Thinking Positive about Mass Surveillance
Jul 13th, 2009 by sherri
This week I’m trying to think positively about mass surveillance. It seems inevitable, after all.
“Iran’s Web Spying Aided By Western Technology,” read the front page of the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago. “European Gear Used in Vast Effort to Monitor Communications.”
Judging by the Intelligence Support Systems industry marketing brochures, Iran’s “monitoring center” is not exactly advanced compared with European state-of-the-art.
Nokia-Siemens themselves said that they sold Iran a “restricted functionality” monitoring center. (Reports indicate that Iran also has “deep packet inspection” capabilties, presumably from another source.) According to Nokia-Siemens, over 60 countries have been sold a Monitoring Center. But their current “Intelligence Platform” solution is far more full-featured. Check out the Intelligence Platform brochure, which touts its “pattern recognition” and “behavioral analysis” capabilities. It “automatically detects formerly unknown patterns.” (Ah, dragnet.)
We can’t stop the unrelenting march of mass civilian communications monitoring, but perhaps we can turn lemons into lemonade. (Mmm, mass surveillance lemonade…what?)
 From the Nokia-Siemens Intelligence Platform Brochure |
Consider this technology’s potential for good. You could watch the spread of information through different routes the way doctors watch radioactive materials travel through the blood. You could measure how a population feels about a particular issue and get instantaneous feedback on policies with infinitesimal granularity. Better understanding of human psychiatry and communication could help us make better individual decisions and perhaps collectively govern ourselves more efficiently.
National communications surveillance is a very powerful tool for government right now (not to mention lucrative for phone companies, who are paid for the access). Also, given revelations about NSA wiretapping and FBI’s “Quantico Circuits,” it’s clear that the fundamental infrastructure is already in place (*ahem* NarusInsight).
Mass communications information would be very valuable for scientists– psychiatrists, anthropologists, etc. Unfortunately, today Internet, mobile and transaction surveillance data tends to go exclusively to the people who can pay for it or profit from it– ie. spooky government agencies with big budgets and advertisers. What if academic researchers had access to the same information that intelligence agents already comb every second?
Not that I really want to be under anybody’s microscope. But if anyone’s going to be analyzing my phone calls, payment transactions, emails and IMs, I’d rather it be researchers who will publish their findings, instead of secretive intelligence agencies. If our communications aren’t going to be private, let’s at least use these capabilities for clear, transparent public benefit.
Here’s an e-affirmative action proposal: For every intelligence agent that has access to mass surveillance data, one academic researcher should have access to the same information. And report on it.
At least then we’d know what the heck was going on.
| Sherri Davidoff |
| PGP-signed text: 2009-07-13 (current) |
The idea of the government making immediate policy decisions based on the reactions of the people terrifies me. The very reason we have a representative democracy rather than a true democracy is that our founding fathers believed (correctly I feel) that the average person was either too ignorant of current issues, or didn’t care enough to really invest in making wise decisions. Obviously a true democracy wasn’t practical back then, but it was discussed with strong disfavor during the constitutional conventions.
The Clinton administration set new records for the amount of polling that was done, and I think a lot of its inefficiencies (or defficiencies?) can be blamed on too much waffling over what the public really wanted. Going further in that direction is both dangerous and stupid. Look at the public’s reaction to 9/11. A week after we would’ve been fine with strip searches and Army personnel on every flight, but three months later and we couldn’t handle minor security impedance. The problem is that people in mass make poor decisions based on immediate gratification. Individuals can be intelligent, but groups are always idiots.
With that said, I believe this trend is unavoidable and has played a large part in the downfall of several other great civilizations throughout history.
Sorry for the political rant…
Yeah, I was trying really hard to think of something good about the whole situation. Perhaps that was unrealistic.
The whole thing scares me. Unless there’s an appropriate, well-defined feedback loop in the system, mass surveillance will be used for the purposes of control. As you point out, even technology used for the purposes of “democracy” can facilitate stupid decisions.
>Look at the public’s reaction to 9/11. A week after we would’ve been fine
Don’t forget, the media did a lot to fuel the panic. More panic, more papers sold.
Thanks for the rant
s
Nokia moved their brochure that you linked to — check your links, and/or post a local copy of what they may have taken down. It’s only two weeks since you posted this — presumably they are very sensitive about “the wrong people” finding out what they’re selling.
Is business as usual for Nokia-Siemens the sale of death, torture, and rape, with a little investor fraud on the side?
Nokia deserve all the backlash they get for their big-brother leanings. Ben Roome, their PR supremo, has been doing a ‘stella’ job at muddying the water – but then he was the one that passed off the CEO ‘with cause’ firing as business as usual.
Here is an example of Ben Roome’s ‘positioning’, describing Frank Dunn’s firing from Nortel as ‘business as usual’:
http://www.businessgreen.com/crn/news/2008888/change-command-nortel
Perhaps business as usual, but Frank Dunn’s business activities were so outrageous that they attracted the attention U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and, I believe, the ever alert Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Dunn