FRFI 160 April / May 2001
Over the past few years, there has been an increase of surveillance infrastructure, which is turning Britain into a real life ‘big brother’ nightmare. The future holds more in store, as HELEN BURNES reports.
Surveillance is increasing, technology is becoming more probing and there is greater centralisation of databases, all of which is introducing an unprecedented infrastructure for mass, systematic ‘intelligence gathering’. Our activities are recorded and can be monitored by employers in the workplace, by closed circuit television or road cameras outdoors and even TV companies can record every channel you click on to. Phone companies and banks automatically record all information, and can be called upon to supply the government or courts with their data.
Corporations are encroaching further into our private lives, seeking out new opportunities to sell us products and turning every aspect of life into a commodity. The Labour government is introducing the apparatus of greater social control. Social security offices can already access claimants’ bank details, but before long, all our social and economic records may be stored on central databases, making it possible for the authorities to compile individual profiles.
The pretext for this indiscriminate surveillance is the effort to catch the ‘evil people’ in our society, paedophiles, football hooligans, criminals and violent extremists. However, the fact is that the technology is in place to allow greater repression of the government’s political opponents, and this is a significant motivation.
In December 2000, the Home Office admitted that it was considering a proposal made by MI5, MI6 and the police and circulated in an internal document, calling for legislation to introduce the systematic logging of all electronic communications in this country for seven years. Every telephone call made and received by a member of the public, all e-mails sent and received and every web page looked at would be recorded. The document was written by Roger Gasper, deputy director-general of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the government agency that oversees criminal intelligence in Britain, who says that the government ‘should be prepared to defend our position.’
This proposal follows on the tail of the latest surveillance legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) which became law in 2000. RIPA has given police broad access to e-mail and Internet communications. It allows the Home Secretary to instruct telecoms providers to install interception tools that it can used to read e-mails and tap telephone calls. One provision of the legislation allows businesses to intercept employees’ communications for ‘specified purposes’. This includes encrypted data, so that failure to decrypt can lead to an order for the encryption key or password to be handed over to authorities.
E-mail and Internet
E-mails are like postcards over the Internet, they are open for everyone to read. Few people bother or know how to encrypt their e-mails. ‘Web Bugs’ can be hidden inside e-mails that silently transmit information to an unconnected computer. For example, if you forward an e-mail you have received to some one else, after first making comments on the contents, the person who originated that e-mail can be sent a copy of your comments.
Even when you surf the Internet, nothing you do is anonymous and every page you visit and the information you look at is recorded. When you access the Internet you do so via a browser. Every website you visit sends information to your browser that is stored on the hard drive of your computer. When you access the website again, your browser sends that information back to the website, so it can know that you have been there before and know what information you looked at previously. This has a marketing use, as websites can build up a profile of your buying habits and tailor banner adverts to your interests. It also means that if you are regularly using the same computer, anyone, including your boss, can find out exactly which websites you have visited. When you visit a new address on the Internet, your browser may pass on information about the website you were at before hand.
However, at present you are relatively anonymous on the Internet, because usually every time you connect your service provider gives you a different Internet Protocol (IP) address. This is also soon to change since the introduction by the Internet Engineering Task Force of a new feature called IPv6. This includes a new, expanded IP address, part of which is the unique serial number of each computer’s network-connection hardware. In other words every piece of data will carry the user’s electronic fingerprints. To see how this could be used by the government, consider the provisions within the new Terrorism Act that criminalise support for named ‘terrorist’ organisations. The charge could be backed up with this technology by proving that you have visited certain websites or by intercepting the contents of your e-mails.
On 18 January 2001 the Labour government published the new Criminal Justice and Police Bill. There are many alarming provisions in the Bill, including allowing all DNA samples to be kept in the future, and DNA and other police data to be exchanged with states and agencies outside the UK, even for ‘speculative searches’. Clause 49 allows the police to remove a computer even if it contains legally privileged material. Clause 53 says the legally privileged material must be returned, but allows the police, or other agency, to retain it if it is ‘inextricably linked’ to what they are looking for.
Cameras
There are one million CCTV cameras operating in Britain, more than anywhere else in Europe. Several thousand of these are speed cameras that record car licence plates and alert police if they read a ‘suspect’s’ number plate. The City of London police force, which was first to introduce the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) technology in 1997, retains video tapes for several months.
Most CCTV cameras use video-tape recorders, although the process of ‘computerisation’ is underway. The new technology will catch a person’s face in its view and send a digitalised image to a central database, which will compare the face with thousands of face-images stored on a database, supposedly of ‘known criminals’. Within three seconds the computer will let the camera operator know if the face matches any of those stored on the database. Accuracy is below 100% and there are bound to be mismatches.
This technology is already being used in large public arenas without our knowledge. On the 1 February 2001, biometric scan (face-recognition) technology was used to scan the faces of every person entering the Raymond James Stadium in Florida to watch a baseball game. Biometric scan cameras have been used for some time in private establishments, such as casinos. In 1998, the London Borough of Newham introduced the software necessary to have face-recognition capabilities in cameras covering a shopping area. This year they will introduce the software onto a fifth camera, with a watch-list of between 100-150 people, supposedly ‘active criminals’ chosen by a Metropolitan Police committee.
Mobile phones
When a mobile phone is switched on it is constantly receiving signals from between one and three phone masts, or ‘base stations’. This means that it is possible to detect a person’s approximate location by measuring their phone’s distance from the base stations. Phone companies use this information to monitor the traffic on their network, but they are also called upon to provide information about an individual’s location for police as evidence in court. If it is pre-paid, the phone can still be tracked but there is no name associated with its ownership.
The mobile phone industry is developing a new technology protocol, known as 3rd generation (3G) mobile phones. 3G mobiles will allow customers to surf the Internet, make e-commerce transactions (buying on the Internet), and send e-mails and other data through their mobile phones. The phones will also include location tracking devices that will give the phone carrier location to within inches. Known as the E911 system, it works by GPS, a satellite direction-finding system originally developed by the US military in the 1970s.
The excuse for introducing the tracking facility on mobile phones is that it will help the emergency services to locate people making distress calls. However, phone companies can pass this location information on to corporations who will target you for advertising. For example, your phone could receive an advert for a special offer at McDonald’s when you are within five minutes walking distance. This may be an optional service, but it demonstrates the alarming capabilities of multinationals to hound us with their relentless commodity culture. Corporations are analysing our behaviour and creating individual marketing profiles. The by-product of this is that people who are already excluded from capitalist commodity culture, that is the poor working class, including the one third of all children in this country born into poverty, will be further excluded and increasingly alienated and marginalised.
The collection of information on all of us serves the interests of the corporate state. Low-intensity surveillance has been used by the British to oppress opposition forces and revolutionaries all over the world, including in the Six Counties of Ireland and in London after the inner-city uprisings in 1981 and 1985. The new technology allows much greater intelligence and individual profiling, in a systematic way on an unprecedented scale. The response of the Labour government to alarm at this invasion of privacy is: ‘If you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear.’ Anyone who opposes this infringement of their civil liberties is dismissed as a middle-class liberal.
These surveillance tools will rarely be used to protect working class estates from the drug dealers and the criminals that plague them daily. They will rarely be used to combat racist attacks, or to bring justice to victims of police harassment. They will be used to protect the intellectual property rights corporations and to protect the property and privileges of the rich and powerful. Furthermore, these are additional tools to increase the intensification of labour, giving employers greater power to monitor the work output of employees. Not one minute in the work place should be unproductive and unprofitable. Far from giving us greater freedom, this new technology is chaining us more than ever to the relentless drive for profits. Many workers do not have access to modern technology like the Internet at home, but they are being denied the right to use it personally, even briefly, in the workplace.
The government and the bourgeois media have reacted with alarm at the use of the Internet, e-mail and mobile phones by anti-capitalist direct action protesters. The May Day 2000 demonstrations in the centre of London, which led to clashes with the police, were publicised over the Internet, while international anti-capitalist actions like those in Seattle and Prague were co-ordinated via the Internet and e-mail. There is no doubt that these surveillance resources will be used for the repression of political opposition movements. Following future protests, for example, the government could arrest every person whose mobile phone was registered as being in the area.
We must be aware of the tools that have been developed to combat dissent, but remember that even big brother surveillance cannot stop the growth of progressive opposition forces. It is people, not technologies that create revolutions.
