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Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn - June 23 2003
Privacy invasion under the thin guise
of social need
Have you answered the phone at dinner time to a stranger selling
you a better mortgage? Or opened your mail box to find a glossy,
personally addressed brochure, even though you didn't request it?
Or looked up into the blind eye of a security camera and wondered
if your privacy was being invaded? It was. But nothing like it's
about to be.
Imagine your every move, your every action, even your thoughts
tracked and recorded, all without your knowledge. First, there's
radio frequency ID (RFID) in your clothes. RFID tags are tracking
devices the size of a grain of dust. They're inserted into items
like clothing, cosmetics and car tyres.
Unlike barcodes, which are identical for every unit of the same
product, the RFID number is unique to each unit and can be used
to secretly identify you. In essence, any chipped item you inadvertently
buy is registered to you, making both you and the item trackable.
So, if you buy a new skirt, then wear it a month later, your clothing
will beam out your identity to anyone with access to a database
- without your permission.
Then there are radar-based devices that can identify you by the
way you walk. Operating on the theory that an individual's walk
is a unique signature, the Pentagon has financed a research project
at the Georgia Institute of Technology that has been 80 to 95 per
cent successful in identifying people.
Over at Carnegie Mellon University, researchers in biometrics
are developing video recognition methods for "spatio-temporal gaits"
and "3-D body tracking".
If that's not scary enough, there is a new concept called Lifelog.
Known as ontology surveillance, the system captures, stores, and
makes accessible, the flow of one person's experiences and interactions
with the world.
Think about it - a system able to trace the threads of your life
in terms of events, states, and relationships. By dividing your
life into three main categories - physical, transactional, and context
or media data - the anytime-anywhere technology would capture what
you see, hear, and feel.
GPS, digital compass, and inertial sensors would pinpoint your
orientation and movements. Biomedical sensors would capture your
physical state. Combine all this with computer-based interactions
and transactions throughout the day and the very nature of privacy
and who you are in the world alters. And all of this could happen
without your knowledge or consent.
According to Privacy International, a London-based human rights
watchdog, surveillance has become a fixed component of the burgeoning
information economy. Each adult in the developed world is located,
on average, in 200 computer databases.
Think it all reads like a Philip K. Dick novel? (Or the movie
based on his book, Minority Report.) It's not.
Most of this information comes from the official website of the
Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, the central research
and development organisation for the United States Department of
Defence. And it all comes under the auspices of an official plan
that until last week was called the Total Information Awareness
programme.
Renamed Terrorist Information Awareness after civil liberties
and privacy groups protested, the programme has been described as
a blueprint for unlimited government. With its usual double-speak
the Department of Defence denies it is developing dossiers on innocent
citizens. Rather, it is protecting people by detecting and defeating
foreign terrorist threats.
As Simon Davies, of Privacy International, says, "The next generation
of technology will exploit a growing fusion between people and technology.
An intimacy without parallel will mean that areas of life traditionally
considered private will be comprehensively revealed. DNA profiling,
satellite surveillance, police systems and credit-reporting agencies
will all converge."
And we used to think security cameras were an invasion of privacy.
While their mechanical eyes may have violated our human dignity,
converting our anonymous public lives into somebody's private video
collection, the new systems do far more.
Not only do we simultaneously become more anonymous (a collection
of data), we also become more exposed with every transaction, interaction
and connection we make.
In the coming world, the entire concept of privacy will be vastly
changed. Even the presumption of innocence will be consumed by the
basis of surveillance theory: the presumption of guilt until proven
innocent.
And here's the irony (or is it duplicity?). The "all-surveillance,
all-the-time" society is a product of far right governance, of the
military-industrial complex that is the conjunction between business
and government, of the commitment to free-market philosophies and
to the reign of business above all else, under the thin guise of
social need.
At the heart of the surveillance society lies fear. A fear of
the unknown, unfettered individual. The result will not be a captured
terrorist but a captive consumer, signed, sealed and delivered to
the market.
ENDS
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
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Barbara Sumner
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