Six Ticks till Midnight: One Plausible Journey from Here to a Total Surveillance Society

The ACLU has recently announced a Surveillance Society Clock which depicts, in their view, how close we are to a total surveillance society. At the time of this writing the clock sits at 11:54pm – just six minutes from midnight!

This clock got me thinking about what series of plausible events might lead up to total surveillance. Unfortunately, such an exercise turned out to be spooky because I quickly concluded that a total surveillance society is not only possible but a certainty. It will happen through a series of fairly quick small steps, it will be irreversible, and the real shocker is that I suspect consumers will find it "irresistible!"

The Six Ticks till Midnight

11:54pm – All cell phone are GPS enabled

Consumers love all of the location-based services. They’ll know that Starbucks is just ahead on the left. The kids just made it home. To avoid the traffic accident at I-15 and Central Parkway, try Pierre Avenue instead. As the prices drop for GPS cell phones, everyone wants one. Manufacturers decide there is no point in making cell phones that don’t have GPS.

Tick.

11:55pm – RFID chips everywhere

The cost of RFID becomes so cheap that objects of all sizes and shapes are embedded with these little transmitters, each announcing what they are … to nearby receivers. RFIDs find their way into your car, keys, sunglasses, prescription bottles and underwear. They also happen to be in everything else ranging from your dinner plates to your casino chips. While manufacturers need this to improve supply chains and lower costs, consumers applaud the new conveniences, e.g., faster check-out lines, simplified warranty service and merchandise returns, etc.

Tick.

11:56pm – Biometric user authentication is added to cell phones

Recognizing that cell phones contain so much information, manufacturers start integrating biometric user authentication (e.g., fingerprint). Consumers cannot seem to live without this feature because it prevents information loss if the phone is stolen and, better yet, now that phones can be tied to specific owners, consumers are able to use the cell phone to pay for goods and services without having to even take out their wallet. Predictably, there is less identity theft. Everyone is a winner! Responding to market demand, manufacturers add biometric user authentication to all cell phones.

Tick.

11:57pm – Cell phones become RFID readers

In a natural convergence of two very useful technologies, cell phones are designed to also be RFID readers. Cell phones can now probe nearby objects recording "what" things (e.g., your Dolce & Gabbana sun glasses), "when" things (e.g., 7:35pm last night) and "where" things (e.g., at your friend Bill’s house). Consumers absolutely love this feature because it makes it so easy to manage all their stuff, e.g., where were my sunglasses last seen. So many nifty services are now possible that user demand for RFID-enabled cell phones goes through the roof. Consumers can’t seem to live without it.

Tick.

11:58pm – Cash is replaced by cell phone debit

Why go to the ATM or manage all those plastic cards when you can move cash via your cell phone? No more losing money. No more stolen credit cards. Consumers also appreciate the improved transaction speeds, and retailers like the fact that many cashier errors are eliminated. The cashless society emerges because it is preferred.

Tick.

11:59pm – All persons carry cell phones at all times

By this point in time, most everybody will be hard pressed to ever separate themselves from their cell phone. In fact, consumers will be incentivized to keep it with them at all times. For example, insurance companies may offer lower rates for those consumers who agree to always carry their cell phone as the GPS will help determine driving habits. Furthermore, since cell phones contain important life saving data like emergency contact info, current medical prescriptions and blood type, the value of marrying a cell phone to every person become obvious. Between personal benefit, corporate benefit, state and federal services, health and safety issues, immigration and national security it becomes a no brainer to mandate legislatively that every person over the age of six carry their cell phone. Instead of having to have a social security number or carry some form of ID, your cell phone will do.

Tick.

12:00am – Welcome to the Total Surveillance Society

Total? How total? I guess one might argue that my made-up sequence of events results in a lot of surveillance but not total surveillance. Maybe total surveillance would require that every bathroom have cameras covering every angle and people having to wear skull caps with mind reading instrumentation (coming?). My argument simply being: there comes a degree of surveillance under which everything that matters will be digitally recorded – one’s location, communications, transactions, associations to others, and one’s proximity to things.

Oh yeah, one more thing, no more need for facial recognition (a very hard problem many years off anyway). In this coming world, all that useless video being collected can now be efficiently recalled because GPS data provides the missing link … who was where when?

While the exact technologies or the exact sequence of events may unfold quite differently, nonetheless such a future is coming. And this future is being created by us consumers, not the government!

Consumers are funding the surveillance economy, with the blistering pace of this extraordinary surveillance being driven by ordinary people who relish all the technological advances and willing to entirely trade in their information and privacy as they optimize their life.

Now what?

Well, if this is the future, then I think here are some key considerations:

1. Under what condition and authority can an actor (i.e., a person, an organization, a government) look at what data, and when?

2. How will we know when an actor is breaking the rules?

3. Will oversight and accountability be easier in a total surveillance society?

4. How do we make sure that access to extraordinary knowledge is not limited to a few? And, how do we ensure that data about us is knowable by us?

5. For the few people that resist being plugging into the matrix – will they be less employable, less trustworthy, or suspected of hiding criminal activity?

With all this in mind, it seems ever more important that the technology community better engage the privacy community – there simply is not enough conversation going on between these two camps – and time is of the essence. [See: Responsible Innovation: Staying Engaged with the Privacy Community]

Why are more people not working on privacy-preserving technology e.g., anonymization, immutable audit, selective revelation, data masking, data expiration and destruction services, etc. – and more importantly why are not more organizations starting to take advantage of these emerging privacy-enhancing alternatives?

Closing Thought: Will virtual reality be the only remaining place one can enjoy anonymity and freedom of action?

RELATED POSTS:

Ubiquitous Sensors? You Have Seen Nothing Yet

Responsible Innovation: Designing for Human Rights

Responsible Innovation: Some Things are Best Left Un-invented

Responsible Innovation: Staying Engaged with the Privacy Community

Comments

[Vinay Gupta]

Hey Jeff,

the State In A Box paper is now online, with a (very crude) demo of the code running.

Gives an alternate model, where we accept that a lot of this information will be generated but privatize the world by selective use of encryption.

[Vinay Gupta]

http://guptaoption.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php

Helps if I remember to post the URL too.

[Dan Linstedt]

Hi Jeff,

You've hit the nail on the head... What I'd like to add to this list are the following points:

Universal Travel ID - Required by Interpol and World Health Org to travel from country to country. Why? Issued and required in the name of reducing the "threat" of terrorism...

not ticked yet...

Universal Serialization of All Available products..
We're on it.... It's happening in the name of counterfeit products, especially the Pharma industry...

Ticking currently...

And a few others I "can't" mention, right?

Anyhow, just food for thought.
Dan L

[Amy Hengst]

Thanks for the food for thought. I think you are mostly right on.

I'm not sure I agree with your clock though. GPS, RFID, and the other technologies you mentioned do make it easy to track people's movements and behavior, but they wouldn't necessarily enable total surveillance in the classic sense.

For example, in a domestic violence case or a drug deal where you could not see the event in progress, you could not prove it happened at all or who was at fault.

Also, doing enforcement based on GPS data is only possible if the information is logged and tracked. If John Doe robs a jewelry store, but the police haven't been tracking the GPS location info, they won't necessarily know he was there.

So it will be important for citizen's rights orgs like the ACLU to put restrictions on how the info is tracked and used.

Then again, eventually our devices will be incorporated more and more into our bodies -- for example with the ocular implants being used to improve sight in patients with age-related macular degeneration.

Those are treatments we can't simply take off our bodies or leave behind, and they'll eventually be incorporated with new functionalities, new ways of experiencing the world and logging those sensations.
As with cell phones, people will accept those because they're convenient and helpful, even though they will also have serious privacy and health implications.

In a world where we want to be logged in, all the time, it's practically impossible to avoid being watched all the time, too.

[Valdis]

And then there is social network analysis [SNA] and NORA to analyze all of this relationship data.

So, if unbeknownst to X, he is 2 steps from Y [a known terrorist/criminal/activist]? Or, if X and Y usually pick up their dry cleaning from the same place at the same time? Or dozens of other possibilities where X and Y are deemed "close" or "near" or "intersecting". Who will make the judgement call on whether X is a "person of interest"?

[Edward Vielmetti]

Everyone is a "person of interest" Valdis!

[JoHn]

If you are innocent, why worry?

[Ray Garcia]

Interesting sequence of ticks but I wonder if the perspective needs to be reconsidered away from the individual towards the aggregated view of the environment around a category of individual preferences within a general location.

I think an over emphasis on the individually generated data may not afford the best vantage point for thinking about what might result as benefits and dangers to the individual and groups they choose to identify with.

It is not the specific points of data that matter to the individual nor can they be analyzed in any meaningful way. It is the context and meaning of the stream of actions and intentions within an identifying social structure that may be most useful.

It is sometimes difficult for an individual to recall their own stream of actions and what and why they made certain decisions within a particular time period or place.

The surveillance society, when thought of in terms of meaningful action streams of groups becomes beneficial to the individual in helping them reflect on their own behavior and whether it is really in their interest to continue those actions.

Assuming that the individual can extract benefit from the action streams then they can establish an aspirational goal and solicit help from merchants and agencies by providing them access within a limited frame to the surveillance data.

Without some means of establishing meaning and projecting a goal the specific surveillance data remains mostly useless and while it may be subject to abuse, as the volumes and types of data increase, it will remain computationally impossible to infer anything useful from the data. Maybe simplistic correlation might emerge such as the current Ad models on the web but this is far from causation.

Maybe the surveillance should be rethought to enable the individual to reflect on their own actions which are lost to the fragility of human memory recall. In this way the individual is afforded the opportunity to access thier own private past which is lost to them.