Republican News · Thursday 27 June 2002

Big Brother is watching YOU

BY MICHAEL PIERSE

Alex, Kate, Sandy, Jade, Lee, Adele, PJ, Spenser, Johnny, and their 'real life' TV predecessors have usurped original meaning of the term 'Big Brother' in the name of voyeuristic entertainment. But as international legislators move to dilute protections on citizens' privacy rights, George Orwell's 'Big Brother', his nightmarish vision of totalitarianism in the novel 1984, is fast becoming reality.

Depicting a futuristic would-be utopia, the ostensibly socialist Oceania, Orwell's Big Brother masquerades as the benign caretaker of civilisation, watching its citizens from posters everywhere. Beneath this facade, however, is a ruthless dictatorship, where truth is replaced by propaganda and individuality and privacy are lost. What might during the mid-20th century have been seen as the literary product of an overactive, but brilliant imagination may fast be becoming reality, as privacy as a right and a reality is fast being eroded.

The September 11 factor

The invasive practices of the real Big Brother - intelligence agencies and corporate giants - operate on a macrocosmic scale. Availing of the understandably fearful climate that has gripped 'Western' societies following last September's attacks, the US and now the EU are adopting laws that will erode much of the little privacy we have left.

Three weeks ago, on 29 May, the European Parliament passed a controversial measure that allows member states to force telecommunications companies to keep detailed records of customers' data for snooping purposes. It passed the Communications Data Protection Directive by 351 votes to 133, despite an aggressive campaign by civil liberties groups arguing that the measure will enable police to spy even further into citizens' lives. Together with moves by the British government to extend existing British Intelligence powers (to demand the communications records of every person within Britain and the Six Counties) to government departments, local councils and quangos, these measures are the latest in a process that privacy advocates term "Function Creep".

Granted, increased surveillance can mean more efficient crime detection and a safer world. Tailoring production to need, corporate databases too can ensure better consumer satisfaction, but at what cost to the individual and society as a whole?

Cold War legacy

Privacy - being left alone - has become less and less of a possibility since the end of the Cold War. Demands for greater bureaucratic efficiency and rapid technological advances have meant that technologies from the defence industry have lent themselves to law enforcement, civilian agencies and private companies. Outdated laws and regulations and a largely oblivious public has meant that the inevitable abuses of this technology are not being checked.

Powerful computers and central storage and processing of information has revolutionised surveillance since the 1960s and the private sector has been quick to spot the potential for profit making. Information on almost everyone in the 'developed world' is now collated not only by intelligence agencies, but also by corporate giants.

Intelligence in state and business

Intelligence, defense and law enforcement agencies have a long history of stretching those legal constraints that protect civil liberties. From the early 1990s onwards, to justify enormous budgets, their focus switched from international espionage to monitoring civilians. The CIA has shifted its emphasis to economic espionage and cooperation with other agencies on issues of 'terrorism', drug trafficking and money laundering.

The US Department of Defence's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) has provided tens of millions of dollars to private companies through its Technology Reinvestment Project to help develop civilian applications for military surveillance technology.

'Third World' states too, some with dismal human rights records, have been 'beneficiaries' of this technology. Thailand, China and Turkey are now using US-made technology to crush political dissent.

In the econoic sector, corporations are using new technology to target customers, manipulate markets and select, monitor and control employees.

ID

Pressure for a single identifier, ostensibly for information sharing and admin is increasing and schemes currently in place are sliding towards a mandatory system of universal identification.

It could make things handier - it's easy to see the potential benefit of not having to fill in forms for everything and instead having all personal information available at the swipe of a card.

However, privacy advocates argue that all this violates personal liberties. Cards originally designed for single use are being expanded to link multiple databases. In Thailand, Control Data Systems set up a universal ID Card to track all citizens. 'Smart Cards', widely used in Europe, have an embedded microchip that can hold several pages of information. Even more advanced optical technology, which can store hundreds of pages of data on a chip, is currently used in the US. Utah state is considering multifunction cards, providing for services as diverse as motor vehicle registration and library cards, welfare benefits and food stamps.

With multiple doctors per patient quite common these days, combined with the needs of insurance agencies, the arguments for and against ID Card-stored medical records are compelling. Doctors may be in a better position to treat a patient if they have unrestricted access to their entire medical history. The Hippocratic oath, however, which guides medical practice, states of a doctor's attitude to the private details of patients that "I will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept secret". Patients expect privacy in their medical affairs, yet such ID cards would hold their entire medical history, even including X-Rays. Should insurers, for instance, know if someone has taken a HIV/AIDS test, which might suggest, to them at least, that the applicant's sex life is a liability?

Consumer privacy

"The product is you," Adbusters Media Foundation, an anti-globalisation group, proclaims. It is an apt way of describing the latest offshoot of the marketing industry, 'Customer Relations Management' or 'Personaliosation'. Aggregating information from online and offline purchase data, supermarket savings cards, white pages, surveys, contest entries, financial records, property records, vehicle data, the sale of magazine and catalogue subscriptions (the list goes on), allows capitalism to package and label us all. Resulting dossiers, some of them quite extensive, are sold for marketing and law enforcement purposes, and include personal information on the health, sex, race, lifestyle presferences, arrest records, religion and so-on of individuals who have no idea, or control over, how much is known about them.

d those labels are very real. Profiling companies have well-developed lexicons to classify individuals. One company, for instance, divides society into 15 distinct groups, which in turn can be broken down into various subgroups. You could be one of the 'Elite Suburbs' (not likely if you're reading this paper), which includes 'Blue Blood Estates, Winner's Circle, Executive Suites, Pools and Patios or Kids & Cul-de-Sacs'. Less fortunate, you might fit into the 'Urban Cores', one of the 'Single City Blues' or 'Inner Cities'.

Junk Merchandising

Fianna Fáil came in for some flak during the recent general elections for 'autodialing' - ringing constituents' phones with recorded messages urging them to vote for the party. Some people were particularly perturbed that, though their phone numbers were ex-directory, FF still managed to get hold of them. Data Protection Comissioner Joe Meade told a recent press conference at the launch of his annual report that his office is "investigating that matter", adding that "auto dialing is not legal under the data protection directives".

Manipulation of information you unknowingly leave while browzing on the internet is the latest trick up merchandisers' sleeves. Websites can use 'cookies', small bits of information stored on a browser, to surreptitiously track the movements of individual web users. This allows advertisers to more accurately direct advertisements - targeted advertisements get more hits than static ads. So, if someone guesses by the sites you've been visiting that you're fat, they can then bombard you with e-mails about slimming. Offensive or what?

People also go to sites where they don't necessarily want people to know they've been - sites, for example, that relate to their intimate personal lives. It is certainly offensive, indeed shocking, that advertisers should have access to this information.

Misguided loyalty

Club loyalty cards for major retail outlets aren't just there to keep you shopping in the one spot. Detailed profiles of individual consumption habits - how much alcohol, cigarettes, phramaceuticals each consumer buys - are kept on databases to be transferred into junk mail.

While supermarkets often dismiss such information as merely directed towards better services for the shopper, they do not distinguish between information that may be considered by some as of a more sensitive nature. Knowing what kind of vegetables you like is far less significant than knowing whether you are buying baby nappies or adult nappies - American company Experian offers a database of persons who are incontinent.

Supermarket profiles can also be used against customers. Von's supermarket in California sought to introduce loyalty card records in a court case where a consumer had slipped and injured himself in the store. They wished to prove that the consumer may have been alcohol impaired, as his loyalty card would show numerous purchases of alcohol. The evidence was ultimately never introduced.

EU opens the floodgates

Despite previous reluctance to embrace new rules on data protection, the European Commision bowed to pressure from bigger member states following the inevitable security frenzy post-September 11. It says, however, that forcing telecoms companies to keep data is distinct from handing it over to national authorities. Data protection will only be waived to conduct "criminal investigations or to safeguard national or public security, when it is a necessary appropriate and proportionate measure within a democratic society", says the Commission in its ambiguous statement.

But should the right to privacy be absolute? The benefits of Internet monitoring in Ireland were realised on Monday 27 May when 500 Gardaí raided 90 computer owners' homes and offices, in the biggest ever operation in the country to eradicate child pornography. The houses of a judge, a leading solicitor, a bank manager, a company director and a children's choir leader were among those raided. Almost 100 hard drives, suspected of containing pornographic images, including those of children being raped, are currently being inspected by Garda technical staff.

Acting on information from the FBI, who supplied them with the names of almost 100 suspected paedophiles, Gardaí may not have conducted these raids had it not been for the US intelligence organisation's three-year "Cybernet" investigation, which monitored web sites for the trading of child pornography. Such success is a credible counter argument to those who advocate the Internet as an unrestricted space for global communications.

CCTV and mobile phones

Increasing street crime, especially alcohol-related attacks, have led to an increase in CCTV surveillance. Again, such technology can guarantee greater protection for citizens and act as a deterrant against crime, but there is also a downside.

In a recent study of CCTV usage in public and commercial sites, Dr Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong of the Centre for Criminology at Hull University, England, observed that 40% of people targeted for surveillance were "for no obvious reason" selected "on the basis of belonging to a particular or subcultural group".

Blacks were between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half times more likely to be spied on than their presence amongst the English population would lead one to expect. 30% of those were surveilled continuously for a period of more than nine minutes, compared to ten per cent of whites. This mirrors recent revisions to FBI directives in the US, which has allowed them, without particular reason, to carry out random surveillance in mosques.

Britain's spending on CCTV and the surveillance industry generally in the past decade has been between £150 and £300 million per year, with an estimated 300,000 cameras now placed in shopping areas, housing estates, car parks etc.

More than half the population of this island is also carrying a tracking device. Crimes, unpaid taxes or government dues are all grounds for customs, taxation and law enforcement agencies in the North to use information regarding the movements of persons, garnered from their mobile phones, in investigations. The mobile network Orange revealed in March 2001 that it retains for six months information on customers' locations when making or receiving calls - passing it on when obliged by law. The company refused to discuss the matter further. Other mobile phone agencies - Vodafone, BT Cellnet, and One2One in the North; O2, Meteor and Vodafone in the South - admit to doing the same.

Tracking is done via base stations - more densely situated in cities - which can track customers to within 50 metres. For the more dedicated snoop, 'triangulation', a process that uses time delays and strengths of radio signals between a transmitter and at least two base stations, can calculate the user's exact position. As Caspar Bowden, the British director of the thinktank Foundation for Information Policy Research says, "the police have no compunction about lobbying for these retention powers in secret, but there should be a wider debate about basic values needed to preserve liberty".

Dangerous technology

Technological advances in data collation can mean a better society. Used for increased incursions against personal privacy, however, they may become the greatest weapon the opponents of civil liberties have ever had.

"Why does this magnificent applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us little happiness?" Albert Einstein pondered of the contrast between the honourable intentions that garnered him a Nobel peace prize and the ignoble use of his immense discoveries. "The simple answer runs, because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it."