CCT 205

Surveillance

Surveillance

• A changed landscape?

• How much has new technology changed the world of surveillance?

• What are the impact of these changes?

• Where are we headed?

• Is surveillance a technological issue or is it a question of the management & control of information within and between groups?

What’s new….

• The size of databases.

• Technology that makes data collection and storage easier and cheaper.

• It’s not just the government anymore that collects personal data.

• Confusion about what is and isn’t possible

Digital Technologies & Surveillance

• Greater potential for surveillance• Increasing exposure of citizens to surveillance• Increased capacity to store data • Harvesting of transactional information from

credit cards, direct debit exchanges, health & welfare records, electoral registers

• Closed circuit television cameras in urban centers

• Thus, rise of information society = rise of a surveillance society

David LyonSurveillance Society (2001)

• Digitization magnify surveillance functions• Extension of earlier spheres of monitoring

and control• Hyper surveillance• Computerization enhances and alters

social processes– Within government– Within bureaucracies– Within the economy

Robins & Webster: Times of Technoculture (1999)

• ‘Information Revolution’: no more than an intensification of processes set in motion when Scientific Management became the watch word of corporate capitalism.

Giddens on Surveillance

• Surveillance =control of information and superintendence of the activities of some groups by others

• Information gathering & storage key to state in its planning and control functions

• Regularized gathering, storage and control of information = crucial for administrative efficiency & maintaining power

• High level of surveillance associated with totalitarian rule (Anthony Giddens, The Nation State & Violence, 1985)

Surveillance and Control

• Taylor (1947): scientific management = form of control of production process & workers in modern corporate capitalism

• Mass production & mass consumption regulated through efficiency requiring management of info.

• Sloan at GM in 1920s: birth of modern marketing based on collection, aggregation & dissemination of information

Sloanism• Attempt to manage consumption through collection and processing

of data on consumer behavior• Personal data are used to sort populations into consuming types• Sloanism marked the beginning of post-Fordist era, when marketing

began to dominate the process of production. • GM’s method of marketing became a worldwide model by which

business could create and nourish demand. Sloanism continues to be essential to the workings of the late-capitalist economy.

• In the Post-Fordist era society is no longer structured in terms of classes that are determined with respect to labour and production. Now society is structure in terms of consumer classes, i.e now its not where you work but where you shop that determines your place within the social structure.

Michel FoucaultDiscipline and Punishment (1979)

• Key figure in surveillance studies• Knowledge & power always conjoined• Never innocent knowledge; always an expression of

power relationships• “Discipline and Punishment: the Birth of the Prison

(1979)• Traces shift from punishment to discipline, from public

executions (spectacle) to rehabilitation demanding need for information about crime, criminals & circumstances of crime = more need for records in & outside of prison & new forms of recording

Bentham’s Panopticon

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Modern Panopticon

• Illinois State Prison

Questions on Panopticon

• How does Bentham's panopticon work to control behavior?

• How does the informational panopticon affect individual liberty?

• How do big databases that track consumer behavior contribute to the loss of liberty and/or privacy?

• How does a loss of privacy impact our freedom to act spontaneously?

• How are privacy- reducing initiatives sold to the public? 

Panopticon #1

• New prison regime = need for continuous surveillance

• New spatial and social organization of power• Bentham’s Panopticon = architectural design for

prisons which allowed many to be watched by a few who could not be seen

• Live with knowledge that prisoners could be subject to continuous observation

Panopticon #2

• Induces in prisoner a state of conscious and permanent visibility assuring automatic power

• Constant observing of prisoner by inspector

• Prisoner knows himself to be observed or can be observed at every/any moment

• Panopticon = epitome of social control; paradigm of modern discipline

Jeremy Bentham• Bentham was a lawyer and social activist with an agenda to improve

the lives of the powerless in his culture. • Seeking to improve upon the abhorrent prison conditions that

predominated in Britain at the time, Bentham designed the panopticon as the modern model for a rehabilitative prison. 

• The general idea behind the design is that prisoners are distributed around a centrally located watch tower. 

• Prisoners were able to view the tower and knew they were being watched (which theoretically should have induced behavioral changes) while the guards surveyed all of the prisoners easily from the tower. 

• A secondary benefit for the prisoners was an opportunity to be in an isolated environment that provided time for contemplation of the behavior that brought them to prison. 

Foucault

• Bentham's Panopticon at the periphery, a building; at the centre, a tower

• Tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the building is divided into cells, each of which extends the whole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one end to the other.

• All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to enclose in each cell a condemned person

• By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery.

Foucault• Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a

state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.

• Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at t any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.

• In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian.

• The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheral ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen

Foucault

• The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality?

• Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

Panopticon as Metaphor

• Wave of new information and communications technologies are allowing the development of an ‘electronic panopticon’

• People are monitored by unseen forces, often automated, more than ever before

Surveillance

• Sources of data:

Surveillance

Sources of Data:

Sources of Surveillance Data

• Banks & data marketers collect data from transactions & web surfing

• Retailers collect data on every transaction

• Government agencies collect data from tax returns, property tax records & voting records

Sources of Surveillance Data

• Employer records including keylogging software for all computers connected to a company network (on/off site; wired/wireless)

• University networks use keylogging software

• Internet surfing records kept by your ISP• Public records• Public private video cameras

Location of surveillance: you

• Trojan horse / spyware

• More than 5% of executable files are spyware.

• One in 62 internet sites contain “drive by download” attacks.

• Games, celebrity sites, and illegal sites most likely to contain spyware.

• -- University of Washington study, 2006

Spyware: The Trojan Horse

• Beware of ancient Greeks bearing gifts during siege of Troy

• Something that appears good, but conceals something harmful.

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Computer Trojan Horse• A computer trojan horse = a program which appears to be

something good, but actually conceals something bad.• Spread by hiding it inside a distribution of normal software. • In 2002, the sendmail and OpenSSH packages were both used to

hide trojan horses. This was done by an attacker who broke into the distribution sites for these software packages and replaced the original distributions with his own packages.

• A more common method of spreading a trojan horse is to send it via e-mail. The attacker will send the victim an e-mail with an attachment called something like "prettygirls.exe." When the victim opens the attachment to see the pretty girls, the trojan horse will infect his system.

• A similar technique for spreading trojan horses is to send files to unsuspecting users over chat systems like IRC, AIM, ICQ, MSN, or Yahoo Messenger.

Internet Service Providers

• Telus blocked its union’s website.

• Laws about information storage are hazy (at best).

• Worldwide delegation of responsibility to ISPs

Hyper Security: Disney Security

• Personal ID card

• Fingerprinting

• Bag checks

• Card linked to

• passport linked to

• fingerprints linked

• to park entrance

Slippery Slopes…

• At a high-tech prison opening Feb. 2006, inmates wear electronic wristbands that track their every movement and guards monitor cells using emotion recognition software. – BBC, 2006

RFID:Radio Frequency Identification

• Automatic identification method, relying on storing and remotely retrieving data using devices called RFID tags or transponders rs.

• Purchaser may not be aware of RFID or able or able to remove it

• Tag can be read at a distance without consent – beyond sightline of reader

• Can be used almost anywhere as an identification system: passports, food, pets, clothing with simple info or complex instructions

Network sniffers: Carnivore• Definition: Carnivore is a "network diagnostic tool" created by the

U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to assist in crime investigations. It is a secure computer platform running Windows/NT or Windows 2000 and application software developed by the FBI.

• Carnivore has drawn special attention, however, because of the large amount of Internet traffic it is capable of capturing.

• The FBI typically installs Carnivore in an ISP data center when investigating individuals suspected of federal crimes such as terrorism.

• Carnivore snoops essentially all data flowing through the network and saves the bits that fit a specific profile -- email sent or received from a particular user name, for example, or all data sent to Web sites from a particular IP address. Although the data of many other uninvolved people on the Net may flow through the Carnivore system, the FBI claims that the privacy of this data will not be compromised.

Drive by Downloads• Drive-by downloading is a catch-all name for software downloaded

on your computer without your knowledge or intervention. • Drive-by downloads sneak onto computers without the user’s

knowledge or permission. • Some of the most common drive-by download carriers are songs

from free music share sites, free screensavers, etc. Many of these install spyware that monitors your surfing habits, and then displays pop-ups that match your habits.

• Example, if you invest a good chunk of your Internet time cruising sport sites, the spyware detects this, and it could then splash sporting apparel ads on your monitor.

• Drive-by downloads can also attack your computer through e-mail spam

Question

• How do we defend and protect ourselves from the possibility of privacy infringements in a digitally driven society?