Amendments to the FOI - bad news

Andrew at IMPACT blog laments the impending weakening of Freedom of Information in the UK, as the Bill proposing changes to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 for England & Wales and Northern Ireland looks set to progress:

Given that the Freedom of Information regime is, broadly, about the public interest in the good government of this country, it is disgusting that a Bill cutting out the very heart of the legislature from its effects could make it through. Parliament does nothing to improve its public perception by seeking removing itself from public scrutiny.

I quite agree: citizens must watch the watchers if we are to keep their power over us in check. This Bill seems designed to make sure that we cannot.

Traffic wardens get video cameras

BBC News reports:

Traffic attendants in Salford are to become the first in the UK to record their work on video.

Some wardens in the area will start to wear head-mounted miniature cameras from later this month.

NCP, which supplies traffic wardens in the city, will use the film to resolve disputes over tickets and to prosecute motorists who assault or abuse staff.

Good grief.

Gordon Brown promises an ID Card review

So, according to tonight's Evening Standard (no online version available!) Gordon Brown will review the potential impact on civil liberties of the ID Card scheme when he becomes Prime Minister. That's good news if he really means it (you never know with these politicians). After all, with the right technology (and only with the right technology), a government-issued ID Card could be a useful thing for both citizen and government.

Meanwhile, the government also chose today to sneak out the news that the scheme has gone even further over budget. A massive budget overrun for a UK public sector IT project? I suppose we would be rather amazed if that did not happen!

LSE's Identity Project site

Anyone interested in the London School of Economics' work in advising the UK Government not to accelerate the arrival of a Surveillance Society with a poorly-conceived ID Card implementation might want to check out their project site.

Deborah Orr on the transparent society

Deborah Orr rails impassionately against the creeping progress of the surveillance or "transparent" society (thanks to my mum for bringing my attention to the article). The conclusion to a highly thought-provoking piece:

[M]aybe the transparent society really is sinister, for reasons that are spiritual rather than practical. Maybe it is unhealthy for a society to behave itself not because it is underpinned by morality and watched by its caring family or neighbour, but because it knows it'll get caught and punished if it doesn't toe the line.

Maybe we need our privacy not because we want to hide particular things, but because we need a place where we can retreat psychologically, whenever we want, and to be alone and unobserved. Wise parents understand that their children need their privacy to be respected, even if, in their privacy, they do nothing unusual, remarkable, or wrong.

And maybe, our watchers, with the power to watch us, and the inclination not to be watched themselves, are inevitably corrupted by something inherent in the process of believing that there is nothing they can't see.

This all raises more questions than answers for me, as I try to imagine with my feeble little brain how the shifting patterns of information flow might actually play out in the evolution of society.

The only thing that seems certain is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to control who one's audience is (for all the world has been a stage for a while, after all) as one goes about performing identity in all but the most secluded, un-networked places. Will that fact encourage us to conform to rigid, lowest-common-denominator social mores, or conversely serve to free us from the inhibition that can come from being over-aware of one's audience?

Hum...

Garlik raise Series B funding

Looks like Garlik has convinced some more investors that there's money to be made in supersurveillance:

Garlik has raised £6 million pounds in Series B funding from return backers 3i Group and Doughty Hanson Technology Ventures.

Their product:

DataPatrol is a new monthly monitoring service that finds, tracks and monitors your personal information online.

It's the simple and effective way to protect your privacy and identity.

Hum, that's an awful big claim! I reckon I'll have to take their free trial for a spin and report back...

Surveillance judo

Bill Thompson ponders, on the BBC News site, the growing shadow of surveillance over our lives:

We're used to reports that the UK is the most-watched country in the world, but we may well look back on the days of simple closed-circuit television with some nostalgia.

This week we've heard reports of 'intelligent CCTV' systems like 'the bug', an array of eight cameras that scan an area and use movement tracking software to look for unusual behaviour, allowing an operator to zoom in on anyone suspicious.

London is planning to follow Middlesbrough in installing cameras with loudspeakers so that anyone thinking of behaving in an inappropriate manner can be hectored from the control room and told what to do, just as the telescreens ordered Winston Smith to do his exercises in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

There is a danger that the art, like other aspects of control technology, will only serve to dull our senses and dampen our indignation

More and more mobile phones come with GPS built-in, a boon for the geographically-challenged but something that could seriously damage our ability to go about our daily lives unobserved.

And of course almost everything we do online is recorded somewhere and will be available for inspection by the police if current EU plans to retain details of all emails sent, websites visited and files downloaded go through into national law.

Yet, despite the scare stories about the potential abuse of this information, we seem remarkably sanguine about the situation.

Millions of people share personal data online, from friendships on Facebook to favourite bands on MySpace, and not forgetting the photos of our friends, family and feet that go up on Flickr and Photobucket.

I'm as bad as anyone here, handing over my shopping patterns to supermarket loyalty schemes; sending unencrypted emails and visiting websites without seeking to disguise my identity; using Google for my searches and wandering the streets, often walking randomly around in a way that is guaranteed to make me look shifty.

It would be nice to think that the legal framework of data protection and human rights would go some way to protect us here, but I fear that we are going to have to take more direct action rather than rely on the Information Commissioner.

Direct action yes, but opposition is not necessarily the only kind of effective action here. In some surveillance situations it may be more creative and effective to act judo-style, going with the trend towards ever-greater surveillance rather than opposing it. For example, this is what initiatives like MySociety's FOI filer and archive are about—helping us to find out what information government holds on us.

So yes, let's engage in a debate on what is appropriate for the watchers to watch, but let's also insist on watching what the watchers are watching about us. Let's trancend surveillance with supersurveillance!

Watching what the watchers are watching

If the act of watching others is called "surveillance", and that of watching the watchers "sousveillance", what could we call it when we watch the watchers watching us, as if over their shoulders—in other words, when we watch what the watchers are watching?

As we become surveilled in more and more moments of our lives, the typical absence of such transparency around surveillance is becoming a huge issue for society. However, I am not aware of a word that describes overseeing what the watchers are watching about us.

How about co-opting "supersurveillance" from its current usage as a mere superlative of surveillance?

Surveillance schmurveillance

Everyone is going on about the Surveillance Society these days, but I just don't see it myself.