Uberveillance

Augustine of Hippo, one of the most highly revered doctors of the ecclesia catholica, might not have been so greatly esteemed had he flourished centuries later in a world of uberveillance. One of the unique aspects of Augustine’s life which endeared him to the community of the faithful, both past and present, was his rising up from “fornications” and “delight in thievery” to become a paradigm for both the eastern and western churches of the penitent who becomes a saint.

But would the celebrated bishop and author of The City of God have risen to such prominence and reverence had his early and formative life been chronicled on Facebook or MySpace and “serialised” on YouTube? Would Augustine’s long and gruelling years of penitence and good works have been recognised? That we have his stylised and erudite Confessions on paper is another matter altogether; as to its impact, the written record cannot be compared to capturing someone in the act on closed circuit television (CCTV). The audio-visual evidence is there forever to be rerun at whim by those who have access.

And what of the multitude of other canonised “sinners” who in their own time and private space might not only mature by engaging with their humanity, indeed with their flaws and weaknesses, but also aspire to sainthood through repentance? If these “lives of the saints” were rerun before us, would we view such consecrated men and women in the same way? Where context is lacking or missing, then all interpretation of content, however compelling to the contrary, must be viewed with a high degree of suspicion.

Even in the political and civil rights arena, for example, had the private lives of colossal and “untouchable” figures such as John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King been subjected to neverending uberveillance, how might that not only have affected the biography of these two men, but changed the course of history itself? Moreover, how would the knowledge of such bio-intrusive surveillance altered both Kennedy’s and King’s decision-making processes and life habits?

We know for instance, particularly from the seminal study of M.F. Keen, that the surveillance of prominent sociologists in the United States played a major role in shaping the American sociological tradition. Certainly, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI might have kept a detailed account of the supposed meanderings and subversions of its “suspects”, but these records, whether true or false, were not universally accessible—they were limited given the state of information and communication technology at the time. And what of the private lives of popes and patriarchs, kings and queens, great philanthropists, and other exalted figures—how might they have stood up to the nowadays literal “fly on the wall” shadowing?

Engineers at Berkeley have been involved in the creation of “insect cyborgs”, which amongst other applications can be rigged up with bugging devices for miniature surveillance and sensors for reconnaissance. But we need not even go that far. Today the global positioning system (GPS), consisting of a constellation of thirty-one orbiting satellites, can pinpoint a person’s location anywhere on the globe down to about fifteen metres. Small data loggers (called tracksticks), the size of a clothespin, have the capability of continuously recording their own location histories for extended periods of time. These miniature location devices can be placed discreetly into the inner lining of a handbag, attached magnetically to an inconspicuous position on a vehicle, or even unobtrusively placed on an outer garment.

Steve Mann created the website glogger.mobi to guard against the tampering of both overt and covert surveillance output. Over 35,000 people have now become gloggers who record cyborglogs (abbreviated “glog”). Armed with a simple camera phone or webcam, a glogger takes a first-person recording of an event in which they are a participant and then uploads it to a web server where they can broadcast content to the rest of the community or to any of their social networking sites, blogs or personal pages. The glog is the gloggers’ unique record of events, the world through their own exclusive lens, which can be used to provide counter-evidence to multi-media content that has been deliberately fabricated. This inverse surveillance, however, a component of what Mann has called “sousveillance”, is not without its own inherent risks.

Nevertheless, the incongruity behind all of these surveillance technologies (including wholesale surveillance and “dataveillance”) is that individuals of power and influence will as a rule not be subjected to the extreme and exaggerated types of projected surveillance techniques designed and planned for the common people. Except, of course, for those occasions of blackmail and industrial espionage, for example, when the powerful and influential will make use of whatever apparatus is at their disposal to spy upon and to turn against their own. Needless to say, this is not a blanket assertion that all influential and powerful persons must necessarily be corrupt. It is fundamentally a matter of control which revolves around authority, access and opportunity. We return then, to the perennial question of who will watch the guards themselves: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Even uniquely enlightened persons such as Siddhartha Gautama and Jesus of Nazareth needed private space not only to engage inwardly and to reflect on their respective missions, but also to do discreet battle with their respective “temptations”. Uberveillance makes private space inch-by-inch obsolete. Private space is that location which we all need—saint and sinner alike—to make our mistakes in secret, to mature into wisdom, and to discover what we are and are not capable of. In losing large chunks of our privacy we are also forfeiting a critical component of our personal identity which for a substantial group of philosophers is “the identity of consciousness”. There is then, the potential for personality disorders to develop, particularly anxiety or phobic neurosis.

Lest there be any misinterpretation of what is being said here, we are of course not speaking of concealing or protecting our private space in order to scheme or to commit indictable offences or crimes. Computerised monitoring in some instances may surely be warranted.

Before we move on, what exactly is meant by this relatively new term uberveillance, which the Research Network for a Secure Australia considered important enough to sponsor a national workshop to discuss its possible social and political implications in both private and public sectors? It is significant that the keynote address delivered on that day was by Roger Clarke, who had over twenty years earlier introduced us to the murky world of dataveillance.

Uberveillance is an above and beyond, an exaggerated, and omnipresent electronic surveillance. It is a surveillance that is not only always on but always with you. It is ever-present because the technology that facilitates it, in its ultimate implementation, is embedded within the human body. The inherent problem with this kind of bodily pervasive surveillance is that omnipresence will not always equate with omniscience. Infallibility and ambient context will be for the greater part absent. For as Marcus Wigan has pithily put it, “context is all”. Hence the real concern for misinformation, misinterpretation, and information manipulation of citizens’ data.

Uberveillance is more than CCTV feeds, or cross-agency databases linked to national identity cards, or e-tollways and automatic number plate recognition or biometrics and e-passports used for international travel. Uberveillance is the sum total of all these types of surveillance and the deliberate integration of an individual’s personal data for the continuous tracking and monitoring of identity and location in real time.

In its ultimate form, uberveillance has to do with more than biometrics, radio-frequency identification (RFID), wearable or luggable devices. And it is certainly more than the casual capture surveillance technology of either the Nokia N95 or the Apple iPhone; or the geo-tagging of dwellings and people using Google StreetView and Google Latitude towards the Internet of Things. Uberveillance, the causa finalis of surveillance, is Big Brother on the inside looking out. We are referring here to the lowest common denominator, the smallest unit of tracking, tiny microchip implants inside the human body, capturing and transmitting almost everything.

This act of chipification, the embedding of a “technique” inside the human body, is best illustrated by the ever-increasing, and in this instance positive uses of implant devices, for medical prosthesis and for diagnostics. Human-centric implants are giving rise to the electrophorus, the bearer of electric technology. And it is surely not just coincidence that alongside uberveillance we are witnessing the philosophical reawakening throughout most of the fundamental streams running through our culture of Nietzsche’s Übermensch—the overcoming of the “all-too-human”. This is especially obvious in our rampant efforts to rebuild our bodies, to be better, stronger, faster—“we have the technology”. This is reminiscent of the popular 1970s American television series The Six Million Dollar Man.

The unbridled rush and push to create the transparent society, as David Brin very well described it, has social implications which are largely ignored, or at best marginalised. The social implications of information security measures which are connected to neverending surveillance or indeed to other network applications have serious and often irreversible psychological consequences, of which only a few can be cited here: increased cases of mental illness (new forms of obsessive compulsive disorder and paranoia); a rise in related suicides; decreased levels of trust (at all spheres of relationships); and the impossibility of a “fresh start”. The traditionally received idea of the unconditional absolution of sin in the secrecy of the confessional already does not exist in the world of some religious communities; believers are encouraged to “confess” online. These types of social networks are especially dangerous for individuals already battling mental illness, and who might afterwards deeply regret having uploaded imaginary or real discretions for everyone to read.

The author of a noteworthy article published in Newsweek (September 10, 2007), commenting on the high-profile suicides of two internationally recognised digital technologists, Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, put it well when he surmised, “for some, technology and mental illness have long been thought to exist in a kind of dark symbiosis”. The startling suicides first of Duncan and soon after that of her partner Blake, for whom “the very technologies that had infused their work and elevated their lives became tools to reinforce destructive delusions”, is a significant, albeit sad reminder that even those heavily involved in new technologies are not immune from delusional and paranoid torment, whether based on fact or not. And that’s precisely the point, that with covert shadowing you can never be completely sure that your paranoia is groundless.

Long-term research at a clinical level remains to be conducted on the subject of neverending surveillance and mental illness. There is some evidence to suggest that a similar paranoia played at least some part in another shocking suicide, that of the Chinese American novelist and journalist Iris Chang, the author of The Rape of Nanking.

The positions expressed in this article should not be viewed as alarmist, but rather as an advisory forecast of where the automatic identification (auto-ID) trajectory is increasingly taking us given present evidence, at both the applied and theoretical levels. The application of technology is rarely unbiased. Once a technique is set in motion and diffused into our society it progressively becomes irreversible, particularly given the key component of interoperability and the vast amounts of capital invested in twenty-first-century machinery. However, our comprehension of this high-tech diffusion is not on commensurate levels. Cross-disciplinary discourse, public debate and legislation lag far behind the establishment of the infrastructure and the application of the technology. In simple terms, this lag is the “too much change in too short a period of time”, which Alvin Toffler famously referred to as future shock.

It is, unfortunately, reminiscent of that time in Alamogordo, New Mexico, in 1945, when some of those engaged in the Manhattan Project, including one of the group’s top physicists, the Nobel laureate Enrico Fermi, were taking side bets on the eve of the test on whether they would “ignite the atmosphere” once the atomic bomb was tested! But the “fallout” from uberveillance is distributed, and it will initially, at least, be invisible to all except the approved operators of the data vacuum. The setting and foreboding of notable dystopian novels which warn of “dangerous and alienating future societies”—Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—where “dissent is bad” and the deified state knows all, is being gradually realised. This is especially worrying, for as Noam Chomsky and others point out, we are concurrently witnessing a “growing democratic deficit”.

Great strides are also being taken in the field of biomedical engineering, the application of engineering principles and techniques to the medical field. New technologies will heal and give hope to many who are suffering from life-debilitating and life-threatening diseases. The broken will walk again. The blind will see. The deaf will hear. The dumb will sing. Even bionic tongues are on the drawing board. Hearts and kidneys and other organs will be built anew. The fundamental point is that society at large must be able to distinguish between positive and negative applications of technological advancements before we diffuse and integrate such innovations into our day-to-day existence.

Nanotechnology, which is behind many of these marvellous medical wonders, will interconnect with the surveillance field and quite literally make the notion of “privacy”—that is, revealing ourselves selectively—an artefact. We must do whatever is in our lawful power to check, mitigate and to legislate against the unwarranted and abusive use of uber-intrusive surveillance applications. We are talking about applications with such incredible capabilities that they potentially have the power to dehumanise us and reach into the secret layers of our humanity. These are not unruly exaggerations when we consider that wireless sensors and motes, body area networks and brain-computer interfaces are already established technologies and that the era of mind control, particularly through pioneering advancements in brain-scanning technology, is getting steadily closer.

The argument most often heard in the public domain is, “If you have nothing to hide, why worry?” There are, however, at least three problems with this popular mantra. First, freedom implies not only being “free of chains” in the practical sense, to be permitted to go about one’s daily business freely and without undue constraint, but nowadays also without your every move being tracked, monitored and recorded. Second, there is a metaphysical freedom connected to trust, which also implies being able to dream, to think and to believe without outside coercion. And finally, whether we care to admit it or not, we all have something to hide. Disruption of any of these freedoms or rights would affect our decision-making processes and contribute to an unhealthy personality development where what we “want” to do (or engage in) becomes what we think we must do (and theatrically engage in).

To artificially build a personality or to hold on to a set system of synthetically engineered beliefs is to deconstruct the human entity to the point where both initiative and creativity (two vital components of a healthy individual) are increasingly diminished, and ultimately eradicated. Human-centric implants for surveillance will alter the “inner man” as much as the externals of technological innovation will transform the “outer man”. There are those who would argue that the body is obsolete and should be fused with machines; and others who would support mind and identity downloading. In the context of such futuristic scenarios Andrew Ross has aptly spoken of the “technocolonisation of the body”. Others on the cutting edge of the digital world are using technology in ways supposedly never intended by the manufacturers.

If there are elements to this article which might point to the potential mushrooming of new totalitarian regimes and paradoxically so—after all we are living and revelling in a postmodern and liberal society where the individual cult on a mass scale is idolised and thriving—then we should stand back for a moment and reconsider the emerging picture. Two prominent features of the murderous regimes of Stalin and Hitler were the obsession with state secrecy and the detailed collection of all sorts of evidence documented in scrupulous registers. Related to this second action was the well-known and beastly numbering of minorities, prisoners and political dissidents. In our time, privacy experts such as David Lyon are warning, this type of “social sorting” is becoming evidenced once more.

Where are we heading today? Already in the USA a number of states (including North Dakota and Wisconsin) have passed anti-chipping bills banning the forced implantation of RFID tags or transponders into people. Here in Australia it is time now, at both the state and federal levels, for political parties to make clear to the electorate their position on the question of human microchipping. 

A great deal of this discussion should revolve around the related ethics of emerging technologies, and as we have noted, this discourse is especially critical when we consider the “unintentional” and hidden consequences of innovation. However, one of the methodological weaknesses in this global debate is the direct focus by some of the interlocutors on meta-ethics alone. What we must understand, if we are to make any practical progress in our negotiations, is that this subject must first be approached from the perspective of normative and applied ethics. The lines of distinction between all three of these approaches will at times remain unclear and even merge, but there are some litmus tests (human rights for example) for determining the morality and the ultimate price of our decisions.

Unique lifetime identifiers are more touted than ever before by both the private and public sectors as they have become increasingly synonymous with tax file and social security numbers. The supposed benefits of this permanent cradle-to-grave identification are energetically broadcast at various national and international forums, and especially in the contexts of white-collar crime and national security. There is no quicker way to dehumanise an individual than by replacing their name with a number. It is far easier to extinguish an individual on every level if you are rubbing out a number rather than a life history. Two of the twentieth century’s greatest political consciences, one who survived the Stalinist purges and the other the Holocaust, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi, have warned of the connection between murderous regimes and the numbering of individuals.

In 1902 Georges Méliès’ short science-fiction film A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune) spawned the fantastic tradition of putting celluloid form onto the predictive word. More recently representative of this tradition is James Bond in Casino Royale (2006) who becomes a “marked” man, chipped in his left arm just above the wrist by his government minders. “So you can keep an eye on me?” the famous spy sarcastically rejoins. The chip is not only for identification purposes but has multiple functions and applications, including the ability to act as a GPS receiver for chronicling his every move. Later in the film when Bond is captured by his arch-nemesis, the banker Le Chiffre, he will have the microchip, which looks more like a miniature spark plug, cut out of his arm with a blade. These kinds of scenarios are no longer the exclusive domain of the novelist, the conspiracy theorist, the religious apocalypticist, or the intellectual property of the tech-visionary.

We have the ability to upgrade these information-gathering mechanisms to unprecedented proportions: “we have the technology”. It seems ever more likely that sooner rather than later we will in fact set on a program to microchip implant every individual on the planet with a tracking and monitoring device. The justification for this act will rest on carefully articulated arguments, ranging across the social and national security spectrums. In July 2007 Indonesia’s government announced plans to chip-implant over 5000 HIV/AIDS patients in Papua. It was only in December 2008, after human rights organisations had lobbied for eighteen months, that the plans were dropped.

Hybrid architectures—in particular those involving RFID, sensors, wireless fidelity and GPS—are presently being developed, will make this once undreamed-of penetrating surveillance possible. We are living in times in which commercial innovations will possibly match the internal complexity of the neuron with the help of the appositely called “labs-on-chips”. Writers dealing with these subjects have been speaking less in terms of future shock and more along the lines of hyper-future shock. The key question, so far as identification and information-gathering technology is concerned, is: How are we as a concerned and informed community going to curb and regulate the broad dispersal and depth-charged reaches of surveillance? And to do this of course, without denying the many positive and desirable applications of the infrastructures which underlie these technologies, particularly in the domain of healing the sick and the injured.

Readers might well be asking what technology has to do with some of the metaphysical issues that we are raising here. Perhaps it would be sensible to periodically remind ourselves, as has a discriminating online essayist, that two of our greatest thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, both warned of the inherent dangers of glorifying techne (art, skill). It should be subject to “reason and law”. Furthermore, they argued that techne represents “imperfect human imitation of nature”. The pertinent question in this instance might be why modern societies gradually moved away from asking or seeking out these connections of metaphysics. This general apathy, with a few honourable exceptions, towards a philosophical critique of technology can probably be traced to a defensive response of Western economic tradition to Karl Marx’s “critique of Victorian progress”.

In relation to surveillance and ubiquitous location determination technologies, we are at a critical junction; some might well argue that we have long made our decision of which road to travel down. Maybe these commentators are right. Perhaps there is no longer a place for trusty wisdom in our world. Just the same, full-scale uberveillance is not yet arrived. We must moderate the negative fallout of science and control technology, that is, as Jacques Ellul would say, “transcend” it: lest its control of us becomes non-negotiable and we ourselves become the frogs in the slow warming water.

Dr M.G. Michael is an honorary senior fellow in the School of Information Systems and Technology at the University of Wollongong. He is a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Research Network for a Secure Australia.

Dr Katina Michael is a senior lecturer in the School of Information Systems and Technology at the University of Wollongong. She is a senior member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a board member of the Australian Privacy Foundation.

Their article “Microchipping People” appeared in the March 2005 issue of Quadrant.

They would like to acknowledge the insightful comments of Dr Stephen McInerney, who read earlier versions of this article.