5: Surveillance Flashcards
What is surveillance?
According to Lyon: “collecting information in order to manage or control” or “any systematic and routine attention to personal details, whether specific or aggregate, for a defined purpose”
Surveillance is not new, even in democratic societies.
What is new is that whereas surveillance was limited and non-participatory now it is pervasive and participatory
Who is Edward Snowden?
Not a great student, but good with computers
Joined US army, but discharged for health reasons in 2003
Joined CIA and in 2007 was posted to Geneva
According to him, it was this posting that led to his disillusionment with US surveillance policy
Became a consultant to NSA (employed by Booz Allen), wanted to collect data
How did data about NSA programmes get leaked in 2013? Where did Snowden flee to and what was he charged with?
Starts leaking data about NSA programmes in 2013
Guardian publishes a story that Verizon hands over all its telephone data to the NSA on an “ongoing daily basis”.
Other reports reveal that NSA taps directly into the servers of nine IT firms
Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo number among the nine
Where did Snowden flee to and what was he charged with?
Snowden flees to Hong Kong and later Russia
He is charged in the US with stealing government property and revealing classified information.
Through Snowden, what did the world learn?
- Supposedly democratic governments are engaged in mass surveillance of their citizens
- Corporations are sharing data with government as well as develop the technology used by governments for surveillance
- Citizens are participating in their own surveillance
What are the trends that created this culture?
- Increasing existence of digital fingerprints that can be analysed by corporations and governments
Social media and handphones are key culprits - Increasing concern over security
Ideology of the dangerous neighbourhood
Ideology of war against terror
The coronation of national security as an end in itself - Rise of private sector surveillance industry
Hardware, software, analysis, consultancy
Describe the brief history of surveillance.
1980s: direct marketing, police use of sensor technologies (audio/video, heat, light)
1990s: CCTV, credit and loyalty cards, early e-commerce (cookies)
2000s: 9/11 in New York and the London and Madrid attacks provide political cover for vast expansion of surveillance
2000s: launching of Facebook (and other social media)
2000s: growing ubiquity of handphones ushers in era of participatory surveillance
Future developments: facial recognition, fingerprint collection, DNA surveillance
Why should we be concerned about surveillance?
- Surveillance will end up in the hands of criminals or equally nasty people
- Will further increase international tensions. There is a fine line between surveillance for national security and economic espionage
- Very little accountability - Who will watch the watchers?
- False positives - Mistakes will inevitably be made, ruining the lives of many
- Drain on the economy
- Erosion of trust in government and corporations
- Chilling effects on free speech or even academic policy debate (self-censorship)
Describe global surveillance by US government
Starts during WWII with an agreement between US and UK to share data, expanded to key allies (5 eyes) in 1950s
Australia, Canada and New Zealand
Targets have included allies - Brazil, Denmark, Germany, France, India, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain
And enemies or unfriendly states
Iran, Russia, China
What are the 3 layers of global surveillance by US government
Three layers
- Interception of data in transit
Programmes that allows NSA access to optical cables linking the US to the world
- Stored data
PRISM, started in 2007, ties into major US IT companies including Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, and YouTube
Targets chatroom posts, emails, file transfers, internet telephone calls, login ids, metadata, photos, videos, and video conferencing
US law allows targeting only of non-US citizens and those US citizens communicating with non-US citizens - Spyware (Computer Network Exploits)
Quantum Insert programme
What is the rational for this unpredecented level of global surveillance?
How can we evaluate its real effectiveness?
The rationale for this unpredecented level of global surveillance is the national security of the United States.
But of course it is difficult to evaluate its real effectiveness
White House claimed 50 terror plots uncovered by NSA surveillance.
New American Foundation report of 2014 downgraded this claim suggesting that 4 out of 225 NSA investigated incidents. None of these four prevented an attack
What are the new ways of working with data? 2 interesting studies?
The networked society has created huge reservoirs of data
But more importantly new ways of working with data
A combination of algorithms, statistical analysis, and clustering allows for prediction (connect the dots)
Two interesting studies:
90% of 1.1 million credit card holders from unknown countries could be identified from four pieces of information (ie. a tweet, Instagram picture and so on)
2013: found that using big data techniques, 95% could be identified given their phone records
Why does the public not have access to algorithms?
Reasons why the public does not have access to them:
Proprietary
State secrets
And hence no evaluation can be done
Why not having access is a problem?
Algorithms give a sense of objectivity.
They black box human decision-making and frequently human biases and stereotypes
Hence algorithms can generate false positives which have serious consequences for the human beings so identified
Computer assisted passenger pre-screening system
The Faisal Gill Story
Lyon: “How do we square specific surveillance of Gill and his family, simply because they are Muslim, with living in a fair and just society?”
Name the NGOs working on surveillance issues
Electronic Frontier Foundation Electronic Privacy Information Center ACLU Privacy International OpenMedia
