- Webcams today can take you to the intersection of 34th
St. and Broadway in New York City, to a checkpoint at the Finnish-Russian
border or, for that matter, to the shower stall of a pert college girl
making a fast buck from fee-paying voyeurs. But, with the advent of better
search tools, more-comprehensive public databases, and pervasive sensors,
we're moving beyond monitoring pedestrian activities and indulging prurient
cravings. Soon we'll be able to tap into the life of anyone we encounter
with a simple query, knowing all the while that our lives are exposed to
the same scrutiny.
-
- Technology's inexorable advance has brought the world's
democracies to a crucial juncture: will next-generation citizens keep an
eye on each other in a golden "age of transparency," as famously
imagined by science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in his 1988 novel,
2061: Odyssey Three? Or will the tools of surveillance and data analysis
be wielded exclusively and with impunity by governments and corporations?
-
- This much we do know: a combination of political, cultural,
and economic factors are transforming our world into a place where people,
transactions, and things can be observed, monitored, and recorded almost
everywhere, and almost all the time. Within the next several years, we'll
be awash in powerful, cheap sensors: radio-frequency ID (RFID) tags that
track objects (and the people who happen to be wearing, riding, or chatting
into them); biometric sensors that will identify us by our unique irises,
fingerprints, voices, walking patterns, or other physical quirks; Global
Positioning System receivers, embedded into all manner of things, able
to track us to within a meter; and tiny, high-resolution digital still
and video cameras, also built into everything, from cellphones to wallpaper.
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- The resulting torrent of data will cascade into government
and corporate data systems, as well as that system of systems, the Internet.
Facts and information that are largely incoherent but overwhelming in volume
and detail will accumulate in databases too scattered and numerousóand
valuableóto be shut off completely from the rest of cyberspace.
-
- Without a doubt, though, we'll try to do just that. In
fact, we've already started. Researchers, mostly in academia, are now working
on various privacy-enhancing technologies [see "Sensors & Sensibility"
elsewhere in this issue]. But champions of a transparent society, where
the light of accountability would shine upon all of us, contend that over
the longer term these privacy enhancers will be like sandbag walls against
that relentlessly rising tide of data. They'll keep little areas "dry"
for a while, and give some of us a measure of comfort, but will fail to
shield us in any absolute, permanent, or globally effective way. We must
embrace the technologies of surveillance, these advocates contend, and
in doing so, ensure that we can point the electronic eye right back at
the people and institutions who watch us.
-
- This viewpointóarticulated most comprehensively
by science fiction novelist David Brin in his 1998 treatise, The Transparent
Societyóruns contrary to the opinions many of us hold about privacy.
At the other end of the privacy spectrum, activist groups such as the American
Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic Privacy Information Center seem
to see ominous portents in every new sensor advance and federal initiative.
Each side is grappling with the continuing evolution in seeing and knowing
that has been remaking society for centuries.
-
- Our history since the Renaissance has been an endless
quest to extend our ability to see and remember. Beginning with microscopes
and moveable type, speeding up with photography and public libraries, and
accelerating with television, the personal computer, and perhaps most important
of all, the Internet, each advance set off waves of technical innovation,
individual productivity, and artistic expression. At the same time, these
inventions forced us to reexamine and revamp our economies, political institutions,
and ethics in light of our increasing power to acquire, analyze, and act
on data about ourselves and the world we were making.
-
- The next stepóof distributed sensing and rapid
data analysis and disseminationówill certainly up the ante in just
about every conceivable way. But it needn't lead inevitably to Big Brother-style
repression. Brin and like-minded thinkers, such as those who post their
opinions at Universaltransparency.org, argue that so long as we the people
own most of the eyes, we will be able to debate privacy issues knowledgeably
among ourselves, with the aim of shaping public policy for the collective
good. It is a monopoly of vision that we need to fear, say the transparency
advocates, not vision itself.
-
- GETTING TO TOMORROW'S FISHBOWL WORLDówhere we
swim in perpetually refreshed pools of information about ourselves and
one anotherówill take time. Today, every new monitoring or data-gathering
initiative launched by governments or corporations prompts dire warnings
from activist groups about how we're heading straight toward Orwell's terrifying
dystopia.
-
- One of the hottest of hot-button issues, for now at least,
is public surveillance cameras. They're popping up all over Singapore,
Russia, and Great Britain, which now has an estimated four million police
video cameras on public streets, up from fewer than 150 000 just 10 years
ago [see photo, "Guardian Angels"]. In comparison, the spread
of video cameras aimed at U.S. citizens has been almost inconspicuous because
most of the cameras are owned and operated by individuals and companiesóbanks,
stores, building operators, and so on. And unlike their counterparts in
Great Britain, U.S. law enforcement officials rely heavily on these privately
owned security monitors. The Oklahoma City bomber and the Washington, D.C.,
snipers were caught partly because of video footage obtained from unofficial
sources.
-
- Nevertheless, privacy advocates regularly portray the
rise in video surveillance darkly, predicting that it is eliminating our
privacy and undermining our values. They're right about the loss of privacy,
of course. But balancing that imposition are the ways in which the new
technologies can be used to promote our values even as they protect us.
For example, it has been 13 years since an amateur videographer taped Los
Angeles cops beating the daylights out of motorist Rodney King in 1991.
Since then, countless other pieces of video have been used to solve crimes,
expose government abuses, and promote democratic revolutions from Russia
to the Philippines.
-
- The latest, most dramatic example was the debacle in
the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The grisly details of prisoner maltreatment
there became a matter of public record, or at least many of them did, just
months after most of the abuses occurred. Never before has a program of
prisoner abuse been so minutely detailed. The difference this time was
the existence of digital cameras and an easy way of distributing their
images. Many of the cameras were operated by the soldier-jailers themselves,
some of whom could not stop themselves from sharing snapshots of their
twisted escapades with friends via e-mail.
-
- The pictures' subsequent exposure on network television
and in printóand near-instantaneous global distribution on the Internetóturned
the tables on the jailers, and prompted people to start asking tough questions
about policy decisions and implementation throughout the U.S. military's
chain of command. It was a textbook example of what usually happens when
you have scattered sensors and a facile, fast means of spreading their
outputóenough of the data gets out to start the wheels of justice
turning.
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- PUBLIC VIDEO MONITORING ISN'T ALL that bothers privacy
activists. At least as disturbing to them are federal programs aimed at
expanding government monitoring and data collection.
-
- In the United States, various agencies have been hard
at work writing highly sophisticated programs that sift through databases
or sample the flood of e-mail traffic passing through Internet hubs, searching
for word patterns and other cues that might help detect threats to national
interests. When the media spotlight fell on a few of these agencies, they
didn't end their efforts; typically, they became more secretive.
-
- Take the FBI's Omnivore system, which came to light in
2000. Assailed as a giant wiretap on the Internet, it allows the FBI to
monitor traffic going to and from Internet service providers. Despite pressure
from unlikely allies like then Representative Bob Barr (R-Ga.) and the
ACLU, Omnivore continued on, first under the name Carnivore, and now with
the Newspeak moniker of the Digital Collection System Network. It allows
FBI agents to snoop on Internet communications that are the subject of
"a lawful order."
-
- Then there is the case of the Total Information Awareness
program. TIA began in January 2002 as a U.S. Department of Defense research
program charged with developing cutting-edge information technologies to
help detect terrorist activities. The initiatives included 18 data-mining
projects, some aimed at developing tools capable of sifting through petabytes
(thousands of millions of millions of bytes) of data at a time. Substantial
descriptions of these research projects were posted on TIA's Web site.
And the more people knew about what was being funded, the louder the calls
were for the U.S. Congress to cut TIA funding.
-
- All this public outrage has accomplished two ironic things.
First, it has driven many of the TIA undertakings and others like them
into darker corners of the U.S. government, further from any kind of oversight.
Second, it has caused the loss of funding for two TIA programs that would
have created counterbalancing privacy-enhancing software: Genysis Privacy
Protection, which was to develop "privacy appliances" to filter
out personal information from data flowing into and out of a database,
and the privacy portion of the Bio-ALIRT project, which aimed to monitor
the symptoms of patients (whose names were to be concealed) at emergency
rooms and doctors' offices for signs of a biological attack.
-
- Congress terminated many other TIA projects, but much
of the research, including some of the data-mining work, was dispersed
to other departments. Similar efforts at another obscure intelligence and
counterintelligence skunk worksóthe Advanced Research and Development
Activity, which is overseen by the ultrasecretive National Security Agencyócontinue
to receive tens of millions of dollars.
-
- If we can't keep the government from collecting and analyzing
data about us, can we at least force it to keep that information locked
up? We can try, but we probably won't succeedóat least, not completely.
There's no such thing as a hermetically sealed database, conceived and
implemented as these things are by imperfect human beings employed by companies
and government entitiesówhich, driven by profit motives or policy
directives, will keep developing these technologies with or without our
consent.
-
- "Those who think we can protect our anonymity by
banning technological development should first try to explain how they
hope to succeed at banning anything at all," says Brin. "Elites
may let us pass laws to blind ourselves, but they will never allow us to
blind them. Banned technologies willóif we insistóbe developed
in secret." Or as science fiction legend Robert A. Heinlein once put
it: "The chief thing accomplished by privacy laws is to make the bugs
smaller."
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- ANOTHER LAW, MOORE'S LAW, ensures that the bugs will
get smaller, no matter the political climate. So to fully grasp the implications
of the coming sensor revolution, you've got to go beyond the usual sensor
suspectsóthe RFID tags, the biometric sensors, and so on. They're
significant, but they're just the first, crude wave of what's coming: sophisticated
sensors that could empower citizens at the grass-roots level to keep a
wary, high-res eye on governments, corporations, and, of course, each other.
-
- Count on military technologies to keep spinning off commercial
versions. It has already happened for night-vision systems and electronic
compasses. Next up are devices that warn of chemical or biological dangers.
Within five years or so, mass-produced sensors will find their way into
our neighborhoods, wetlands, parks, and houses, where everything from appliances
to security systems will wirelessly communicate their conditions to you
via IEEE 802.15.4, the new ZigBee standard for home automation and control
sensors. Neighborhood or activist groups that create sensor networks to
monitor, say, groundwater quality will have access to data about pollutants
and other toxins rivaling that of local governments.
-
- The same military spinoff effect has already transformed
unmanned battlefield reconnaissance drones into inexpensive but powerful
civilian toys. For US $750, you can now buy a radio-controlled airplane
called the Predator from Draganfly Innovations Inc., in Saskatoon, Sask.,
Canada. With a wingspan just under 2 meters, the drone can cruise independently
for more than an hour along a GPS-guided path, transmitting digital still
photos and real-time color video [see image, "Eye in the Sky"].
Surely, somewhere in the world, hormone-besotted teenagers are already
using them to find the skimpiest bikinis on a beach. Homeowners will use
them to keep tabs on the neighborhood or reconnoiter fast-moving wildfires.
-
- The question is, should we push for yet another unenforceable
law to guard our backyards against Peeping Toms and their drone planes?
Or, as Brin has suggested, perhaps we'd be better off simply insisting
that the companies that make the little robot spies give us the means to
trace them back to their nosy pilots. One enabling technology for that
kind of reciprocal transparency is being developed at ETH Zurich, Switzerland,
by researcher Marc Langheinrich. His personal digital assistant application
detects nearby sensors and then lists what kind of information they're
collecting.
-
- "If the sensor is mandatory, like a security camera,
at least I know I'm being taped," he explains. "If it's an optional
service, like a friend finder for instant messaging, then I can turn the
software off or on." The commercial version of the device probably
won't look like today's PDA, he says, but will be built into a watch or
cellphone.
-
- Just as Langheinrich's invention will shrink in size
right in step with Moore's Law, so too will the devices his spy tracker
tracks. Cameras will become hugely more effective and ubiquitous when they
get to be so small that they are hard to see with the unaided eye. Absolutely
nothing in the physics of this technology precludes that kind of miniaturization.
At the University of California, Berkeley, researchers such as Kristofer
Pister and David Culler, as well as companies like Crossbow Technology
Inc., in San Jose, Calif., and Dust Networks, Berkeley, Calif., are already
developing technology they call smart dustócubes of silicon the
size of ants' heads that each host a sensor, a processor, and wireless-communications
hardware. A decade or so from now, these kinds of devices could well spread
vision into every nook and cranny of our world.
-
- As the sensors and sources of data proliferate, so too
will our options for accessing their output, digested or otherwise. Foremost
among these options will be sensor-studded, wearable multimedia devicesósuch
as displays, already commercially availableóthat clip onto eyewear
or pop down from visors. They will be mated to computational and communications
capabilities woven into clothing. They'll overlay your view of the world,
whenever you wish, with digitally supplied facts, directions, or commentary,
snatched out of the ether by tiny but ferociously fast wireless receivers.
-
- For most of us, the incredible convenience and utility
of having instant access to entertainment and information wherever and
whenever we want it will trump any self-consciousness about funky-looking
eyewear or odd little garment accessories. These same wearables will not
only let us access information, they'll acquire it, too, documenting our
every noble gesture, promise, or transgression.
-
- Consider Microsoft Corp.'s new SenseCam, a prototype
badge-sized camera worn like jewelry that automatically records 4000 images
per day from the wearer's point of view, digitally documenting everything
he or she sees [see photo, "Digital Diary"]. In the foreseeable
future, surely cyberwitnessing of public events, business deals, and crimes
will be considered routine. It's an inescapable attribute of a world where
cellphone cameras already outsell all other types of cameras and where
consumers' insatiable demand for small, sleek recording devices of all
sorts makes it likely that someday everybody you meet will be wearing a
"wire."
-
- IT WILL NOT BE EASY to create a truly transparent society.
For most of us, being more accountable, and holding others to account,
will be a challenge. But the benefits might well outweigh the costs, as
in this scenario, circa 2010:
-
- Passing you on the street, I swipe my RFID reader to
obtain your name and address. Googling you on a few public databases, including
one of new homeowners in the neighborhood, I discover that you're in the
market for a used lawn mower. Your bank account is in order, and your credit
is fantastic, even after you paid off your ex-wife's debt as part of your
recent divorce settlement. You had a quadruple bypass last year and need
a riding mower just like the one sitting in my garage. Your spy tracker
alerts you to the fact that I'm checking you out, prompting you to launch
your own investigation. You learn I suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder
and am taking medication to keep my life together. But you also know that
my disorder manifests as a cleaning fetish; it's a good bet that the lawn
mower I listed on eBay is in pristine shape. Furthermore, you can infer
that I'm so desperate to make my credit card payments this month that I'll
sell you that mower for a song.
-
- Ideas and attitudes about personal privacy differ from
culture to culture, era to era. Is it such a stretch to believe that the
developed world's collective attitude toward privacy is evolving to a point
where we're no longer concerned with who's watching us or what they know
about us, as long as our lives are safer and more convenient? After all,
we live in a time when we automatically remove our shoes so airport screeners
can check for explosives; when we are videotaped every time we conduct
an ATM transaction or walk into a store or office building; and when we
are tracked every time our computer accepts a cookie from a Web site we've
visited.
-
- For entertainment, we gather in front of the tube for
mass-mediated group therapy sessions called reality shows. Hundreds of
millions of us around the globe tune in to watch people who eagerly endure
excruciating plastic surgery; stab each other in the back for a chance
to work for Donald Trump; or wolf down sea worms, cockroaches, and worse
to survive on a desert island. For Generation Y, "Big Brother"
is a reality television show, where, for a chance at winning half a million
dollars, contestants volunteer to be cooped up in a house with total strangers
and have their most private moments broadcast to a hungry audience.
-
- It's not hard to imagine a near future of reciprocal
transparency when all of us are watched and can watch right back. We're
halfway there.
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- © Copyright 2004, Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers, Inc. http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul04/0704over.html
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