The Independent has a terrifying story, if there is no public outcry over which, I have no hope for the short-term survival of liberty in Britain. Perhaps it is just our turn to live under totalitarianism, and our children's and grandchildren's too (assuming liberati and other anti-social types are permitted to breed in the well-ordered society) ...

Britain is to become the first country in the world where the movements of all vehicles on the roads are recorded. A new national surveillance system will hold the records for at least two years.

Using a network of cameras that can automatically read every passing number plate, the plan is to build a huge database of vehicle movements so that the police and security services can analyse any journey a driver has made over several years.

Read the whole thing here. Then answer me this question: by what right is this power assumed? It is no doubt being done in the name of 'public safety', in which case where's the democratic mandate, and when was parliament asked?

Cross-posted to Samizdata

This from Your Guide to Oyster Daily Price Capping {pdf}

Once you have reached a cap, you must continue to touch your Oyster card on the card reader on every trip. If you do not do so, you may be liable to pay a Penalty Fare or you may be prosecuted.

In other words: "Even if your travel is fully paid for, we still want to know where you are."

Is it just me, or is the Oyster logo half a pair of handcuffs?

Compare this:

By 2050 earlier, probably -- all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -- they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. Even the literature of the Party will change. Even the slogans will change. How could you have a slogan like "freedom is slavery" when the concept of freedom has been abolished? The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Syme {no relation} in 1984

with this:

People's names are already on a large number of databases. Most of us have dozens of cards in our wallets with our identities on. We already have a Big Brother society. ID cards mean identity fraud can be dealt with and stopped. ID cards are a means of controlling the Big Brother society rather than creating it. Big Brother society is already here.

Charles Clarke, quoted in the Eastern Daily Press today.

Controlling the Big Brother society might sound like preventing it, restraining it. But your expectations deceive you. Forget literary allusion. "Big Brother society" means whatever the establishment defines it to mean.

Now consider only the words, how they literally fit together. Big Brother society = our society. ID cards are a means of controlling society.

Wired reports that a California bill is moving swiftly through the state legislature that would make it illegal for state agencies and other bodies to use the technology in state identification documents.

The bill, which California lawmakers believe is the first of its kind in the nation, would prohibit the use of radio-frequency identification, or RFID, chips in state identity documents such as student badges, driver's licenses, medical cards and state employee cards. The bill allows for some exceptions.

The bill allows for a number of exceptions for the use of RFID, such as devices used for paying bridge and road tolls, ID badges used for inmates housed in prisons or mental health facilities, or ID bracelets and badges used for children under the age of four who are in the care of a government-operated medical facility.

The bill allows agencies to obtain additional exceptions to the ban if they can prove to the legislature that there is a compelling state interest to use it in certain situations and can prove that other, less invasive technologies would be unsuitable. The bill allows state agencies that already have RFID devices in place - such as the Senate and Assembly office buildings - to phase them out by 2011.

It would also outlaw skimming - which occurs when an unauthorized person with an electronic reading device surreptitiously reads the electronic information on an RFID chip without the knowledge of the person carrying or wearing the chip.

Wired reports how in an attempt to establish equity in the world of surveillance, participants at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference in Seattle this week took to the streets to ferret out surveillance cameras and turn the tables on offensive eyes taking their picture.

The opposite of surveillance -- French for watching from above -- sousveillance refers to watching from below, essentially from beneath the eye in the sky. It's the equivalent of keeping an eye on the eye. With that in mind, Mann conducted his tour with conference participants to see how those conducting surveillance would respond to being monitored.

In the stores, as conference attendees snapped pictures of three smoked domes in the ceiling of a Mont Blanc pen shop, an employee inside waved his arms overhead. The intruders interpreted his gesture as happy excitement at being photographed until a summoned security guard halted the photography.

Mann asked the guard why, if the Mont Blanc cameras were recording him, he couldn't, in turn, record the cameras. But the philosophical question, asked again at Nordstrom and the Gap, was beyond the comprehension of store managers who were more concerned with the practical issues of prohibiting store photography.

Mann quoted Simon Davies of Privacy International, a London-based nonprofit that monitors civil liberties issues:

The totalitarian regime is the regime that would like to know everything about everyone but reveal nothing about itself.

He considered such a government an "inequiveillant regime" and likened it to signing a contract with another party without being allowed to keep a copy of the contract.

What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record ... my actions. Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions.

The Daily Texan reports that State Rep. Larry Phillips, R-Sherman, isn't happy that one-quarter to one-third of all Texans drive without automotive insurance, according to his research. He aims to change that with his proposed House Bill 2893, which includes a subsection that some find disturbing: the addition of an electronic tracking and identification system onto each vehicle.

The RFID tag would transmit a unique frequency that would show the vehicle's make, model, identification number, the title as registered with the Department of Transportation and whether or not the driver has insurance coverage. The proposed law also makes clear that the state will create a database of insurance provider and coverage information, keeping track of who has what insurance policy and whether it is paid or not. Scott Henson, a Texas American Civil Liberties Union police accountability and homeland security specialist warns:

The language opens up the whole tracking system for any conceivable law enforcement use," Henson said. "Once that happens, Texans' cars might one day appear as electronic dots on law enforcement's computer mapping screens.

The transponder lets the government track you wherever you go, whether to visit your grandmother, secretly visit a gay bar or drive to a medical supplies office, whatever.

Philip Doty, associate director of the Telecommunications and Information Policy Institute at UT-Austin goes to the heart of the matter:

In post-Patriot Act America, people have lost awareness of the little changes that lead to a chain of effects that restrict us politically and individually.

Simson Garfinkel of MIT Enterprise Technology explains:

RFID technology is already broadly deployed within the United States. Between the “proximity cards” that are used to unlock many office doors and the automobile “immobilizer chips” that are built into many modern car keys, roughly 40 million Americans carry some form of RFID device in their pocket every day. I have two: last year MIT started putting RFID proximity chips into the school’s identity cards, and there is a Phillips immobilizer chip inside the black case of my Honda Pilot car keys.

He comes to an interesting conclusion:

The problem of voluntary, industry-approved privacy standards is that they’re voluntary—companies don’t need to comply with them. And the very real danger facing the RFID industry is that a suspicious public will push for regulation of this technology. Although the industry has successfully killed legislation proposed earlier this year in California and Massachusetts, high-handed actions on the part of RFID-advocates will likely empower consumer activists and their legislative allies to pass some truly stifling legislation.

Indeed.

Something tells me that HMG does not expect their proposed fox-hunting ban to be awfully popular with the country folk:

Police are planning to use spy cameras in the countryside to enforce a ban on fox hunting.

Chief constables intend to site CCTV cameras on hedgerows, fences and trees along known hunting routes to enable them to photograph hunt members who break the law after hunting with hounds is outlawed.

They used to warn that 'walls have ears'. Now walls will have eyes as well. I suppose the panopticon countryside is nothing more than a logical extension of our panoptican cities. It is merely a matter of time before every workplace and every home is wired up to the Big Eye of Big Brother. Then the nightmare really begins.

There exist all manner of varying justifications for this surveillance-fever but there is only one reason that our political masters are deploying it with such alacrity: because they can.

The same technology that enables us to chatter with each other across national boundaries is being used to create a tightly-wrapped police state.

What a very, very grim future we face.

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net

Mayor of the City of Chicago has outlined elaborate camera network. The plan is to monitor the city a vast security network from a hi-tech command center. Thousands of surveillance cameras will be linked - and authorities will be alerted to crimes and terrorist acts.

Some people are concerned about "Big Brother" invading their privacy but Mayor Daley says the cameras will be located in public areas. The city's plan is to route the live images provided by those cameras on the public way into a unified network piped into the 911 Center. There are well over 2,000 cameras that the city and its sister agencies - like the school system - monitor everyday. The city is adding another 250 cameras to potential high risk areas, most of them downtown.

That includes every city department. That includes the Chicago public schools, the CTA, city colleges. That includes the park district, any other sister agencies that have cameras out there.

Remind me exactly, how that is not Big Brother...

The Mayor retors:

You could photograph me walking down the street. They do it every day. I don't object. You do it every day. You have that right. Why do you have that right?

Hm, I never thought that someone in his position would equate the rights of the individual (to take pictures in public places) to the 'rights' of the state (to monitor its citizens in public).

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

This is one scary, scary animation... It may seem exagerating and a bit on the cheesy (or sprout submarine combo) side but it is certainly my impression that things are moving in that direction.

via Dan Gillmore

Silicon.com reports on Japanese authorities decision that tracking is best way to protect kids.

The rights and wrongs of RFID-chipping human beings have been debated since the tracking tags reached the technological mainstream. Now, school authorities in the Japanese city of Osaka have decided the benefits outweigh the disadvantages and will now be chipping children in one primary school.

The tags will be read by readers installed in school gates and other key locations to track the kids' movements.

Apparently, Denmark's Legoland introduced a similar scheme last month to stop young children going astray.

Josh McHugh in Wired has a feature on RFID chips in supermarkets. He describes his visit to the Future Store built by European retailer Metro to be the premier live testing ground for RFID tags.

Thanks to the coordinated efforts of the world's biggest retailers and manufacturers, not to mention the persistence of former lipstick marketer Kevin Ashton, these little tags are about to infiltrate the world of commerce. Depending who you ask, RFID tags constitute:

1. the best thing to happen to manufacturing since the cog.
2. the biggest threat to personal privacy since the crowbar.
3. the near-exact fulfillment of the Book of Revelation's description of the mark of the beast.

There's a compelling argument for each of these perspectives - including number three.

He explains why manufacturers and retailers alike are so eager to implement RFID technology. It is mostly about the supply chain margins.

Retailers are even keener to get their hands on the sort of information RFID tags promise to reveal. The way it works now, all the little kinks along the supply chain accumulate in the lap of retailers, which take delivery of products without knowing whether the shipments are correct until they're unpacked. The average rate for shipping screwups is 1 in 20. That's a big part of why margins in the retailing business are so thin - average net profit for supermarkets is 1 percent - and precisely the reason that Wal-Mart, Target, and Metro have given their top suppliers six to nine months to start slapping RFID tags onto crates and delivery pallets. Manufacturers want this technology, but retailers need it.

RFID will be good for the customer too. Shopping will be much easier and the information gathered about their shopping behaviour will result in a closer match between demand and supply.

There is more, especially on the argument opposing RFID that we have written about here already. It is worth reading the whole thing.

Yesterday Michael Jennings introduced me to Skype, a sort of instant messaging program that is very good at voice communications. This is part of an ongoing trend which is seeing computer networks challenge the traditional telephone networks for business.

Because rather then pay a large sum of money to make an international phone call, I'm now able to speak with Michael in London from my Australian home, for free, and with a better sound quality then I was able to do before.

So as you can imagine, it is a time of fast change in the telephone business. This has implications wider then the share prices of telephone companies.

To encourage take up of VoIP, legislation has been introduced in the US Senate, by Senator John Sununu. The VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act of 2004 is designed to exempt this technology from most state and federal regulations.

Needless to say there's been plenty of opposition to this. Much of the opposition comes from self-interested telephone companies, but the US Dept of Justice is not happy either.

The VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act of 2004, sponsored by Senator John Sununu, would exempt VoIP service from a wire-tapping regulation called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, commonly used to listen in on traditional telephone calls, said Laura Parsky, deputy assistant attorney general for the DOJ's criminal division.

"I am here to underscore how very important it is that this type of telephone service not become a haven for criminals, terrorists and spies," Parsky told the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee Wednesday. "If any particular technology is singled out for special exemption from these requirements, that technology will quickly attract criminals and create a hole in law enforcement's ability to protect the public and national security."

You can read Laura Parsky's complete testimony here

What this statement is all about is that the Dept of Justice has got quite accustomed to using the wiretap to track down undesirables and is most unhappy that this legislation might prevent them from doing so in the future.

This is part of a wider trend that I suspect we will see more of, with people taking the opportunity to try out new ways of communicating with each other, and regulatory agencies scrambling to keep up. In the United States, there are US Senators who seem, like Senator Sununu, who consider privacy issues and freedom from regulation important. I fear that when the EU catches up, as it surely will, that those issues will be the least of the concerns of the people who draft the regulations.

RFID news reports that the UK-based vehicle licence plate manufacturer, Hills Numberplates Ltd, has chosen long-range RFID tags and readers from Identec Solutions to be embedded in licence plates that will automatically and reliably identify vehicles in the UK.

The new e-Plates project uses active (battery powered) RFID tags embedded in the plates to identify vehicles in real time. The result is the ability to reliably identify any vehicle, anywhere, whether stationary or mobile, and - most importantly - in all weather conditions. (Previous visually-based licence plate identification techniques have been hampered by factors such as heavy rain, mist, fog, and even mud or dirt on the plates.)

The e-Plates project has been under development for the past three years at a cost of more than £1 million, and is currently under consideration by a number of administrations. It is hoped that e-Plate will be one of the systems trialled by the UK Government in its forthcoming study of micro-chipped licence plates.

Brought to my attention by Stephen Hodgson of Unpersons.net. Thanks.

It is a long time since I have contributed anything to White Rose. And it is a long time since this article by journalist and novelist Alexandra Campbell appeared, in the Telegraph, on May 14th. Apologies on both counts, but better occasional contributions and late reports of White Rose relevant material than never, I hope you agree.

This article did not just appear in the Telegraph. It was also reproduced in full, in the "last word" slot, towards the end of the "all you need to know about everything that matters" magazine (i.e. lots of good bits from all the different British newspapers) The Week, of May 29th, Issue 462. That was where and (approximately) when I first read the piece.

Ms. Campbell, on the basis of vague CCTV "evidence", was falsely accused of a crime, and it took a scarily long time for the system to stop persecuting her.

Concluding paragraphs:

"In theory," said Mark, "it's innocent until proved guilty. In practice, whoever makes the allegation first is believed."

Now that we are all picked up on CCTVs up to 300 times a day, and can also easily be identified electronically through swipe cards (health clubs, the office, season tickets, etc), there is a real risk of someone linking you to a passing resemblance on a fuzzy CCTV image and making an allegation against you.

It had taken about eight months to get to this point of the inquiry and I was terrified of enduring months' more worry before I was cleared, but the police followed up my brother's statement quickly and dropped the charges. However, they told me that current policy is to leave fingerprints, pictures and allegations permanently on file.

Checking subsequently with the police press office, I find that "fingerprints may not be held for more than 42 days", but I find it scary that nobody really seems to know. I suspect our civil rights are being chipped away all the time in the name of crime and terrorism prevention.

The whole thing, I discovered, was based on a breach of the Data Protection Act. Companies using CCTV are supposed to show images only to authorised people, such as the police. The supermarket involved should never have allowed the receptionist and the credit card victim to see footage on demand. The receptionist, himself in charge of CCTV, should have known this. He wasn't even following his own company's code of practice, which asks staff who are suspicious of members to take the matter to a manager first. But he has done nothing illegal.

And neither have I. But while I struggle to have my records deleted from police files, he has drifted on and cannot, so far, be contacted. Nobody knows if he made the allegation out of boredom, spite, or genuine, if misplaced, civic-mindedness. It's Kafkaesque, said friends. It's a joke, said others. But it wasn't fiction and it wasn't funny. I was actually very lucky.

I might not have been able to prove where I was. If I'd been a lawyer, police officer, accountant or worked in financial services, my career and livelihood would also have been on the line, and if I'd been a celebrity, the story would have been splashed all over the papers before it was disproved. If the allegation had been connected to terrorism, I would have been jailed immediately.

I used to think that if you didn't break the law, you had nothing to fear from it. Now I know that if this can happen to me, it can happen to anyone.

Most Americans do not care about exposing themselves to massive data surveillance but they should, says George Washington University law professor and New Republic legal affairs editor Jeffrey Rosen in his new book, "The Naked Crowd." Rosen discussed technology and the uneasy balance between security and privacy on April 20 at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.

Jeffrey Rosen: The book is a response to a challenge by my friend and teacher Lawrence Lessig, who writes about cyberspace. We were on a panel about liberty and security after 9/11, and I denounced the British surveillance cameras, which I had just written about for the New York Times magazine, as a feel good technology that violated privacy without increasing security. Lessig politely but firmly called me a Luddite. These technologies will proliferate whether you like it or not, he said, and you should learn enough about them to be able to describe how they can be designed in ways that protect privacy rather than threatening it. I took Lessig's challenge seriously, and spent a year learning about the technologies and describing the legal and architectural choices they pose. The rest of the book followed naturally, and it's an attempt to think through the behavior of the relevant actors who will decide whether good or bad technologies are adopted -- that is, the public, the executive, the courts, and the Congress.

… and will soon be invisible. Anyone who bases their arguments about the dangers of camera surveillance on the primitiveness of current technology is, unlike the latest cameras, being very short sighted. Take a look, for example, at this:

It sounds like the speeder's nightmare. A speed camera accurate up to 150mph which can be concealed in road studs as small as a cat's eye indicator, and which can also - as you're passing - cast a glance at your tyres to see if they're a bit bald.

And at you, to see who you are and where you are, and what you're up to. If not yet, then very soon.

Wake up: this camera exists, and it's being trialled.

I'm awake already.

But the anti-camera lobby can rest easy for a while. The Department for Transport says that there is no way that these cameras, designed and made by a British company called Astucia, will ever be used for "enforcement" to level fines and penalty points. However, they will start being tested around the country later this year, as part of the wider efforts to encourage motorists to respect speed limits.

So, they will not (yet) do "enforcement", not "for a while". But they can already do "encourage". Sounds like enforcement will be with us very soon.

The Australian government has long desired to force ISP's and Internet content Hosts to take responsibility for the activities of their clients. An attempt to do this in 1999 was defeated, but the authorites are back for more.

The draft bill states that ISPs are required to determine whether their services are used for "illegal conduct or speech."

Paragraph 152 of the Explanatory Notes to the draft bill says that "Possible action that could be taken by ISPs and Internet Content Hosts (ICHs) so as not to facilitate use of a carriage service by another person that breaches proposed subsection 474.16(1) includes an ISP ceasing to provide Internet services to that person or an ICH ceasing to host a particular Website containing content that breaches the proposed offence."

Obviously, the implication is clear- should this measure get up, ISP's will be legally required to be much more aggressive in their surveillance of their customers; a gross breach of their privacy.

(Via Whirlpool.net.au)

Via b3ta.com, I came across a nice piece of White Rose Relevant graphics, here.

Since I don't know what the policy is here about pictures, and in any case do not have picture posting privileges, but since b3ta.com is such a Niagara of pictorial diversions, here today and gone tomorrow, I nailed down the relevant image here, amidst appropriately educational commentary.

"Money grabbing gits!" is what b3ta said. Would that our money was the only thing in danger here.

The news just goes from bad to worse on the RFID front. Trevor Mendham quoted Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy as saying that RFID tracks products, not people, but American tech company Applied Digital Solutions, through it's subsidiary Verichip Corporation, has already broken through that barrier.

They have developed a RFID product that is implanted in the victim.

The VeriChip minaturized Radio Freqency Identifcation (RFID) Device is the core of all VeriChip applications. About the size of a grain of rice, each VeriChip contains a unique verification number, which can be used to access a subscriber-supplied database providing personal related information. And unlike conventional forms of identification, VeriChip cannot be lost, stolen, misplaced or counterfeited.

Once implanted just under the skin, via a quick, painless outpatient procedure (much like getting a shot), the VeriChip can be scanned when necessary with a proprietary VeriChip scanner. A small amount of Radio Freqency Energy passes from the scanner energizing the dormant VeriChip, which then emits a radio frequency signal transmitting the individuals unique verification (VeriChipID) number. The VeriChip Subscriber Number then provides instant access to the Global VeriChip Subscriber (GVS) Registry - through secure, password protected web access to subscriber-supplied information. This data is maintained by state-of-the-art GVS Registry Operations Centers located in Riverside, California and Owings, Maryland.

It's a password protected website- anyone with knowlege of the internet knows that password protected websites are not that secure; anyone that says that they can guarantee the security of such a webserver is whistling in the wind.

It's rather like that dreadful George Lucas film, The Phantom Menace, where the slaves are fitted with a tracking device. Verichip Corp. doesn't have slaves in their sights as a target market- they have a wider target market in mind.

VeriChip products are being actively developed for a variety of security, defense, homeland security and secure-access applications, such as authorized access control to government and private sector facilities, research laboratories, and sensitive transportation resources, including the area of airport security.

In these markets, VeriChip is able to function as standalone
personal verification technology or it is able to operate in conjunction with other security devices such as ID badges and advanced biometrics.

In the financial arena, VeriChip has enormous potential as a personal verification technology that could help curb identity theft and prevent fraudulent access to banking and credit card accounts.

In other words, they are after a world where everyone is fitted with these devices. Does Big Blunkett own shares in this company? At the moment, they are working with gun manufacturers. Who will be next?

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is examining the use of RFID-tagged airline boarding passes that could allow passenger tracking within airports, a proposal some privacy advocates called a potentially "outrageous" violation of civil liberties.

Anthony "Buzz" Cerino, communications security technology lead at the TSA, said the agency believes the use of boarding passes with radio frequency identification (RFID) chips could speed up the movement of passengers who sign on to the agency's "registered traveler" program. This would permit them to pass through a secure "special lane" during the boarding process.

Under the registered traveler program, frequent fliers would provide the TSA with detailed personal information that would be correlated by a background check. Privacy advocates said they believe the RFID boarding pass would then serve as an automatic link to the registered traveler database. Details about how the system might work haven't been released by the TSA, and Cerino couldn't be reached today for further comment.

Cerino didn't say when or if the TSA would push for introduction of the RFID boarding passes or how such a project - likely to require a massive, networked infrastructure - would be funded.

The TSA has already started to work on deploying RFID boarding passes in Africa under the Federal Aviation Administration's Safe Skies for Africa Initiative - the initiative identifies Angola, Cameroon, Cape Verde, the Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mali, Namibia, Tanzania and Zimbabwe as member countries.

Katherine Albrecht, founder and director of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering (CASPIAN), a privacy group that has fought the use of RFID tags by retailers and other organizations, called the idea a potentially "shocking and outrageous" violation of civil liberties.

London Underground is set to roll out high-tech CCTV surveillance software that will automatically alert operators to suspicious behaviour, unattended packages and potential suicide attempts on the capital's Tube system. The move comes as London remains on a high state of alert against a possible terrorist attack following the bombs in Madrid earlier this month.

LU has been trialling the technology at Liverpool Street station during the past two months and is now evaluating the results with a network-wide rollout tipped to follow across the Tube's 6,000 CCTV cameras, which cover 95 per cent of stations.

The Intelligent Pedestrian Surveillance system from Ipsotek compares CCTV footage against pictures of the empty station and alerts operators to strange behaviour such as people loitering or bags that have been left on the platform.

Sergio Velastin, director of research and founder of Ipsotek, said that it cuts down on operator time and costs related to blanket monitoring of all CCTV screens by alerting staff only when there is a potential problem. Privacy groups are concerned about the increasing coverage of monitoring technology such as CCTV. Velastin dismissed privacy concerns over IPS and said the software monitors only behavioural patterns and not the individual.

We have tried very consciously to stay away from facial recognition issues. None of our system is capable of recognising an individual – just behaviour. Then the police can come in and say 'we need to find out who that person is'. It is a balance between being free to do what we wish and being protected.

Computerworld has an opinion article by Jay Cline about the privacy scare surrounding RFID technology who explains that the RFID hype has outpaced reality. Manufacturers and retailers have yet to agree on a universal electronic product code. RFID scanning is also far from error-free. But more important, RFID signals are so weak that they're easily blocked by metals and dense liquids. It's infeasible today for someone driving a vehicle down your street to intercept signals from RFID-tagged goods inside your home.

He also argues that the economics of RFID chips also limit how they're used. Until the price of RFID chips comes down to about a penny apiece, they'll mostly be used at the case and pallet level, clear of any personally identifiable activity. So we have several years to identify the privacy controls we want to see in RFID systems. Some companies are already creating these privacy controls. Chip makers and users are discussing how the principles of data privacy could be built into the RFID process. A top priority is notifying customers that certain items are tagged with these transmitters - which could be done by placing a common RFID logo on product packages. To give customers the ability to turn off the transmitters, some companies plan to make them peel-offs. RSA Security Inc. is also developing a chip that could be worn on watches or bags to block nearby RFIDs from transmitting certain information. So the RFID privacy ball is rolling.

Glad to hear that. Nevertheless, I will still be watching the RFID development with interest...

Information Week reports that the State Department plans to begin issuing passports with chips containing biographic information later in the year. Maura Harty, testified at a Congressional hearing Thursday that the United States needs to take the lead in issuing the new passports to encourage other nations to do likewise. Doing so, she says, will help secure our borders against terrorists and other potential troublemakers. Harty told member of the House Government Reform Committee's hearings on the government's US-Visit program, which requires many foreigners entering and leaving the United States to have their fingerprints and face electronically scanned.

We recognize that convincing other nations to improve their passport requires U.S. leadership both at the International Civil Aviation Organization and by taking such steps with the U.S. passport. Embedding biometrics into U.S. passports to establish a clear link between the person issued the passport and the user is an important step forward in the international effort to strengthen border security.

Of course, biometrics is foolproof and fingerprinting your citizens is going to improve border security how exactly?! Another example of a fallacy typical of the statists that if only we had total surveillance, then no crime, threat or terrorism would be possible. Balls, balls, balls.

Sorry for the outburst, it is just one stupid statement by a state official too many... Sadly, I am sure there are many more to come.

Wired reports that privacy groups, business travelers and members of Congress asked the federal government this week to reconsider its plans to implement a passenger-profiling system because agencies have not adequately addressed privacy concerns or shown effectiveness in detecting potential terrorists.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-California), joined by 25 other Democrats, sent President Bush a letter Wednesday asking his administration to protect passenger privacy. The group also proposed that airlines should tell passengers exactly what information they pass along as travelers make reservations.

Before the Computer-Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening Program (CAPPS II) is implemented, we urge the adoption of a specific policy that makes clear the role of airlines in sharing consumer information with the federal government.

Members of Congress and the public have no real assurances that the system will not rely upon medical, religious, political or racial data.

CAPPS II will require passengers to give more personal information when buying airline tickets, information that will then be checked against mammoth commercial databases, watch lists and warrants to screen for suspected terrorists and people wanted for violent crimes.

An ideologically diverse group of public-interest groups - including Common Cause, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Free Congress Foundation -joined the letter-writing campaign, asking Congress for hearings.

I rather think this may be the first posting about animal rights and their potential violation here on White Rose. (For some dumb reason I can't make that link work, so go via the link below, where for some equally dumb reason the exact same link does seem to work.)

Anyway, this just in, via Dave Barry:

AKRON, Ohio – More stray cats could find their way home under a proposed plan to implant microchips that would electronically identify the cats' owners. Democrat Renee Greene introduced legislation Monday to implant microchips beneath the fur of 1,000 cats, giving the animals a permanent identification tag. A runaway cat's owner would be identified by scanning the chip, which would be about the size of a grain of rice, then checking the scan against a voluntary registry maintained by the city. Buying and installing the microchips would cost the city nearly $10,000. The City Council still must approve the legislation.

The legislation is an amendment to a cat law passed about 18 months ago that added cats to the city's laws governing dogs and gave the city's animal wardens the right to capture free-roaming cats, which can be killed if they aren't claimed. The Summit County Animal Shelter, where stray cats are taken, already has the scanners that would be used on the microchips.

First they came for the cats …

Do you also get the feeling that humans will be next?

Paul Smith is a man with a profound interest in driving and road safety. As a driver myself I, too, have a vested interest in these matters. Whenever I depart from point A I much prefer it to be overwhelmingly probable that I will reach point B with all my favourite limbs and organs in situ and functioning as nature intended.

The British government and its various agencies claim that they share this interest as well. Moreover, they assure us that the solution to the problem lies with forcing everyone to drive more slowly and punish those drivers who fail to comply. Hence the virus-like proliferation of the 'GATSO' or 'Speed Camera' which (just by complete coincidence I am sure) has also raised tens of millions of pounds for the public coffers from already over-taxed motorists who infringe blanket and arbitrary speed limits.

In response to the wave of discontent this has caused, the government, the police and the various lobbyists that support them, have doggedly stood their ground and explained that, yes, it is all very regrettable but the point of the GATSO's is most assuredly not to raise revenue (no, perish the thought!) but merely to save lives. In other words, they are relying on the canard that freedom must be sacrificed in order to achieve safety.

Well, they are wrong and Paul Smith has made it his business to prove, publicly and beyond argument, that they are wrong. His website, Safe Speed, cuts a swathe through the cant and the piety:

We have never seen any credible figures that put road accidents caused by exceeding a speed limit at even 5% of road accidents. We object to speed cameras mainly because they fail to address the causes of at least 95% of road accidents. The Government claims of 1/3rd of accidents being caused by excessive speed are no more than lies according to the Government's own figures.

I am shocked, SHOCKED I tell you!

Mr Smith has amassed a treasure trove of documentary, audio and video evidence that entirely discredits the myth that Tax Speed Cameras are anything whatsoever to do with either road safety or saving lives. In fact, so confident is Mr Smith in his own research that he throws down this gauntlet:

So here's the challenge. We promise to publish here (in this box, on the first page of the web site) web links to any serious credible research that implies a strong link between excessive speeds and accidents on UK roads.

So if you are one of those people who thinks that the GATSO is a life-saver, you know exactly what to do.

In the meantime, more power to Paul Smith and his campaign for common sense and reason. When we eventually win this battle, the victory will be due in no small part to the dedication and integrity of people like him.

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net.

Silicon.com reports that the controversial radio frequency ID (RFID) tracking tags will become ubiquitous in consumer goods but privacy issues, standards and cost need to be addressed first, according to a senior executive of UK supermarket chain Safeway.

Safeway ran an RFID pilot with Unilever last year on 40,000 cases of Lynx deodorant tracking them from the factory through to the shelves of three stores and, in an exclusive interview with silicon.com, Safeway CIO Ric Francis said that while the company has no immediate plans to use RFID, the pilot did enough to convince him that the technology is absolutely key to the future of the retail sector.

We see that as a long-term investment. RFID is clearly going to be hugely important to the retail business. My biggest fear about RFID is that if we all try and do independent things we’ll end up with a range of standards that is not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

As and when it becomes cheap enough it will be important from the consumer point of view as well. That will start, I think, with higher value items and will come down and down throughout the sales portfolio. If these things end up being a penny a go, which I’m sure they will be at some point in time, then that will be a route to implement in a ubiquitous nature.

A kind reader provided a link to an article by the BBC warning that snooping powers given to more than 600 public bodies look set to create a small industry of private firms that will help process requests for information about who people call, the websites they visit and who they swap e-mail with. One firm, called Singlepoint, has been specifically created to act as a middleman between the bodies that want access to data and the net service providers and phone operators that hold it.

We saw an opportunity for a business or a facility that could provide secure processing for the data requests that will come out of this legislation.

Singlepoint spokesman explained that without Singlepoint it would be more difficult and costly for public authorities to request data as they would have to set up relationships with all of the UK's communication service providers. Instead, Singlepoint was setting up a system that would automatically route requests for information to relevant net or phone firms.

The Home Office estimates that up to 500,000 requests per year are made for information about who pays for a particular phone or web account. About 90% of these requests are for subscriber information. Singlepoint estimates that there could be millions of requests per year. Most of these requests are made by the police but approximately 4% are made by the many public authorities that have had new powers granted under RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act).

Other firms are starting to set themselves up as trainers for people within public bodies involved with investigations.

the Home Office was keen to get firms offering courses because the police did not have the resources to take on the training of these public body workers itself.

Bodies granted snooping powers include the Serious Fraud Office, all local authorities and councils plus other organisations such as the Charity Commission and the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science.

When proposals to grant these snooping powers were first aired in mid-2002 they were greeted with alarm by privacy advocates and civil liberty groups.

A campaign co-ordinated by the FaxYourMP website prompted the government to withdraw its proposals. However, following a consultation exercise the proposals were resurrected and the powers granted in a series of statutory instruments issued in November 2003.

Wired reports that customers will want to control exactly who knows where they are and when now that wireless companies can track a mobile phone's location.

Bell Labs says it has developed a network software engine that can let cell users be as picky as they choose about disclosing their whereabouts, a step that may help wireless companies introduce location-based services in a way customers will find handy rather than intrusive.

Under a federal mandate requiring that cell carriers be able to pinpoint the whereabouts of any customer who calls 911 during an emergency, expensive network upgrades have made wireless companies more anxious to deploy services that can exploit these new capabilities for a profit. Examples of such services would typically include the ability for restaurants and other businesses to send a solicitation by text message to a cell phone when its owner wanders within range of those merchants. Other applications might include the ability to locate co-workers and customers.

While many cell-phone users might like to be notified of a nearby eatery or find it helpful to let others keep track of their movements, most would rather not expose themselves to round-the-clock, everywhere-they-go surveillance. However, given the real-time requirements of transmitting information over a telephone network, it can be difficult to program a wide range of options for individuals to personalize preferences such as when, where and with whom to share location information. One solution is to hard-code a network database with an "on-off" switch that activates or deactivates a service, for instance, during a window of time with set hours such as peak and off-peak.

Bell Labs said it used a "rules-driven" approach to programming that can take personalization to a less-rigid level without bogging down the computing power of a network.

Telegraph reports that America began a strict new regime of border controls yesterday, scanning fingerprints and taking photographs of arriving foreigners to track down potential terrorists.

The only exceptions will be visitors from 28 countries, mostly European states, including Britain, whose citizens can visit America for 90 days without a visa.

The tough measure was ordered by Congress after it emerged that two September 11 hijackers had violated the terms of their visas. Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, defended the scheme at its launch at the international airport in Atlanta, saying it would make borders "open to travellers but closed to terrorists".

Yeah, right.

The Government has been considering congestion charging based on road use. Under the scheme every car would have a tracking device attached. Satellite technology would then be used to track every car journey made. This personal information would be recorded centrally and drivers billed for their road use.

The privacy implications are obvious and frightening.

It seems that in the wake of Big Blunkett's ID Card announcement privacy concerns are now irrelevant. Transport Secretary Alistair Darling is to push ahead with the plan. Darling has appointed Professor David Begg to head a committee to consider the practicalities.

Begg said:

"It is now a matter of when, not if. Six months ago it was on the shelf, but Mr Darling is now very serious about it."

BBC Report here

Cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

Today's NYT on moves to restrict freelance surveillance:

CHICAGO

WHAT grabbed my attention," said Alderman Edward M. Burke, "was that TV commercial when the guy is eating the pasta like a slob, and the girl sends a photo of him acting like a slob to the fiancée."

The commercial, for Sprint PCS, was meant to convey the spontaneity and reach afforded by the wireless world's latest craze, the camera phone. But what Mr. Burke saw was the peril.

"If I'm in a locker room changing clothes," he said, "there shouldn't be some pervert taking photos of me that could wind up on the Internet."

Accordingly, as early as Dec. 17, the Chicago City Council is to vote on a proposal by Mr. Burke to ban the use of camera phones in public bathrooms, locker rooms and showers.

Trouble is, how are such infringements to be detected?

Most will assume this to be a surveillance debate. But might it instead not be a 'too many laws' debate? I have in mind a world in which everyone will break the surveillance laws routinely, but only Enemies of the People will be prosecuted for it. Just wondering.

Both us civil libertarians and our critics are in the habit of arguing that technology, especially in the hands of government, never works properly, so either (civil libertarians): it should never be relied upon – or (anti civil libertarians): why are civil libertarians making such a fuss about it if it's so useless? My own opinion is that this stuff is getting inexorably cleverer, and that to assume permanent techno-incompetence, in these times of all times, is ridiculous. Bureaucratic and legal confusion can be relied upon to continue indefinitely. But technology can be depended upon to improve.

Here's a BBC report today, about the inexorable development CCTV software:

Visitors to a South Yorkshire science centre are helping the FBI in a project to improve CCTV evidence.

Scientists from the University of Sheffield were asked to help the US law enforcement agency develop a way of identifying often blurry faces caught on video footage.

Now 3,000 volunteers at the Magna Centre in Rotherham are to have their heads scanned to form a three-dimensional image which can then be compared with enhanced CCTV footage.

Researchers at the university's department of forensic pathology hope the resulting technique will revolutionise the way CCTV evidence is used in court cases on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Magna" eh? Anything to do with Magna Carta?

News of some White Rose Relevant Modern Art. At one of my other places I expressed some uninformed prejudices ("messing about", I called it, and a commenter took exception) about an artist called David Cotterrell, prejudices I still believe to be on the button, now that they are slightly better informed by me having browsed through this site.

Here, though, is a description of a David Cotterrell work, which brings together the worlds of art and of surveillance:

'The Paranoia of a London Attache Case' consists of seven twenty two minute video recordings playing concurrently. It was produced using the closed-circuit surveillance camera network within Monument/Bank Underground Station in the heart of the City of London.

The Installation tracks the movement of the attashe case as it is carried by an actor through the labyrinth of tunnels, platforms and escalators that make up the public areas of the station. Observed by 81 of the station’s security cameras, the journey begins and ends with the case being exchanged on opposite platforms.

The security cameras were connected to seven monitors, in turn connected to seven video recorders. By pre-mapping the journey then filming and editing it ‘live’, it was possible to create a continuous sequence. This runs from 14:08:30 to 14:31:10 the time coding and location description can be seen at the bottom of each screen. The sound was recorded simultaneously using a recorder concealed within the attache case.

Look out Michelangelo. Still, it shows you something of what the arties are brooding on these days.

And next time you complain about the government spying on you, be ready for them to say: "Oh but it's art."

Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog links to this piece from last August at Tollroadnews about the EU banning one kind of road pricing technology, in order to make things easier for its own preferred sort of technology.

Here's what the EU wants to ban:

No new DSRC systems would be permitted in Europe after 2008, and existing ones would be banned in 2012. This radical anti-DSRC move is an attempt to force adoption of what is seen as a modern technology (GPS) regardless of cost or difficulty by forcing out the existing short range wireless technologies.

And they want to replace it with their own pet satellite based system.

I always want to believe the worst of the EU, and unimpeded by any facts, I do. In this instance, I assume that the technology that the EU is engaged in banning is better from the civil liberties point of view than the technology it favours, and that this is part of why it is banning what it is banning. It doesn't supply as much in the way of incidental snooping and central surveillance as the kit it wants to use.

Tollroadnews assert that it's a bodge of the worst sort, because the new kit will work worse than the old kit. But if it could be made to work, would the system the EU wants be more centralised and Big Brotherish, or from this particular point of view is there no great difference? Obviously, comments welcome.

Adelaide is swathed with security cameras that observe comings and goings in the Adelaide CBD.

The local police love this and are boasting about how well it is going.

The company in charge of the cameras is well pleased as well, and are so pleased that they are providing live feeds from the cameras on their website. They have had the good grace to omit a privacy policy. After all, that would be a bad joke.

It had to happen:

Undercover Agents Talking To Each Other In 'Under 12' Chatroom

WASHINGTON, DC—In an effort to weed out pedophiles, two FBI agents, identified only as "Cutiepie1994" and "KoalaLover," unknowingly communicated with one another in the under-12 chat room of TweenTalk.com for almost two hours Tuesday. "You should see me in my new bathing suit. It's really rad," Cutiepie wrote. "Kewl. Guess what? My parents aren't home right now," KoalaLover responded. Two minutes after their lengthy Internet conversation ended, KoalaLover unknowingly passed Cutiepie on the way into the bathroom.

Well, it probably will happen, assuming life imitates Onion.

I am right now in the "Yahoo Cafe" airside in Terminal 2 at Tokyo Narita international airport, in transit on my way from London to Sydney. This internet cafe is absolutely free, and I have been using it for 45 minutes or so and nobody has asked me to stop. (There is a sign up saying that the cafe is there to advertise Yahoo and Toshiba - the computers are Toshiba laptops). This is great, partly because I always enjoy getting things for free without having to pay for them, and secondly because I do not have any Japanese money, and there are no cash machines airside. (Given the lack of enthusiasm that the Japanese have for credit cards, getting a beer is going to be harder).

However, there is a sign up outside the cafe stating that people who wish to use the cafe must provide their passports (or some equivalent form of ID) to be scanned or copied, so that use can be monitored. It is stated that "This request is in compliance with various Japanese laws". As to whether this means that the laws require this, or whether they merely allow this, I do not know. It also says that people who do not wish to have their use monitored in this way should not use the cafe. (I will take a picture of the sign, and I will post it when I am in Australia. I could try to do it now, but the machine has no free USB ports. For reasons I will get to).

When I asked to use one of the computers, I handed over my (machine readable) passport, and my passport was actually scanned by a machine, which presumably read my passport number and other details electronically. I was then given an electronic key device, which I was required to plug into the USB port of the computer I want to use. Therefore, my internet use is being connected with my passport number.

I do not know if the "government regulations" require lead to things like happening at all internet cafes in Japan, or just those at the airport. However, I cannot imagine that this sort of system is very hard to subvert with the internet in present form. I am sure that actual criminals have no trouble using the internet anonymously, and that it is only normally law abiding people like me who get their use monitored. (I am almost tempted to go to a porn site to see if I am instantly thrown in a Japanese prison, but I rather doubt that would happen. For one thing, this is the land where people quite openly read pornographic comic books on the subway. They are rather more relaxed about this kind of thing than the Americans).

However, there are lots of proposals in place (justified in a lot of cases by fears of copyright violation) to build computer hardware in such a way that monitoring of this kind is ubiquitous and automatic for everyone everywhere.

However, it's interesting and a little troubling to see that one government of a democratic and in some ways quite liberal country is trying to do it now.

Update: It is perhaps less sinister than that. I went to the bar for a little while, and I came back to the internet cafe. I was recognised and handed another USB key thingy without checking my ID again. As I doubt they remembered my name, it seems they are not matching internet use to actual people, but are merely checking ID. They could switch to matching very easily and without anyone noticing, of course.

The Telegraph has an article about a roadside watch by local volunteers under fire.

Volunteers from villages, known as "speed watchers", will use the devices at the roadside to identify speeding motorists before passing the information to the police. A senior police officer said the three-month pilot scheme at Milton of Campsie, near Glasgow, was a "local solution to a local problem".

But motoring organisations, civil liberties groups and lawyers have criticised the idea on the grounds that there could be difficulties in providing acceptable evidence in court and that the system could be abused by people involved in disputes.

Well, it is a busybodies' license to interefere further in people's lives. When someone with attitudes such as Patrick Friel, the first person to be offered a speed camera, volunteers to 'police local community', I know the police are pandering to those with worst social instincts.

Everyone I've spoken to supports the use of the camera because something has to be done about speeding drivers.

Yes, and the way to do this is to help government impose more constraints on our daily lives.

Coverage of surveillance in the Nov 2003 issue of National Geographic is summarised and accessed here.

The theme, a running meme here, is that because surveillance technology can do such good stuff, it will be installed, and then it can also do bad stuff.

Underwater surveillance, we are told, saved this man's life:

On this particular day maybe the lifeguards weren't paying as close attention as they should have been. Certainly they believed the trim, athletic LeRoy was not a high-risk swimmer.

But on this evening LeRoy was practicing apnea swimming – testing how far he could swim underwater on one breath – and at some point, without making any visible or audible disturbance on the water's surface, he blacked out. The guards failed to notice as he stopped swimming and descended to the bottom of the deep end of the pool. With his arms crossed over his head and his feet twitching, he was unconscious and drowning. It would take him as little as four minutes to die.

Although the human lifeguards watching the pool were oblivious, 12 large machine eyes deep underwater were watching the whole thing and taking notice. Just nine months earlier the center had installed a state-of-the-art electronic surveillance system called Poseidon, a network of cameras that feeds a computer programmed to use a set of complex mathematical algorithms to distinguish between normal and distressed swimming. Poseidon covers a pool's entire swimming area and can distinguish among blurry reflections, shadows, and actual swimmers. It can also tell when real swimmers are moving in a way they're not supposed to. When the computer detects a possible problem, it instantly activates a beeper to alert lifeguards and displays the exact incident location on a monitor. The rest is up to the humans above the water.

Sixteen seconds after Poseidon noticed the large, sinking lump that was Jean-François LeRoy, lifeguards had LeRoy out of the pool and were initiating CPR. He started breathing again. After one night in the local hospital, he was released with no permanent damage. Poseidon – and, more precisely, the handful of French mathematicians who devised it – had saved his life.

And if the machines can see stuff like that, what else can they see?

Thanks to Dale Amon for the tip about something called the Crypto-Gram Newsletter, which contains much of White Rose relevance. Dale particularly singled out a piece called The Future of Surveillance. Excerpt:

Some uses of surveillance are benign. Fine restaurants sometimes have cameras in their dining rooms so the chef can watch diners as they eat their creations. Telephone help desks sometimes record customer conversations in order to help train their employees.

Other uses are less benign. Some employers monitor the computer use of their employees, including use of company machines on personal time. A company is selling an e-mail greeting card that surreptitiously installs spyware on the recipient's computer. Some libraries keep records of what books people check out, and Amazon keeps records of what books people browse on their website.
And, as we've seen, some uses are criminal.

This trend will continue in the years ahead, because technology will continue to improve. Cameras will become even smaller and more inconspicuous. Imaging technology will be able to pick up even smaller details, and will be increasingly able to "see" through walls and other barriers. And computers will be able to process this information better. Today, cameras are just mindlessly watching and recording, but eventually sensors will be able to identify people. Photo IDs are just temporary; eventually no one will have to ask you for an ID because they'll already know who you are. …

And as soon as I saw the title The Patriot Act and Mission Creep I knew that White Rosers would want to look at that one also.

Big Mother

Here's another of those Has This Person Been Reading White Rose? pieces, this time by Jemima Lewis in today's Telegraph:

Some pestilential scientist has invented a device that allows parents to trace their child's location via his mobile telephone. This is the latest in a rash of new gadgets designed to make sure children never get a moment's privacy. There is the tracker watch, which uses Global Positioning System satellites to pinpoint a child's whereabouts (and which, once affixed around the poor blighter's wrist, cannot be removed without alerting the police). There are similar devices that can be sewn into the child's clothing or school bag, or - creepiest of all - surgically implanted under the skin. And last month we saw the unveiling of a gadget which, when installed in the family car, reports back to parents where, and how, their child is driving.

It seems extraordinary that, at a time when children's rights are more loudly invoked than ever before, there is not an uproar over this invasion of their civil liberties. There is no statistical justification for it: children in Britain are no more likely to be abducted by a stranger now than in 1975. It can serve only to foster parental paranoia and make children feel more hounded than ever.

Who would want to be young in the reign of Big Mother?

Often one says at this point: read it all. But that's all of it. It's just a diary bit in a longer piece which is about lots of other things as well. So, no need.

Speaking of medical privacy, time for a little light relief. The BBC reports that Philips has invented underwear that can monitor your vital signs and dial 999 in the event of a problem.

Apparently the hi-tech spy underwear can be washed and ironed as normal. Just be sure to take it off first.

The problem with using technology to look after children is that it is liable also, in due course, to be used to look after adults.

As part of writing for this, I occasionally buy the Times Educational Supplement, and on page 5 of the most recent issue (October 3 2003) it says this (paper only):

Pupils will soon be asked for a thumb-print instead of a password to enter internet chat-rooms.

A firm in the north-east of England has spent three years developing a scanner that will make it harder for paedophiles to prey on youngsters via the internet.

Think2gether, which is based in Gateshead, says the scanner is the first secure access system for chatroom users.

For about £30 schools will be able to buy the thumb-print scanner, which is already being used at the South Tyneside city learning centre and in Leicester education action zone.

Alan Wareham, director of Think2gether, said the system had attracted interest from as far away as Singapore.

"The problem is that children often tell other people their password, which is something adults tend not to do," he said.

"A child can pass on this information in all innocence and the adult can then lon on as that child and pretend it is them using the chat-rooms.

"The scanner removes this possibility by scanning the child's thumb-print three times before letting them in. We are also developing hardware which will monitor and record conversations in chatrooms, as additional protection."

As so often when someone is quoted, the last bit is the scariest.

Australia is often held up as an example of a country where the threat of Big Brother was beaten off once and for all. Now it looks likely to re-emerge.

ABC reports Steven Fitzgerald, General Manager of Operations from the Sydney Airport Corporation, giving evidence to the Committee into Aviation Security. The Committee was critical of Sydney airport's own security record and questioning Fitzgerald about plans to tighten up.

Fitzgerald admitted he had discussed the idea of a national passenger profiling database with the Federal Government.

The last few lines of the transcript are of relevance to British readers and others in Commonwealth countries:

COMMITTEE MEMBER: Sounds very Big Brother-ish.

STEVEN FITZGERALD: It's? I think, that's an issue that really is one for the Commonwealth and not private sector airports at this at this point.

COMMITTEE MEMBER: Have there been discussions with them about it?

STEVEN FITZGERALD: It has been discussed in terms of the broad and, I'll have to say, confidential discussions that we have about the range of, of issues that are being considered around the world.

The New York Times has an article today on the pros and cons of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) being attached to products in supply chains and in stores. A couple of highlights.

Tags with the technology known as radio frequency identification, or R.F.I.D., transmit a digital response when contacted by radio signals from scanning devices. Older versions of the technology have been around for decades, but now major manufacturers and retailers and the Defense Department are pushing to speed the development of a new version that could be read by scanners anywhere in the world, making it cheaper and more efficient to track the flow of goods from global suppliers to consumers.

The Defense Department expects to issue a statement in the next few days calling on suppliers to adopt the new version of the technology by 2005. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. made a similar announcement in July when it said it was requiring its top 100 suppliers to place tags with the new technology on cartons and pallets shipped to its stores by the end of 2004.

The Department of Defence. A government mandate for doing business with that part of the government. One doesn't have to be cynical, here. There are obvious reasons why the DoD needs and wants this technology that have nothing to do with taking away people's privacy. (It simply allows them to run their logistics better, and potentially to keep track of what is going on on a battlefield). However, these are not the sorts of people I expect to want to put protections in place that safeguard my privacy, either.

Ms. Albrecht and other critics say that companies and government agencies will be able to monitor what people read or where they assemble from radio tags embedded in their books or woven into clothing. Unlike bar codes, which cannot be scanned unless a laser has a direct line of sight to them, the radio tags can be read through walls, and multiple tags can be read in an instant.

"R.F.I.D. certainly has value in the supply chain and in inventory management," said Beth Given, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. But she added that "there are so many potential issues once it gets beyond the point of sale that consumer protections need to be written into law."

(Link via slashdot).

There are several disturbing features of this panoptican state in which we will soon be living not the least of which is the sheer breakneck pace of its assembly.

It seems like only yesterday that speed cameras suddenly appeared on every lamppost but even they are so much old hat now:

Automatic Number Plate Recognition systems are set to be deployed by police forces throughout the UK as a major plank of a campaign of "denying criminals the use of the roads." The system will link up to the DVLA, Police National Computer and a National Insurance Database, with these links alone giving it the capability of identifying untaxed, unroadworthy and uninsured vehicles, but they'll also facilitate police surveillance operations, the swapping of data on "prolific offenders" between forces and, well, other stuff... Take this, for instance:

"Eventually the database will link to most CCTV systems in town centres, meaning that all vehicles filmed on one of the many cameras protecting Bedford High Street, for instance, can be checked against the database and the movements of wanted cars traced to help with serious crime investigations."

As far as the drivers are concerned, well, that just about wraps it up, folks.

But truly one hardly has time to digest one horror before the next one comes galloping over the horizon. Dr.Sean Gabb has suggested that our rulers our 'drunk with the technology' but I am not so sure. More like they are stone-cold sober and determined to get the whole country locked down before the public realises exactly what has been done to them.

After reading Natalie Solent's article called A law-abiding person has nothing to hide?, reader Matt Judson wrote in with this cautionary tale as a case in point. The camera does indeed lie.

I have read with interest your posts on security cameras, and the threat they represent. I was especially interested in your post on the idea that law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from security cameras and other surveillance technology, because I was recently unjustly accused of vandalism due to security video.

I recently moved to Nob Hill in San Francisco. Nob Hill is justly famous for the lack of parking; After a few weeks of struggle, I surrendered, and chose to pay $255 per month to park in the Masonic Garage.

Purely by coincidence, my friend works in IT for the Masonic Center of San Francisco, which oversees the garage. Friday morning, he sent me an email: "Emergency: call me now! This is not a joke." I called him, and he told me that the garage manager had asked for his help in emailing security camera video. The garage had caught someone keying a car on camera; they identified the suspect because he drove off a few minutes later, and they had his license plate number. They wanted to send the video to the owner of the car, so that the owner could take it to the police and file charges.

When he looked at the video, he was shocked to see that I was the suspect on the video. He did not think that I was the kind of person who would vandalize a car, but he thought I looked very suspicious on the tape. If he had not known me, he would have sent the video off without a second thought.

I told my friend that I have never keyed a car in my life. That was me on the tape, no question. I knew what I was doing when I was on the camera: I checked for my car on one level, but did not see it; I then turned around, thought about heading for the stairway, and then decided to take the elevator to the next level. I did all of this next to the car that had been vandalized.

At lunchtime, I went to the garage to speak to the garage manager. I told him that it was not me, and asked him to review the tape carefully. He replied that the garage had already reviewed the tape carefully, and they were convinced that they had the right person. He suggested that I call the car owner and try to work out a deal so that I would not be charged.

My friend believed me, and spent the rest of the day reviewing video. Two days after I was caught on video, he found video of a group of teenagers doing something to the car in question; when the teenagers noticed the security camera, they covered their faces and ran away. My friend took the video to the manager, and forced him to call me to apologize. His apology was grudging, of course: "Your friend found someone who was maybe more suspicious than you were."

If it had not been for an incredible stroke of luck, I would have been in for a major headache, perhaps charged with a crime. The initial reviewers of the video tape were completely untrained in viewing video; they did not bother to review the tape carefully; the way they passed on their suspicions resulted in a psychological set that I was guilty; if I had not had a close friend in the process, it would have been very hard to convince anyone of my innocence. Lastly, the garage was going to pass the video on to the owner of the car without telling me; if the car owner had seen me in the garage and recognized me from he video, what would he have done?

Law-abiding people do indeed have something to fear from security cameras.

Matt Judson, San Francisco

I was just thinking up a few scenarios in answer to the assertion that "a law abiding person has nothing to fear from ID cards, in-car tracking systems or surveillance cameras". These are some wholly or mostly law-abiding persons who do have something to fear:

• A person who has unpopular political beliefs of left or right that might lose them their job or promotion.

• A person who is homosexual but their family does not know.

• A teenage girl secretly visiting her boyfriend. He is of a different race to her family, and they have forbidden her to see him.

• A man who is seeking to change his job needs to attend interviews with other companies. He doesn't want his present employer to know for fear that if the interviews don't work out he might end up worse off than before, having lost the confidence of his boss.

• A woman scouting out places to go to get away from her violent partner.

• Someone going to Alcoholics Anonymous or drugs rehabilitation sessions.

• Someone going to church, synagogue or mosque who fears the scorn of their secular friends, colleagues or family.

• Someone attending classes of religious instruction prior to converting to another religion who fears the vengeance of their family if their apostasy becomes known.

• A son or daughter visiting an estranged parent without the knowledge of the parent they live with.

• An ex-criminal seeking to go straight who must meet his probation officer or register with the police.

• An adulterer. (I think adultery is very wrong, but I don't want the government involved in exposing it - besides the intrinsic nastiness of state intervention in such matters, you can bet they would expose the adulteries of their opponents and pass over the adulteries of their friends.)

That example takes us to a more general point: there are so many laws that nearly all of us are breaking some of them all the time. This fact gives local and national authorities enormous scope for quiet blackmail. You think it's unlikely that they would be so wicked? Well, the blackmailers themselves might scarcely see it as blackmail. Imagine this scenario: they get to know that X, an irritating serial complainer, writer of letters to the editor, and general thorn in the side of several local councillors, is attending an adult education class for more than the number of hours permitted to an unemployed person who is meant to be actively seeking work. How satisfactory to take action against this pest! Meanwhile Y, who sat next to X in the class and is equally unemployed and equally breaking the rules (or equally unaware of them), is ignored because he is not a troublemaker.

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net

I really don't know how all these so-called 'civil libertarians' can possibly live with themselves. Don't they care about the children?

Children are frightened of speeding traffic and want more measures to make roads safer, a survey has suggested.

Three-quarters of children questioned said they wanted more speed cameras.

About 70% thought drivers should go slower near their school, with almost as many wanting drivers to slow down near their house.

Half of the 1,500 children surveyed wanted safer places to cross the road.

The findings of the survey of children aged 7-14 in city schools by road safety charity Brake were released to coincide with the annual Road Safety Week.

A good friend of mine who has been professionaly engaged in market research has provided me with chapter and verse on just how ludicrously easy it is to get the answers that the researcher wants. Quadruple the easiness when the views being solicited are those of children.

A 'road safety charity'?

Here's an interesting list, from Saturday's Telegraph:

These are the agencies able to run surveillance operations or "covert human intelligence sources", for example agents, informants and undercover officers – people allowed to authorise are in brackets:

It starts with "Any police force (superintendent/inspector if urgent)" and it ends with "Royal Pharmaceutical Society (fitness to practice dir)", with (I counted) thirty five items in between those two.

Quite a list.

It's like a cancer that we can battle against but never truly defeat. As it creeps purposefully through our national lymph system some of us can summon up the courage to fight it back and, for a while, it can appear as if we are in remission. But then comes the hoping and the praying for the final 'all clear' that signals a rebirth and a new lease of disease-free life.

It never comes. The cells are corrupted again and the cancer returns to devour us:

Sweeping powers for Government agencies to carry out covert surveillance, run agents and gather the telephone data of private citizens were contained in legislation published yesterday.

State bodies ranging from the police, intelligence services and Whitehall departments to local councils, the Postal Services Commission and the chief inspector of schools will be able to authorise undercover operations.

The measures were activated by David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, under the controversial Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which became law three years ago. They need to be approved again by both Houses of Parliament before they can be used.

These horrors first made their appearance about a year ago and set off a call-to-arms that, in turn, caused the Home Office to drop the proposals. Or, at least, they made an appearance of dropping them because, like that lurking cancer, they never really went away. They were merely stacked neatly in the pending trays until an another opportune moment presented itself. Seems that the moment is now.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said the British people were "the most spied upon in the Western world".

I reckon that's a pretty fair prognosis. But why? Why are our political elites so determined to construct this panopticon? Why are they so single-minded about this project that they appear immune to sweet reason, protest or appeals to decency? What exactly is driving them? Are they so riddled with paranoia and insecurity that they see monsters and assassins lurking behind every curtain? Is that how they see us? I cannot think of any other reason why a democratically elected government would come to think of themselves as colonial occupiers of their own country.

What has led to this calamitous collapse of trust? Is it repairable? I rather fear that it is not.

Questions, questions. Answers may come in due course but I suspect none will be satisfactory or stop the cancer from spreading. Time for palliative surgery?

[This has been cross-posted from Samizdata.]

Does any of this sound familiar?

Government agencies will be able to access e-mail and phone data, under measures unveiled by ministers.

Local councils will be among the bodies able to use surveillance to investigate crimes, protect national security and protect public safety.

They will be able to use the powers to collect taxes.

It should.

Initial plans to revise legislation were dubbed the "snooper's charter" when announced by home secretary David Blunkett last summer.

Yes, I remember that.

In a separate development phone companies and internet service providers will be told by the government to keep records of phone calls and internet visits for a year.

Is anyone complaining?

The civil rights campaigners Liberty have denounced the latest plans which give agencies such as fire authorities, jobcentres, the Postal Services Commission, the Gaming Board and the Charity Commission the power to use surveillance to investigate crime.

Liberty director Shami Chakrabati said: "This underlines the uncomfortable fact that the British public are the most spied upon people in the Western world."

"The government has failed to learn from its mistakes.

"After the original "snoopers' charter" was published last year, the government was forced to retreat after enormous public outcry. We hope the same happens again".

What the government seems to have learned is: if at first you don't get your snoopers' charter, try, try and try again.

In the category of "better late than never", I don't think White Rose noticed this CNN story from Aug 13 first time around:

JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) – Students in Biloxi public schools started classes this week under the watchful eye of Webcams that will keep track of every classroom and hallway.

I glanced through the WR archives from around then and couldn't find anything. Presumably these webcams are still operating.

Car tracking news from New Zealand:

Motorists face being taxed on how far they travel under government plans to generate cash.

Transport Minister Paul Swain said with vehicles becoming more fuel efficient, revenue from petrol tax would drop and alternative charges needed to be considered.

It is one of a number of transport schemes being looked at by officials, including a Big Brother-style project to equip every car with a personalised microchip so law-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.

And Declan McCullagh offers a different angle on the same technology.

A report in The Times suggests that the Police Superintendents' Association (PSA) will this week call for a compulsory national DNA database. Kevin Morris, chairman of the PSA, insisted that "people were not as fearful as politicians believed".

He's wrong.

The article also stated that Big Blunkett hopes to announce this month that he is to go ahead with his plan for compulsory National Identity Cards for innocent British citizens.

Call me cynical but I suspect a smokescreen. The row over a compulsory DNA database could obscure the arguments over Identity Cards. The tactic appears to be to set up the DNA database as a bogeyman so that compulsory ID Cards don't seem as bad.

Now is the time to write to your MP about Identity cards. Next month could be too late.

Partly cross-posted from The Chestnut Tree Cafe

Microchips buried inside your vehicle could soon be tipping off the authorities about your driving misdeamenors, says Jason Barlow in the Telegraph.

Reports this week indicate that the Government is working on a scheme that will lead to every car in the country being fitted with a personalised microchip, enabling the powers-that-be to identify and prosecute motorists who break the law.

Electronic vehicle identification (EVI) allows the chip buried within your car to collude with the existing network of roadside sensors to provide a host of information about the individual behind the wheel, as well as monitoring exactly how vigorous their progress is on any given journey. An in-car informer, in other words, to go with the mobile phone, the Switch and credit cards, and the army of CCTV cameras already tracking our every move.

The police and the DVLA claim there are obvious benefits. Stolen cars could be traced more effectively, and uninsured vehicles more efficiently identified, reducing premiums among middle England's most law-abiding citizens. EVI could also eliminate potentially dangerous cars without valid MoTs. The Treasury stands to recoup an estimated £185 million in unpaid vehicle excise duty.

But the truth of the matter is that it is merely another way – the most pernicious yet – of squeezing revenue out of the poor, beleaguered motorist. Motorists already supply a tenth of all government revenue – that's £38 billion – and because we value our freedom so highly, a freedom typified by our desire to travel by car, we reluctantly continue to stump up even in the face of over-regulation and exorbitant fuel prices.

It could be worse. And, in five years, it will be – you'll be fined for doing an illegal U-turn in the middle of nowhere at three in the morning, while someone burgles your house and gets away with it. Cue calls for everyone on the planet to be fitted with a microchip. After all, the innocent will have nothing to fear.

Truer words have rarely been spoken...

Shami Chakrabarti, the new director of Liberty, is planning a monitoring operation on Britain’s giant retailers. Chakrabarti, formerly a high-flying legal advisor to two home secretaries, takes up her new post today.

Liberty is to set up a unit to monitor the experiments being carried out by various retailers with radio frequency identification technology. M&S and Tesco are pioneering the use of tiny microchips, the size of a grain of sand, which are inserted into the packaging of goods or sown into the labels of clothes.

Chakrabarti believes Britain, already the world leader in the use of CCTV cameras, is set to become the ‘surveillance capital of Europe.’

As from today Liberty will be monitoring the supermarkets and big chain stores. If we think a legal challenge can be mounted to stop their experimentation then we will make it. We will certainly be in touch with the company executives and we will do all in our power to let customers know what is happening. It is up to consumers to decide whether or not they want to boycott a particular store or chain but the companies must be made aware that this is the risk.

Florida police have scrapped a security camera system that scanned city streets for criminals, saying it had failed to recognise anyone wanted by authorities since its introduction two years ago. The system was intended to recognise the facial characteristics of criminals and runaway children by matching passers-by in the Ybor City district of Tampa with a database of 30,000 mugshots.

"It's just proven not to have any benefit to us," Captain Bob Guidara, a department spokesman, said. The cameras have led only to arrests for such crimes as drug deals.

Tesco has ended a trial of new technology that tracked customers buying Gillette razor blades. The retailer denied that the technology was being used for security reasons, but shoppers considered it to be an invasion of their privacy.

After Tesco's use of radio frequency identification (RFID) chips was revealed, protests were held outside the store and consumers wrote to Gillette demanding that plans to use the chips be shelved.

Gillette has reportedly backed away from introducing RFID chips into individual products on a wider scale, despite being an enthusiastic supporter of the technology. The company is heavily involved in the Auto-ID consortium, which is looking at ways of developing RFID for shops, but it says that chips may not be used to monitor individual products for at least 10 years.

Tesco said its Cambridge trial had finished as planned; it was only meant to be in place for six months from January, and decisions had not been affected by the protests. The company has now moved to its next phase in testing RFID, by placing chips in DVDs at its store in Sandhurst, Berkshire.

Barry Hugill, of the civil rights group Liberty, was concerned at "function creep", in other words, information recorded for one purpose being used for another.

We want clear legal guidelines as to what information companies, government agencies, local authorities are allowed to glean [and] what they can do with it.

The Guardian reports that a "watch list" drawn up by Mexican security forces of 80 anti-globalisation activists who are believed to be headed for Cancun for the World Trade Organisation gathering next month has provoked an angry response - from those whose names are missing. Ten days ago, the Mexican daily La Reforma ran a story on a "watch list" that has been compiled by the security forces concerned about possible trouble at the September 10-14 event. The list named 60 international and 20 Mexican anti-globalisation activists.

A letter addressed to "Government Agents Bent on Re stricting Civil Liberties", which is currently being circulated for signatures, reads:

Despite hefty expenditures of tax money on intelligence gathering ... we are concerned that you were only able to find 60 internationals and 20 Mexicans who are opposed to the World Trade Organisation. Haven't you noticed that the tide of public opinion is turning decidedly against the WTO? ...Please add my name to your 'watch list' immediately!

If you are unwilling to add my name to the list, then I must insist that you remove those singled out for special attention. I can assure you that we have similar views - we are all opposed to the WTO and a 'free' trade agenda that impoverish the majority of us while enriching a few corporations.

Heh.

There's an interesting White Rose relevant posting at 2 Blowhards just now. 2 Blowhards? Mostly culture in the paintings-movies-literature sense, but often they wander towards culture in the Brian's Culture Blog sense (where culture means whatever I want it to mean). Anyway, Blowhard "Friedrich" put a piece up yesterday called They Know Two Much, which is about targetted marketing, in this case at the extremely rich. It's surveillance in its way. As Friedrich says, of the people he's writing about, the "geodemographic segmentation" merchants:

Well, the next time you get some direct mail or other advertising that seems to know exactly who you are and where you live and how much tread life remains on your right rear tire, you know who to thank – or blame.

Which makes the point nicely that these people will surely be getting into bed with the CCTV minders if they haven't already. Which would supply the CCTV people with lots of money and motivation.

"Looks like a worn tyre there – give me the number would you? Make? Owner? Address? Phone? Thank you." Then: call one from the police about driving with a worn tyre, and call two from the tyre salesman offering immediate delivery and fitting.

Ah, brave new world.

In more traditional police-states, citizens may be blissfully unaware that they have done wrong until they are woken in the wee small hours by an ominous rapping on their front doors. In modern police-state Britain, the knock on the door is to be replaced by the thud on the doormat.

If this report from the UK Times is accurate (and it is just about creepy enough to be true) then it may be time to think about buying a bicycle:

EVEN George Orwell would have choked. Government officials are drawing up plans to fit all cars in Britain with a personalised microchip so that rule-breaking motorists can be prosecuted by computer.

Dubbed the “Spy in the Dashboard” and “the Informer” the chip will automatically report a wide range of offences including speeding, road tax evasion and illegal parking. The first you will know about it is when a summons or a fine lands on your doormat.

The plan, which is being devised by the government, police and other enforcement agencies, would see all private cars monitored by roadside sensors wherever they travelled.

Who the bloody hell are the 'other enforcement agencies'? And the very notion of an informer in every vehicle! Saddam Hussein could only dream about that level of control.

Police working on the “car-tagging” scheme say it would also help to slash car theft and even drug smuggling.

The same old, same old. Every accursed and intrusive state abuse is sold to the public as a cure for crime and 'drug-dealing'. The fact that it still works is proof that we live in the Age of Bovine Stupidity. A media advertising campaign showing seedy drug-dealers and leering child-molesters being rounded up as a result of this technology will have the public begging for a 'spy in the dashboard'.

Having already expressed my doubts about the viability of new government schemes here I should add that the fact that this relies on technology rather than human agency means it just might.

The next step is an electronic device in your car which will immediately detetct any infringement of any regulation, then lock the doors, drive you to a football stadium and shoot you. HMG is reported to be very interested and is launching a feasibility study.

[This item has been cross-posted on Samizdata.]

Here's an article by Tom DeWeese of NewsWithViews.com, entitled Total Surveillance Equals Total Tyranny.

First three paragraphs:

In the name of fighting terrorism a new kind of government is being implemented in Washington, D.C. We are witnessing the birth of a powerful multi-billion dollar surveillance lobby consisting of an army of special interest groups, Washington lawyers, lobbyists, and high-tech firms with wares to sell.

The personal rights of American citizens, protected until now by the Bill of Rights, are the farthest thing from their minds as they seek to fill their pockets while enabling government to monitor and control our lives to a degree unheard of prior to September 11, 2001. This army seeks riches as it pushes for laws and regulations to spy on and control the lives of law-abiding Americans.

The Government Electronics and Information Technology Association (GEIA) reports that there are more than 100 federal entities involved in forging the largest conglomeration of government-private contractor interests since the creation of the Pentagon. GEIA represents hundreds of corporate members seeking to cash in on the Homeland Security-citizen-surveillance-spending spree.

The counter-terrorist-industrial complex?

Here's a description of a helpful and amusing mapping system that they've developed in Amsterdam, linked to by David Sucher.

For the exhibition Maps of Amsterdam 1866-2000 at the Amsterdam City Archive Waag Society together with Esther Polak have set up the Amsterdam RealTime project.

Every inhabitant of Amsterdam has an invisble map of the city in his head. The way he moves about the city and the choices made in this process are determined by this mental map. Amsterdam RealTime attampts to visualize these mental maps through examining the mobile behaviour of the city's users.

During two months (3 Oct to 1 Dec 2002) all of Amsterdam's residents are invited to be equipped with a tracer-unit. This is a portable device developed by Waag Society which is equipped with GPS: Global Positioning System. Using satellite data the tracer calculates its geographical position. Therse tracers' data are sent in realtime to a central point. By visualizing this data against a black background traces, lines, appear. From these lines a (partial) map of Amsterdam constructs itself. This map does not register streets or blocks of houses, but consists of the sheer movements of real pepole.

When the different types of users draw their lines, it becomes clear to the viewer just how individual the map of amsterdam can be. A cyclist will produce completley different favourite routes than someone driving a car. The means of transport, the location of home, work or other activities together with the mental map of the particular person determine the traces he leaves. This way an everchanging, very recent, and very subjective map of Amsterdam will come about. If you spend (or should we say move) a good amount of time within the 'ring' of the Amsterdam A10 Highway, you can apply here

for becoming a testperson during rhe testing and development-stage or for becoming a participant during the time of the exhibition. Participants receive a print of their personal routes through the city, their diary in traces.

As Sucher says, this could be

…the first step to charging for street use. Or more.

My attitude to charging for street use is: if it's your street? … But: "Or more." Exactly. The whole point of the Internet is that we don't each of us, separately, any longer have to do our own personal filing. The great Giant Filing Cabinet in the Sky can do our filing for us, and we can share each other's files. There are huge advantages to this process. Huge.

But what are the disadvantages? Who else gets to look at your "personal" files, and what use to they make of what they learn? The White Rose agenda is, among things: the disadvantages of the Internet. What if they price we pay for this thing ends up being a whole lot more than just the price of getting connected to it?

White Rose: Depress yourself about the future of technology.

If you are one of those who favours privacy laws, to protect people against being snooped on, you might want to make sure you aren't asking the government to make operations like this one illegal.

That link was in David Carr's Samizdata piece yesterday, and there's more comment from him and from the Samizdata comment pack.

It's a day or two late to be passing this on, but here it is anyway:

A government report that urges the U.S. Postal Service to create "smart stamps" to track the identity of people who send mail is eliciting concern from privacy advocates.

The report, released last month by the President's Commission on the U.S. Postal Service, issued numerous recommendations aimed at reforming the debt-laden agency. One recommendation is that the USPS "aggressively pursue" the development of a so-called intelligent mail system.

Though details remain sketchy, an intelligent mail system would involve using barcodes or special stamps, identifying, at a minimum, the sender, the destination and the class of mail. USPS already offers mail-tracking services to corporate customers. The report proposes a broad expansion of the concept to all mail for national security purposes. It also suggests USPS work with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to develop the system.

If you want to. read the whole thing.

The case of the comedian who strolled into Prince William's 21st birthday party on June 21 illustrates the point that surveillance cameras are only as much use as the people supposedly manning them and paying attention to them. That night, the members of the Metropolitan Police and of the various Royal Security organisations who were supposed to be doing this weren't. Had our joker been a real suicide bomber he might have landed us all with King Edward, so I heard on the TV today.

The thing is, criminals of the more usual in-out don't-make-a-fuss sort have already worked out that merely being photographed doesn't matter if no one is paying attention to the photographs until they've done their criminal deeds.

I believe that the spread of surveillance cameras means that there will soon be a whole new class of people in the world, the surveillers. We will become aware of these people rather as we recently became aware of call centre operatives, for there will have to be a lot of them to keep up with the flow of pictures. One thing's for sure. They'll know a lot more stuff than they'll officially be allowed to tell, and there'll be lots of arguments about what their rights and responsibilities will be, and who they will have to report to.

I suppose it is possible that "expert" computer programmes will enable CCTV security to be entirely automated, to the point where robots will spot trouble and act against it, but it seems unlikely. Too much to go wrong, I would have thought. (Comments on the immediate likelihood, say in the next two decades, of such expert systems would be most welcome.) I wonder, will the day ever come when a human can be arrested and charged by a robot? Maybe not. But computers will have work to do in observing what they think might be unusual or anomalous events, which require serious human attention.

An extra dimension of interesting could be added to such matters by the fact that, what with modern communications racing ahead the way they are, the people looking at the pictures (assuming computers don't muscle in on this job) won't even have to be in the same countries as the cameras, any more than call centre people have to be now. People who became skilled in the art of watching television (I reckon I'm pretty good at this myself) could win national awards for export achievement.

The Baby Boom is getting old, and is going to be very hard to keep in nice fat juicy pensions like they (we) are now expecting, and they (we) will have a lot of votes. We will, I anticipate, be demanding undemanding jobs to top up our pensions. Snooping on other people with CCTV cameras would be just the thing. The 21st century equivalent of peeking at the passing scene through net curtains.

Not a very pretty picture. Not a definitely nice world. Please understand that I am describing the way I think things are heading, not recommending it or approving of it.

CNET News.com reports:

Lawmakers in California have scheduled a hearing for later this month to discuss privacy issues surrounding a controversial technology designed to wirelessly monitor everything from clothing to currency.

Sen. Debra Bowen, a California legislator recently on the forefront of an antispam legislation movement, is spearheading the August 18 hearing, which will focus on an emerging area of technology known as radio frequency identification (RFID), a representative for Bowen has confirmed.

RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Retailers adore the concept, which enables them to automatically detect the movement of merchandise in stores and monitor inventory in warehouses using millions of special sensors. CNET News.com wrote about how Wal-Mart and the U.K.-based grocery chain Tesco are starting to install "smart shelves" with networked RFID readers.

According to Declan McCullagh of CNET News.com Proponents hail the technology as the next-generation bar code, allowing merchants and manufacturers to operate more efficiently and cut down on theft. The privacy threat comes when RFID tags remain active once you leave a store. That's the scenario that should raise alarms - and currently the RFID industry seems to be giving mixed signals about whether the tags will be disabled or left enabled by default.

Further, unchecked use of RFID could end up trampling consumer privacy by allowing retailers to gather unprecedented amounts of information about activity in their stores and link it to customer information databases. They also worry about the possibility that companies and would-be thieves might be able to track people's personal belongings, embedded with tiny RFID microchips, after they are purchased. Katherine Albrecht, the head of Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a fierce critic of RFID technology says:

If you are walking around emanating an electric cloud of these devices wherever you go, you have no more privacy. Every door way you walk through could be scanning you.

Policy makers in Britain are also starting to ponder the privacy implications of RFID. A member of Britain's Parliament has submitted a motion for debate on the regulation of RFID devices when the government returns from its summer recess next month.

Steven Chapman is the sort of blogger whom White Rose readers ought to keep on their list of haunts. He has White-Rose-relevant material here about how war erodes civil liberties, even in the face of the strongest written constitutions, and here about car surveillance via road pricing, with a link to this Observer story.

David Farrer comments here on the case of a someone who may be sent to jail for using a mobile telephone to record and transmit proceedings in the Perth Sheriff Court.

Apparently they don't like it so much when we use technology to keep tabs on them.

From the Telegraph yesterday:

Closed-circuit television cameras are to be installed in every classroom at a school for the first time in Britain in a development that has raised alarm among parents and teachers.

CCTV will operate throughout the new school, King's Academy in Middlesbrough, when it opens in September. The cameras are intended to make it easier to monitor and control bad behaviour by pupils.

The school says they will also watch over expensive computer equipment and will assist staff by providing evidence to clear teachers if they are falsely accused of abuse or assault.

This last is to counter the fear among the teachers that the cameras will also be used to spy on them.

King's is the latest of the Government's trumpeted city academies, funded jointly by state and private money. It will specialise in business and enterprise. Although CCTV is used for security reasons around many schools, King's is the first to use it throughout classrooms.

Manchester city council is now seeking funds to install cameras in five schools as part of a discipline crackdown. A CCTV network of 40 to 50 cameras, which would cover the average school, would cost about £16,000.

Not for the first time, my reaction to being told the cost of some surveillance kit is: that's cheap. Soon, if they want it to be everywhere, and they do, it will be.

Supermarkets have begun trials on coordinating RFID tags and security cameras in order to reduce theft as the first step in converging logistical and surveillance technologies.

The first step has already been taken through trials at a supermarket in Cambridge, where RFID tags were used to identify a purchaser through a security camera. In this particular case, a second camera at the checkout was used to ensure that the item was purchased legally.

The technology is also utilised on the London Tube.

Transport for London is also using RFID-style chips in its new Oyster smart cards to allow users to travel around the tube network. The intention is that registered users will have information such as their names and addresses stored on the cards, which would eventually replace season tickets.

A spokesperson for TfL said that the entry and exit points of each journey made by Oyster users were recorded and that, technically, it would be possible to track people through the tube network. Nicole Carroll, marketing director for TranSys, the consortium responsible for implementing the system, told the Guardian that all the journeys made by a user would remain stored in a central computer for the lifetime of the card.

The article produced a link to one of the lesser known groups within civil liberties and demonstrates the diversity of organisation that these concerns attracts. The campaign, known as Consumers Against Supermarket Privacy and Invasion and Numbering, or CASPIAN, is opposed to loyalty cards as those who opt out of obtaining a card tend to pay higher prices as the cost of preserving their privacy.

They also provide the answer for that burning question...With all the pain and suffering in the world and people starving in [fill in location here], how can you justify spending your time on supermarket club cards?

The answer includes: My passion happens to be preserving personal freedom, staving off totalitarianism, and resisting Orwellian intrusions.

Sentiments we can all agree with.

Over wide areas of the urban first world, the Panopticon State is already very much a reality. Folks like us, the contributors to White Rose, Samizdata.net and the grizzled veterans over at Privacy International cry out warning pretty much daily alerting people not so much about the simple fact of surveillance per se but rather surveillance plus data-pooling.

Yet it is important to draw people attention to the basic facts and encourage them to notice the evidence right in front of their eyes, peering down at them like menacing mechanical crows perched on metal branches jutting from walls everywhere, that we are increasing under surveillance by the state directly...

...and by companies whose surveillance footage states are increasingly reserving themselves the right to gain access to on demand...

But the people who would like our every move recorded and subject to analysis are not fools. They would rather you did not actually notice what is before your very eyes and so we are seeing the second age of CCTV: more aesthetically pleasing and less intrusive cameras, rather than the stark utilitarian carrion crows which currently predominate...

...rounder, blending in with the background...

...looking more like the lighting fixtures than the all-seeing-eye.

The second age of security cameras is at hand...still quite literally staring you in the face, but increasingly hiding in plain sight, counting on a mixture of clever design and the fact that familiarity breeds contempt. But Big Brother is still watching, only with a little more style and taste now. That just makes it more dangerous.

This from Harry Mount in the Telegraph today, on speed cameras:

Speed cameras are no longer about safety – even the official at the Department of Transport, who I talked to yesterday, acknowledged, "We're moving away from calling them safety cameras" – and all about raising cash. And when policemen's eyes are full of pound signs, they can't see whether your driving is dangerous, and they couldn't care less, even when they claim otherwise.

It's worth reading more of it of course, but that struck me as the killer para.

This from the BBC:

Eavesdroppers, including stalkers and jealous spouses, are listening in on hundreds of thousands of private conversations in Britain every week because of a legal loophole, BBC News Online has discovered.

Telephone tapping without a valid warrant is illegal under both the 1998 Wireless Telegraphy Act and the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

The law relating to intrusive surveillance devices - bugs - is less clear.

But it is legal to trade in taps, bugs and covert cameras, which explains the myriad websites, mail order businesses and spy shops.

And so on.

I'm a libertarian and I don't quite know what I think about all that. I mean, I'm in favour of trades of all kinds, including lots of trades that other people aren't in favour of. I think, for example, that it ought to be legal to buy a small and sneaky camera, if you want to buy one and if someone wants to sell you one. It's a bit like guns. It's what you do, and in this particular case it's also where you do it, that matters, not the mere owning or buying of the thing itself.

But my attitude to posting on White Rose is: if it's of interest and relevance, stick it up. I'm trying to give the customers here, that is to say the people the editors here want to be the customers here, what they want. No doubt they'll straighten me out if I'm doing it wrong.

Since September 11, 2001, travellers to the United States have readily accepted that a few more checks and questions are the price they have to pay for safety. But is security turning into surveillance? Michael Kerr reports.

Since September 11, 2001, we have all become readier to yield up our freedoms for what we hope will be greater security. But we should not forget the words of that great American statesman Benjamin Franklin: "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Often, we expect curbs on civil liberties to be the desired goal of our own left-wing authoritarians or the unfortunate consequence of some EU directive. It is rare that the demands of the United States may result in one more step towards the "surveillance state".

EU passports will soon have to incorporate a radio frequency identification (RFID) chip, including biometric data, that would be machine-readable for entering the US. This is a consequence of the US Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act of 2002 that demands all visa-free entrants incorporate biometric information on their passports from October 2004. (Hint: you may want to change your passport if you wish to visit the United States after this date).

In the tension between liberty and security, the demands of this Act appear a prudent measure to curb the use of false passports for perpetrating acts of terrorism. However, the biometric identifiers used will be standardised according to workgroups meeting for the International Civil Aviation Organisation and International Organization for Standardisation.

Their work will be co-opted by the European Union. A European biometric identification strategy was announced in June at the summit in Greece. The European Biometric Forum was established, with major players and strong links to their counterparts in the United States, to ensure that there would a single standard for applications of this technology, pursued by all member states of the EU.

The EBF will be launched on the 21st July in Dublin and the technology is being promoted as an additional protection for the privacy of individuals, although the growth is driven by state institutions and telecom/security companies.

The BBC reports that in a surprisingly positive move, the US Senate has voted to withdraw funding from the proposed Terrorism Information Awareness programme (TIA).

The TIA (previously called by the much more chilling name "Total Information Awareness") was to have been the largest snooping system in the world. Its objective was to centrally co-ordinate and cross-reference every single piece of data available on every single person in America. The justification for this appalling idea was the phoney "war on terror". As usual, supporters used the lie that "the innocent have nothing to fear".

It now seems that with funding removed the TIA will be scrapped - publicly at least.

Now if only this country could remove funding from then scrap Big Blunkett.

When you type "Surveillance" into google, some of the more interesting stuff is the adverts on the right. The top one in the list today was this. The one with the creepiest name was this.

A commenter ("Grace") on a previous surveillance related post of mine here said that governments will always be more powerful users of this stuff than the general run of surveillance-inclined people:

We're deluding ourselves if we think there's ever going to be any degree of equality in information collection between the government and the (no-longer) private citizen. 1) The government has the money, the power, the inclination and - increasingly - the ability to carpet the nation with surveillance. 2) Forms of counter-surveillance proving to be effective will be declared illegal – in the interest of public security, of course - and forced underground. (That'll be interesting.)

We're fighting a rear-guard action.

And then she recommends a book.

But she's missing my point. I'm not saying that all these regular punters are going to try to spy only on the government and thereby to hold it at bay, although no doubt that will be part of the story, in the form of spying on lesser government officials and the like. My point is that people concerned about surveillance don't just have the government to worry about. They'll also have the amateurs spying and spooking all over them. These amateurs may not have mainframe computers and super-intelligent software, but they are awfully numerous, compared to the government.

And the kit that the amateurs need is now getting very cheap, and very easy to use, and to hide. As these adverts prove.

I second Brian's post on the same topic. The Evening Standard reports that one in 30 Britons now has their DNA stored on a national database of genetic fingerprints. The database reached the two million mark today, and is one of the world's largest. It is used to help solve an average of 15 murders and 31 rapes each month.

The government is trying to make it easier to add DNA entries to the database. A law before Parliament would allow samples to be stored from people when they are arrested and retained regardless of whether they are convicted or not... Have a brush with the law and you are on file for life. Currently a sample can be stored only if a person is charged.

The move is expected to dramatically increase the number of samples stored but has led to claims from civil liberties groups and the Liberal Democrats that the system is being abused by the government.

Home Office Minister Hazel Blears said that only criminals should be worried by the scale of the database.

Law-abiding citizens have nothing to fear from the retention of DNA samples.

Yes, we do.

The State is not your friend

Here's news of a portable phone that can view through your home webcam.

Now that REALLY sounds like the democratisation of surveillance to me. Who says your "home" webcam has to be at home? What happens when webcams get REALLY small? They'll be everywhere, accessed by who the hell knows who?, is what.

Via boingboing. "Self-surveillance", Xeni Jardin calls it. Xeni Jardin is missing the bigger picture.

At present I am not in the market for a longer penis, or for more energy when my mind turns to the sexual as opposed to urinary use of the penis that I already have, so most junk emails are for me just that: junk. Delete. However, I got one this morning, and I'm sure millions of others did too, which interested me, White Rose wise, and (although in the years to come I will probably mark this moment as the one when my life stopped working and went to hell, my identity stolen, my bank account emptied, my hard disc and that of all my friends virused, etc.) I pressed this link.

For the benefit of those wiser or more cautious or more internet savvy than me, the link leads to a website devoted to a computer programme which enables you to learn everything there is to learn about all of your friends and all of your enemies.

Now, once downloaded to your computer, the INTERNET INVESTIGATOR quickly sorts through the maze of over 800 million web pages and other information sources, easily and effortlessly, and turns your personal computer into a POWERFUL information goldmine.

The democratisation of joined-up government, you might say. Everyone can be a member of the surveilling class. (And by the way I think "surveilling class" or maybe "surveilling classes" is a meme with a future.)

As with current strength surveillance cameras, the actual effectiveness of this particular programme as of now – it sounds to me a lot like an old fashioned search engine (but what do I know?) – is not really the big point here, or not the point that interests me. What I think is the big point is that, sooner or later, such programmes surely will do what this one promises to do.

Not surprisingly, the same web site also pushes another programme called "Privacy Protector", which, I guess, enables you to defend yourself against Internet Investigator. Maybe Privacy Protector is the real product, and Internet Investigator only exists to scare up business for Privacy Protector.

Whatever. It all has the smell of the new battles that people are going to be fighting in this brave new twenty first century. And they won't just be government-people or people-government battles, they'll be people-people battles.

Evidence, if you ever needed it, that surveillance cameras are getting smarter:

Britain's first digital speed cameras are being installed today and will go "live" next month.

The new "super cameras", which need no film or servicing, are being tested at Limehouse, in east London. With traditional cameras, motorists hope that there is no film in the camera and that they can get away with speeding.

But there will be no escape with the new digital version, which sends a stream of images and data along a phone line to a Metropolitan Police centre in Kent.

The first cameras are being installed at the Limehouse Link tunnel, which is an accident blackspot. Surveys have shown that drivers of nearly all of the 80,000 vehicles using the tunnel each day break the 30mph speed limit.

In the last three years, 14 accidents there have led to death or serious injury.

And evidence too of why surveillance cameras are widely believed to be a good thing, not just by the surveilling classes, but by the surveilled also.

I just caught a snippet news item on the BBC about how magazines are complaining about people browsing through their mags in the shops, and photoing favourite pages with their camera-portable-phones and immediately phoning them to their friends. Information theft! Couldn't find anything about this on the BBC website, but maybe someone else can.

I think this presages the moment when it won't only be Big Brother who wields surveillance cameras in the street. Everybody will be able to! And they'll be able to phone in the footage to – I don't know – their personal websites or something. It'll get even more fun, if that's the word, when the cameras are in people's buttons or glasses and you won't even know that someone is doing it.

This kind of thing is probably happening already, on the quiet. The real excitement happens when doing it becomes a teen fad, and it starts being known about, and argued about by people saying they have a right to do it. Which maybe they do. After all, the government does it.

What happens then? What will White Rose make of that.

I've always been better at questions than at answers.

Police yesterday released footage of the moment a 16-year-old girl was dragged into bushes as she walked home at 3am. A police officer driving home from work had spotted the girl walking on her own and had rung colleagues at the local police station, telling them to train the camera on her. Officers watching the CCTV footage saw the man carry her 20 yards into bushes.

An urgent message was sent over the police radio and several patrol cars raced to the scene. It is thought the man ran off when he either heard or saw the police cars in the distance. Det Con Mick Blunt, of Adwick CID, said last night:

The feeling among officers is that it could have been a lot worse. A man approached the girl from behind and had a brief conversation before picking her up and dragging her into adjacent bushes. The girl fought back, kicking and screaming, which resulted in her attacker releasing her.

This is good news - the girl was relatively unharmed, if traumatised, and it certainly appears that the CCTV camera was instrumental in saving her. Surveillance cameras are popular with the public precisely for this kind of assistance in crime prevention.

My opposition to surveillance is unabated though. It is based on two arguments. One is, installing a CCTV camera somewhere does not protect people in the area effectively. The effectiveness of such devices is determined by the way in which they are used. In this case, it was the police officer who spotted the girl and decided to instruct his colleagues to train the camera on her who made the difference.

We live in a country with three million surveillance cameras. Why does a case of a surveillance camera being partially instrumental in preventing and potentially solving a crime make it to the headline news? In order to justify the instrusion into its citizens' privacy, the state has not made a case strong enough for surveillance effectivness. I do not see any corresponding decrease in crime. The only practical use of surveillance camera footage is forensic, after the event. The lenient criminal justice system in the UK is making even that use insignificant.

The main reason of opposing surveillance cameras rather than putting up with a minor 'inconvenience' of being monitored in public places (after all, an honest citizen has nothing to hide, does he?) goes to the very nature of the state. Under the guise of public security, governments happily assume the role of the Big Watcher and lay down an infrustructure that give them greater control over the lives of individual citizens. And as Brian pointed out in his post on road pricing and total surveillance, it is impossible to pry it out of the state's cold intrusive fingers...

More surveillance, straight from the school locker room to the internet.

More on vehicle tracking, linked to by A Small Victory:

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is developing an urban surveillance system (search) that would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city.

Dubbed "Combat Zones That See," the project is designed to help the U.S. military protect troops and fight in cities overseas.

Police, scientists and privacy experts say the unclassified technology could easily be adapted to spy on Americans.
The project's centerpiece is groundbreaking computer software that is capable of automatically identifying vehicles by size, color, shape and license tag, or drivers and passengers by face.

With reservations, I supported the invasion of Iraq, and can see the point also of rescuing other places. But this is exactly the sort of thing that the opponents of such escapades abroad have in mind as the reason why they are opposed, and why I also have reservations.

Governments acquire the habits of despotism in faraway places where it seems to make sense, or maybe just not to matter. Then they do it everywhere. Surveillance is indivisible, you might say.

From an Australian newspaper (of all places) a report on a British company offering parents everywhere peace of mind:

Parents in Britain can check exactly where their children are without having to phone them, thanks to a new service launched yesterday.

The mapAmobile service can pinpoint a child to within 50 yards by using the signal from their mobile phone.

I think it is safe to assume that the technology can be applied just as readily to adults. Apparently, the recipient must agree to be traced by replying to text message but I bet that hurdle will prove surmountable with just a little tweaking.

For as long as I can remember I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the principle of road pricing, for much the same reasons that I favour the pricing of any other scarce and desirable product or service. Reduce queueing caused by underpricing. Encourage the construction of better roads, more suited to the desires of drivers, more creatively designed. Pricing will enable road ownership, and that will enable better environmental policies, because owners will then be responsible for environmental impact. Etc.

However, there are two different ways of doing road pricing, both of which have big advantages and big disadvantages.

One. Anonymous Charging. Charge each vehicle to go past certain barriers, physical or electrical. Either the man at the wheel chucks some coins down a shute, or the place has a machine which debits the vehicle as it goes by, by debiting a box on the vehicle which has been filled up with money, gas meter style.

Advantage: Anonymity! The vehicle user is no more spied on than he is when he buys a pair of socks in a shop. If the vehicle user consents to the transaction tracking inherent in the use of a credit card, fair enough. But money remains an option, and money is freedom, because money is anonymous. (I remember once a trader in a street market shouting at me: "You don't ask me where I got the stuff I'm selling, and I won't ask you where you got your money.")

Disadvantage: Cumbersomeness. Every barrier becomes a huge Thames Flood Barrier for cars. Installing machines in cars is complicated and expensive, and what if different cities use different systems? A different box for each system? Until the same system wins a battle of the gauges, it's a nightmare either of delay or of incompatible equipment.

In a characteristic Samizdata posting, Perry de Havilland regrets the modern use of the phrase "Big Brother" to describe reality TV shows, and harks back to Orwell's original coinage, with grim pictures of CCTV surveillance cameras outside primary schools, and of propaganda for CCTV cameras in the form of big posters in the London Underground.

All this anti-surveillance thinking over at Samizdata is connected to the recent launch of this new blog, which will be concerned with civil liberties and "intrusive state" issues. I've already done a couple of posts here, the most substantial of which concerned organ donorship, and I intend to contribute many more similar efforts. The boss of White Rose is one of my closest friends.

However, I have long been nursing heretical thoughts about this total surveillance stuff, which it makes sense to put on a "culture" blog rather than on a politics blog. Because what I think is at stake here is a sea change not just in state surveillance, but in the culture generally. What is more, it is a sea change which places programmes like Big Brother right at the centre of what is happening.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.
- George Orwell, from 1984

Today is George Orwell's birthday. Happy birthday George, you were right... just a few years too early. And now we have thermal imagers which means even darkness is no shield from the Panopticon State.

Nah! You must be paranoid! It'll never happen here!

All UK mobile phone operators now track the locations of cellphones, according to this BBC piece. The technology was built in order to provide mobile phone users with information about nearby services: dial a number and ask for the nearest Mexican restaurant, for example. But providers are beginning to offer reverse location lookups, so others can track the location of a particular phone, or send text messages to people in a particular area.

"All the big four operators now offer a commercial service so you can send them a telephone number and they will tell you where it is," said Colin Bates, chief technology officer at location services company Mobile Commerce.

[...]

But location-based services are going to be much more common, now that locations can be requested for a few pence a time and firms such as Mobile Commerce and Verilocation are springing up to funnel location requests to the various networks.

The location system works best in urban areas covered by lots of base stations that have overlapping coverage. This lets operators give a location fix accurate to about 200 metres.

Providers are quick to point out that they won't release information about a phone's location without permission from the owner. Except if you're a law enforcement officer, of course, or a corrupt employee, or a skilled social engineer, or the rules change..

Soon Verilocation plans to offer a service for families that lets worried parents find out where their offspring are. The service will cost a fixed amount every month and let family members check locations a few times per month.

Mr Overton said Data Protection legislation means that tracking cannot be done without consent of a handset owner.

- BBC, Being tracked down by your mobile.

Verilocation's web page has some more information on how the process works, but there are no technical details.

The opportunity for abuse of such a capability is particularly alarming in a government-controlled monopoly such as telecommunications. The lengths to which network operators will go to please their state protectors was illustrated recently when it was revealed that UK government departments make 1 million requests for phone records each year. Service providers hand over as many as 100 million call records each year in order to maintain a good relationship with police and other investigatory agencies.

Cross-posted from Vigilant TV

To be honest I have never understood what the fascination people have with so-call 'reality TV' programmes like Big Brother. I have forced myself to watch a couple times and ended up despairing for the future of western civilization. Suddenly my taste for explosion filled action movies and lycra clad starlets with guns does not seem so low-brow after all.

Oooo! Very exciting!

No doubt some of our faithful commenters will put me right on this area of complete disconnection between me and this baffling area of popular culture.

But maybe this Disneyfication of the entirely unfunny term 'Big Brother' that George Orwell coined will soon be coming to an end.

Then maybe we can start getting more people frowning with concern rather than smiling vacuously at the sound of the words 'Big Brother'. Why bother watching the TV to see a bunch of self-absorbed cretins in a room back-stabbing each other when you can be in your very own rolling endless episode of 'Big Brother' by just walking down almost any CCTV filled high street in Britain?

Here is some real reality TV, staring... you.

 

Cross posted from: Samizdata.net