, transport isn't as centralised as it is in London so is vastly harder to implement, but for sure others are looking into similar schemes.
And now they actually accept debit cards directly at the gates without even the oyster cards.
If someone tries, of course they can pay cash and they can change up cards. But the point isn't that it's impossible to avoid surveillance, but that we are in a surveillance state which you have to try hard enough to avoid that avoidance is a red flag in itself.
In NL they do everything possible to avoid you buying the cards with cash (and there is a surcharge for disposables).
Also, like with most things these days, we're sold on the convenience that registering adds i.e. no loss of funds if lost or stolen, and "auto top up" from your registered credit / debit card... most people don't care enough to pay an extra GBP5 to make their transport history "disappear" every so often - especially when there are so many other ways we're tracked.
On the Web, this happens already (try a browser add-on such as RequestPolicy which will show you the numerous sites that track you all over the Web - often 20 or more per page).
127.0.0.1 hosted-pixel.com 127.0.0.1 cdn.hosted-pixel.com
When web bugs first appeared, there was a huge public outcry. Now that they call it "analytics" or "big data" everyone seems cool with it.
However I can't block everything with hosts; some of the tracking scripts come from the same hosts as I actually use. I'm planning to write a firefox addon which will do stuff like remove the Facebook "Like" buttons. Even if I don't click the button, Facebook knows that it served me the script.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/policeman/
Or on Github for a more bleeding-edge version
[^1]: https://github.com/futpib/policeman/issues/28 Plus issues 92 and 95.
So, I went ahead and created a wiki for this: https://github.com/UprootLabs/gngr/wiki/List-of-request-bloc...
If there are any known issues with RPContinued or there are other extensions that are not listed, please feel free to add them. Thanks.
The extensions which have a switchboard like interface enable the user to block requests based on the request's domain name, the primary frame's domain-name, and also the type of request.
In contrast, extensions like NoScript have a global switch. If I allow scripts from DontBeEvil.com, they are enabled on all domains. They don't prevent XSS attacks, for example.
If there's a better name for this concept, please do suggest one.
You can stop a lot of trackers by minimizing referer leaks. Firefox has the config option network.http.sendRefererHeader which defaults to 2, "always send referer." 1=same FQDN, 0=never send. So by setting it to 0 or 1, a typical tracker that's gotten past your /etc/hosts entries, adblock, etc. will see you requesting their pixel image but never see the sites that initiated those HTTP GETs.
There are no silver bullets, just good tools, and reducing the referer footprint is one of them.
||twitter.$domain=~twitter.com
||twitter.$domain=~twitter.com|~another.comIt generates massive value that everybody benefits from. People appreciate that.
I just wonder how much of the set of "analytics" that requires involving 3rd parties (web bugs and other referrer tricks) is actually useful and a value. The set that is a value "that everybody benefits from" is going to be even smaller.
I'm sure most people want this data, and see a lot of potential use. Usually, there is a big difference between "want" and "need", and I suspect a lot of the current attitude that throws analytics on everything is some experimentation, a limited amount of real value, and a whole lot of people joining in because they can (fad, bandwagon effect, it's what a tutorial said, etc).
I am completely cool with someone analyzing their own logs if I visit their site. What I'm not cool with, is them finding out what _other_ sites I visit.
I regard the current focus on analytics as unduly obsessive. How much do you need to know about your customer to flog your products? Just because you can measure something, it doesn't mean that it's going to do anyone any good to measure it.
I used to do direct mail; all we ever did was what today is known as A/B testing - we'd send "test drops" to different lists, with different prices, different wording in the offer letters and so on. It worked really well.
As you mention, I'm more concerned with tracking as a 3rd-party[1]. There is, obviously, at least some real benefit in these cases that would not be possible when only using server logs. It's probably a lot less than most people think. A lot of that data (or similar-enough data when measured in e.g. how much it benefits sales or makes marketing cheaper) can probably be found elsewhere.
If we knew what the core benefits (needs, not wants), we might (in an ideal world) even be able to have some sort of social negotiation where the data can be provided in some form (or an alternative, or by making sure the real social cost is covered properly).
[1] While the law currently doesn't work this way, involving a 3rd-party unauthorized should really be considered some new type of (criminal) wiretapping in states that require 2-party consent.
If you can find equivalent data somewhere else, you should go build a company around this. People built their products this way because it works. If you have a better idea then you should make it happen.
The degree of focus that this permits is how startups and small companies can find and target their market quickly, where a large company could just market to everybody and see who responds. It's hard to tell how much of the tech startup boom has been driven by this, but after working for and with a few of them, third party analytics is critical because you usually don't have the time or money to find your market without it. Before we had analytics the strategy was "make a lucky guess and verify it before you run out of money". Now the default strategy is "measure who is interested and go directly to them".
I'll accept that large, successful companies don't really get much out of this sort of thing - they already know who buys their product, and have the scale and resources to target everybody. They probably do use analytics just because it's there, and not because they need to.
Also, In England we have CCTV on the buses. I'll take a photo next time I get a bus but there are about 5 cameras on the top deck.
However, women don't generally have beards, so I expect that facial recognition is more effective at identifying them than us men.
I suffer from paranoia myself. I've been thinking for more than twenty-five years about how to handle this and the only thing I can come up with is that we must make our control systems good or devolve into some nightmare scenario.
I have Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder. It's much like being manic-depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. One of the schizophrenic symptoms is paranoia; if the paranoia gets bad enough, I have visual hallucinations as well.
Having all this surveillance going on, even to the extent I am assured they're not looking for me, makes my illness far worse.
It doesn't help to take more medicine.
I would be very interested to see a comparison of psychiatric hospitalization rates from before and after Snowden's disclosures. It's not hard to get such statistics but it would be some work to interpret them meaningfully.