surveillance

Is snitching a social good?

In 1984 one of the basic premises of state control was to be found in the dictum “He who controls the past, controls the future”. This can be seen as a version of the popular quote from the Spanish philosopher George Santayana: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it“.

One of the themes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four the way in which the repressive society encourages friends, neighbors and family to spy on one another. The informer was seen as a hero by the state. In particular Orwell writes that parents lived in fear of their children.

The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way. The children, on the other hand, were systematically turned against their parents and taught to spy on them and report their deviations. The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

This is based on the story of Pavlik Morozov, a child who denounced his father to the soviet state and became part of soviet mythology and naturally part of the the fear of the soviet state.

Now we could dismiss the whole thing as a fiction set in a far away place, in a far away time but this is not what Orwell wants. The same year Nineteen Eighty-Four was published he wrote in a letter*

My recent novel [Nineteen Eighty-Four] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter), but as a show-up of the perversions . . . which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. . . . The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else, and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.

Today we are again and again being actively encouraged to destroy not family but society. We are supposed to discover and report “suspicious behavior” for the good of us all – in the name of terrorism. The most reason slick version of the state asking us to denounce anything different comes (via BoingBoing: What to do if you smell a terrorist). It’s about a video released by the LA police department in a campaign called IwatchLA.

The video is slick, sleek and personal. It encourages people to denounce anything unusual – even an unusual smell – and let the authorities decide if its terrorism. This is what Orwell feared. The goal of terrorism prevention is a praiseworthy goal but the destruction of social trust by creating universal suspicion is not the way to go.

—

* The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4 – In Front of Your Nose 1945–1950 p.546 (Penguin)

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Useless self-surveillance for the paranoid

There is a widespread misconception that cameras somehow create safety. This misconception has spread to encompass the idea that surveillance somehow creates safety. This morning while standing in an all too crowded buss to work I was forced to stare at an advert which I first thought was for an optician since it contained a picture of a blond woman smiling while trying on different sunglasses… At first I thought it was odd to be advertising sunglasses in Sweden in December since there is no sun to be bothered by. Should the sun peek out everyone would greet it rather than hide from it, but as usual I digress.

paranoia by katiew (CC by-nc-nd)

The add was for a voluntary mobile phone self-surveillance system.

The banner read (in Swedish, but I translate): Watch over yourself [as in surveillance] with your mobile. The ad then went on to explain that you send a text message with the word “SAFE” to the company who then register your position and follow your movements for 30 minutes. After that time you receive an sms asking if you are safe – to which reply that you are. If no reply comes the company notify your friends, attempts to reach you and notifies the police.

The ad attempts to increase the level of paranoia people feel at the same time attempts to claim that a system such as this will keep you safe from the fears which they themselves promote. Naturally as with all surveillance systems they cannot prevent crime the only thing that surveillance can do is to help clean up the mess after the fact. If you are mugged, beaten, raped, killed…. or any of the other things you fear… this system will be able to tell you were you were.

Posted on by mklang

Buzzing with FRA

The whole of Sweden is buzzing with the new surveillance law entering into effect in 2009. Or at least many of the Swedish blogs I follow. The outside world is a mystery to me since I am stuck inside writing. Paddy K has written an English version of what’s going on that is well worth reading. Not only that he also lightens my guilt of not actually being more active in publicising the anti-FRA to the non-Swedish speaking world, which is most of you out their since there are only 9 million swedes.

Paddy K also includes the brilliant line:

I guess politicians have short memories. Or scriptwriters with a developed sense of irony.

Thanks I needed a laugh!

The Swedish wikipedia has a good background on FRA. For more about this in English check out EDRIgram, jill/txt, English wikipedia and the Economist.

Posted on by mklang

The Swedish Surveillance State

I am almost ashamed for not blogging and discussing this in more detail. There have been plenty of media, discussions, and a blogging frenzy in the past two weeks…

Short of actually doing the work myself I simplified life – or gave way to my laziness and re-post this post from the EFF

A proposed new law in Sweden (voted on this week, after much delay) will, if passed, allow a secretive government agency ostensibly concerned with signals intelligence to install technology in twenty public hubs across the country. There it will be permitted to conduct a huge mass data-mining project, processing and analysing the telephony, emails, and web traffic of millions of innocent individuals. Allegedly these monitoring stations will be restricted to data passing across Sweden’s borders with other countries for the purposes of monitoring terrorist activity: but there seems few judicial or technical safeguards to prevent domestic communications from being swept up in the dragnet. Sound familiar?

The passing of the FRA law (or “Lex Orwell”, as the Swedish are calling it) next week is by no means guaranteed. Many Swedes are up in arms over its provisions (the protest Facebook group has over 5000 members; the chief protest site links to thousands of angry commenters across the Web). With the governing alliance managing the barest of majorities in the Swedish Parliament, it would only take four MPs in the governing coalition opposing this bill to effectively remove it from the government’s agenda.

As with the debate over the NSA warrantless wiretapping program in the United States, much of this domestic Swedish debate revolves around how much their own nationals will be caught up with this dragnet surveillance. But as anyone who has sat outside the US debate will know, there is a wider international dimension to such pervasive spying systems. No promise that a dragnet surveillance system will do its best to eliminate domestic traffic removes the fact that it *will* pick up terabytes of the innocent communications of, and with, foreigners – especially those of Sweden’s supposed allies and friends.

Sweden is a part of the European Union: a community of states which places a strong emphasis on the values of privacy, proportionality, and the mutual defence of those values by its members. But even as the EU aspires to being a closer, borderless community, it seems Sweden is determined to set its spies on every entry and exit to Sweden. When the citizens of the EU talk to their Swedish colleagues, what happens to their private communications then?

When revelations regarding the United Kingdom’s involvement in a UK-US surveillance agreement emerged in 2000, the European Parliament produced a highly critical report (and recommended that EU adopt strong pervasive encryption to protect its citizens’ privacy).

Back then, UK’s cavalier attitude to European communications, and its willingness to hand that data to the United States and other non-EU countries, greatly concerned Europe’s elected legislators. Already questions are being asked in the European Parliament about Sweden’s new plans and their effect on European citizen’s personal data. Commercial companies like TeliaSonera have moved servers out of Sweden to prevent their customers from being wiretapped by the Swedish Department of Defence. Sweden’s own business community have expressed concern that companies may move out of Sweden to protect their private financial data.

Sweden has often led the charge for government openness and consumer advocacy, and has, understandably, much national pride in seeing its past policies exported and reflected in Europe and beyond. Before Sweden’s MPs vote next week to allow its government surveillance access to whole Net, they should certainly consider its effect on their Swedish citizens’ privacy. But it should also ponder exactly how their vote will be seen by their closest neighbors. If the Lex Orwell passes, Sweden may not need something so sophisticated as a supercomputer to hear what the rest of the world thinks about their new values.

Posted on by mklang