BIG BROTHER TECHNOLOGIES

THIS MONTH’S ISSUEWhy we chose…

Big Brother TechnologiesWe chose to examine forecasts for surveillance technologies for this month’s STEEP Report because the technologies are without precedent and the social implications could change the future of our entire civilization.

Dramatic? Yes. Hysterical and paranoid?

We wish.

There is surprisingly little discussion in the media about the rapid development of information technologies that will be used to track individuals anywhere on the globe in real time.

These technologies will not be implemented as part of some government scheme to control citizens, but all for useful commercial and government applications – marketing, logistics, health policy, human resources, and security.

This doesn’t change the gravity of the ethical (and business!) implications of what’s next for surveillance technologies.

A portfolio of surveillance technologies will soon be able to track most of the world’s population in real time.

Do not underestimate the consequences or possibilities from this development.

Through technologies such as GPS, RFID, IPv6, and facial recognition, we are rapidly developing the capacity to track billions of people in

real time.

The power of ubiquitous computing and sensing will give your company dramatic new powers and significant liabilities.

Our societies may never be the same.

Talk to your employees, your lawyers, and your elected officials

The world is investing in cameras, RFID, GPS, remote sensing and powerful internet architectures to measure, store, and correlate trillions of points of data around the world

Big Brother Tech: The Global View

HOLLYWOOD: Movie posters scan facial features to examine which images evoke the most response

WASHINGTON: Global climate change monitoring tracks individual factories

CHINA: One billion Chinese citizens issued radio-frequency identification cards that broadcast family history, marital status, prison records

LONDON: Advertisements coordinated with GPS positioning in cell phones to show businesses within walking distance

AFRICA: Refugee movements tracked by satellite to coordinate humanitarian efforts

The Trends

Radio Frequency Identification Tags

(RFID)

Global Positioning Systems (GPS)

IPv6 Internet networking

Facial recognition software

A portfolio of information technologies is converging in the near future (2010+) with dramatic social consequences, and plenty of business opportunities, too:

We are entering, willingly or not, into the era of Big Brother Technologies.

Iris scanning

Biometrics

Ubiquitous video surveillance

RFID Tags – unlimited applications for “talking barcodes”

In usage since 1955, radio-frequency identification chips are essentially barcodes that talk. With a tiny chip and an antenna to broadcast its unique code, short-range radio signals broadcast a limited amount of information to any device capable of listening.

The technology is maturing, having dropped in price over the last eight years to begin to find applications in the logistics industry.

The RFID market is set to explode: US $1 trillion by 2017?

• From 1955 to 2005, total sales of RFID tags were $2.4 billion.

• Last year alone, 2.24 billion tags were sold worldwide. and analysts project that by 2017 the annual sales could reach $25 billion.

With a variety of maturing applications, from improving global logistics to preventing

pharmaceutical counterfeiting, the market for RFID tags will explode in the next ten years.

(“Microchips Everywhere: A Future Vision.” Todd Lewan. Seattle Times. January 29, 2008. )

RFID tags: headed to the item level

Until recently, the high price of RFID has kept it on pallets, monitoring of batches of products in transit. It has been too expensive to have one on each unit.

In the coming decades , as the price continues to fall, RFID tags will finally be incorporated on individual items

“[RFID] is like having an expert with a clipboard sitting next to every of your trucks, manufacturing lines, pallets with goods, and they can tell you at any time what is happening, where,” - Ken Douglas, global director of technology at BP.

Tracking shampoo bottles is great, but applications for the future surely won’t stop there. Now companies are selling RFID tags to help identify and track pets, children and the elderly.

RFID tags: headed to the individual citizen level

RFID chip

Plus, save time and money if you have employees in sensitive areas – many companies are choosing to implant RFID chips, increasing security and dispensing with messy ID cards.

In the future, anything with these tags could be scanned at increasing distances without a person’s knowledge.

Market researchers could scan items in your car from five feet away or a police officer could scan your ID as you pass on the street.  

RFID tags: mass data collection at a distance

NOTE: The Chinese government just ordered one billion RFID-loaded chips to identify its citizens.

GPS chips: Surveillance at a serious distance

GPS chips, computer chips that record and broadcast their location via satellite, are now commonly used in navigation, telecommunications, tracking almost anything in real time.

The market for these devices is poised for exponential growth.

GPS sales predicted to hit one billion units per year by 2012Between real-time navigation, geo-tagging of images in digital cameras, emergency rescue, and more, there are seemingly limitless applications for GPS.

If market forecasts are correct, then billions of digital devices will begin streaming out digital information about their position. The era of losing track of things may be over…

GPS will lead to the advertising of the future:100 million Europeans will subscribe to “location-based services”

As all advertisers know, we are in an arms-race when it comes to capturing the attention Businesses are using GPS for new and creative ways to advertise:

Pictured at left Yell.com has installed digital billboards fitted with GPS technology on the sides of London buses to create location-specific advertisements.

Facial recognition software: the end of anonymity?

1. A tiny camera projects an invisible light pattern onto the subject’s face, revealing the face's surface geometry, which is captured on streaming video at 30 frames per second.

2. This 3-D measurement allows point-to-point measurement, such as forehead to cheekbone.

3. The face pattern is plugged into an algorithm to generate a 3-D "mesh" created from measurements smaller than a millimeter.

4. A biometric template -- based on bone structures that don't change over time -- is created from the image and is stored in the database.

5. The database stores the images, comparing them to locate matches.

Combining software analysis, cameras, and databases facial recognition software could be the nosy neighbor of the future. This cutting-edge software can quickly scan faces at a distance and compare results to any database – domestic or international

Facial recognition: The billboard of tomorrow will watch YOU

Worried about your latest ad campaign? With facial recognition software, billboards like this one analyze who looks at the advertisement, where they focus, and for how long. Unlike biometrics, it requires ZERO consent from those observed.

Advertisers measuring:• Age• Gender• Race

Located in:• McDonald’s

(Singapore)• Ikea (Europe)• A&E (New York)• 30 more locations in

US

Biometrics: check on employee productivity without the need for managerial skill

• Monitor employee activity through PC and laptop computers, mobile phones, and blackberries

• Monitor employees’ heart rate, breathing, body temperature, facial expressions and blood pressure

• Record and analyze words and numbers used and websites visited

• Measure workload and test for honesty

Microsoft recently filed a patent application for “Monitoring System 500” a “virtual middle manager” that uses to:

Biometrics to meet the talent crunch

The “Monitoring System 500” is designed to replace middle managers by:

• Measuring speed of task completion• Identifying areas of assistance• Offering assistance (prompts) when employees need it

AND…• Nothing like invasive surveillance to motivate productivity!• Eliminating human interaction!

Video surveillance: an old technology expands as governments become more interested in security

Where there is little data correlating surveillance and public safety, governments on both sides of Atlantic are increasing their investments in Big Brother Technologies.

The United States has approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in operation, mostly in cities – roughly one for every 10 people.

Nearly every block of Manhattan under camera surveillance

London monitors every neighborhood. “Every Briton can expect to be caught on camera on average some 300 times a day.”

“Learning to live with Big Brother.” The Economist. Sept 27, 2007.

IPv6 Internet networking: faster and more secure

Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched internetworks. It is designated as the successor of IPv4, the first and still dominant version of the Internet Protocol, for general use on the Internet.IPv6 has a much larger address space, which allows flexibility in allocating addresses and routing traffic. The extended address length eliminates the need to use network address translation to avoid address exhaustion, and also simplifies aspects of address assignment and renumbering when changing Internet connectivity providers.The IPv6 address space is extremely large: IPv6 supports 2128 (about 3.4×1038) addresses, or approximately 5×1028 (roughly 295) addresses for each of the roughly 6.5 billion (6.5×109) people alive today.[1] In a different perspective, this is 252 addresses for every observable star in the known universe[2] – more than ten billion billion billion times as many addresses as IPv4 supported.IPv6 is an updated internet system, greatly expanding the number of potential IP addresses, therefore the number of possible internet users. Under the current system, IPv4, the overall pool of IP addresses is expected to be depleted by 2012, leading to the necessity for IPv6.

IPv6 Internet

IPv6 uses a 128-bit address size compared with the 32-bit system used in the IPv4, allowing for as many as 3.4x1038 possible addresses, enough to cover every person on the planet several times over.

The 128-bit system also provides for multiple levels of hierarchy and flexibility in hierarchical addressing and routing, an improvement over the IPv4-based Internet.

The Whole is Greater…

The combination of surveillance techniques and advanced technology is greater than the sum of its

parts.

Combining all of the parts: China’s Golden Shield

Golden Shield – a nationwide digital surveillance network, linking national, regional, and local security agencies through a web of surveillance technologies, featuring:

• Speech recognition

• Facial recognition

• Closed circuit TV

• National ID cards

• Credit records

• Internet surveillance

Building China’s surveillance society The police will be able to coordinate vast amounts of

data

RFID-implanted national ID cards –scanned without

owner’s knowledge

Closed-circuit TV: monitoring public

spaces

Database - instantly comparing fingerprints

Nationwide database: tracking

citizens since birth

Speech recognition: monitoring telephone

conversations

Facial recognition – capturing and

matching facial images in a crowd

How the technology works in Shenzhen

• This web of cameras will be linked to the country’s national ID system, tracking citizens by RFID tags.

• Anyone who does not get the ID card cannot live in Shenzhen and cannot get government benefits.

• It allows the government to control the movement of political and religious dissidents and control the population of the future.

In the rapidly-growing city of Shenzhen, police are installing over 20,000 surveillance cameras in the streets, guided by American-made facial recognition software.

Implications

RFID: Implications for the Future

• ADVERTISING – to the individual level!!!! • Theft prevention• Pets, elderly, kids• Shipping industry• Sales – locate desired product in remote warehouse• Medical – speed lifesaving when seconds count, anti-

counterfeiting • IDs – immigration (passports)• Political/population monitoring – eye on troublemakers• Market research!!!!!

Implications for the Future

Biometric applications combined to improve security for:

• Travel speed/border security• Purchases by credit card• Secure access to buildings• Security for high-volume events•Computer passwords •National or state identification

Questions

Broad issues:

• Right to privacy•Does consent exist anymore? Limitations? •Who “owns” this info? What if the info “they” have is somehow wrong (like on credit reports)? How do you know, how do you correct it if it’s not public? •What does the credit report of tomorrow look like? •Is it inevitable that we are headed for a system like China where all info is tracked on each individual since birth? •Can a person ever make a mistake? • Will there eventually be some sort of international data standard? Shared data? Will the Chinese call the shots?

Questions

Broad issues (cont):

•Is there a way for laws to guide the development of these technologies? Can we overturn the PATRIOT Act, ect…• If all of this information is available on everyone, what is the future of hackers? • How to balance enormous benefits and positive uses of this technology with its far-reaching, scarring impacts?

What To Do Today

Addendum: Big Brother Tech - By the NumbersFigure Source

There are approximately 30 million surveillance cameras in the U.S. – roughly one for every ten people.

“Learning to live with Big Brother.” The Economist. Sept 27, 2007.

Analysts project that by 2017 cumulative sales of RFID tags will top $1 trillion - generating more than $25 billion in annual revenues for the industry.

“Microchips Everywhere: A Future Vision.” Todd Lewan. Seattle Times. January 29, 2008.

GPS sales are expected to hit $1 billion by 2012. "GPS chipset sales to approach one billion by 2012 according to market research firm," Digitimes, April 19th, 2008.

100 million Europeans will subscribe to location-based services.

"Euro LBS users to top 100 million by 2012." GPS World. April 9, 2008.

Facial recognition software used behind the billboards. Ads for McDonalds in Singapore, Ikea in Europe, A&E in New York, and 30 different locations in malls across the U.S.

“Billboards with facial recognition software trickling out.” Nilay Patel. June 4, 2008. http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/04/billboards-with-facial-recognition-software-trickling-out/

“Every aspect of computer users’ lives — from their heartbeat to a guilty smile — could be monitored and immediately analysed under the futuristic system detailed in Microsoft’s patent application.”

“How computer spy in the office will monitor everything you do.” David Brown and Elizabeth Judge. London Times. January 16, 2008.

In the rapidly-growing city of Shenzhen, police are installing over 20,000 surveillance cameras in the streets, guided by American-made facial recognition software.

Find out more: Books1984. By George Orwell.

(Why not have another look? The technology is there.)

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom? By David Brin.

RFID Applied. By Jerry Banks.

Find out more: BooksLoving Big Brother: Performance, Privacy and Surveillance Space. By John McGrath.

No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society. By Robert O’Harrow.

Handbook of Biometrics. By Anil K. Jain, Patrick Flynn and Arun A. Ross.

Find out more: Articles

“Big Brother gets bigger, says global privacy study.” Elinor Mills. CNET News. January 2, 2008. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9838743-7.html

“Big Brother in China – via U.S. technology.” Warren Mass. The John Birch Society. August 16, 2007. http://www.jbs.org/node/5153

“Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society.” Jay Stanley and Barry Steinhardt. ACLU. January 2003. http://www.aclu.org/FilesPDFs/aclu_report_bigger_monster_weaker_chains.pdf

“Biometrics – the future for flying bliss?” Nick Heath. February 21, 2008. http://www.silicon.com/retailandleisure/0,3800011842,39170130,00.htm

“Do Americans Care About Big Brother?” Massimo Calabresi. Time. February 14, 2008. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1722537,00.html?xid=feed-cnn-topics

"Euro LBS users to top 100 million by 2012." GPS World. April 9, 2008. http://lbs.gpsworld.com/gpslbs/LBS+News/Euro-LBS-Users-to-Top-100M-by-2012/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/509169

"GPS chipset sales to approach one billion by 2012 according to market research firm," Digitimes. April 19th, 2008. http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20080419PR200.html

Find out more: Articles

“How computer spy in the office will monitor everything you do.” David Brown and Elizabeth Judge. London Times. January 16, 2008. http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article3193223.ece

“Japan’s teenage smokers face wrinkle test.” Justin McCurry. The Guardian. May 13, 2008. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/may/13/japan.health

“Learning to live with Big Brother.” The Economist. Sept 27, 2007. http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9867324

“Microchips Everywhere: A Future Vision.” Todd Lewan. Seattle Times. January 29, 2008. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2004151388_apchippingamericaiii29.html?syndication=rss

“New security camera can ‘see’ through clothes.” CNN. April 16, 2008. http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/04/16/camera.england/index.html

“RFID Tags: Big Brother in Small Packages.” Declan McCullagh. CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/2010-1069-980325.html