Citizen Power - Part I: using our cell cameras for safety and freedom

If you push long and hard enough for something that is logical and needed, a time may come when it finally happens! At which point – pretty often – you may have no idea whether your efforts made a difference. Perhaps other, influential people saw the same facts and drew similar, logical conclusions! Here is my own latest example:

“Qualcomm and other wireless companies have been working on a new cellular standard—a set of technical procedures that ensures devices can “talk” to one another—that will keep the lines open if the network fails. The Proximity Services, or so-called LTE Direct, standard will be approved by the end of the year.”

This technology, which would allow our pocket radios to pass along at-minimum basic text messages, on a peer-to-peer basis (P2P), even when the cell system is down, would seem to be the obvious backup mode that we all might rely upon, in emergencies. Indeed, failure of cell service badly exacerbated the tragedies of Hurricane Katrina and Tsunami Fukushima. I have been hectoring folks about this since 1995, when I started writing The Transparent Society, and in annual speeches/consultations with various agencies and companies, back east, ever since.

 Indeed, it was access to communications that enabled New Yorkers to show the incredible citizen resilience that Rebecca Solnit portrays so well in her book A Paradise Made in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster. Communications enabled the brave passengers of flight UA 93 to “win” the War on Terror, the very day that it began.

A few years after brainstorming with some engineers at Qualcomm, I learned that company was charging ahead with LTE direct, installing it in their chip sets, whether or not AT&T and Verizon decided to activate it. In emergencies, phones that use it will be able to connect directly with one another over the same frequency as 4G LTE transmissions. Users will be able to call other users or first responders within about 500 meters. If the target is not nearby, the system can relay a message through multiple phones until it reaches its destination.

When it is fully operational, the benefits will become apparent. A more robust, resilient and agile civilization will be more ready for anything that might come.

== Phones and Protest ==

Last year, largely unheralded by media, saw the most important civil liberties decision in thirty years, when the courts and the Obama Administration separately declared it to be “settled law” that citizens have a right to record their interactions with police, in public places. There will be tussles over the details for years, as discussed here. And here.

Those tussles could be hazardous! The Electronic Frontier Foundation has published a guide to using cell phones if you are going to a protest or other zone of potentially tense interaction with police.

Good, practical advice. I have long urge folks to join EFF as one of their dozen or so "proxy power associations." I do not always agree with them! But that doesn't matter as much as ensuring that they -- and the ACLU, etc -- remain out there and untrammeled.

For more on your right and duty to join orgs that give your voice see: Proxy Power...

== What worries me most? ==

There are moves afoot to require that cell phone manufacturers include "kill switches" so that phones can be remotely turned off. Ostensibly, this aims to enable you to render your stolen phone useless to any thieves, thus securing your private data and eliminating much of the incentive to steal phones, in the first place.  

Behind the scenes, however, are Security Concerns, e.g. that cell phones make excellent remote triggers for terror bombs.  Or that terrorists can use phones to coordinate an attack in real time. In both cases - and some other hypotheticals I am not at liberty to divulge - the State will be better able to serve and protect us, if it can shut down  service in an area....

...and if that does not give you a creepy feeling, there is something wrong with you.  As legitimate as that necessity might seem, it is countered by our own need and right to stay connected, during a crisis, and to use our tools to perform citizen-level accountability!

In fact, it is easy to imagine a negotiated solution... a win-win that could help the Protector Caste without leaving us citizens reduced to impotence, to the level of bleating sheep, bereft of tools exactly when we need them most. I have long pointed out that access to communications was the trait them empowered New Yorkers and the brave volunteers on flight UA93, in contrast to the disastrous consequences of communications breakdown, after Katrina and Fukushima.

 Certainly the cell-phone's camera functions... and the ability to upload images to safety at trusted cloud sites... should be safeguarded from any and all kill switches. (Indeed, these are things you don't mind a thief doing, with your stolen phone!  You might get it back!)

Or else (and I recommend this highly) you should go all retro.  Buy and maintain several cheap, old fashioned digital cameras.  Keep them around.  Just in case.

Forever.


Continue to Part II: Those Cop Cameras

Future Perspectives… and does the ACLU (at last) understand sousveillance?

== Perspectives on our future ==

A reminder: I’ll be performing at this event in mid May -- THE FUTURE IS HERE: Science meets Science Fiction, Imagination, Inspiration and Invention --  will be a lavish/spectacular event MAY 16-18, 2014 in Washington DC, presented by the Smithsonian Magazine in collaboration with the UC San Diego  Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, Nerd Nite, Smithsonian Grand Challenges Consortia, and the Smithsonian Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation.

Presenters include: Patrick Stewart, David Brin, Kim Stanley Robinson, Brian Greene,  Adam Steltzner, George Takei,  Stewart Brand, Sara Seager, and some of the Mythbusters .

Reaching back a bit…I had a chance to speak with the mighty maven of tech-future Journalism, Tim O'Reilly, during my previous visit to Washington DC. The next day in Forbes, Tim cited me with the following quotation: "It is intrinsically impossible to know if someone does not have information about you. It is much easier to tell if they do something to you." His article, The Creep Factor: How to Think about Big Data and Privacy, is cogent.

 Elsewhere I tout Julia Angwin's Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance. It' a very entertaining and wise book, in which Ms. Angwin kindly cites my book (The Transparent Society) as partial inspiration. But here's a quotation from an interview the author recently gave… a thought-provoking call for us to drop the sick temptations of cynicism and to re-acquire that good old, optimistic, can-do spirit.

"I am aware that I take a slightly irrationally optimistic view of this. But I also think that the only way to get change is to be irrationally optimistic. Change happens all the time. I compare privacy to environmental damage. We lived in a world where we were perfectly willing to tolerate our rivers catching fire and the air being filled with soot and people dying of black lung disease and then all of a sudden, after 50 years of that, we decided maybe we don’t want that kind of world. And we’ve been very successful at cleaning up our environment. We did it partly through laws, but we also did it by changing our social norms. I mean if you told someone 50 years ago that Upper East Side women in fur would be picking up their dog’s poop, they would have laughed at you. But we did it, we changed our social habits. I think privacy is a similar social problem. It’s something that we will change both through laws and also through being smart about what choices we make about what technology we use." 

I had a chance to meet Ms. Angwin during a privacy (IAPP) conference in DC a few months back. Delightful and very smart.

== Is the ACLU Catching On? At last? ==

License plate readers and face recognition are already ubiquitous. And Vigilant Solutions is bringing it to you. And yes, the ACLU is (legitimately) concerned about increasing powers of unbalanced surveillance. And yes, the ACLU joins those (foolishly) whining about it, instead of seeking the obvious and only possible answer.

Only… maybe I am too harsh. The ACLU report, "You Are Being Tracked," does conclude by suggesting two reforms that smack of intelligent sousveillance…

1) People should be able to find out if plate data of vehicles registered to them are contained in a law enforcement agency’s database.

2) Any entity that uses license plate readers should be required to report its usage publicly on at least an annual basis.

Okay… maybe they are starting to catch on. Still, to even imagine that we won't all be using face-recog and things like license plate scanning in the near future displays the kind of stunning myopia that always puzzles me, when displayed by intelligent and well-meaning people.

== Transparency News ==

 The Internet of Cops is Coming… FirstNet (First Responder Network Authority)—pitched as a state of the art communications network for paramedics, firemen and law enforcement at the federal, state and local level—will give cops on the streets unprecedented technological powers, and possibly hand over even more intimate data about our lives to the higher ends of the government and its intelligence agencies. FirstNet will also give local law enforcement the ability to take digital “fingerprints from the field,” record and share high quality video, and instantaneously marry these freshly sourced data with others over the network. In the video above, a demonstrator uses facial recognition software on a tablet; finds out if the target is in a linked database, and is immediately provided with a wealth of information on him.

Of course, having a police officer be able to instantly identify you with a tablet —or the “single […] device for voice, data, and video” being developed—is open to abuse, and raises serious worries for privacy.

"One scary thought is that it could help set up … “communications systems apartheid”: where the public are relegated to an “insecure, heavily monitored network that can be turned off at the flick of a switch,” while the government enjoys the benefits of an encrypted network that is far more stable."

Of course this is a downside scenario I long ago described in The Transparent Society.  And yet, in all the years since, I keep hearing people come crying "stop them from looking at me!" To which I respond, don't blame me!  Blame yourselves for all the endless whining about stuff like this. Whining that will go on and on and on and that you all will never stop doing…

 …rather than focusing on what might work: the militant, assertive and practical measures that might defend freedom.  Not by trying to resist the absolutely unstoppable trend toward the mighty getting to look at us. (They will; and whimpering about it is pathetic.) But instead to strip the mighty naked with supervision so that they will never dare to use all that vision to actually harm us.

That is an activity we can accomplish. That is do-able and might actually work. We should be militant! But focused.

Alas, I have to wonder, is this generation even the same species as the ones who 200 years ago understood this distinction so well?  No matter how many times I explain the difference between militant sousveillance and impotent whines of "don't look at me!"... it always turns out that 1% actually get it... and the rest go right back to the same futile refrain -- "don't look at me!"

Case in point. This reporter - on a dare - investigated another person simply based upon an anonymous tweet… and figured our enough information that he could have emptied the other guy's bank account. Scary stuff.  Would you bet your life or security on any assurance that this capability has been stopped?  Really?

Let's insist on getting to detect when and who makes such enquiries.  That might be achievable.

== And… ==

In "The Secret Cost of a Surveillance Society" you can see a truly awful article, in which the author utterly conflates causation with correlation and draws unwarranted conclusions. Still, there is a glimmer of a point: that a sensitivity to surveillance may be deterring individuals from seeking basic services like hospitalization. As a raising of possibilities, it seems worth a read.

Watch Your Privacy: A Google Glass App overlays the streetscene with warnings (in red) of where cameras may be pointing. Close appraisal suggests they may over-promise. But the implications are interesting.

Cameras with wireless transmitters will soon be so small that they could be taped to an appliance, wall, ceiling, dashboard. “Our aim is to add eyes to any digital device, no matter how small,” says an innovator about the system--  which requires no lens… the heaviest and bulkiest part of most modern optics. "It might become almost impossible for an ordinary person to know if they are in a private space." complains one critic, without offering any suggested way to stop the trend. We'll need to learn more about this, and think about the ramifications.