Tag: Surveillance

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Municipality of Saanich Does the Right Thing on Police Surveillance

Kudos to the mayor of Saanich for, you know, obeying BC law with regards to ubiquitous license plate surveillance technologies that have been found to violate BC law. As the mayer says,

“Certainly [Saanich police] are finding it a useful tool, but because this thing is hosted by the RCMP, who isn’t subject to this oversight, there’s a glitch there,” Leonard said.

“Until it gets sorted out, we just voluntarily suspended use.”

It’s good to see ‘voluntary’ decisions to not violate BC law. Guess now we wait and see whether the other mayors of BC take similarly strong stances.

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Quotations

2012.11.27

As Denham points out, though, the RCMP is not under her jurisdiction, so she can’t bring them into line. But the RCMP simply shouldn’t be running a surveillance system on people who haven’t broken any law, and they shouldn’t be able to take advantage of the federal-provincial jurisdictional split to do so either.

This means Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart is going to have to school the Mounties on what privacy rights really mean, and why setting up a massive “just in case” database is not only a bad idea, it’s against the law.

Vincent Gogolek, “It Takes Two To Kill Illegal Police Licence Surveillance”
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Ubiquitous Police Surveillance and Guilt by Location

The Times Colonist has a particularly good opinion piece concerning authorities’ use of automatic license plate recognition. This technology was recently subject of an investigation in British Columbia, with the provincial information and privacy commissioner asserting that many of the current uses of the technology must stop. For more information, you can read the decision  (.pdf) or some press coverage about the decision.

When speaking about authorities’ interests in retaining locational information about people who aren’t immediately of interest to police, the author of the opinion piece writes:

And the concept [of collecting such information] goes against the golden thread that winds its way throughout our justice system – the presumption of innocence unless proven otherwise. A person shouldn’t become the focus of an investigation just because he or she happened to drive along a certain street at a certain time.

But a person who hasn’t done anything wrong shouldn’t worry, right? Ask that to people whose lives have been ruined when they have been investigated or charged for a crime and later exonerated. That stigma of being the target of a police investigation is not easily erased, even when a person is cleared of all wrongdoing.

This latter paragraph – that the stigma of a false investigation can significantly alter a person’s life possibilities for an extensive period of time – is often forgotten about or glossed over when reporting on new policing surveillance practices. In an era where information is in abundance, and the attention span to monitor stories and issues is at a premium, a false charge may be legally overturned without the population more generally ever correcting their false impressions. This can create a long-standing disadvantage for falsely accused person as they try to carry on with their lives.

Moreover, the very potential that information could be used against you turns the (popular) understanding of guilt on its head: instead of authorities clearly linking a person’s presence at a location with a crime, it becomes the responsibility of each individual to demonstrate the innocence of being in place X at time Y. Given that these license plate scanners can capture where people are, at any time of the day, there isn’t a necessary reason that a person will know why they were at X at Y. While such oversights ought to be understood as the reasonable failings of a reasonable human’s mind, the danger is that an inability to justify one’s presence at a particular place could be taken as an indication of potential guilt. As a result of such ‘suspicious’ behaviour an individual who was just driving at the ‘wrong place’ at the ‘wrong time’ could be subjected to more intrusive police surveillance, simply because a scanner identified a person at a particular place at a particular time.

Fortunately, the privacy commissioner has significantly come out against this ubiquitous form of surveillance. Her stance should limit these dystopian risks of license plate scanners in her jurisdiction. Now it’s up to the authorities to respect the decision and mediate how and why they use the technology.

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Quotations

2012.11.15

Iranian officials have been assuring the public that the establishment of the [National Information Network] NIN will not cut them off from the Internet. The NIN, according to the government, will provide a “faster, safer, and more reliable” network for domestic purposes, in addition to the global Internet for daily usage.

What the officials have been less vocal about is that the NIN will make it easier for them to monitor user activities and carry out surveillance. Moreover, the establishment of the NIN as an independent network from the Internet will provide officials with the option of cutting off access without affecting the country’s administration. Shutting down the Internet in the aftermath of the contested 2009 elections, for example, was problematic since it interrupted banking and government operations. With the establishment of the NIN, a similar outage will not interrupt internal network traffic.

asl19, “Iran’s National Information Network”
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Quotations

2012.11.14

But first and foremost, Canada must get its own house in order. Thailand wasn’t the only country requesting that Google remove content; Ottawa did as well. What is most notable, and troubling, about Canada’s takedown requests is that an increasing number were not accompanied by a court order, but rather fell into Google’s category of “other” requests from the “executive, police, etc”.

This demonstrates that the government increasingly is bypassing formal and lawful processes in their attempts to get the compliance of private sector companies in their Internet censorship activities. Meanwhile, the government continues to resurrect Bill C30, despite widespread condemnation. The proposed electronic surveillance law would give the government unprecedented access to Canadians’ private online information without the requirement of a warrant.

If the Canadian government fails to respect freedom of expression, the right to privacy, and the rule of law in our own country, how can it expect other countries to do so in theirs?

Kieran Bergmann, “Throttling free speech, at home and abroad”
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Social Media Used to Target Advocate/Journalist

While it comes as no surprise that police monitored Facebook during last year’s Occupy protests, in the case of Occupy Miami an advocate/journalist was specifically targeted after his Facebook profile was subjected to police surveillance. An email produced in the court case revealed:

the police had been monitoring Miller’s Facebook page and had sent out a notice warning officers in charge of evicting the Occupy Miami protestors that Miller was planning to cover the process.

Significantly, the police tried to destroy evidence showing that they had unlawfully targeted the advocate, footage that (after having been forensically recovered) revealed that the charges laid against the advocate were blatantly false. That authorities conduct such surveillance – often without the targets of surveillance knowing that they have been targeted or, when targeted, why – matters for the general population because lawfully exercising one’s rights increasingly leads to citizens being punished for doing so. Moreover, when the surveillance is accompanied by deliberate attempts to undermine citizens’ capacities to respond to unlawful detentions and false charges, we have a very, very real problem that can affect any citizen.

We know from academic research conducted by scholars such as Jeffrey Monaghan and Kevin Walby that Canadian authorities use broad catch-all caricatures during major events to identify ‘problem populations.’ We also know that many of the suspects that are identified during such events are identically labeled regardless of actually belonging in the caricature population. The capacity to ‘effectively’ sort in a way resembling fact or reality is marginal at best. Consequently, we can’t just say that the case of Occupy surveillance is an ‘American thing’: Canadian authorities do the same thing to Canadian citizens of all ages, be they high school or university students, employed middle-aged citizens, or the elderly. These are surveillance and sorting processes that are widely adopted with relatively poor regulation or oversight. These processes speak to the significant expansion of what constitutes general policing as well as speaking to the state-born risks of citizens even in ‘safe’ countries using social media in an unreflective manner.

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Quotations

2012.11.9

People in Azerbaijan live in fear. We fear for our lives, we fear for our jobs, we fear for the lives and jobs of our fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, we fear for our friends. We fear every time when someone close to us dares to disagree with you. We also pay a high price when we dare not to fear.

Before 2009 I had criticized you mostly online. Then I was attacked in the centre of Baku. I was arrested and later sentenced in a show trial on fake charges of hooliganism. My father died while I was in jail, his health was deteriorating since the day of my arrest. I could not be there when he was placed in hospital and I was not there the day I lost him. Some of my relatives and friends lost their jobs. They were told that they are too close to “the enemy of the state”. Now, many people I knew are afraid to communicate with me online and offline and I can understand them.

In our interconnected world, civil society, states and businesses from across the world must work together to thrive in our global information society. This is the meaning and the spirit of this Internet Governance Forum. Internet governance can’t properly serve sustainable human, economic and social development without freedom of expression, the rule of law and efficient democratic governance.

Emin Milli, writing as Azerbaijan hosts the Internet Governance Forum
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Writing

Google’s ‘Friendly Tracking’: Fitfully Creepy?

Kashmir Hill wrote an article last week about how Google Now is informing some Nexus owners of how active they have been over the past week. She rightfully notes that this is really just making transparent the tracking that smartphones do all the time, though putting it to (arguably) good and helpful use. This said, Google’s actions raise a series of interesting issues and questions.

To begin, Google’s actions are putting a ‘friendly face’ on locational tracking. Their presentation of this data also reveals some of the ways that Google can – and apparently is – using locational data: for calculating not just distance but, based on the rate of movement between locations, the means by which users are getting from point A to B. This isn’t surprising,given that Google has had to develop algorithms to determine if subscribers’ phones are moving in cars (in fast or slow traffic) for some of their traffic alerts systems. Determining whether you’re walking/biking instead of driving is presumably just a happy outcome of that algorithmic determination. That said: is this mode of analyzing movement and location necessarily something that users want Google to be processing? Can they have been genuinely expected to consent to this surveillance – barring in jargon-ridden Terms of Service and Privacy Policies – and, moreover, can Now users get both raw data and the categories into which their locational data has been ‘sorted’ by Google? Can they have both sets of data fully, and permanently, expunged from Google databases?

Friendliness – or not, if you see this mode of tracking and notification as problematic – aside, I think that Google’s alerts speak to the important role that ambient technology can play in encouraging public fitness. In the interests of disclosure, I’ve used a non-GPS-based system to track the relative levels of my activity for the past six or seven months. It’s been the single best $100 that I’ve spent in the past five years and led to very important, and positive, changes in my personal health. I specifically chose a non-GPS system because I worry about the implications of linking health/fitness information with where individuals physically move: I see such data as a potential gold mine for health insurers and employers. This is where I see the primary (from my perspective) concerns: how can individuals be assured that GPS-related fitness information won’t be made available to health insurers who are setting Android users’ health premiums? How can they prevent the information from leaking to employers, or anyone else that might have an interest in this data?

Past this issue of data flow control I actually think that making basic fitness information very, very clear to people is a good idea. A comfortable one? No, not necessarily. No one really wants to see how little they may have been active. But I’m not certain that this mode of fitness analysis is necessarily creepy; it can definitely be unpleasant, however.

Of course individuals need to be able to opt-out of this kind of tracking if they’d like. Really, it should be opt-in (from a privacy perspective) though from a public health perspective I can’t help but wonder if it shouldn’t be opt-out. This is an area where there are competing public goods, and unlike a debate around security and privacy (which tends to feature pretty drawn out, well entrenched, battle lines) I’m not sure we’ve had a good discussion about the nature of locational tracking as it relates to basic facets of public fitness and, by extension, public health.

In the end, this is actually a tracking technology that I’m largely on the fence about, and my core reason for having problems with it are (a) I don’t think people had any real idea that they had opted-in to the fitness analysis; (b) I don’t trust third-parties not to get access to this data for purposes at odds with the data subject’s own interests. If both (a) and (b) could be resolved, however, I think I’d have a much harder time disagreeing with such ‘fitness alerts’ being integrated with smartphones given the significant problems of obesity amongst Western citizens.

What are your thoughts on this topic?

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Dispelling Some Mistruths Surrounding Lawful Access

David Fraser has a terrific breakdown of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police’s recent argument for lawful access legislation. If you’re Canadian you should definitely check out what he has to say.

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Links Writing

Question to SCOTUS: Can we even bring legal action over warrantless spying?

The EFF continues it’s long slog to challenge the US government’s warrantless wiretapping. At this point a series of cases have been dismissed, though the Supreme Court is now hearing a case to ascertain whether those who have been affected by the dragnet surveillance – lawyers, journalists, human rights lawyers – can challenge the statute given that it “prevents them from doing their job without taking substantial measures when communicating to overseas witnesses, sources and clients.”

This is an incredibly serious case. The outcome will not decide the legality of the statute itself but just whether it can be challenged. By anyone. A dismissal of the case – that is, a decision declaring that no one clearly has standing to challenge the statute – would prevent the existing intelligence operations from ever being challenged so long as the government avoids bringing warrantlessly-accessed data into a trial as evidence.

Watch this case; if it goes sideways then the American government will have (effectively) been given license by the highest court in the land to surveil Americans, without warrant, and without an effective means to prevent the surveillance.