Big Brother is watching YOU

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday June 30, 2002 01:24 by MC MEAN

As international legislators move to dilute protections on citizens' privacy rights, George Orwell's 'Big Brother', his nightmarish vision of totalitarianism in the novel 1984, is fast becoming reality.

Depicting a futuristic would-be utopia, the ostensibly
Oceania, Orwell's Big Brother masquerades as the benign caretaker
of civilisation, watching its citizens from posters everywhere.
Beneath this facade, however, is a ruthless dictatorship, where
truth is replaced by propaganda and individuality and privacy are
lost. What might during the mid-20th century have been seen as
the literary product of an overactive, but brilliant imagination
may fast be becoming reality, as privacy as a right and a reality
is fast being eroded.



The September 11 factor

The invasive practices of the real Big Brother - intelligence
agencies and corporate giants - operate on a macrocosmic scale.
Availing of the understandably fearful climate that has gripped
'Western' societies following last September's attacks, the US
and now the EU are adopting laws that will erode much of the
little privacy we have left.

Three weeks ago, on 29 May, the European Parliament passed a
controversial measure that allows member states to force
telecommunications companies to keep detailed records of
customers' data for snooping purposes. It passed the
Communications Data Protection Directive by 351 votes to 133,
despite an aggressive campaign by civil liberties groups arguing
that the measure will enable police to spy even further into
citizens' lives. Together with moves by the British government to
extend existing British Intelligence powers (to demand the
communications records of every person within Britain and the Six
Counties) to government departments, local councils and quangos,
these measures are the latest in a process that privacy advocates
term "Function Creep".

Granted, increased surveillance can mean more efficient crime
detection and a safer world. Tailoring production to need,
corporate databases too can ensure better consumer satisfaction,
but at what cost to the individual and society as a whole?



Cold War legacy

Privacy - being left alone - has become less and less of a
possibility since the end of the Cold War. Demands for greater
bureaucratic efficiency and rapid technological advances have
meant that technologies from the defence industry have lent
themselves to law enforcement, civilian agencies and private
companies. Outdated laws and regulations and a largely oblivious
public has meant that the inevitable abuses of this technology
are not being checked.

Powerful computers and central storage and processing of
information has revolutionised surveillance since the 1960s and
the private sector has been quick to spot the potential for
profit making. Information on almost everyone in the 'developed
world' is now collated not only by intelligence agencies, but
also by corporate giants.



Intelligence in state and business

Intelligence, defense and law enforcement agencies have a long
history of stretching those legal constraints that protect civil
liberties. From the early 1990s onwards, to justify enormous
budgets, their focus switched from international espionage to
monitoring civilians. The CIA has shifted its emphasis to
economic espionage and cooperation with other agencies on issues
of 'terrorism', drug trafficking and money laundering.

The US Department of Defence's Advanced Research Projects Agency
(ARPA) has provided tens of millions of dollars to private
companies through its Technology Reinvestment Project to help
develop civilian applications for military surveillance
technology.

'Third World' states too, some with dismal human rights records,
have been 'beneficiaries' of this technology. Thailand, China and
Turkey are now using US-made technology to crush political
dissent.

In the econoic sector, corporations are using new technology to
target customers, manipulate markets and select, monitor and
control employees.



ID

Pressure for a single identifier, ostensibly for information
sharing and admin is increasing and schemes currently in place
are sliding towards a mandatory system of universal
identification.

It could make things handier - it's easy to see the potential
benefit of not having to fill in forms for everything and instead
having all personal information available at the swipe of a card.

However, privacy advocates argue that all this violates personal
liberties. Cards originally designed for single use are being
expanded to link multiple databases. In Thailand, Control Data
Systems set up a universal ID Card to track all citizens. 'Smart
Cards', widely used in Europe, have an embedded microchip that
can hold several pages of information. Even more advanced optical
technology, which can store hundreds of pages of data on a chip,
is currently used in the US. Utah state is considering
multifunction cards, providing for services as diverse as motor
vehicle registration and library cards, welfare benefits and food
stamps.

With multiple doctors per patient quite common these days,
combined with the needs of insurance agencies, the arguments for
and against ID Card-stored medical records are compelling.
Doctors may be in a better position to treat a patient if they
have unrestricted access to their entire medical history. The
Hippocratic oath, however, which guides medical practice, states
of a doctor's attitude to the private details of patients that "I
will not divulge, as reckoning that all such should be kept
secret". Patients expect privacy in their medical affairs, yet
such ID cards would hold their entire medical history, even
including X-Rays. Should insurers, for instance, know if someone
has taken a HIV/AIDS test, which might suggest, to them at least,
that the applicant's sex life is a liability?



Consumer privacy

"The product is you," Adbusters Media Foundation, an
anti-globalisation group, proclaims. It is an apt way of
describing the latest offshoot of the marketing industry,
'Customer Relations Management' or 'Personaliosation'.
Aggregating information from online and offline purchase data,
supermarket savings cards, white pages, surveys, contest entries,
financial records, property records, vehicle data, the sale of
magazine and catalogue subscriptions (the list goes on), allows
capitalism to package and label us all. Resulting dossiers, some
of them quite extensive, are sold for marketing and law
enforcement purposes, and include personal information on the
health, sex, race, lifestyle presferences, arrest records,
religion and so-on of individuals who have no idea, or control
over, how much is known about them.

And those labels are very real. Profiling companies have
well-developed lexicons to classify individuals. One company, for
instance, divides society into 15 distinct groups, which in turn
can be broken down into various subgroups. You could be one of
the 'Elite Suburbs' (not likely if you're reading this paper),
which includes 'Blue Blood Estates, Winner's Circle, Executive
Suites, Pools and Patios or Kids & Cul-de-Sacs'. Less fortunate,
you might fit into the 'Urban Cores', one of the 'Single City
Blues' or 'Inner Cities'.



Junk Merchandising

Fianna Fáil came in for some flak during the recent general
elections for 'autodialing' - ringing constituents' phones with
recorded messages urging them to vote for the party. Some people
were particularly perturbed that, though their phone numbers were
ex-directory, FF still managed to get hold of them. Data
Protection Comissioner Joe Meade told a recent press conference
at the launch of his annual report that his office is
"investigating that matter", adding that "auto dialing is not
legal under the data protection directives".

Manipulation of information you unknowingly leave while browzing
on the internet is the latest trick up merchandisers' sleeves.
Websites can use 'cookies', small bits of information stored on a
browser, to surreptitiously track the movements of individual web
users. This allows advertisers to more accurately direct
advertisements - targeted advertisements get more hits than
static ads. So, if someone guesses by the sites you've been
visiting that you're fat, they can then bombard you with e-mails
about slimming. Offensive or what?

People also go to sites where they don't necessarily want people
to know they've been - sites, for example, that relate to their
intimate personal lives. It is certainly offensive, indeed
shocking, that advertisers should have access to this
information.



Misguided loyalty

Club loyalty cards for major retail outlets aren't just there to
keep you shopping in the one spot. Detailed profiles of
individual consumption habits - how much alcohol, cigarettes,
phramaceuticals each consumer buys - are kept on databases to be
transferred into junk mail.

While supermarkets often dismiss such information as merely
directed towards better services for the shopper, they do not
distinguish between information that may be considered by some as
of a more sensitive nature. Knowing what kind of vegetables you
like is far less significant than knowing whether you are buying
baby nappies or adult nappies - American company Experian offers
a database of persons who are incontinent.

Supermarket profiles can also be used against customers. Von's
supermarket in California sought to introduce loyalty card
records in a court case where a consumer had slipped and injured
himself in the store. They wished to prove that the consumer may
have been alcohol impaired, as his loyalty card would show
numerous purchases of alcohol. The evidence was ultimately never
introduced.



EU opens the floodgates

Despite previous reluctance to embrace new rules on data
protection, the European Commision bowed to pressure from bigger
member states following the inevitable security frenzy
post-September 11. It says, however, that forcing telecoms
companies to keep data is distinct from handing it over to
national authorities. Data protection will only be waived to
conduct "criminal investigations or to safeguard national or
public security, when it is a necessary appropriate and
proportionate measure within a democratic society", says the
Commission in its ambiguous statement.

But should the right to privacy be absolute? The benefits of
Internet monitoring in Ireland were realised on Monday 27 May
when 500 Gardaí raided 90 computer owners' homes and offices, in
the biggest ever operation in the country to eradicate child
pornography. The houses of a judge, a leading solicitor, a bank
manager, a company director and a children's choir leader were
among those raided. Almost 100 hard drives, suspected of
containing pornographic images, including those of children being
raped, are currently being inspected by Garda technical staff.

Acting on information from the FBI, who supplied them with the
names of almost 100 suspected paedophiles, Gardaí may not have
conducted these raids had it not been for the US intelligence
organisation's three-year "Cybernet" investigation, which
monitored web sites for the trading of child pornography. Such
success is a credible counter argument to those who advocate the
Internet as an unrestricted space for global communications.



CCTV and mobile phones

Increasing street crime, especially alcohol-related attacks, have
led to an increase in CCTV surveillance. Again, such technology
can guarantee greater protection for citizens and act as a
deterrant against crime, but there is also a downside.

In a recent study of CCTV usage in public and commercial sites,
Dr Clive Norris and Gary Armstrong of the Centre for Criminology
at Hull University, England, observed that 40% of people targeted
for surveillance were "for no obvious reason" selected "on the
basis of belonging to a particular or subcultural group".

Blacks were between one-and-a-half and two-and-a-half times more
likely to be spied on than their presence amongst the English
population would lead one to expect. 30% of those were surveilled
continuously for a period of more than nine minutes, compared to
ten per cent of whites. This mirrors recent revisions to FBI
directives in the US, which has allowed them, without particular
reason, to carry out random surveillance in mosques.

Britain's spending on CCTV and the surveillance industry
generally in the past decade has been between £150 and £300
million per year, with an estimated 300,000 cameras now placed in
shopping areas, housing estates, car parks etc.

More than half the population of this island is also carrying a
tracking device. Crimes, unpaid taxes or government dues are all
grounds for customs, taxation and law enforcement agencies in the
North to use information regarding the movements of persons,
garnered from their mobile phones, in investigations. The mobile
network Orange revealed in March 2001 that it retains for six
months information on customers' locations when making or
receiving calls - passing it on when obliged by law. The company
refused to discuss the matter further. Other mobile phone
agencies - Vodafone, BT Cellnet, and One2One in the North; O2,
Meteor and Vodafone in the South - admit to doing the same.

Tracking is done via base stations - more densely situated in
cities - which can track customers to within 50 metres. For the
more dedicated snoop, 'triangulation', a process that uses time
delays and strengths of radio signals between a transmitter and
at least two base stations, can calculate the user's exact
position. As Caspar Bowden, the British director of the thinktank
Foundation for Information Policy Research says, "the police have
no compunction about lobbying for these retention powers in
secret, but there should be a wider debate about basic values
needed to preserve liberty".



Dangerous technology

Technological advances in data collation can mean a better
society. Used for increased incursions against personal privacy,
however, they may become the greatest weapon the opponents of
civil liberties have ever had.

"Why does this magnificent applied science, which saves work and
makes life easier, bring us little happiness?" Albert Einstein
pondered of the contrast between the honourable intentions that
garnered him a Nobel peace prize and the ignoble use of his
immense discoveries. "The simple answer runs, because we have not
yet learned to make sensible use of it."