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At this year’s DICE 2010 Expo, Carnegie Mellon’s Jesse Schell gave a fantastic presentation that starts with why Facebook *shouldn’t* work in the way that it does and extrapolates forward into a half-creepy and half-inspiring vision for the embodied internet, the network of things, the culture of games and the SPIMEworld to come.
Chris Poole, founder of 4Chan, did a short interview with CNN.
He has some very interesting things to say about online identity and lifestreaming and, well, truth:
He also spoke at the TED 2010 conference. Can’t wait to check that out when it goes online.
From Mashable:
How would you like to be able to point your iPhone towards an object – the Eiffel Tower, for example – and instantly see the admission price, working hours, its height and other information
…
A patent called ID App does just that; it recognizes an object based on visuals (through the iPhone’s camera), a RFID reader or through GPS, and then fetches the data from related databases…in the beginning it’ll probably just take you to a related Wikipedia page.
Another patent focuses on facial recognition… It could bring you info about a person (scary, I know) just by pointing a camera at him; or it could be used for security, enabling only recognized users to use the device
Do you hear that sound? It’s the Augmented Reality Future knocking on your door…
MIT’s Spacebook project looks to be a very interesting exploration of post-privacy:
Spacebook is a project to design an interactive house whose walls gradually change in transparency with changes in local environmental conditions and the presence or absence of people inside and outside the space. The projects uses a new type of glass that was recently patented at the SENSEable City Lab
via Planet Damage
From PSFK:
Swedish software and design company The Astonishing Tribe are currently developing Augmented ID, an augmented reality concept for mobile phones. This utilizes facial recognition software (supplied by Polar Rose) to visualize the digital identities of those around you.
By simply aiming your mobile device at someone, you would be able to access that individual’s pre-selected information through floating icons that would appear around their image. These could contain anything from a phone number and email address to links to their favorite content or social networking platforms.
On the Internet, no one knows if your’re a dog, or so I’m told. But does President Obama’s newly announced “Cyberspace strategy” herald a possible end to the days of anonymity (or for that matter Anonymous) on the internet?
The answer is, “Possibly”.
Along with his press conference, today listing Cyber-Security as a national security priority, the White House also released the 75 page “Cyberspace Policy Review”. It all seems pretty straightforward, answering basic national security, infrastructure and financian concerns about various “cyber threats”. (The validity of a lot of these threats is, of course, up for debate, but isn’t what I’m looking to address here.) However, buried in the text is a somewhat scary bit of policy jargon:
10. Build a cybersecurity-based identity management vision and strategy that addresses privacy and civil liberties interests, leveraging privacy-enhancing technologies for the Nation.
Now, to be frank, there’s a few scary bits throughout the document. There’s a lot of wording that could support the growing of walled gardens in the private and public sector and the promise of more government regulation of the internet in the United States, but that bit sticks out to me.
An “identity management vision” is a means of regulating and more importantly authenticating your identity online. This would mean the creation of some sort of regulatory agent that can assist in the establishment of authenticity standards in the hopes of allowing federal agencies the ability to tell if sexb0mb29@gmail.com, Captain Swing on myspace, and chimplover35 who comments on Digg are all in fact the same individual. It’s, theoreticaly, the end of anonnimity on the internet. (At least the US bits.) Obviously it’s not the first time the US Federal government has shown an interest in policing identity on the internet, and it probably won’t be last, but it doesn’t bode well.
Io9’s Annalee Newitz has an interesting (and likely) take on the likelyhood of indentity policing ending up in the hands of a private sector company:
And here’s where my not-so-wild speculation about Facebook identities comes in. Many companies have turned to Facebook as an “identity management” system (including Gawker Media), allowing people to log into their services using their Facebook identity. The reason is simple: Most people only have one Facebook identity, and they stick with it. There’s a general notion that your Facebook identity is your authentic identity, or at least an identity that you keep over time, and that its characteristics can be traced back to who you are in real life. Therefore, having you log into every web service, from io9 comments to Digg to (possibly in the future) Paypal, is a way of managing your identities. Instead of having a separate identity for each of those services, you have one. Easy to manage, easy to trace.
Why shouldn’t Obama’s cyberczar just cut a deal with Facebook (and maybe a few other social networks like LinkedIn) and turn those profiles into your authentic identities? So you can send mail and buy things using your Facebook ID, and that’s how you’ll be tracked. Hey, you’re already on Facebook right? And you can set your profile to “private.” So it’s easy and “privacy enhancing.” (Never mind how easy it is to get around those privacy settings - pay no attention to that black hat behind the curtain.)
The scenario I’m describing is, in essence, how the Social Security Card became the twentieth century’s identity management system starting in the 1930s. These cards were not originally intended as ID cards, or as a way to authenticate your true identity. They were just a way to manage government assistance to those who needed it. But they became an ID card simply because everyone in the US had been issued one. When the government and businesses needed a way to track people’s identities, it became the easy choice. Showing your social security card meant that you couldn’t just come up with random new names for yourself every time you signed a form or took a job.
Though people in the US now think of the Social Security Card as the “obvious” form of ID, it took years for it to evolve from a simple social assistance card to an “identity management vision.”
Just as the (currently, temporarily scrapped) National ID card system would have been carried on the backbone of private interests, it’s entirely likely that any form of identity policing on the internet would end up being, by and large, maintained by a pre-existing entity in the private sector. At first glance, a Facebook/US Government partnership seems unlikely, but does it really? Newitz is right in claiming that this is exactly what happened with the Social Security Card. This little white and blue piece of paper that most Americans posess quickly became a universal form of ID even though it was never intended to act as such. (And in fact the card insists that a SSN is not an ID.) And there are many, many companies that are currently using Facebook as identity sourcing or are looking at doing so.
Why not link your email addresses and your paypal accounts and your amazon information and your bank information to your Facebook account. It’s safe and private, right? While you’re at it, why not link your biometric information to your email account to your facebook account? (Here’s the fun part — a lot of people already do that, and expect to see more push for email-based biometric security in the next year.)
Facebook is just one likely candidate for an increasingly likely scenario, and that scenario is one in which the powerful anonymizing factor of the internet is slowly reduced via public-private partnerships. Partnerships which will be based on “convienence” and public safety.
On the bright side, Obama claims that he still supports net neutrality:
“Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not include — I repeat, will not include — monitoring private sector networks or internet traffic,” he said. “We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans. Indeed, I remain firmly committed to net neutrality so we can keep the internet as it should be, open and free.”
But those aren’t very comforting words when they’re released next to a document that encourages us to look back to the cold war, and discussed the importance of selling the idea of a national security cyber-threat to the American People. It’s easy to say “I remain firmly committed to net neutrality…” but harder to accomplish when your policy documents outline how to convince the Internet-using populace to allow internet regulations and promotes solidifying “who is in charge” of the internet. (Those are just a few of the gems I noticed on a quick skim.)
Am I being reactionary? Maybe a little. But while the Obama adminstration has talked a good game regarding electronic civil liberties, he certainly hasn’t actually backed up the talk with actions, yet. In fact, he’s done just the opposite with his support of enhanced wireless wiretapping powers and his appointment of MPAA/RIAA and staunch anti-P2P advocate Joe Biden as his VP. While I’m not quite ready to go down to my local teabaggers meeting just yet, It’s obvious that electronic privacy is going to be an interesting minefield to watch Obama walk through.
On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. Except Facebook. And Linkdin. And the FTC and LexisNexis and the CIA and the NSA and SEC. Oh, and 4Chan.
The Obama administration, while progressive in some areas, still appears to be on the same page as the Bush administration regarding warrentless servailance.
The Obama administration says the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures does not apply to cell-site information mobile phone carriers retain on their customers.
The position is being staked out in a little-noticed surveillance case pending before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The case has wide-ranging implications for Americans, as most citizens have or will carry a mobile phone in their lifespan.
At issue is whether the government can require federal judges to order mobile phone companies to release historical cell-tower information of a phone number without probable cause — the standard required for a search warrant. While judges have varied on the issue, the resulting evidence can be used in a criminal prosecution.
The sticky part about the cell phone records is that they include general location as well. So not only can your phone records be pulled without a warrent, but so can your approximate location.
(Can anyone tell me if the location derived from cell-phone triangulation is admissiable in US or foreign courts?)
Also of note the White house has called “National Security” regarding the contents of the recently-proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement:
The White House this week declared (.pdf) the text of the proposed treaty a “properly classified” national security secret, in rejecting a Freedom of Information Act request by Knowledge Ecology International.
“Please be advised the documents you seek are being withheld in full,” wrote Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House’s Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.
The national security claim is stunning, given that the treaty negotiations have included the 27 member states of the European Union, Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Switzerland and New Zealand, all of whom presumably have access to the “classified” information.
In early January, the Bush administration made the same claim in rejecting (.pdf) a similar FOIA request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
If ratified, leaked documents posted on WikiLeaks and other comments suggest the proposed trade accord would criminalize peer-to-peer file sharing, subject iPods to border searches and allow internet service providers to monitor their customers’ communications.
Between this, and the recent developments in the Al-Haramain domestic spying case that may result in the same kind of evidence sequestering or destruction that led to the 2005 destruction of video tape evidence that was being used by the ACLU to prove government mistreatment of prisoners, it seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same.
To some degree, the current adminstration has been very true to their pledges of transparency, especially in regards to cleaning up past messes like Gitmo, but as the above links show, there are still some areas where the spectre of the Bush administration lives on in the House of Change. At least for now.
But is that really all that shocking? Electronic information, is still “the new threat” in many circles and policy regarding electronic and information freedoms are still in flux worldwide and across the US. There are things that almost everyone can agree are “bad” — like torture. But ask the person on the street about their electronic liberties and you’re likely to get a blank stare or a lecture about Chris Hanson and America’s Next Top Pedophile.
Linked from: Wired Threat Level and Even More Wired Threat Level
New security check points in 2020 will look just like something out of the futuristic movie, The Minority Report. The idea of the new checkpoints will allow high traffic to pass through just as you were walking at a normal pace. No more, waving a wand to get through checkpoints. The new checkpoint can detect if you have plans to set off a bomb before you even enter the building.
How does it work?
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security is developing a system called Future Attribute Screening Technology, or FAST for short. The system uses cameras to detect slight alterations in pupil sizes, blink rate and even direction of gaze. A laser radar called BioLIDAR measures heart rate and changes between heartbeats. The BioLIDAR can even monitor a persons respiration and track movements in the face, neck, and cheeks. Stressed out? A thermal camera will pick up on this too by gauging changes in the skin temperature.
The protoypes’ initial tests results are showing over 75% accuracy for deception or mal-intent by test subjects. Given these numbers, it might show up even sooner than 2020.
See also:
Link via /., photo via techfragments.com.
From PinkTentacle:
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.
The scientists were able to reconstruct various images viewed by a person by analyzing changes in their cerebral blood flow. Using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, the researchers first mapped the blood flow changes that occurred in the cerebral visual cortex as subjects viewed various images held in front of their eyes. Subjects were shown 400 random 10 x 10 pixel black-and-white images for a period of 12 seconds each. While the fMRI machine monitored the changes in brain activity, a computer crunched the data and learned to associate the various changes in brain activity with the different image designs.
They predict that within “10 years, advances in this field of research may make it possible to read a person’s thoughts with some degree of accuracy.”
I don’t know about you, but that idea freaks me the fuck out. We’re looking at one messy future kids. Imagine police equipped with such a device, able to pull from your brain exactly what you’re thinking. All the more reason to start fixing the world now, before such a device can be abused by some totalitarian government. Mental discipline will ever more become a survival tool for the future.
The total flip-side being this is just the tool one needs to capture the genius thoughts one has just as they drift off to sleep.
thanks for the tip-off Marc Starecky!
As communication becomes increasingly reliant on social media experiences i.e., email, IM, and text messages - valuable information woven subtly in physical interaction are lost. Communicate by Remote Concepts isn’t the first of its kind. The idea is simple. A user wears a small device with an integrated camera. This real time image is then translated into an abstract representation.Therefore the receiver gets (at least a part) of the visual stimuli the remote person encounters throughout the day. So you can get a glimpse of the kind of visual context the other person is in. This allows for a feel of connectedness and empathy with the remote user.
In this manner two or more people can always share experiences even from a distance. The receiving unit is a series of modular triangles one can set up however they like. It becomes a dynamic wall sculpture personalized by the abstraction of experience.
Link and video via yankodesign.com.
Here’s FAST (Future Attribute Screening Technologies), a system the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is testing that measures facial expressions, pupil dilation, pulse/breathing rates, and skin temperature to determine if someone has hostile intent.
Testing the system with 140 paid volunteers, DHS says it’s 79% accurate on hostility and 80% on deception. This is just creepy. Isn’t there a law about search and seizure, privacy, anything? Never mind the U.S. Constitution, just protect us from evildoers no matter what, Big Brother. What if someone is just angry at a roommate or girlfriend? It sounds like the DHS should borrow a new name: the Pre-Crime Division, lifted from fiction to fact, right out of Minority Report.
Travel happy, never angry.
Link and photo via dvice.com.
From ArsTechnica:
CareerBuilder found that 22 percent of the 3,100 employers it surveyed now use services like MySpace and Facebook to research candidates, up from just 11 percent in 2006. An additional nine percent of responders said they don’t conduct such research but intend to start doing so. Of those managers who did screen potential employees, just over one-third of them—34 percent—said they had found information that led them to dismiss candidates from consideration. Listed reasons include:
- 41 percent of candidates disclosed incidents of drinking/drug use
- 40 percent posted provocative photos or information
- 29 percent had poor communication skills
- 28 percent badmouthed a previous company/employer
- 27 percent lied about qualifications
- 22 percent made offensive statements about gender, race, religion, race, etc.
- 22 percent used an unprofessional screen name
- 21 percent were linked to criminal behavior
- 19 percent shared confidential information from previous employers
Not that you even need SNSs to demonstrate your n00bitude. Back in the day, you know, when email was cutting edge, a co-worker sent an email to her friends back home about how much she’d lied to get the job, how much she was being over-paid, and how little work she was doing; only she sent it not just to her friends, but to the entire company.
So never use company email for personal purposes, and, as the article ends with:
If your MySpace, Facebook, blog, or LiveJournal contains information you don’t think an employer should see, it should be kept in “Friends Only” mode.
See Also:
The Washington Post has an interesting overview of the rising lifelogger scene. There is what might perhaps be a little generational-bias in there, but they have still come back with some interesting anecdotes:
When San Francisco couple Brynn Evans and Chris Messina heard of a new Web site called BedPost, they registered an account before the site was even out of beta. BedPost was created to map users’ sex lives online — everything from partner to duration of the encounter to descriptive words, which could later be viewed as a tag cloud….After all, they already use project-management site Basecamp to chart the nonsexual parts of their relationship.
They use location tracker BrightKite.com to study where they’ve been.
They track their driving habits on MyMileMarker.com, their listening habits on Last.fm, and their Web-surfing habits, to the minute, on RescueTime.com.
“Brynn uses a service to track her menstruation,” says Messina helpfully. (Two of them, in fact: MyMonthlyCycles.com and Mon.thly.info). Some of these trackings are visible to other people, but mostly the couple monitors the information just for themselves.
Before BedPost, they’d been using an Excel spreadsheet to track each interlude since the beginning of their six-month relationship, though they found the interface limiting. They saw BedPost and thought, “Oh, look, this guy’s doing this, too, and he’s actually making plots of it. Plotting was cool,” says Evans.
…
Messina and Evans prefer the term “data junkies,” spoken with the self-effacing self-awareness that comes from months of meticulous self-study.
Self-trackers like Messina and Evans could spend hours online, charting, analyzing, tracking. Life as a series of pure, distilled data points, up for interpretation.
It’s not about tracking what you do, they say. It’s about learning who you are.
…
In San Diego, statistics student David Horn already belongs to BrightKite, Last.fm and Wakoopa.com, which tracks his Internet usage. He’s also experimented with Fitday.com to map food intake and calorie expenditure…Horn is working with his engineer girlfriend, Lisa Brewster, to develop an all-encompassing life tracker, under the working title of “I Did Stuff.”
“I’d like to track the people I talk to,” says Brewster, “and how inspired I am six hours later. And definitely location history — where I am, what time — ”
“Correlated with weather history,” interjects Horn. “And allergy data, pollen and mold in the air.”
Plus, “Web sites I read and their effect,” says Brewster.
…
These ideas are the types of heady possibilities that will be discussed by the members of a new group in San Francisco called Quantified Self. Members plan to meet monthly to share with one another the tools and sites they’ve found helpful on their individual paths to self-digitization. Topics include, according to the group invite: behavior monitoring, location tracking, digitizing body info and non-invasive probes.
And on it goes.
What are they odds that we have readers in the Bay Area heading along to Quantified Self? Hit us back with a report if you go!
via @chris23
One man’s pervy spycam is another man’s lifestreaming device.
Remember when phone-cams first came out and you could not disable the annoying faux-camera-click? Yeah, that lasted about a year. Being out in public in today’s world means almost certainly being photographed in the background of someone’s quick holiday snap, not too mention the increasing spread of CCTVs.
So, want to get easily add video to your lifestream, as you go about some cool activity. For around $40? Then check out this guide from Instructables:
How To: Spy Sunglasses! - video powered by Metacafe
via GizoWatch.
“It’s like I can distantly read everyone’s mind,” Haley went on to say. “I love that. I feel like I’m getting to something raw about my friends. It’s like I’ve got this heads-up display for them.” It can also lead to more real-life contact, because when one member of Haley’s group decides to go out to a bar or see a band and Twitters about his plans, the others see it, and some decide to drop by — ad hoc, self-organizing socializing. And when they do socialize face to face, it feels oddly as if they’ve never actually been apart. They don’t need to ask, “So, what have you been up to?” because they already know. Instead, they’ll begin discussing something that one of the friends Twittered that afternoon, as if picking up a conversation in the middle.
This is just a small sample of Clive Thompson’s excellent piece in the NY Times, I’m So Totally, Digitally Close to You.
It’s a great overview of the emergence of ambient awareness (or intimacy); how a whole generation are using to online tools to maintain relationships, discover and re-connect with each other.
The anecdote about Facebook’s introduction of the News Feed is particularly interesting. How people’s first reaction was to rebel against ‘lost privacy’, but soon came to appreciate the benefits - the gestalt, if you will - of being able to scan what their friends have been up to.
Great work Clive!
This is the PENSIEVE user interface (click through for high-resolution):
This is IBM’s promo video for it:
This is ganked from PhysOrg:
“This is like having a personal assistant for your memory,” said Dr. Yaakov Navon, the lead researcher and image processing expert from IBM’s Haifa Research Lab. “Our daily routines are overflowing with situations where we gain new information through meetings, advertisements, conferences, events, surfing the web, or even window shopping. Instead of going home and using a general web search to find that information, PENSIEVE helps the brain recall those everyday things you might normally forget.”
…By simply typing the person’s name into PENSIEVE, you can recall when and where you met them, and any related information garnered at that time. You could even browse forwards or backwards in time to find out what events transpired before or after the initial meeting.
Another use of this technology is in reconstructing and sharing an experience or memory. If enough media-rich data was collected about a particular event, it can be used to build a more complex visual associative representation of the experience.
“This is where the real power of collaboration kicks in,” said Eran Belinsky, research team leader and a specialist in collaboration. “You can recall the name of the person you met right before you entered a meeting by traversing a timeline of your experiences, or share a business trip with colleagues by creating a mashup that shows a map with an animation of your trail and the pictures you took in every location.”
This is the corporate future and it is only just starting to get messy. Let us just say I would be very careful now about using any company property for personal reasons.
Obviously this is awesome technology for personal use though, but I would want to be controlling the database. In a secure location. (According to CSI) Police already take people’s mobile phones in the event of emergency or tragedy. Would you want to hand over an indexed/tagged, searchable lifestream?
That being said, how rad would it be if it pulled-in CCTV images of you walking around?
Philip K Dick :- becoming more a prophet of the modern condition every second.
From NaviGadget:
Spanish brand Keruve has come out with a GPS device designed to keep an eye out for Alzheimer’s patients.
The system consists of a special bracelet and a PSP like handheld device that can show the location of the person wearing the bracelet. Speaking of the bracelet; it is water resistant and it can only be taken off using a special tool.
According to Engadget “it can also apparently fall back on cell tower triangulation (otherwise known as A-GPS) provide a location when regular GPS is unavailable”.
So what we have here is a device perfect not just for finding your favourite senile uncle, but also for any would-be stalker, controlling spouse, un-trusting parent, or anyone else who just can’t bare to not know where someone is.
That’s the Con side. The Pro being, you could stalk yourself, ie lifelogging. And I am sure this could be incorporated into some neat RL/ARG games.
via medGadget
In a move that I suspect will benefit both parties immensely, the latest version of Twhirl now supports the new indenti.ca microblogging service.
This just cements Twhirl as the desktop client of choice, since it already supported not only Twitter, but Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts (not to mention allowing broadcasting to Jaiku and Pownce).
So what is indenti.ca? As they explain on the Twhirl blog:
identi.ca is a very young service, just a few weeks old. So please keep in mind that it does not support all functionality you are used to from twitter. For example, it does not allow to send private, direct messages, so everything you post is visible to everyone.
Not to mention no text-messaging support either! So why bother integrating it? Because it is built from the ground up to be far more stable and scalable!
…the Twhirl client won’t have to ping the Identi.ca servers to get updates; instead, updates will be sent directly to the Twhirl client. This makes nanoblog conversations more live–you can have a back-and-forth without hovering over the “update” button. It also means that your Twhirl client doesn’t have to be hitting the Identi.ca servers every few minutes for updates, which reduces the load profile on the service, theoretically at least.
So how is this win-win for both Twhirl and identi.ca? Twhirl gets a more robust alternative (ie no FailWhales) to Twitter, something that will keep people using it’s software. identi.ca gets to tap into an existing user-base, something that will help give it momentum, and encourage developers to extended its feature-set to be a true competitor to Twitter. How they solve the Web->SMS problem though, I am very keen to see.
Right, the best for last. Rumor has it that integrated time-lines are in Twhirl’s immediate future; ie one time-line, multiple services. If they would just switch Pownce and Jaiku from broadcast/cross-posting to full integration we would be just about there.
Previously:
(Apparently, I really like Twhirl…)
The first time I ever heard of Shenzhen and the “Special Economic Zone” was when I was working for an international information clearinghouse that should remain nameless. It came up when I was facing the possibility of transferring to our Pan-Asia branch and living there part time. However, over the years, other than being the place where, chances are good, any random bit of tech you have on your desk was manufactured (your iPhone’s been there, as have many other Apple and IBM products, Wal-Mart items and the like) Shenzhen only popped back up on my radar a few months ago as one of the birthplaces of the new surveillance culture.
Chinese officials call it call it “The Golden Shield” and while it’s ostensibly a project of the Chinese Government, it’s being developed by familiar companies like IBM, AT&T, Nortel, Cisco, General Electric, Yahoo, Honeywell, and according to some reports, Google. What the Golden shield comprises is the largest integrated surveillance network in existence. It combines the existing “Great Firewall” which filters almost all net content into China with the “Safe Cities” initiative which includes cameras in all internet cafes, many entertainment venues, and in many cities (2 million cameras in Shenzhen alone by 2010) and a massive photo and biometric information database of all of China’s 1.3 billion citizens.
It’s a massive and lucrative project which is why Western companies are flocking to build a better democracy-free future for China, while here in the US they continue to sell a “freedom friendly” image. Meanwhile the “Golden Shield” has already been tested on examples like the Lhasa riots which recently left anywhere from 16 to 100 people dead as monks clashed with police. The Shield allowed CCTV footage to yield become identities and then locations of many monks and passersby involved in the rioting allowing Chinese police to quickly round up hundreds of people allegedly involved. The same security system is being used, of course, to protect the upcoming 2008 Olympics as well.
As Naomi Klein writes in the Rolling Stone article that many of my statistics are pulled from, these are the kind of companies doing business with China on the sly in order to testbed a new generation of biometrics technologies:
You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it “captures” more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security’s massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with “mobile iris and multimodal devices” so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department’s “largest facial-recognition database system”; and produces driver’s licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in “extremely general” terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company’s CEO would only say, “Stay tuned.”
The good news, though is that the American Government, as they learn about these technologies is only too eager to strip mine them for ideas:
The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was “mined for ideas” by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. For Walton, the most chilling moment came when the Defense Department tried to launch a system called Total Information Awareness to build what it called a “virtual, centralized grand database” that would create constantly updated electronic dossiers on every citizen, drawing on banking, credit-card, library and phone records, as well as footage from surveillance cameras. “It was clearly similar to what we were condemning China for,” Walton says. Among those aggressively vying to be part of this new security boom was Joseph Atick, now an executive at L-1. The name he chose for his plan to integrate facial-recognition software into a vast security network was uncomfortably close to the surveillance system being constructed in China: “Operation Noble Shield.”
Empowered by the Patriot Act, many of the big dreams hatched by men like Atick have already been put into practice at home. New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C., are all experimenting with linking surveillance cameras into a single citywide network. Police use of surveillance cameras at peaceful demonstrations is now routine, and the images collected can be mined for “face prints,” then cross-checked with ever-expanding photo databases. Although Total Information Awareness was scrapped after the plans became public, large pieces of the project continue, with private data-mining companies collecting unprecedented amounts of information about everything from Web browsing to car rentals, and selling it to the government.
Check out the rest of that excellent article for far more detail on the topic of surveillance culture in China. My goal isn’t to poke at China in particular. For example the draconian national firewall around our old friend Dubai (as well as Saudi Arabia, and Qatar) is built and administered by U.S. based company Secure Computing a.k.a. Smart Filter. Now leaving aside the possibly vastly hypocritical clash behind some of their senior staff’s personal lives (Google boingboing, adult baby, and smartfilter, if you care to) and the technologies they develop to limit internet access for others, once again we have a Western company (this one more public about it since internet censorship is their raison d’etre) implementing and developing censorship technologies overseas.
What prompts this little link-filled rant, then? Well, today the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 passed. This act, for those of you playing along at home or abroad, first of all offers up immunity to Verizon, AT&T, and several other telecom companies for their part in assisting the National Security Agency with warrentless wiretaps before and after the 9/11 attacks. The act then proceeds to arguably weaken oversight of domestic wiretaps and information collection. The Bill passed with overwhelming support, granting retroactive protections for invasions of privacy by a collection of telecom companies.
These are some of the same telecom companies and their interests that, as we’ve seen elsewhere, have their hands on the rudder of a different Web 2.0. One that resembles the satirical USIdent integrated internet/entertainment/surveillance solution from Southland Tales more than it does the Web 2.0 of a thousand blog entries. While it’s easy to see mainly the utopian or fantastic applications of a lot of the technologies we discuss and trumpet on here, so many of them have an equal footing in a parallel version of the future being grown as we speak by some of the same companies produce the cool new future gadgets.
This is one of the reasons I take the “find outbreaks of the future” mandate so seriously. First of all, outbreaks of the future are not always pretty; but secondly, by keeping our eyes open and aggregating this kind of information, we’re at least increasing the odds of being able to pick our own futures. Because honestly? I don’t want the futures that the people are offering “liberation” with jokes about surveillance are selling.
At least, that’s what I tell myself at night.
