Tag Archives: surveillance

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Transparency bites – Brin blasts back

transparent-train-carriage Wired has given David Brin some rebuttal space to defend his Transparent Society concept in response to Bruce Schneier’s recent criticisms (as covered earlier here on Futurismic):

“How did we get the freedom we already have, becoming the first civilization in history to (somewhat) defy ancient patterns? Yes, it’s imperfect, always under threat. We swim against hard currents of human nature. But reciprocal accountability is the innovation that lets us even try.

Schneier claims that The Transparent Society doesn’t address “the inherent value of privacy.” But several chapters do, and I conclude that privacy is an inherent human need, too important to leave in the hands of state elites, who are themselves following ornate information-control rules written by other elites — rules, by the way, that never work. (Robert Heinlein said “‘privacy laws’ only make the bugs smaller.”)”

Going back and reading Schneier’s piece again, it does seem like he’s arguing a similar point from a different direction – they’re both opposed to top-heavy hierarchies of control. It would be great if Wired could arrange some sort of formal public debate between Schneier and Brin – the topic has never been more relevant, after all, and as Cory Doctorow points out, talking about these issues is the best way to ensure things don’t get any worse. [image by David de Groot]

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Transparent society redux: Camera ‘sees’ through clothing

Who needs to look at clothing anyway?In fortuitous timing to fit in with Paul’s story earlier today on David Brin’s ‘Transparent Society’, it emerges there may be a new technology that may take that definition a little too literally. BBC News reports that ‘ThruVision’, a camera utilising terahertz rays to ‘see’ concealed objects. Normal security cameras use X-rays to probe a person but as everything emits different levels of terahertz rays normally, the system is passive, simply observing the body’s glow.

“If I were to look at you in terahertz you would appear to glow like a light bulb and different objects glow less brightly or more brightly,” said the firm’s spokesperson. “You see a silhouette of the form but you don’t see surface anatomical effects. In addition, the system does not involve any of the “harmful radiation associated with traditional X-ray security screening.”

[story and image via BBC News]

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Schneier shreds the Transparent Society

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CCTV-warning-sign Regular readers will know I’m fond of citing David Brin’s Transparent Society concept as a potential solution to the escalating level of surveillance in our cultures. [image by takomabibelot]

However, it looks like I may have to reconsider the idea in light of an essay from security maven Bruce Schneier. The problem is that mutual disclosure doesn’t take into account the amount of power you have before a transaction begins:

“An example will make this clearer. You’re stopped by a police officer, who demands to see identification. Divulging your identity will give the officer enormous power over you: He or she can search police databases using the information on your ID; he or she can create a police record attached to your name; he or she can put you on this or that secret terrorist watch list. Asking to see the officer’s ID in return gives you no comparable power over him or her. The power imbalance is too great, and mutual disclosure does not make it OK.

You can think of your existing power as the exponent in an equation that determines the value, to you, of more information. The more power you have, the more additional power you derive from the new data.”

That said, Schneier is still definitely on-side with an increase in “watching of the watchers” – our ability to keep tabs on those who keep tabs on us is the difference between control and liberty. I just hope that, in light of the UK police’s increasingly Orwellian PR efforts, we haven’t already gone too far in trading freedom for supposed security.

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Facet – open source swarming smart-phone software

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Cellphone This one must have passed me by at the time, but Warren Ellis’s team of future-culture hounds at grinding.be have brought it to my attention. A New Scientist article from October 2007 talks about Facet, an open source software project that networks mobile phone cameras over Bluetooth:

“To test the software, the researchers attached four phones running Facet to the ceiling of a corridor in their department. The phones were angled so that the camera of each could see a different part of the corridor and so that they could all see peopling walking past.

Whenever a phone detects an object entering or exiting its field of view, it sends a message via Bluetooth to alert the phones on either side. These phones, in turn, pass the message on to other nearby handsets so that eventually the entire network receives the message.

One handset on the network also reports this information to a computer over a normal GPRS cellphone connection.

Each phone determines the distance to its nearest neighbour. The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone’s view to another’s.”

That would put fairly top-range surveillance capabilities into the hands of street-level operations. Maybe the only logical response to nation-states with endemic surveillance of citizens is for the citizens to start watching the watchers? [Image by Asim Bijarani]

[tags]phone, technology, surveillance, open source[/tags]
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Watching the watchers

Mike Elgan has an opinion piece in ComputerWorld about the “endemic surveillance” that now permeates society in the US and the UK.  Elgan takes a position that seems to be growing in popularity: forget privacy as we knew it in the 20th century – it is dead, cold and buried in the ground.  Instead, “privacy” advocates should take up a new fight – a fight for our right to watch the watchers:

Surveillance technology is on the rise. Powerful organizations — law enforcement, corporations, governments and others — have demanded and won their right to videotape the public, often secretly. They do this in order to hold individuals accountable for their actions.

Yet the rights of individuals to use similar technology to do the same are often restricted. Why should shoppers, pedestrians, bank customers and citizens be held accountable, but politicians, police, judges and others are not? What kind of democracy is that?

Shouldn’t recording your own police interrogation be a constitutionally protected right, like the right to an attorney? If not, why not?

Glenn Reynolds,of Instapundit fame has also recently written about this concept in Popular Mechanics and on his blog.  And of course, anyone interested in the topic should read David Brin’s masterful treatise, The Transparent Society (Brin also wrote a fantastic novel titled Kiln People based on many of the concepts presented in The Transparent Society).