ThinkingShift

The British motorist is under threat. Not from another British motorist sidelining a car, although that may indeed happen. Nope, the British motorist, happily exploring the back roads of the British countryside on a Sunday afternoon, is threatened by US enforcement agencies keen to spy on them. I’m sure Mum and Dad cruising down the country roads of the UK will be a fascinating subject for the snoops in our surveillance society.

Images of private cars captured by public/street cams and personal data that can be gleaned from these images (such as licence plate number, driver details and so on) are to be exported to the US under a secret squirrel proposal by the Home Secretary (Jacqui Smith). Under the guise of the usual “anti-terrorism” mantra, the Home Secretary seemed to forget to mention, when saying the police could access “real time” images from cameras, that she was also proposing to ship the data offshore to the US (and other enforcement agencies around the world). A spokesperson for the Home Secretary has declined to say how many images have already been sent to the US. But the spokesperson said that: “We would like to reassure the public that robust controls have been put in place to control and safeguard access to, and use of, the information.” Yeah? Like what?

This is the pattern of the future: huge databases stuffed full of private information about YOU and ME, being data mined by powerful computers looking for patterns and profiling behaviours. This is insidious enough but when we find that personal data is being “exported” to the US through “forgetting to mention” or keeping plans secret from the UK Parliament, then this just an abuse of civil liberties.

What’s up with the UK? They seem to be hell-bent on snooping and surveilling their citizens and sharing this data with the US. Homeland Security in the US is busy with its plans to collect all 10 fingerprints from international visitors rushing through American airports and the UK is following suit with its proposal to collect the 10 fingerprints of its citizens and residents for a massive central database. This will be achieved through the controversial national ID card scheme. Interesting to see that the UK Govt is currently proposing that biometric data be collected by the private sector (let’s not get our hands dirty they’re thinking) - further evidence of the strong alliance between the State and Big Business when it comes to snooping and tagging its citizens. So criminals and citizens get the same treatment. Collection of DNA will follow no doubt.

And who will be the first UK politician to get their paws printed in ink I wonder? Perhaps the UK Prime Minister or Home Secretary? I had to laugh when I saw this Wanted poster from Privacy International:
Privacy International are offering a reward for the first person to collect and submit the fingerprints of Brown or Smith.

Although I find the collection of biometric data offensive in itself, I could live with it if I had confidence that the data would be used responsibly and for the purposes it’s said to be collected for (which is the usual War on Terror drivel that I simply don’t believe). But I have no confidence that it will be safeguarded or used responsibly. Consider the recent publication (not a leakage, publication!) of Italian citizens’ tax details and incomes on the website of the Italian National Tax Office recently. I’m sure that finding out what your neighbour earns would be fascinating but it’s PRIVATE and we look to the State and its agencies to safeguard our private details. Not the poor Italians though: a list arranged alphabetically and by region was freely available until outraged citizens demanded its removal from the website (smart people those Italians!). The idiot (and now former) Tax Minister who authorised the publication defended his actions by saying: “This is an act of transparency, of democracy, similar to what happens elsewhere in the world”. Hello? Mr Tax Minister, democracy is supposed to protect privacy and not smack citizens in the face by publishing private details! This private right is of course tempered by the public’s right to security - I don’t see how publishing citizens’ private tax details aided the general public’s security. Even Australia hasn’t gone this far!

Well, the evolving form of democracy IMHO is the surveillance society. I met yet another person the other day who said he could care less whether he’s fingerprinted because he “has nothing to hide”. Sure, the usual response. That’s true, if you have nothing to hide why not get fingerprinted. But we need to look beyond this simple response and ask some serious questions:

• is a monitored and surveilled society in which our behaviours and actions are closely scrutinised really the world we wish to live in? Do we really want our biometric data, including DNA, stored in huge central databases (remember the film Gattaca?)
• can we be confident that our private data will not be abused by the State in cahoots with private companies?
• why are we standing back like submissive sheep and allowing monitoring technologies the control?
• even if we go down at the barricades, why aren’t we putting up a fight?

My answer to this last question I guess is because we are too busy living the good life in the selfish society - we are not noticing the gradual (actually, rapid) erosion of our basic right to privacy and our loss of civil liberties.

Now, this gets me really hopping mad. The high school I went to was Ku-ring-gai High in North Turramurra. No private school for me as my family couldn’t afford it and my dad thought it was toffee-nosed to send a kid to a private school anyway. At the time (around 1000 BC!), it was a great school. So great in fact, I was inspired to go off and take a degree in History and a further one in education so I could become a History teacher. I well remember Mr Thomas, my History teacher. Guess he’s no longer with us on the planet, but he inspired my lifelong love of History.

So I read with jaw-dropping incredulity that my old high school is one of six schools in New South Wales to attempt to bring in a new attendance monitoring system. Nothing wrong with seeing if kiddies show up to school, but this monitoring system was to be carried out via……fingerprinting children. Hello teachers! Have you heard of good old-fashioned roll-call? I never had any problems with it.

Regular ThinkingShift readers (all two of you!) would be well aware of my antipathy to invasions of privacy, monitoring, tracking and so on. So how can I help but be frankly disgusted by what I’ve read. Where is Year 10 student, Brad Lorge? I want to say to him well done, you stood up to THEM. Brad, along with three other students was hauled out of class, without notice, and asked to have their fingers scanned for a 6-month trial of this stupid new system. Apparently, parents had been informed by letter from the Principal and told they could apply for an exemption if they objected to their kid being treated like a criminal, sorry, fingerprinted.

But it seems that Brad wasn’t given that chance. He refused to participate in the fingerprinting trial because of concerns for his privacy. This kid gives me hope! Maybe not all kids these days are giving away details of their lives on Facebook and MySpace. He said:

“When I began to question, I was informed that I would be stupid to not comply and that there was no reason for me to not provide my fingerprint. It was intimidating. I was the only one out of the four who refused to provide my fingerprint. Considering the current controversy with biometric identification systems, I don’t think it is appropriate for a school or any government body to try to enforce a system.

Clearly, a very thoughtful young man. There have been allegations that staff (I simply can’t believe that teachers would do this) bullied and insulted students who were unwilling to take part in the trial. It seems the P&C group wanted to introduce biometric identification rather than the Department of Education. Hello parents and citizens: are you well-informed enough about the dangers of biometric identification before you happily give consent to your kid being bar-coded, finger swiped and all? If not, read this blog under the categories of biometric identification, surveillance, RFID and privacy!!

Thankfully, the Department of Education has called a halt to this stupidity and is now reviewing just how thoroughly (or not) the school consulted its students and their parents before scaring the hell out of them. Shame on my old high school!

I last visited Japan about 10 years ago. Been there; done that. Probably a good thing, as Japan is now off my list of countries to visit. Like the US (and soon Australia with its proposed biometric registered traveller programme), Japan will soon be requiring visitors to submit to photographic and fingerprinting procedures to “help prevent terrorist attacks”. Last time I looked, Japan was the victim of domestic terrorism with the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by members of Aum Shinrikyo.Long time foreign residents will be included in the new measures. Human rights groups are concerned that the perception could be that foreigners equal terrorists. But in my mind, it’s all that biometric data on the loose that concerns me - where’s it stored? who has access? what do they do with it? Apparently, under certain circumstances (not outlined of course) the Japanese Government can share biometric data with other Governments.The new procedures are part of an amendment of Japan’s Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Act, which contains measures to prevent terrorism.

The measures come into force on November 20. And in a wonderful display of openness and transparency, public comments on the new procedures were invited, but if you can’t speak Japanese you wouldn’t have bothered as comments were only accepted in the Japanese language.Should you decide to stand on your dignity or claim fingerprinting and taking of photographs is an invasion of your privacy - well, forget it, you won’t be allowed in the country. So if you’re a longtime permanent resident, you’ll get rounded up and subjected to fingerprinting and photographs - this reminds me of another country in recent history. From what I’ve read, the new measures could very easily be seen as Japan equating terrorism with foreigners and it could all play quite nicely into the hands of xenophobes. Let’s hope they’ll get busy and fingerprint their own domestic terrorists too. Seems the world is getting pretty small for me - soon I’ll be running out of countries I can visit, because I refuse to go through fingerprinting, iris scanning, facial recognition procedures.Source: Financial Times

I’m picking up some disturbing news from various sources (well, I think it’s disturbing - you can agree or not). I haven’t heard too much about these two separate pieces of news, but stitch the two together and you have a snapshot of a future world scenario.

First up is the fact that US domestic spy satellites are being turned on American citizens. In the Baltimore Sun, I picked up an article about the eye in the domestic skies. We already know that the Patriot Act in the US allows the US Government to check out your library reading list. And you probably heard that the new Protect America Act (rushed through by Congress in late July/early August) gives the Bush administration the power to order communication providers like mobile phone companies and ISPs to make their networks available to government eavesdroppers. So this would include services like Skype, Twitter, GMail, AOL, social networks and FedEx. The US Government likes to refer to this as ‘closing the surveillance gap’ - previously a court order would be required to snoop. If you want to learn more about this new legislation, check out Wired’s Threat Level blog.

But are you aware that the Department of Homeland Security is turning US military technology against its own citizens? After the Cold War suffered its meltdown, spy satellites were used for benign purposes such as cartography, snapping photos of damage caused by natural disasters, conducting environmental and scientific studies and so on. But the Bush administration has decided (under the usual veil of anti-terrorism) to expand satellite use to allow civilian agencies and law enforcement to enforce criminal and civil law within the US. This expanded use was authorised in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell.

Border security is the rallying cry behind this, as well as illegal immigrants and tracking down drug lords. But from all the documentation I’ve read to date on this initiative, there seems to be no legal limit to use of satellites on the domestic US population. It’s uncharted territory. Isn’t it against the US Constitution for the Government to spy on its own citizens? The Wall Street Journal was the first to go public with news about the satellites and what can only be rubber-stamping by Congress. Apart from abuse of privacy and legal issues, who exactly will have access to information and images collected by the satellites? (Apparently, the National Application Office will know what is being spied on from space). These are military satellites and are more powerful than civilian ones, so they can detect heat generated by people in a building and traces left by chemical weapons for example. The technology to be used is a closely guarded secret and you have to wonder if security concerns will override privacy issues.

Just as I was recovering from my attack of the vapours after learning about all this, I then stumbled on another article in Harper’s Magazine about the use of biometric identification in Iraq. Now, I know there are times when the military has to use high-tech stuff. What concerns me is whether anybody is thinking about how said stuff will be used once the “war on terror” is over and done with. The Pentagon is using biometric technology, which helps to create a database stuffed full of profiles and information about Iraqi adult males. So US troops and other American personnel are doing things like scanning fingerprints and iris patterns of people at home, in the workplace and at checkpoints.

All to make it easier to run background checks I’m sure but…let’s recall how identification cards and information were used in South Africa and other areas of the world. And let’s recall how this information was often used as the basis for ‘ethnic cleansing’. As the article pointed out, the biometric identification of Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd populations vastly increases the possibility that this information may be misused at some future point. What are the guidelines for use of biometric data being collected and maintained by the US military? A future regime in Iraq could most certainly exploit this database, which is eventually to be handed over to the Iraqis (this is already under discussion).

The Electronic Privacy Information Centre has waded into the fray. If you go to their site, you will find a lot more info on biometric identification in Iraq and the potential abuse of fundamental human rights.

I think these two snippets of news (which didn’t receive a lot of attention around the world it seems to me) need to be viewed against the backdrop of the whole surveillance society we currently are living in. Once the satellites are pointed down on citizens, they’ll remain doing so; once fingerprinting and iris scanning becomes the norm in Iraq, it is easily transportable to any other population.