May 15th 2010

Google like any large organisation are not in full control of their employees, if you believe their claim that sampling public wifi broadcasts with their Google Car was a complete mistake.


Apparently since 2006 the experimental code has been incorporated into vehicle software. Interestingly in all that time it only came to light because German authorities asked to audit the vehicles data.  Though proof Google didn't know about this will be impossible to prove many will take this as complicity in yet another invasion of personal privacy. At the end of this following BBC report, why would Googel want to position people by using their wifi signals?. What was that research about ?,and who sanctioned it? - this must have appealed to someone at some point within Google who could have take a view on its wider implications but failed to,           

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8684110.stm

GD 

AndalOcio - CÓRDOBA SE VISTE DE AZUL POR EL DÍA DE EUROPA

AndalOcio - CÓRDOBA SE VISTE DE AZUL POR EL DÍA DE EUROPA

18th Jan 2010 Janet Chan: Police Cellphone Recordings from Roger Clarke

Hi Glenn –  something for your RGC project...Janet
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From the email list Surveillance, it was posted by Roger Clarke, http://www.rogerclarke.com/

Police fight cellphone recordings
Daniel Rowinski, New England Center For Investigative Reporting / Jan 12, 2010 Boston.com (15 January 2010)
  http://mobile.boston.com/art/21//news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/police_fight_cellphone_recordings/?single=1


http://mobile.boston.com/art/21/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/12/police_fight_cellphone_recordings/?single=1
http://snipurl.com/u30fs

Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager's mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.

Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.

"One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,'' Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, "my phone was seized, and I was arrested.''

The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.

Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.

Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.

There are no hard statistics for video recording arrests. But the experiences of Surmacz and Glik highlight what civil libertarians call a troubling misuse of the state's wiretapping law to stifle the kind of street-level oversight that cellphone and video technology make possible.

"The police apparently do not want witnesses to what they do in public,'' said Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who helped to get the criminal charges against Surmacz dismissed.

Boston police spokeswoman Elaine Driscoll rejected the notion that police are abusing the law to block citizen oversight, saying the department trains officers about the wiretap law. "If an individual is inappropriately interfering with an arrest that could cause harm to an officer or another individual, an officer's primary responsibility is to ensure the safety of the situation,'' she said.

In 1968, Massachusetts became a "two-party'' consent state, one of 12 currently in the country. Two-party consent means that all parties to a conversation must agree to be recorded on a telephone or other
audio device; otherwise, the recording of conversation is illegal. The law, intended to protect the privacy rights of individuals, appears to have been triggered by a series of high-profile cases involving private detectives who were recording people without their
consent.

In arresting people such as Glik and Surmacz, police are saying that they have not consented to being recorded, that their privacy rights have therefore been violated, and that the citizen action was
criminal.

"The statute has been misconstrued by Boston police,'' said June Jensen, the lawyer who represented Glik and succeeded in getting his charges dismissed. The law, she said, does not prohibit public recording of anyone. "You could go to the Boston Common and snap pictures and record if you want; you can do that.''

Ever since the police beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1991 was videotaped, and with the advent of media-sharing websites like Facebook and YouTube, the practice of openly recording police activity has become commonplace. But in Massachusetts and other states, the arrests of street videographers, whether they use cellphones or other video technology, offers a dramatic illustration of the collision between new technology and policing practices.

"Police are not used to ceding power, and these tools are forcing them to cede power,'' said David Ardia, director of the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Ardia said the proliferation of cellphone and other technology has equipped people to record actions in public. "As a society, we should be asking ourselves whether we want to make that into a criminal activity,'' he said.

[snip -- goes on about other cases and outcomes in other states]

Positive Uses of Surveillance

Are we over-reacting to the Google Car? To anyone travelling to a strange country or part of town, it is reassuring to be able to find the destination on the map, get the direction on how to get there, and have a preliminary glimpse of what the neighbourhood looks like. We all benefit from this free service (or shall we call it survice?) We all want more information, more detailed information, and more up-to-date information. Is it any wonder that Google Map is alive and well, in spite of the occasional protests and resistance?
As Benoit Dupont points out in his chapter 'Hacking the Panopticon' in Matheieu Deflem's book Surveillance and Governance: Crime Controal and Beyond, the Internet has democratized surveillance and allowed 'marginalized groups to deploy sophisticated surveillance technologies against the state and large corporations'. He cited Amnesty International's campaign 'Eyes on Darfur' as an example where violence and genocide can be monitored and exposed by this 'global neighbourhood watch'.
Dupont also highlights the resistance strategies that Internet users have adopted to block and mask their activities. He refers to the paper by Gary Marx, 'A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance' which outlines eleven such moves:

The 11 prominent types of response to privacy-invading surveillance are: 1) discovery moves, 2) avoidance moves, 3) piggy-backing moves, 4) switching moves, 5) distorting moves, 6) blocking moves, 7) masking (identification) moves, 8) breaking moves, 9) refusal moves, 10) cooperative moves, and 11) counter-surveillance moves.
One move not mentioned by Marx is the work of artists who make surveillance the subject of their research and creative work. There is a growing list of such artists, see Ctrl [Space] Rhetorics of Surveillance: From Bentham to Big Brother, and many others.

Different Maps

Suppose for a moment that the GoogleCar is a bit like a probe-head, scanning a surface. What you get is, at one level (that of a user employing the standard interface) a map composed of "tubes" (Glenn's image) whose interior is covered with stitched-together images. But if you pull back, and abstract from this, you get other maps. For example, the map featured on the Street View wikipedia page, which shows (in terms of countries visited) where the Car has been (dark blue) is planning to go (light blue) and is not currently "interested in".

There you get a map of "commercial interest", or a map of "security issues", or however you'd prefer to frame it. But suppose you were to focus on the UK for a moment, and you produced a reasonably high resolution map of the country showing places GoogleCar had been to and had not been to, and showing (via colour coding) the reason for its not having gone there. Suppose you allowed one colour (grey, as per the above map) for places which GoogleCar is not currently particularly drawn to... but used other colours to symbolise the reasons why GoogleCar has been actively excluded from going to a given location? For example, government installations are black, gated communities are red, private roads yellow, places like Broughton, Bucks that relied on force majeure to keep the Car at bay are a violent purple, and so on...

So, you'd end up with a "scanned" image like a thermogram, but registering, rather than temperature, but variations in effective privacy in the UK (or whatever country you choose)...

Howabout a Google Ear, rather than a Google Car? I imagine an enormous ear driving round, picking up all the noises and conversations, all the interactions that constitute our everyday life. Just an intrusive maybe, but more true to the complex, temporal nature of our existence. To some extent Thomson and Craighead have done something on these lines in their short film Flat Earth. If you click here you will get the essay I wrote for Animate, the commissioning agency, about Flat Earth. In the film blog entries are juxtaposed with zooms onto a Google Earth style representation of the globe. T + C's film reminds us that the spaces represented by Google Earth are filled with people with complex interior lives and desires.

From Rob Owen - Google Car reminds me...

The reversal of the Google Car is an interesting debating point; and my first reaction was "what does it matter?" Who cares if the camera on wheels comes whizzing down the road scooping up images and depositing them into some far off virtual space. Except of course, that far-off space is rather close and infact only a few clicks away for anyone who wants to see it, but who would want to? 


A few months ago I did catch a glimpse of the said vehicle trundling down through our rural village - but I can't say I was compelled to look up the results on a webiste. I know what our house looks like. I know what the street looks like. Why would I want to see it on screen? Maps from the air are different of course, and when we bought our house over a year ago, one of the first thing we did was have a look at Google Maps - and yes there it was: our house, complete with garden, greenhouse and extensive tree vegetation.


We even looked at it a few months later and blow me - the image had changed! It was now our car in the drive - and not that of the previous owner. The image had been updated and of course no-one told us. There was no postcard from those nice men and women at Google saying,'oh by the way we've had a bit of a fly through and now you'll be glad to know that we've got the very latest image of your lovely rural dwelling - nice bit of gardening by the way.' Nope - none of that. So something's going on. There's somebody, somewhere gathering lots of images and data at ever increasing frequency. How soon before the images are collected and updated every month, every week..even daily? Is that what will happen if the Google car accelerates?


Our postman, Percy, delivers the letters at around 9.15 every morning and as part of the service he drops off the Sun newspaper to the house over the road. Whilst I was on holiday during the summer, I noticed that prior to popping the newspaper through the letter box, Percy would have a good gawp at Page Three. I must have been quite bored, because this daily ritual became a bit if a joke - as I hid behind the curtains waiting for Percy to park outside, leave the van running and walk upto next door - before defly having a sneaky look at a topless woman and then pushing the folded paper through the letter box. But once the Google car accelarates, I'll no doubt be able to see this little ritual on line!


The Google Car also got me thinking about how organisations collect data, with no apparent purpose. We are all now required to record our time in work. Our wonderful IT/Corporate Services dept. have decided that we need to know what everyone is doing. This is crucial information for managers. We've spent too long managing budgets and ignored managing the staff's time. Great, so far. Anyway, the new system gets introduced and it looks like the work we do as an organisation of 450 staff spread across 16 offices in Wales can be classified into 1645 different activities. Isn't that great to know! Then the system they devise sets out that we must record our time according to 15 min blocks. Now, not all members of staff will undertake all 1645 activties, obviously, but you can do the maths yourself..there are 30, 15 min blocks in each 7hr 30 min days...so 450 staff x 1645 activities x 30 time units/day...that's one heck of a lot of data each day of the year! And for what? Here's the shocker, once that data is collected, hardly anyone looks at it. Seriously! You might look at your own time sheet, if you had nothing to do; or if you had even more time and you were bored, ala Percy-watching, you might have a sneaky look at how someone else is spending their time. But for the most part you wouldn't ever glance at it ever again. So what's this all about? Maybe it's the same phenomenum as the Google Car..ie colleceting endless data that has no real meaning?


Meanwhile life goes on. There's a 'which is the tail and which is the dog issue' here. We seem to collect data because we can - but there's hardly any apparent use for it. Did we have a debate in society and decide that what we need is endless images of every street in Britain, so that we can all see where everyone else lives? Perhaps I missed that one. Maybe there was an announcement over the summer and I was too busy looking through the curtains to catch a glimpse of Percy. Damn! I've missed something again! That just goes to show that you've always got to be plugged into the system. Keeping an eye out for the latest new thing. More e-mails that's what we need! I only had 143 in work yesterday, something's going wrong. I want information to flow my way in a faster and faster fashion. I was twitter and blogs (oops this is one, isn't it?) and I want to know what everyone, and I mean everyone, is doing at all times please. That should be easy.


Maybe the Google Car can't be slowed down. Maybe all this speeding up and data nonsense is the same thing. Maybe we're accelerating into the oblivion, getting closer and closer to the Sun (Percy was just a pioneer) until we all combust into a smouldering couldren of data - a mass of irrelvant information and facts. We're doomed Captain Mainwairing..we're doomed!


Maybe the only way to reverse the Google car is to let it accelerate. Just make sure you're not still on board.
You've been warned!"
I could rant further but I feel a pint calling me for some far distant pub! I'll be there for 1 hour and 45 minutes if anyone cares to know....
Cheers


Rob