INVENT-10N: GOOGLE GLASS THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS A NICENIK SOCIETY

GOOGLE GLASS: THE FIRST STEP TOWARDS A NICENIK SOCIETY

An interesting article in this week’s The Economist’s entitled ‘Ubiquitous Cameras’ (http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21589863-it-getting-ever-easier-record-anything-or-everything-you-see-opens) which discussed the implications of the widespread use of Google’s Glass headset.

Google Glass is a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display which can also take pictures.

Now most of the debate about Glass has centred around ‘oh, won’t it be terrible all these Glass-equipped people going around taking surreptitious photographs of us and invading out privacy’ this countered by the inevitable, ‘if people don’t want their business archived in a photo, don’t do guilty things in public’.

To me what Glass exemplifies is the increasingly rapid miniaturisation of surveillance equipment and the thought that in a few short years it won’t just be photographs the Glass-of-the-future is taking but videos (and probably constant-stream videos at that, then we’ll all be ‘life loggers’). And once this is teamed up with facial recognition we will truly be in a PanOpticon society, where everyone will be able to see what we were doing at any moment in our public life.

The result will be a radical change in how we disport ourselves in public. Since the Rialto police in the USA began using body cameras to record incidents in February 2012 public complaints against police officers fell a staggering 88% and the use of force by officers by 60%. Body cameras, it seems, incentivise people to conduct themselves in a more civilised manner … nobody wants to see themselves looking and acting like a total prick on YouTube.

But (and I think it’s a pretty big but) what this will provoke is a massive experiment in social re-engineering with people being obliged to act in a more censured way. They will know they are being watched and will act accordingly. A good thing, you might suggest, but the upshot will be that life, I suspect, will become even more boring than it is today.

As Jenni-Fur says in Invent-10n:

I am fed up enduring the claustrophobic, cossetted tyranny of the nice.

Fuck nice.

NICE

 

THE MUTABLE NATURE OF WRONG

THE MUTABLE NATURE OF ‘WRONG’

In reading the ‘Comments’ made following the report of the BBC on the public interrogation of Britain’s three spy chiefs on 7 November (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24847399) I was struck by how many times the adage ‘you’ve nothing to worry about surveillance if you’re not doing anything wrong’ was brandished in defence of what the British Security Services are doing.

The problem with this argument is that ‘wrong’ is a very mutable concept which is apt to change – often quite radically – over a surprisingly short period of time. Considering that the last SUCCESSFUL prosecution for blasphemy was in 1977 (just thirty-six years ago!) tells me that the (relatively) liberal country we live in is a recent construct. Fifty years ago it was a crime to bad-mouth God or to be a practicing homosexual, and the law (and much of society) was unconcerned about those who penalised or persecuted others for being black or female.  Fifty years ago what was considered ‘wrong’ was profoundly different from what we consider ‘wrong’ today.

'Wrong' is an ever moving target. What is perceived to be ‘wrong’ today may not be ‘wrong’ tomorrow.

And how quickly the mood and sensibilities of a country can change is, I would suggest, illustrated by the growth of the ultra-conservative Tea Party movement in the USA and the emergent of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece. These exemplify how quickly the political and moral outlook of a country can alter (especially as a result of economic set-backs). To my mind this is what makes the collection and storage of so much information by our Security Services (and by other organisations) so worrying.

Let us say that for some unknown reason Britain in twenty years makes a sudden shift to the right or the left and a new, more draconian ethos takes hold when homosexuality is seen as a bad thing or that Jews were once again branded as untermenschen. Then it would be a relatively simple task for our Security Services to access their databases and identify those who had bought Gay Times or Diva, or to make a search for those who had attended a synagogue.

THAT is what makes the collection and storage of surveillance information so troubling: not how it IS being used but how it MIGHT be used. It is not the present we should be worrying about but the future and that is why the debate about what is collected by GCHQ, how long it is stored and how it is managed is so important.

SURROGATE SURVEILLANCE

THE RISE OF SURROGATE SURVEILLANCE

The recent appearance of the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ on television has centred everyone’s attention on the scope and the dangers of State surveillance, but what commentators have forgotten is that surveillance conducted by those not belonging to the Secret Service community is much more ubiquitous and, in many ways, much more disturbing.

And the reason for this is simple: we are willing participants in this Surrogate Surveillance.

Take, for instance, the loyalty card phenomenon. At first glance the reason why Tesco and all the other big stores provide loyalty cards is simply to reward those who shop regularly at their stores and by doing so to encourage them to keep coming back. But there is another reason why these stores are so keen on promoting their loyalty cards: the vast quantities of information they acquire about their customers enables them to profile them. A shopping cart reveals a great deal of information about you: whether you have children or live alone; whether you drink (and how much); whether you have a pet; how clean you are; whether you are environmentally conscious; and (from the papers you buy) what your political views are likely to be. All these data are stored (for how long?), analysed and used to develop a portrait of you useful in tailoring adverts directed at you. Bespoke promotion … you can see it on the side of your Facebook page.

Not that the stores are stopping there. The news that Tesco will be installing face-recognition equipment in its petrol stations (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10435521/Facial-recognition-inevitable-but-will-shoppers-approve.html) is just the next step: Tesco aims to put faces to data. I’m guessing that soon we’ll be in a ‘Minority Report’ type world where adverts are tailor-made for each potential customer passing them by. Of course, it will also enable Tesco to refuse entry to known shop-lifters and serial-complainers but that’s by-the-by (unless you happen to have the misfortune to look like a shop-lifter!).

What is important about this development is the vast amount of data that Tesco have to store and process in order to make their face-recognition initiative work. This is just a STORE when all said and done, not GCHQ or the NSA.

Which brings me back to my central point. Around the country (and on-line, Amazon must be awash with data) there are hundreds of stores doing pretty much the same thing as Tesco and warehousing copious amounts of data. And these databases are supplemented by those holding the information hoovered up by official surveillance devices operated by the police and local authorities, and the information held by the Inland Revenue, local GPs, the rating authorities, the police, by the Congestion Charging centre in London, by the DVLA in Swansea and, of course, by the banks. Moreover if Tesco is using facial recognition you can bet your bottom dollar that the police and GCHQ are way ahead of them. Even the Inland Revenue is using Google Earth (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2494152/Now-taxman-spying-home-using-Google-Earth-Satellite-images-clues-wealth-lifestyle-youre-paying-enough.html).

This is what I call Surrogate Surveillance.

The Snowden brouhaha focussed attention on how the internet and cell phone service providers co-operated (or didn’t co-operate, depending on who you believe) with the GCHQ/NSA to facilitate their tapping into our e-communications but what was forgotten was that there is this mass of Surrogate Surveillance data collected quite openly that could provide very interesting information about us. Nobody seems interested in it.

Nobody, I suspect, apart from GCHQ.

Now with all this data lying around neatly warehoused I would have thought it beyond belief that GCHQ wouldn’t be accessing it. After all it has been acquired quite legally (and often with the surveillee’s co-operation) so no one can criticise GCHQ for using it. Now I’ve never made a bomb but I suspect that the ingredients are pretty standard and need to be bought by any would-be bomber. Analysing data held in a store’s databases would reveal who was buying this stuff (presumably terrorists have credit cards) and hence who was worth MI5 taking a closer interest in.

Forget Tempora and worry about Surrogate Surveillance ...

BREAKING NEWS: SPIES SAVAGED BY TOOTHLESS DOG

On Thursday  7th November I invested ninety minutes of my life watching the Intelligence and Security Committee grill (if that’s the word) the Heads of GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 for the first time in public. Now I had no great hopes for this televised interrogation (any Committee that includes Hazel Blears has no right to use the word ‘Intelligence’ in its title) and it lived down to my low expectations. The three being interrogated (Andrew Parker of MI5; John Sawers of MI6 and Iain Lobban of GCHQ) were obviously well-rehearsed and had been provided with a selection of sound-bites to recite. Worse, the questions posed by the Committee were anodyne in the extreme.

The Independent 7th November, 2013

 

For example: there was no question as to why the existence of the Tempora system (which taps into the transatlantic fibre-optic cables) had been kept from the Committee; there was no question as to why GCHQ had to monitor e-communications in Germany; and there was no question regarding the extent of the monitoring of e-communications here in the UK. And there was most certainly no questioning of if (oh yeah) GCHQ co-operates with the NSA to circumvent UK law.

So pretty much a waste of time but there were some points of interest.

 

1. The body language of Iain Loggan (Head of GCHQ) was that of a man under EXTREME pressure. Not a poker player methinks: he was just one mass of twitches and tics.



The Times 8th November 2013

2.       Lobban used the analogy that GCHQ’s task was akin to finding a needle in a haystack. What he failed to mention was that to build the haystack ALL the hay (or e-communications in normal speak) has to be gathered. His claim that GDHQ does not spend its time listening to calls made by the majority of the British population is simultaneous accurate but evasive.

 

The Guardian 7th November 2013

 

3.       Andrew Parker’s admission that most of the terrorist threats MI5 have dealt with since 7/7 in 2005 had been domestically organised should have generated more interest from the Committee. Surely the corollary of this is that GCHQ’s would be directing more of their resources towards surveilling the UK and its citizens. None of the Committee seemed able to join up these dots.

4.       I can only hope the questioning during the Close-Door sessions  is more determined than what was seen today otherwise we’re in big trouble.

INVENT-10N: MAYBE ANGELA MERKEL SHOULD TAKE UP POKER

SURVEILLANCE: AGELA MERKEL DOESN’T PLAY POKER

John Rhys-Davies (who played Gimli in The Lord of the Rings trilogy) once opined that:

‘Spying is like chess: sometimes you have to withdraw, sometimes you have to sacrifice one of your pieces to win – preferably a knight rather than a king or a queen.’

Unfortunately Rhys-Davies was wrong on two counts. The first is mechanistic: you can’t sacrifice your king in chess. But the second is more philosophical.

When you sit down to play chess you can see ALL the pieces – those belonging to yourself and those controlled by your opponent – and, moreover, you both know the rules governing the playing of the game. This was not the case in the topsy-turvy world of espionage. Here each side does its damnedest to hide its pieces from the opposition and the breaking of rules was not only expected but positively encouraged. Further, in espionage there is never only one opponent: a nation’s  enemies are numerous and even those who evince friendship might, if push comes to shove, reveal themselves as in league with the bad guys.

Espionage is a game of bluff and counter-bluff.

Thus espionage is more akin to poker than to chess with every player desperately trying to keep his opponents from having a peek at the cards he or she is holding.

Of course, as in real-life  poker, everyone is trying to get an advantage (fair or otherwise) and religiously searches their opponents for ‘tells’,  the signals regarding the strength or weakness of a player’s hand that are sent by the player’s body language or by changes to their physiological condition. How a player holds himself, how he stacks and plays with his chips, the way his hands move, his facial expressions  …  all these and many, many others can give clues as to the player’s state of mind and what their intention is vis à vis their hand.

I suspect that the reason why in the last twenty years we’ve seen such a blanding out of our politicians (in Britain, post-Thatcher, all the leaders of our political parties have been youngish, white, sport a full head of hair but no beards or moustaches, have an athletic frame, are neatly if conservatively dressed, have a family life of yawning conventionality and speak in a neutered, indeterminate accent. Only one deviated from that template, Brown, and look what happened to him!). The reason isn’t wholly to do with this being the ‘image’ of a leader opinion polls tell the party gurus will best secure victory in an election but also because it is indicative of a person who is willing to sublimate his personality to the political process  … a person who can maintain an impassive poker face.

But there is another aspect of poker playing which has a wider relevance to the espionage world-at-large: card counting. Card counters in poker keep a mental record of all the high and low valued cards played and this allows them to assess the probability of a high or low value card being played next (for anyone interested I recommend Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich).  

Surveillance is card counting writ large, the means by which espionage agencies seek to tip the cards in their favour. The problem is that to do this surveillance must be directed at ALL the players, friendly and unfriendly alike, because their actions are intertwined and what one player does influences what other players do and so on. Thus it is no surprise that America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ have been eavesdropping on the German government. Germany is a powerful nation and what it does has major international political and economic repercussions, therefore for Angela Merkel to say (following the disclosure that the NSA had accessed her ‘phone records) ‘Spying on friends is not on at all’ is breathtakingly naïve.

For her to say she didn’t know what was  going on is pure bullshit. Back in 1998 the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee commissioned a report which advised ‘The European Parliament should reject proposals from the United States for making private messages via the global communications network assessable to US intelligence agencies’. The report urged the NSA’s activities in Europe be scaled back or be made more transparent. They did neither, so for Merkel to pronounce ignorance is hokum.

The report also castigated Britain’s involvement in this snooping. Just as NSA and GCHQ have circumvented domestic controls by indulging in reciprocal surveillance in order that they can monitor (all?) their country’s citizens (‘Hi there GCHQ!) so they have done the same thing in Germany (and Spain and Italy …).

Methinks that Merkel’s outrage wasn’t triggered by moral indignation but rather by the thought that she wasn’t one of the Watchers but one of the Watched.

Welcome to the club, Angela. Maybe you should take up poker?

INVENT-10N: A FUNNY OLD WEEK FOR THE SURVEILLANCE DEBATE IN THE UK

Funny old week for the surveillance debate in the UK.

Sir Andrew Parker, the new Head of MI5, gave his first public speech and used it to rail against the nerve The Guardian newspaper had to release details contained in the US intelligence files pinched by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The nub of what The Guardian revealed was that GCHQ (the UK’s surveillance centre) was operating a system known as Tempora, a secret electronic surveillance program accessing data carried on transatlantic fibre-optic cables. Apparently the data collected is immense (21 petabytes a day) this being stored for three days (though related metadata is stored for thirty days). According to Snowden Tempora had made the UK into a ‘surveillance superpower’.

Now when I read this I can’t say I was particularly surprised. To my mind it is obvious that as computers become more powerful, e-storage becomes cheaper and cheaper and the algorithms manipulating said data increasingly sophisticated that security services would become more-and-more addicted to the acquisition, warehousing and analysis of the information flying around the e-universe. And this would be especially the case in the UK: you have only to look at how enthusiastically Britain has embraced the CCTV camera (there’s one for every 14 people!) to see that ours is an e-surveillance paradise. We love being watched!

Which makes it all the more amusing when the week began with Chris Huhne, the disgraced former Liberal-Democrat MP, claiming that during his time in cabinet he was told nothing about GCHQ’s Tempora or the NSA’s PRISM or about their ‘extraordinary capability to vacuum up and store personal emails, voice contact, social network activity and even internet searches’. And worse, the National Security Council (attended by ministers and the heads of the security services and GCHQ) of which Huhne was a member was never briefed regarding Tempora. The answer to the question ‘who watches the watchers’ is ‘not Chris Huhne’.

Anyway, back to Sir Andrew Parker. One of the points he made in his speech was that, ‘We only apply intrusive tools and capabilities against terrorists and others threatening national security. The law requires we only collect and access information that we really need to perform our functions, in this case tackling the threat of terrorism’.

The weasel-words here are ‘only apply intrusive tools’.

Sir Andrew went on: ‘In some quarters there seems to be a vague notion that we monitor everyone and all their communications, browsing at will through people’s private lives for anything that looks interesting’. This is, he added ‘utter nonsense’.

So while GCHQ doesn’t monitor and apply intrusive tools to everyone’s communication there is no denial that they COLLECT such data and run it through their algorithms checking for any correlations with known badniks. And to make such correlations GCHQ has to collect (or have access to) ALL the data and that includes the data held by the banks (including that relating to debit/credit card transactions), Inland Revenue files, CCTV cameras, medical records (if the DoH can ever get the thing to work!) etc. etc.

So I think it’s a fair assumption to make that:

1)      GCHQ e-intelligence gathering goes far beyond Tempora;

2)      GCHQ will continue to develop its e-intelligence gathering capability;

3)      There ain’t nothing we can do to stop this happening, MI5 having that wonderful get-out of jail-free card called ‘national security interests’.

Now the big threat of this isn’t, as The Guardian and others fret about, the erosion of civil liberties and of privacy, those are abandoned every time you sign up to FaceBook or begin Tweeting. No, the real threat is that governments and the digerati (the people with access to the information held by GCHQ) will use it to begin manipulating the people of Britain.

As Jenni-Fur says in Invent-10n:

YESTERDAY THEY WERE SERVING YOU …

TODAY THEY’RE WATCHING YOU …

TOMORROW THEY’LL BE CONTROLLING YOU!