
How Britain Exported Next-Generation Surveillance - lelf
https://medium.com/matter/how-britain-exported-next-generation-surveillance-d15b5801b79e
======
conductor
Tracking and surveillance is everywhere.

Mobile phones: location tracking (they keep the cell IDs your phone is
connecting to, with a time-stamp), texts, calls meta-data, calls audio.

CCTV: ANPR, face recognition

Internet: everything

Payments: everything except cash (I'm surprised cash is still legal)

The list goes on.. Public transport, hotels reservations, etc.

~~~
mahyarm
Cash still covers too many edge cases that electronic devices cannot to be
illegal. Also remember less developed countries.

~~~
terrywhite
"Also remember less developed countries."

Don't worry. American corporations are thinking far ahead.

"Branding Nigeria: MasterCard-backed I.D. is also a debit card and a passport"
[1]

[1] [http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/25/business/branding-
nigeria-...](http://edition.cnn.com/2014/09/25/business/branding-nigeria-
mastercard-backed-i-d-/)

------
yuvadam
Everytime I try to explain why privacy matters, and why dragnet surveillance
is one of the worst plagues of our times, I can't help but link to Glenn
Greenwald's talk which explains it better than I ever could:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcSlowAhvUk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcSlowAhvUk)

~~~
teddyh
I find this 2006 column by Bruce Schneier to be most lucid and succinct:

 _The Eternal Value of Privacy_

[http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securi...](http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2006/05/70886)

------
jamesbrownuhh
Very interesting article. I've been thinking about this more often recently
(perhaps it's watching the 31C3 talks that do it) and I find that I'm becoming
increasingly conflicted over the whole issue of surveillance.

On one level, my gut instinct is "mass surveillance of innocent people is
wrong"... But the moment I think of it from the law enforcement point of view,
I realise how desperately I'd want that bulk data and how damn _useful_ it
would be.

I can easily see myself, in another lifetime, being the one who said "Hey, you
know if we stick a camera here, I can get a computer to read the number plates
and beep if it sees a car we need to stop." \- That's nothing other than a
great use of technology to do what a human could do, but much more
efficiently. A good hack, nothing not to like about it at all.

At first it'd seem only reasonable to use that technology ONLY to flag
vehicles that were known to be of interest at the time. Keeping
dates/times/plates of innocent vehicles might not be right. But then again...
How seductive to sling all that data into a database. How powerful, how
efficient, how god damned _useful_ it would be to be able to go back in time
and, for any given number plate, rule a vehicle's presence in or out of
suspicion. OK, clearly a possibility of "wrong place, wrong time" for the
unlucky, but an equal chance of such historical information actually verifying
an alibi, proving that a person of interest is as innocent as they claim.

The extent to which you could get a whole lot of law enforcement done, purely
with a big database and some well-written SQL queries... It's seductive. If I
were law enforcement, I'd want that /so/ bad.

I wasn't a fan of "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide"
before the Snowden revelations, or after. But today I find myself realising
just how useful the results of such surveillance /could/ be. I wonder if I've
just given in, taken the cowardly way out and somehow convinced myself to be
comfortable with the idea of such intrusion because it's obviously never going
to end, or whether my mind on the subject has been genuinely changed.

Quite a quandary. Still not sure where I stand on the issue now.

~~~
pgeorgi
In an attempt to help you find out where you stand on the issue (that is, I
don't expect a response):

80% of sexual abuse of minors happens within existing social contexts, that is
"family and friends".

It would be useful to place cameras in every single private room and have them
be automatically monitored and the live feed passed to some on-staff LEO when
software considers anything suspect.

Are you at peace with that? If so, why? If not, why not?

(Yes, it's an extreme example. Both in terms of privacy intrusion and in the
potential of helping law enforcement with a 'worthy cause'. It's why I think
this example is particularly helpful to consider one's position)

~~~
rimantas
This is not an extreme example. What is extreme is looking at the world from
the law enforcement perspective. Why not just lock everybody in the prison
already, perfect conditions for surveillance and control.

~~~
pgeorgi
It is an extreme example in that everything more intense (at least of the
scenarios that I can come up with) requires a qualitative shift, such as
depriving people of additional basic freedoms (eg by locking them away), not
merely a quantitative like moving cameras closer to home.

------
roel_v
Meh, it's an inevitable effect of the lowering cost of cameras and image
processing. In a few years we will have 'social' data sharing networks
(analogous to the blockchain) that will share results of analyses of all sorts
of cameras worn by regular people every day and everywhere they go, basically
a 'decentralized' pervasive monitoring system, fed by cameras everywhere -
shops, car dashboards, phones, on private property, ... Think Facebook tagging
is creepy, just wait until you get home from work and find a website with 50
pictures of you during the day in all places you were... Just a few people who
contribute footage will be enough to map the vast majority of people. Imagine
10 people walking around in a shopping mall with a Google Glass and a dashcam;
with enough processing power, that would be enough to map the locations of
thousands of people per day.

I used to care, years ago - but there is no escaping it. The real question is
how can we deal with such pervasive monitoring? I don't think anyone has a
real answer, or has even tried to answer it (note that I'm not talking about
pervasive monitoring by just one actor like the state, since what we will
experience will be monitoring of all, by all).

~~~
carapace
Well, think about Star Trek --let me finish!-- the computer on the Enterprise
always knew where everybody was and it didn't concern anybody unduly. As
ubiquitous surveillance becomes pervasive we are confronted with the task of
growing into a humane and healthy world polity.

~~~
krapp
It's also worth remembering, no one on board the Enterprise was a member of
the public, per se. The Federation is a quasi-military organization, and I
don't think anyone wouldn't expect the military, or even a defense contractor
or high-tech lab, to at least make sure they know where personnel are at all
times ... and in that light, the surveillance on the Enterprise seemed almost
lax.

In one episode, crew and officers were being transported while they slept to a
pocket dimension and having their organs rearranged by sinister aliens. You
would think at the very least, that would set off some alarms. But the
computer never seems to keep track of people's whereabouts unless someone asks
(for drama's sake, obviously, but still) or even that the first officer
apparently was missing a kidney they had only twelve hours ago.

I don't remember getting a sense that the computer was actively keeping track
on everyone's position, and constantly recording their movements, keystrokes
and conversations.

~~~
carapace
You're right, of course, but as you say a lot of what we see in the show is
for the sake of the drama. I think there's no way to put the genie back in the
bottle when it comes to our technology enabling ubiquitous surveillance: How
can you be sure that everyone is obeying policy (around how to use the
collected info) unless you have a surveillance system to watch them in the
first place?

It doesn't matter what we think the policy is if we can't control the "root"
of the system, and we can't be sure we control the "root" without being able
to check on people (ourselves) to make sure they haven't somehow wrested
control from us.

"Trusting trust" gets even more crucial once nanotech starts to hit.

I don't like it but as far as my analysis has proceeded I can only imagine a
humane-but-totalistic system being workable, and the best most widely-known
image of such is (I think) Star Trek. ;-)

~~~
krapp
I'm not entirely sure I agree with the premise that ubiquitous surveillance is
unavoidable and unstoppable. To me, that attitude seems half like a cynical
cop-out and half cyberpunk wish-fulfillment. No infrastructure which requires
as much complexity and cost and effort as that does, is immune to political,
economic or societal forces.

Already, you can begin to see pushback from other (many themselves) government
and some companies like Apple, who both may be genuinely bothered by
government intrusion and see "privacy" as a near-long-term necessity for
selling products domestically but more importantly globally. It's true that
Facebook is creepy, but it's also true that people have known that Facebook is
creepy for years now and young people are leaving in droves.

Of course, _nearly_ ubiquitous surveillance would be much more likely.
Probably not all of our worst nightmares, but more than enough.

I personally believe (I even wrote a terrible paper about it that will never
see the light of day) that the biggest and most pervasive threat to freedom in
regards to privacy will lie in the intersection of (not strong but good
enough) AI, social media, and the internet of things. Essentially, we're
coming to a point at which our devices will be designed to interact with us
emotionally, as well as socially, and as a result people will be trained to
form deep emotional relationships with products as well as people. Imagine
having a deep intellectual conversation with someone online, only that someone
is a refrigerator, or a car. Imagine most of the friends you've grown up with
are products, because most of your interaction is online.

Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't, but almost certainly it won't happen the
way we currently predict. The future right after the moon landings isn't the
one anyone would have predicted. We were supposed to be drinking Coca-Colas on
Mars by now.

Although _if_ it did happen, then i'm still not entirely certain the 'humane-
but-totalistic' model necessarily works. In theory, yes, but in practice, if
everyone knew everything about everyone else, this wouldn't necessarily
balance power between the weak and the strong (and imbalance which exists in
the real work, but not Star Trek) but would enable the strong to more easily
dominate the weak. Because such systems can't be perfect, there must always be
ways to exploit information asymmetry. Governments, corporations and criminals
will always be more able to rig the system than will the common person.

I like Star Trek, but because it presents a Utopian ideal, i'm skeptical of
using it as a springboard for describing actual potential future societies,
because humans just don't work that way. Every other species on in the
franchise was more human than the humans (purposely, because they were there
to be mirrors on the 'unevolved' aspects of human nature.)

~~~
carapace
Very good points, and I agree wholeheartedly that the confluence of "good
enough" AI, mass data on social interactions, and ubiquitous networked
sensors+cpus means that we are rapidly entering a sort of intense feedback
system with ourselves that calls into question the very meaning of being
human, and that it could be a threat to freedom. ;-)

It is definitely neither cynicism nor wish-fulfillment that makes me think the
future system (assuming we don't simply destroy ourselves or degenerate into
some N. Korean nightmare) has to be totalistic, and that it will be humane.

I think it _has_ to be "total" in the sense that in order to apply and enforce
_whatever_ policy we have, including policy around who gets to access and use
surveillance data, somebody somewhere _has_ to be looking at _all_ the data
and searching for violations.

Flipping it over, I don't see how any government can say to its people "Hey,
we know for sure that no one is spying on you. (Except us.)" without spying on
everyone to make sure.

So I don't see how we can avoid the technology _forcing_ the "political,
economic or societal forces" to adapt, rather than the other way around. At
best most people would be content with some privacy-protecting measures that
other people would simply find ways to circumvent, and since the circumventors
have greater ability to act without the contented people even knowing about
it, how would you stop them?

Effectively the U.S. agencies and their allies are already merging into one
large "trustworthy" (for some measure of trust, for some subset of humans)
information processing system.

Now, if we accept that _somebody_ is going to have the panopticon the
immediate concern becomes the nature of our rulers. I think the future cyber-
totalitarian regime will be humane, but only because I have hope that humans
are intrinsically good.

I have no hope that we can roll back or even curb the capabilities of our
technology but I feel confident that we can enshrine and effect our highest
values within the system we are so vigorously constructing.

------
tzs
People worried about surveillance should read the story "The Dead Past" by
Isaac Asimov. Here is a link to a copy of it [1]. It makes a point, which is
probably not apparent until the twist ending, that is often overlooked
(although I see a few commentators here have touched on it).

[1]
[http://www.redlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html](http://www.redlibrary.net/ScienceFiction/Asimov41/27323.html)

~~~
carapace
Also "The Light of Other Days" by Sir Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter.

------
switch007
> ANPR IS A BRITISH INVENTION: created, developed, and tested in the UK. Its
> first major outing was in 1984,

1984! What a coincidence.

------
junto
These systems have a side purpose, some might argue a primary purpose, which
is to maintain control of the generql population. People who are likely to
protest, regardless of what their beliefs are, are a potential dangerous
threat to the status quo. They can be used to stop and harass members of the
public who have been tagged as trouble makers. Sheeple are the ideal
population, not those who question authority and submit FOI requests.

Surveillance on the other hand is easy. Everyone volunteers to carry a
tracking and bugging device with them at all times and pays a monthly fee for
the privilege. It is called a mobile telephone.

------
MichaelCrawford
Well that clinches my decision.

I've been getting around on public transit for quite a long time, but have
been thinking of getting a car.

Now I've decided not to.

I'm a generally law-abiding citizen, but I simply do not wish to be tracked.
How would you feel were someone to follow you around everywhere you went? Even
if they kept their distance, never spoke to you our overtly harmed you in any
way, it would be very disturbing.

~~~
lozf
I guess it depends where you are but UK cities are right up there with
surveillance on public transport too, both trains and buses[0]. Transport for
London have a system that detects if you're still on a platform after a train
to each destination has departed, and alerts a human - ostensibly in case
you're contemplating suicide or otherwise need help. It stands to reason that
implementing the likes of facial recognition and "Gait DNA"[1] is high on the
agenda if not already functional.

Not to mention the huge incentives (>50% discount) for using a traceable RFID
card as your "ticket" instead of paying with cash.

[0] [http://boingboing.net/2009/08/31/london-bus-
with-16-c.html](http://boingboing.net/2009/08/31/london-bus-with-16-c.html)
from 2009 - newer buses, e.g. the 2012 "new" routemaster may well have more.

[1]
[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/6995061.stm)
from 2007.

~~~
MichaelCrawford
Fuck.

I'm never leaving my house ever again.

~~~
lozf
That's just what they want - at least you won't be out spreading nefarious
ideas that they can't monitor, and starting the revolution.

 _Now sit down here like a good little citizen and watch this lovely
entertaining "programming" we have for you - and don't forget to buy some of
the products we show you too - you know you need them really._ ;)

