Liveblogging the Privacy & Ethics of Surveillance Workshop

I am in Austin at David Phillips’ Ethical Surveillance Workshop at UT. This is a great, very cross-disciplinary mini-conference that brings people doing surveillance studies together from across the academy, including legal scholars, information school professors, geographers, artists, sociologists, cultural studies scholars and two other graduate students. We’ve been teasing out common threads on a huge variety of subjects: implants, identity presentation, consent to surveillance, techniques of surveillance, subjectivity, vehicle identification systems, CCTV, wiretapping and activism.

I’m going to selectively blog some of the sessions, since I didn’t bother to get anyone’s permission for this. Would this count as micro-surveillance? I wonder.

Notes from subject area sessions:
Surveillance, Technologies and Things
Politics and Activism

Surveillance Techniques, Technologies and Things
Processes of pervasiveness, each with an illustrative technology

1. Infrastructuralization and normalization
    a. Technologies as individual things become both dispersed and hidden in society
    b. Graham: the fifth utility: CCTV has become an expected thing which underpinned safety on the street: e.g. they get irritated when there are *not* cameras/pictures of things
    c. Why does it not work?
    d. Cookies: used to be a matter of intense debate, now: nobody cares
    e. Satellites: GPS, from military to normalized technology

2. Miniaturization: individualized and portable, therefore now as individual technology
    a. Mobile phone: can now be used to associate with individual
    b. RFID tags
    c. Nanotechnology: very small, not very very small (fakeout nanotech)
    d. Inside other things: implantation (etc.)

3. Increasing power/capabilities
    a. Multiplier effect: things that are smaller that can also do more things
    b. Google Earth: even 10 years ago (3 years ago!) totally inconceivable, but the military had this technology in the early 80’s with keyhole satellites
    c. Memory: detailed retention of records you can have

4. Networking
    a. Wireless: can enable things to be connected together more and more
    b. Personal area networks / global area networks
    c. We can connect “almost anywhere”
    d. URLs: every object/person/thing will have a Universal Resource Locator: be addressable in the future
    e. Attach to you –

5. Distribution
    a. Capacity and materials: not other forms
    b. Enabled by wireless to communicate
    c. Therefore we can all become part of larger systems – larger computers

Vehicle Identification Numbers, mobile phone networks: single systems through distributed parts: each becomes a node in the network

6. Standardization
    a. Ability of these dev ices to communicate with each other
    b. Interoperability: everything from IP to USB etc.
    c. Stuff like Blu-Ray vs. HDVD
    d. Global media interests: $$$: industry-driven, locking markets down, cultural expectations
        i. Janet Abbate in “inventing the internet”
        ii. Patrick Fenning? Fanning? ISO standards for P2P
        iii. Nina Wakeford:
        iv. Lucy Sedgewill (sp?)
        v. Dave Clarke
e. Who’s working on this stuff?

7. Mobility: not just mobile technologies that you can carry around: portability: things moving by themselves: moving around, remote control, roombas, etc.
    a. Predative drones
    b. Learning technologies
    c. Search engines / heuristics: systems that can teach themselves to work better

8. Hybridization and convergence: a lot of these other proicesses come together:
    a. Prosthetics
    b. Cyborgs
    c. Human/animal/living things
    d. Ethical problems that aren’t just to do with the surveillance: bioethics, etc.

Issues:
    o Patchiness of pervasiveness: it’s not actually pervasive
    o Exist as goal, but it’s a gap between the current technology and the desire (ultimate aim)
    o Reliance/reliability and breakdown: false positive,
    o Convergence is weak: political/bureaucracy:

Ideas about organizing/practice/what’s important/valued become embedded in technologies through semantic closure
Progressively tighter coding of values into algorithms and code
Open the ethical issues that are embedded within them

Politics and Activism

Three fundamental questions
1. If gov’t can operate w/ impunity, what are the strategies for preventing abuse of surveillance practices?
    a. What does “operating w/ impunity” mean?
    b. Gov’t flagrantly surveilling in opposition to the laws (wiretapping)
    c. Law enforcement accountability and transparency
        i. “black box”
        ii. Public has no opportunity to see what’s going on – relying on people who do surveillance to do it in an honorable way

2. How do you involve citizens/residents/population (subjects of the surveillance) in designing the system/participatory design
    a. How do you involve these subjects in regulation/oversight
    b. Sharing accountability
    c. Cultivating widespread public debate

Strategies for activism
- Ppl have other things to be concerned w/
- Focus on particular initiatives: e.g. national identity cards: deal specifically with that, and what’s being planned
- Involve media through op/ed, brief journalists, provide information
- Work with politicians particularly opposition members who can take parliamentary, congressional avenues to question policy decisions at legislative level
- Public hearings, conferences
- Pressure gov’t to design something more limited or more appropriate particularly to the task.
- Sunshine: not reactionary in making public claims
    o Be very specific
    o Acknowledge the strengths in the system so you maintain credibility
- Subversive information flows
    o New channels of accountability
    o International data sharing trees: international politics
    o Trans-national mechanisms for accountability, etc.
- Historical look at attempts to implement given technologies: what lessons can be learned from previous technologies, or activism against technologies that are already in place.
    o Genetically Modified Organisms
    o What can we learn from these processes? Don’t reinvent the wheel

3. International data flows: transnational information
    a. Example: tagging of individuals as criminal extremists, terrorists : where do the standard legal constructs come in? Due process? Probable cause?