We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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ZDNet has an article about the implanted RDIF chips and the debate about its pros and cons.
Advocates of technologies like radio frequency identification tags say their potentially life-saving benefits far outweigh any Orwellian concerns about privacy. RFID tags sewn into clothing or even embedded under people’s skin could curb identity theft, help identify disaster victims and improve medical care.
Critics, however, say such technologies would make it easier for government agencies to track a person’s every movement and allow widespread invasion of privacy. Abuse could take countless other forms, including corporations surreptitiously identifying shoppers for relentless sales pitches. Critics also speculate about a day when people’s possessions will be tagged – allowing nosy subway riders with the right technology to examine the contents of nearby purses and backpacks.
The notion of embedding RFID tags in the human body, though, remained largely theoretical until the 11 September, 2001, terrorist attacks, when a technology executive saw firefighters writing their badge numbers on their arms so that they could be identified in case they became disfigured or trapped.
Richard Seelig, vice president of medical applications at security specialist Applied Digital Solutions, inserted a tracking tag in his own arm and told the company’s chief executive that it worked. A new product, the VeriChip, was born.
Washington Post has an article about a test project, which aims to give frequent fliers a quicker pass through security checkpoints, is underway at four US airports. It relies on the latest biometric technologies to verify a passenger’s identity with increased precision. Digital fingerprint scans and photographs are already used to identify foreigners traveling on a visa, and U.S. officials plan to encode a facial recognition technology into passports.
The program offers the first wide application of iris-scanning technology, which had previously been used only for government employees with access to classified sites or for employees with access to nuclear facilities, said Paul Mirenda, director of field operations for LG Electronics Inc., one of the TSA’s contractors that makes the scanners. The technology takes a close-up photograph of the iris, which has more unique characteristics than a fingerprint, and applies digital codes to the photograph to store it as a bar code. The photograph and fingerprint are then stored in a file along with other information about the passenger.
But some security experts worry that terrorists could apply to become a registered traveler and score an easier pass through security checkpoints. “If you look at 9/11 hijackers, some of them would have qualified as frequent fliers. All they had to do is run a few tests and find out what the parameters were and get people registered.”
Travelers who signed up for the program yesterday said they were impressed with the technology and were eager to be afforded special privileges at the checkpoint. None of the enrollees said they had a problem with providing the government with their personal information.
Mark Ellott has a thing or two to say about the Norwich Union’s pilot scheme for pay-as-you-drive motor insurance.
While we are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, the Norwich Union is egging us on… They are trialling a system of in-car monitoring (a black box by any other name) that records details of the vehicle’s journey. Where it went, how fast it travelled etc.
The box records real-time vehicle usage and sends the data to Norwich Union securely using mobile technology.
Each month or quarter, the motorist will receive a document similar to their mobile phone bill advising them of their journey details. Pay as you go insurance – sounds innocuous enough. During the BBC piece it was suggested that the monthly or quarterly bill may provide advice for improving the cost effectiveness of one’s driving (from an insurance point of view) by providing alternatives to the routes taken.
Even more worrying, perhaps is the quote from the Norwich Union director of the pay-as-you-drive scheme, Robert Ledger:
The interest in the pilot scheme has been phenomenal. We could have filled the pilot twice over with the amount of requests we’ve had from interested motorists, not just within the UK but from drivers around the world.
Sleepwalking indeed…
According to the BBC’s Breakfast programme, there is no clear indication yet about how the data will be stored, used and accessed – will the Norwich Union sell it? Will the police or other agencies have access to it? So far these are unanswered questions.
One motorist volunteer thinks this will give her control over her insurance costs. For a low mileage user, this may be so. For the rest of us? It is always worth remembering that insurance companies are not charities – they are investing in this because they see a revenue opportunity. Oh, how simple it all could be – analysing a driver’s record and declaring his insurance void due to, say driving several hours without a break or breaking the speed limit – or, just hiking the premium.
Personally, I prefer to control my insurance costs by playing them off against each other come renewal time.
New Scientist has an article looking at the US$312 million surveillance system installed for the 2004 Olympics in Athens. The eyes and ears consist of 1,000 high-res and infrared videocameras peppering the city. Cell and landline telephone calls are being recorded, converted into text, and “scanned for phrases that could be linked to terrorist activity.” The software’s developers say it speaks Greek, English, Arabic, Farsi, and other major languages.
John Pike [a defence analyst] believes other undisclosed measures are undoubtedly in place, such as face recognition from video footage. He says such surveillance technology has already proven its worth in intelligence gathering. “They’re basically the sort of stuff the National Security Agency has been using for some time,” he told New Scientist. “And they seem to place great faith in it.”
via Boing Boing
It was with something akin to delight that I saw the Times, not a newspaper overly concerned with civil liberties, have on its front page* an article about objections to Britain’s developing surveillance state.
This is modern Britain
If we cannot get these issues out in the open, we will indeed see Britain ‘sleepwalking’ into what may some time in the future be a panoptic nightmare. Blair or Howard are not going to be having the security services doing ‘midnight knocks’ on the doors of those they disfavour (well, maybe for a few people in the Finsbury Park area) but make no mistake about it, the infrastructure of repression is being put in place at an astonishing rate and someday (hopefully long after I have decamped to New Hampshire) this information is going to be used by statists of both left and right with fewer qualms than Tony Blair to order every single aspect of people’s lives in Britain in ways that places the state at the centre of everything you do in ways earlier totalitarianisms could only dream of… for your own good, of course.
We have a serious battle to win and the more these issues are out of the committee rooms and in the more general public arena, the better we can argue the case for resisting the emerging Panopticon State.
When the state watches you, dare to stare back
* = Readers outside the UK may have difficulties accessing this link once it is archived due to the benighted policies of the Times newspaper.
Biometric testing of face, eye and fingerprints could soon be used on every resident of the UK to create compulsory identity cards. BBC News Online’s Tom Geoghegan volunteered for a pilot scheme and looked, unblinking, into the future.
What was interesting about article that it is obvious that Home Office is trying to make the process as ‘palatable’ to people, so it is not too Big Brotherish…
This isn’t a test of the technology – that’s likely to change in the future as things move on – it’s the process. We’re looking for customer reactions and perceptions, and any particular difficulties.
Just don’t make it feel like Big Brother although that’s what you’ll be getting.
The Times reports that Britain’s information watchdog gives warning today that the country risks “sleepwalking into a surveillance society” because of government plans for identity cards and a population register.
Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, says that there is a growing danger of East German Stasi-style snooping if the State gathers too much information about individual citizens.
He singles out three projects that he believes are of particular concern. They are David Blunkett’s identity card scheme; a separate population register planned by the Office for National Statistics; and proposals for a database of every child from birth to the age of 18:
My anxiety is that we don’t sleepwalk into a surveillance society where much more information is collected about people, accessible to far more people shared across many more boundaries than British society would feel comfortable with.
Downing Street responded to warnings issued by Richard Thomas,
saying there would be a watchdog to prevent situations in which personal information gathered by one Whitehall department was made indiscriminately available to other civil servants without the individual’s knowledge.
We have made it clear that there are going to be guarantees about function creep. That is not what is going to happen. There is going to be proper oversight.
Oversight. Hm, so anyone trying to access the national database will be carefully monitored by CCTV and any other available surveillance technology. Phew, that really puts my mind to rest.
Also on BBC:
Watchdog’s Big Brother UK warning
Washington Post reports that the State Department is moving ahead with a plan to implant electronic identification chips in U.S. passports that will allow computer matching of facial characteristics, despite warnings that the technology is prone to a high rate of error.
Under State Department specifications finalized this month for companies to bid on the new system, a chip woven into the cover of the passport would contain a digital photograph of the traveler’s face. That photo could then be compared with an image of the traveler taken at the passport control station, and also matched against photos of people on government watch lists.
But federal researchers who have tested face-recognition technology say its error rate is unacceptably high – up to 50 percent if photographs are taken without proper lighting.
They then proceed to make a case for fingerprinting that has a lower error rate. Yeah, that will make things much better.
While face recognition is set as a standard, countries could add one or two other approved biometrics: fingerprints and scans of the eye’s iris. Several European countries are considering adding fingerprints to their passports. And branding with fire. Oops the last one wasn’t in the news.
Rebecca Dornbusch, deputy director of the International Biometric Industry Association is quotes as saying:
The important thing to recognize is that it [face-recognition requirement] is an improvement. [The State Department should] continue to implement as many biometrics as they can, so they can ensure . . . the most secure protection.
Oh really, and how about the most secure revenue stream to the International Biometric Industry Association.
One German start-up has created an alternative to RFID that is likely to get under consumers’ skin.
Ident Technologies has dreamt up Skinplex – which could be used in all the same ways as RFID and Bluetooth – but uses a different transmitter: human skin.
Like RFID, Skinplex works by reading a unique identifier remotely using an electromagnetic signal, normally between a microchip and a reader. Unlike RFID, however, Skinplex uses the skin to transmit the signal and an identifier carried on a person. The signal is transmitted when the carrier touches the receiver.
Yeah, right. So much better than RFID then.
The British government is advocating the vaccination of children against particular behaviours using the forthcoming array of pharmacotherapy vaccines. These would innoculate children against a host of behaviours that the government defines as anti-social: drinking, smoking, drugs, blogging and so on.
The article explains that “Doctors would immunize children at risk of becoming smokers or drug users with an injection” and that the program would operate in a way similar to the “current nationwide measles, mumps and rubella vaccination programme.” Further the authors reveal that “such vaccinations are being developed by pharmaceutical companies and are due to hit the market within two years.”
Developments like this are monitored by the Centre for Cognitive Liberty and Ethics, whose response was clear:
Richard Glen Boire, a legal scholar at the CCLE, believes that vaccinating children with “anti-drug” drugs would be “alarming and unlawful, and would signal the first time that neuropharmaceuticals were overtly used to enforce government policy.”
Aside from the human rights concerns, the UK plan raises serious health questions regarding the long-term effects of these drugs on the complex neurochemistry of the brain.
The CCLE warns that advances in the neurosciences will challenge the ability of individuals to maintain their cognitive freedom. Governments will redefine mental health to use drugs and other neurotechnologies in order to police and channel people’s behaviours.
(My thanks to Alex Ramonsky of the Entelechy Institute for alerting me to this issue).
Computing is sceptical about about the government’s ID card proposals and its lurch to national database.
There is, however, a reason to be even more gloomy about government technology than the committee’s collection of mid-term backbenchers imply. The government – and particularly Home Secretary David Blunkett – have become dangerously obsessive about data-centric solutions to any social issue.
In the old days, political reaction to crime scares tended to be tough-sounding but often half-baked responses like boot camps. Now it’s to build a new database.
Computing deserves full marks for asking the right question:
Does the UK have the culture, the legislation or the infrastructure for such dramatic change? We think not.
Perhaps more importantly, there has been almost no debate about privacy, civil liberties, safeguards or security. Those who have been doing most of the shouting about IT government reform are obsessive techies.
The issue is not just whether the technology works – it’s why we are using it.
via Adam Smith Institute blog
For pictures and reporting from the Big Brother Awards check out Samizdata.net.
We went, we booed, we blogged.
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