Tag Archives: Surveillance

Facebook doesn’t like privacy!

[Primeiramente #ForaTemer; First of all #TemerOut]

Unfortunately, the Panopticam stopped broadcasting the exact hour I was showing this message. So, the very last image broadcasted from their Twitter and YouTube accounts was the one just before me. The text below was ready since the day before and I was waiting until Jeremy was back online to release it, but after realising they are not going to resuscitate the project before I finish my sabbatical leave, I decided to post it anyway. So, this message was originally planned and delivered on February 24th 2016, and is being released on June 23rd 2016, with no images from the Panopticam…

Day 76: Facebook doesn’t like privacy

Inspiration for this message/quote came from the Channel 4 series called Data Baby, with lots of very interesting reports on issues involving privacy, Internet of Things, social media, surveillance, and obviously big data.

In one of the articles, “Ten reasons we should quit Facebook of good”, I found this quote saying Facebook doesn’t like privacy, despite its long and visible privacy policy. The problem, according to this text, the change the policy too much, sometimes unannounced, all according to their own interests and to adjust new features and avoid being sued later – and, of course, having the right to sell users’ data, which is what really matters to them.

Data is today’s goldmine and privacy settings are always calibrated to the amount of “freedom” companies have to monetise personal data. They will say they’re never interested in content and the actual personal data, and this is true, but they can do a lot more to what is known as metadata (data about data). Ask the NSA and GCHQ what kind of data they collect and the answer is exactly the same (have a look at this: “Phew, NSA Is Just Collecting Metadata”). US Senator Dianne Feinstein (chair of the Senate intelligence committee) has this to say about NSA bulk metadata collection programmes:

“The call-records program is not surveillance. It does not collect the content of any communication, nor do the records include names or locations. The NSA only collects the type of information found on a telephone bill: phone numbers of calls placed and received, the time of the calls and duration.”

They usually don’t want to read our emails or listen to our phone calls, when all they need to build “profiles” is to know who we’re emailing/phoning or when, where from, and things like that. So, with metadata they have users’ habits, connections, movements, necessities, preferences, consumer records, you name it! Ok, this message isn’t about NSA or GCHQ, but Facebook. So, just imagine what Facebook can do with everything its users post/like/share/comment on their profiles?!

A final update to this message (June 23rd 2016) comes from the funny picture posted by Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, recently, where it’s possible to spot his own laptop on the background with tape covering its webcam and microphone. If there’s anyone who knows what’s possible to collect from someone else’s computers, I guess this is him…

Zuck’s covered camera and mic

Who has the rights to be where, when and how?

This message is, in fact, a quote by sociologist Paul Jones during an interview to Mark Townsend for his interesting article published by the Guardian titled “Will privatisation of UK cities rip out their hearts?” earlier this week.

This is part of a series of articles by the Guardian on the privatisation of public spaces in the UK. Townsend’s article focused on Liverpool and its central Liverpool One private development which, obviously, resembles any other privatised development in London or elsewhere in Britain: clean, full of nice cafés, sanitised, and with its own rules when it comes to public gatherings, skating, biking, and, as they usually say, inappropriate “anti-social behaviour”.

The discussion is timing and relevant, as real public spaces are being squeezed to a few ones surrounded by a merchandised city private companies, groups and individuals assume control of large portions of urban land, dictating the kind of behaviour they expect from people “publicly” using “their” places. Then, the issue raises questions about the legitimacy of publicness in today’s city and about the rights to access, experience and share open spaces.

In the end it is, indeed, as Paul Jones stated in his interview, about asking local authorities and city makers “who has the rights to be where, when and how?”. This is the kind of question to be asked when private developers assume every citizen is a potential customer who should have their rights restricted in deciding whether to consume Cocal-Cola or Pepsi, or to go to Starbucks or Costa!

These are times when I caught myself rethinking about a concept I really never liked, Marc Augé’s famous non-place idea, which he uses to describe, very shortly, homogenised spaces in supermodernity times. Analogously, and using another quote from Townsend’s piece, Anna Minton resonates this notion of places without identity while commenting about Liverpool One:

“But then Liverpool One is not for the people of Liverpool, it’s basically a regional centre where you can drive straight into an underground car park, come out for an all-day shopping experience, head back and not even know you’ve been in Liverpool. It’s like a hermetically sealed bubble that could be anywhere in the world.”

Day 74: Who has the rights to be where, when and how?

Do you want to talk to NSA and GCHQ?

Do you know that the British and US embassies in Berlin have active spy stations capable of listening to all communication in the area known as government district? Their spying structures are physically hidden in the buildings of the embassies and are comprised of antenas and other devices capable of capturing communication signals, even from live mobile phone conversations.

Artists Mathias Jud and Christoph Wachter were invited by the Swiss embassy, just next door to US and UK buildings, to perform a work of art that would question the obscure powers of NSA and GCHQ in a very ironic way. Their answer to the invitation was a project called “can you hear me?” with anonymous open connection to wifi network through antenas installed on the roof of the Swiss embassy, and the possibility for anyone to talk back to NSA and GCHQ. In Jud’s own words: “Well, if they’re listening … let’s talk to them.”

Mathias Jud did an interesting TED talk about this and other installations, and said that for the “can you hear me?” project, they received more than 15,000 messages, including:

“@NSA My neighbours are noisy. Please send a drone strike.”

Day 73: Do you want to talk to NSA and GCHQ?

US wants our devices to have “backdoors”

We have witnessed in the past few days, a heat debate about the judicial requests by the FBI to force Apple, the giant corporation, to open up backdoors on the iPhone. The FBI is trying to unlock the iPhone of one of the killers in the mass shooting spree in San Bernardino, California, last December, and insists Apple should, technically, help them doing so.

Apple, on the other hand, rejected, so far, any demand and said that, even though the FBI is trying to access one single device, the development of this limitation in securing access to iPhones could set a dangerous precedent and compromise electronic security and encryption of every device from then on. Here is what Apple said about the case in an open letter to their customers:

“Specifically, the FBI wants us to make a new version of the iPhone operating system, circumventing several important security features, and install it on an iPhone recovered during the investigation. In the wrong hands, this software — which does not exist today — would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone’s physical possession.

The FBI may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would undeniably create a backdoor. And while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control.”

Backdoor is a method of bypassing authentication to enter on a device or system. In other words, it’s a master key that gives its holder access to our personal data. It’s no secret that the US government, through it’s various agencies, wanted all devices to have this kind of hidden access, and it has now found an opportunity to force this to happen via court order and with the excuse of a real sensitive and violent case under investigation.

It’s unusual to see privacy activists on the same side of companies like Apple or Google, but this is happening now and everyone seems uncomfortable with the situation. Reacting to Apple’s letter, Edward Snowden posted yesterday on Twitter that “The FBI is creating a world where citizens rely on Apple to defend their rights, rather than the other way around.” David Murakami Wood, a well known surveillance scholar said, also on Twitter, that “Big corporations vs. big government is just one Big Brother against another”.

On the technical side, apparently there is a way of protecting the iPhones against unauthorised access, even if a backdoor was built by Apple to help the FBI against its will. On an article to The Intercept, Micah Lee explains how to do so. Lee justifies this saying that

“If it sounds outlandish to worry about government agents trying to crack into your phone, consider that when you travel internationally, agents at the airport or other border crossings can seize, search, and temporarily retain your digital devices — even without any grounds for suspicion. And while a local police officer can’t search your iPhone without a warrant, cops have used their own digital devices to get search warrants within 15 minutes, as a Supreme Court opinion recently noted.”

It seems that, after becoming the holy graal of our personal data for the sake of convenience and a connected life, smartphones are also, finally being turned into one of the ultimate levels of protection to our privacy. Sooner or later, this kind of dispute between agencies with investigatory powers and companies that produce our devices would come to light. It’s highly possible that this is not the last time we will witness this happening. I just hope the debate only grows and things are not dealt with under the table, as sometimes we know they are.

Day 72: US wants our devices to have “backdoors”

I connect, therefore I am!

This is how André Lemos and I attempt to discuss, on a recently published paper, what we call informational territorialization, when the power to connect can determine position and ownership in space. The title of the paper is “I connect, therefore I am: places, locales, locations and informational territorialization” and, in our own words:

“We seek to build an understanding of how to think through the different forms of spatiality (territorialization, placemaking, locales, locations, etc.), and the recent developments in the human experience with information and communication technologies, especially those most directly related to, or dependent on, geolocational and control functions.”

What we try to do in this article is to, first, clarify the conceptual boundaries between location, locale, and place, and then reflect on how these geographical dimensions behave in the face of communication, information and the various possibilities of territorialization.

Day 71: I connect, therefore I am!

I’d rather dérive than be a smart idiot!

Who isn’t tired of this “smart everything” discourse?

I am, and I am also tired of things deciding what’s best for me. I am tired of algorithms trying to guess what I am thinking, suggesting me what it thinks it’s the best route, are the best shops (or even know about our bodies before we do, like I posted yesterday), etc. And I’ve just read the news that Twitter will use algorithms to order users’ timelines, instead of time itself…

So, today’s message is a tribute to the theory of dérive by Guy Debord and his situationist friends. I would rather get lost in the city than having “best routes” calculated all the time by things that think they know me better than I do!

Day 68: I’d rather drive than be a smart idiot!

Your gadgets know a lot about you!

Carnival in Brazil, servers down (back just as soon as the party finished). Coincidence?…

Anyway, back to normal, I was reading a lot of articles and stories about Big Data and Internet of Things (IoT) theses days. One of stories on the media this week was about the possibility of fitness tracking devices knowing its user is pregnant even before any clear body signal of it. The story was about a user reporting problems with his wife’s Fitbit wrist tracker that apparently were getting all readings wrong. After a while the company realised there wasn’t any problem with the product, but that his wife’s body was changing, suggesting she could be pregnant…

This story immediately reminds us the famous Target case when the company asked its statisticians to discover pregnant customers as they are more likely to change their consumer habits, preferably in their second trimestre (when they start shopping for the newcomer).

Any doubt that in this “smart future” our gadgets (and retailers) will know more and more about us and compromise more and more of our privacy and our choices?

Day 67: Your gadgets know a lot about you!

Stop hunting whistleblowers!

We all know Julian Assange isn’t a whistleblower, he (or Wikileaks) just facilitates the job of these guys. Let’s face it, whistleblowing became a crucial humanitarian service in today’s confusing, blurred and obscure world. In a time when (mega) corporations and powerful governments do lots of things under the table, whistleblowers are a necessary balance in favour of ordinary citizens.

They’ve been around for a long time, but have become more visible recently because of the pervasive nature of electronic communications and the permanent attempt of intelligent agencies and corporations to collect and manipulate information about other people and other government/companies.

We must recognise the importance of organisations such as Wikileaks, Freedom of the Press Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others alike which protect important information and whistleblowers. We must also praise people like Daniel Ellsberg, Katharine Gun, Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and many others for coming forward and risking their own lives…

Day 66: Stop hunting whistleblowers!

And as one of these coincidences, while visiting the vigil in solidarity to Julian Assange at the Ecuador Embassy, I was given a poster to help the protest, that was exactly about stopping the attacks on whistleblowers…

Stop the attack on whistleblowers

There was a big hope that Assange would walk free from the embassy today, as the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled his deprivation of liberty as arbitrary. However, the British and Swedish governments declared that UN ruling changes nothing, threatening to arrest Assange if he stepped out of the embassy. This is probably an unprecedented decision by major nation-state members against UN recommendation, and sets dangerous prospects for future rulings against dictatorship or abusive regimes, as Ed Snowden tweeted:

“This writes a pass for every dictatorship to reject UN rulings. Dangerous precedent for UK/Sweden to set.”

Free Assange!

The message could hardly be other than something related to today’s announcement that Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, is near to end his enforced stay at the Equatorial Embassy later this weak. The UN body on arbitrary detention will rule on Assange’s case on Friday morning. Assange said he will come out either way – free to fly to Ecuador or to be escorted to prison in Britain (and then Sweden). He will step out Friday at noon if the UN rules against his case, but also demands his passport back and free way to Ecuador in case it rules otherwise.

The case of is notorious for the links between the attempts, by many governments but mainly the US, to stop Wikileaks doing what it is famous for (leaking top secret documents and cables), and the person (body and mind) of its founder. Many facts and documents to this story can be found at justice4assange.com.

I’ve written about the uncommon territorial connections of this story in a paper published in Portuguese a few years ago (I am currently writing an update and expanded version in English) called “Territory and Materiality: Wikileaks and the Control of the Informational Space”. I believe that what is happening to Assange/Wikileaks and, more recently, to Ed Snowden, can also be inspected through the lens of the association between surveillance and space, which will help us further understand important aspects in the geography of surveillance, international/domestic legislation, and geopolitics.

The world (and Jeremy) is waiting to see the end of this three-and-a-half-year drama, hopefully in favour of Assange.

Day 65: Free Assange! justice4assange.com

You’re definitely being watched, Jeremy!

It seems there are more watchers playing with Bentham’s Auto-Icon. Who are they? How many are there? Who is watching whom?

Does it sound familiar?…

New watcher…

Get out of your “territorial bubble”!

Another message based on territorial control and how boundaries are managed, sometimes by law and regulations, sometimes by negotiations between potential insiders and outsiders. Although the definition of a territorial boundary may not always involve a final agreement by all parts involved, there is a mutual recognition about the portion of the space being on dispute, and the possibilities for border and boundary interpretations. It’s a power struggle, so a dispute might go on for years and years without a consensus (see the cases of nation-states and disputes like the one between North and South Korea, Spain and Catalonia or the Basque Country, and so on).

Obviously, territorial control is not only about nation-states and disputes involving spatial jurisdiction and boundaries definition can happen in many different scales. In the article that served as an inspiration for today’s message, “The S.U.V. model of citizenship: floating bubbles, buffer zones, and the rise of the “purely atomic” individual”, Don Mitchell explains how much blurriness and confusion can exist when we try to understand these kinds of controversy. On his analysis of the relationship between territory and citizenship, Don starts with the case of a court ruling in the US which defined spatial buffers and bubbles around health clinics and people, respectively, in order to avoid forms of protests that include person to person interaction. Don explains that:

“The law creates two kinds of bubbles. First, it establishes a one-hundred-foot radius buffer zone around health clinic entrances. Second, within that buffer zone, it establishes an eight-foot floating bubble around each person who enters, a bubble that cannot be pierced for the purposes of politically charged conversation, leafleting, “education,” and so forth.”

This is a very interesting idea to explain some socio-spatial experiences and also resonates Sloterdijk’s theory that uses the metaphor of spheres and foams to engage in the debate of securitised spaces, fear and paranoia.

Day 63: Get out of your “territorial bubble”!

How do you control “your boundaries”?

Last week, I had a very nice and informative walk around the City of London to “see” the boundaries and spatial control strategies for the ring of steel. I thank Henrietta Williams for kindly accompanying me and for explaining everything she knows about this famous urban territory, created in the 1990s to secure the financial core of London against, at that time, bomb attacks by the IRA.

Sentry box on the ring of steel

Jon Coaffee has written many important papers describing the different material and immaterial (technological, political) strategies put in place at the Square Mile (one of the names by which the City is also known) since the 1990s to maintain the ring of steel in place, motivated by ever changing domestic and foreign threats to the security of the powerful businesses situated in this area.

Another interesting work I came across was one by Camilo Amaral on the (re)production of urban enclosures in London – “Urban Enclosure: Contemporary Strategies of Dispossession and Reification in London’s Spatial Production” (2015, unpublished) –, where he analyses various strategies for dispossession and land control in recent urban developments in the English capital. The idea of “tangled control” is particularly useful to understand the material and immaterial forms through which private corporations manage and take control of privatised public areas. It also helps us debate the limits between public and private spaces in the contemporary city. According to Camilo,

“The institution of multiple specific rules, with each place imposing a different set of use norms (such as prohibition of bikes, drinking, or the necessity of leaving a licence on a parking vehicle) transforms the city into an intertwined set of tangled orbits of hierarchy and control.”

I have been revisiting these and other works about securitising urban spaces because of my recent interest in territorial/boundaries control. This has been at the core of my recent work and I am trying to see if there’s any ground for comparison between what is happening in the UK and Brazil with regards to privatised public spaces and the territorial changes triggered by this swap in landownership. So, more to come in this theme soon…

Day 62: How do you control “your boundaries”?

UK Terrorism Act is incompatible with human rights!

“Terrorism” as a concept is a true black box and its definitions is freely and openly determined according to the convenience of certain state and corporate interests. It has become an excuse in current legal systems around the world – and, consequently, for police and border control forces – to skip citizen and human rights in investigations and check points, allegedly for the sake of “national security” – another obscure term.

In recent years, after the phenomenon of Wikileaks and, more recently, the Snowden revelations, we have witnessed the increase in the attempts to use terrorism-based law and regulations against journalists and whistleblowers. In one of the most notorious cases, David Miranda was detained for 9 hours at Heathrow airport during a trip from Germany to Brazil, after a meeting with filmmaker Laura Poitras. David Miranda has knowingly been helping her and journalist Glenn Greenwald in publishing the documents carefully released by Edward Snowden.

British officers used what is officially known as stop powers in schedule 7 of the UK Terrorism Act 2000. Apparently 85,000 travellers a year are “randomly” stopped at British ports and airports under this legal justification. And guess what are the allegations used by officers to invoque schedule 7? A suspicion of a person’s involvement in “terrorism”. Miranda appealed against his detention and yesterday the Court of Appeal’s ruling established that, although his detention was considered lawful, the powers contained in schedule 7 are flawed and that the Terrorism Act is incompatible with European convention on human rights. This is being seen by many, including Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, as an important win for press freedom.

According to the ruling, the government and the parliament will have to re-examine the act and the (considered) broad definition of terrorism.

Day 61: UK Terrorism Act is incompatible with human rights!

China keeps its eyes wide open upon Tibetans

Today’s message was based on a fresh report by Humans Rights Watch on China’s Tibet Surveillance Programme, named by the Chinese authorities “Benefit the Masses”, which has been indefinitely extended. The report was flagged up on twitter by Malavika Jayaram from Harvard University.

This is part of a long term strategy to use infiltrated “spies” (“village-based cadre teams”) in the villages of the Tibet Autonomous Region, and minimize the chances of opposition to the Chinese influence in the region.

According to the report, “The official slogan used to describe the objective of the village-based teams is ‘all villages become fortresses, and everyone is a watchman.'”

Day 59: China keeps its eyes wide open upon Tibetans
[thanks to M.J.]

CCTV is the message! (adapted from McLuhan)

Well, it seems poor Jeremy lost his “visual memory” for good. I can’t rely on the timelapse anymore, so I will try to keep coming the minute past the hour from now on…

Today’s message was an adapted version of the famous provocation by Marshal McLuhan, “the medium is the message”. I got this idea while reading the very interesting paper “‘The footage is decisive’: Applying the thinking of Marshall McLuhan to CCTV and police misconduct” by Richard Evans in the journal Surveillance & Society.

And I was joined again by my mysterious friends with Asian hats…

Day 58: CCTV is the message! (adapted from McLuhan)

Watching Jeremy, Watching Me, Watching Jeremy

Interacting with Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon at UCL