Who knows you are a dog?
The loss of 5 million tax records has highlighted the degree of state knowledge about each of us. The collection of tax data is largely uncontroversial, even though its handling and the tax decisions made are not; however other publicly collected data is, in itself, far more problematic.
In Britain we live in a surveillance society. There are over 4 million CCTV cameras here, over one in five of all the world’s cameras, and this only one visible form of surveillance. We may look askance at the degree of social conformity demanded by Singapore but spitting out chewing gum is far more likely to be aught on camera in London. Surveillance has broad public support because it is widely supposed to improve the personal security of the ‘law-abiding citizen’: seen only as a threat to the miscreant and the hoody.
Hoods, with all the threat that the bare faced may experience in their presence are a rational and effective response to surveillance: hoodies are a fashion statement induced by cameras. The hoovering up of our unhooded images may seem no more problematic that the gathering up of our national insurance numbers along with our bank details. That is until the CD goes missing and our faces become tradable on e-BadaBing and are uploaded on to a Russian server.
It is striking that among a landscape populated by public IT procurement fiascos there are two outstanding successes: London’s congestion charge and Oyster systems. This poses the question of what is common between these two schemes; it may be that Transport for London have discovered an elixir that has escaped the sight of al other local and national government agencies. It may not, however, be totally paranoid to note that both these schemes had the (un)intended side effect of delivering high quality surveillance data to the security services: is it more important to have MI5 in your client team than TfL?
Mike Power of LSE described in ‘The Audit Explosion’ how the response to audit failure was the, frequently successful, demand for more and more audit – it was the demand for further audit that was successful, not the further auditing. We are now told that the appropriate solution to technology failure is more, and more expensive, technology. CCTV is of debatable use in reducing crime and disorder. It is more clearly implicated in the paradox of falling crime rates being accompanied by increasing fear of crime. Every CCTV camera reminds us the possibility of attack, and while giving surface reassurance, more deeply reminds us of the possibility of attack. So CCTV always increase fear of crime, regardless of their effect on crime rates and every camera increases the felt need for more cameras.
The belief in the efficacy of CCTV and advanced technology for crime fighting is systematically reinforced by TV cop dramas. This come in a number of forms, from the technology drooling of the CSI franchise—Top Gear for geeks—to the slightly seedy but tech savvy Spooks to the poor beat PCs watching hours of CCTV on The Bill. The result is the same, the techie always gets his (sic) man. The discrepancy between this vision of perfection and the miscarriages of justice that surface in the Appeal Court as a result of the unreliability of this evidence is less often noted.
There was a famous 1990s’ cartoon showing a dog at a computer saying, “In cyberspace nobody knows you are a dog.” The caption of any current version should state, “In surveillance space, everyone who wants to know knows you are a dog.”
I took a break from writing this to watch Newsnight. On it I saw the Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, John Hutton, explaining to an even more sceptical than usual Jeremy Paxman that the loss of the HMRC data made the ID register, which will stand behind the ID cards, yet more pressing. Biometric data would be the padlock that secured our identities, not the unregulated overflow pipe spilling our personal identifiers willy-nilly.
Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial Complex. That hasn’t gone away but it now has a child, the Surveillance-IT Complex. This devils spawn provides security for the shareholders, career prospects for the police and increasing vulnerability for the rest of us.
In Britain we live in a surveillance society. There are over 4 million CCTV cameras here, over one in five of all the world’s cameras, and this only one visible form of surveillance. We may look askance at the degree of social conformity demanded by Singapore but spitting out chewing gum is far more likely to be aught on camera in London. Surveillance has broad public support because it is widely supposed to improve the personal security of the ‘law-abiding citizen’: seen only as a threat to the miscreant and the hoody.
Hoods, with all the threat that the bare faced may experience in their presence are a rational and effective response to surveillance: hoodies are a fashion statement induced by cameras. The hoovering up of our unhooded images may seem no more problematic that the gathering up of our national insurance numbers along with our bank details. That is until the CD goes missing and our faces become tradable on e-BadaBing and are uploaded on to a Russian server.
It is striking that among a landscape populated by public IT procurement fiascos there are two outstanding successes: London’s congestion charge and Oyster systems. This poses the question of what is common between these two schemes; it may be that Transport for London have discovered an elixir that has escaped the sight of al other local and national government agencies. It may not, however, be totally paranoid to note that both these schemes had the (un)intended side effect of delivering high quality surveillance data to the security services: is it more important to have MI5 in your client team than TfL?
Mike Power of LSE described in ‘The Audit Explosion’ how the response to audit failure was the, frequently successful, demand for more and more audit – it was the demand for further audit that was successful, not the further auditing. We are now told that the appropriate solution to technology failure is more, and more expensive, technology. CCTV is of debatable use in reducing crime and disorder. It is more clearly implicated in the paradox of falling crime rates being accompanied by increasing fear of crime. Every CCTV camera reminds us the possibility of attack, and while giving surface reassurance, more deeply reminds us of the possibility of attack. So CCTV always increase fear of crime, regardless of their effect on crime rates and every camera increases the felt need for more cameras.
The belief in the efficacy of CCTV and advanced technology for crime fighting is systematically reinforced by TV cop dramas. This come in a number of forms, from the technology drooling of the CSI franchise—Top Gear for geeks—to the slightly seedy but tech savvy Spooks to the poor beat PCs watching hours of CCTV on The Bill. The result is the same, the techie always gets his (sic) man. The discrepancy between this vision of perfection and the miscarriages of justice that surface in the Appeal Court as a result of the unreliability of this evidence is less often noted.
There was a famous 1990s’ cartoon showing a dog at a computer saying, “In cyberspace nobody knows you are a dog.” The caption of any current version should state, “In surveillance space, everyone who wants to know knows you are a dog.”
I took a break from writing this to watch Newsnight. On it I saw the Secretary of State for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, John Hutton, explaining to an even more sceptical than usual Jeremy Paxman that the loss of the HMRC data made the ID register, which will stand behind the ID cards, yet more pressing. Biometric data would be the padlock that secured our identities, not the unregulated overflow pipe spilling our personal identifiers willy-nilly.
Eisenhower warned of the Military-Industrial Complex. That hasn’t gone away but it now has a child, the Surveillance-IT Complex. This devils spawn provides security for the shareholders, career prospects for the police and increasing vulnerability for the rest of us.
Labels: id cards, it security, surveillance
posted by btb_london at
19:09
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