Surveillance, gender, and public health

From a review of Anne Balsamo's Technologies of the Gendered Body:

In Balsamo's strongest chapter, "Public Pregnancies," she confidently relates how new medical technologies of surveillance--laparoscopy, ultrasounds, and advanced drug testing--permit and even demand novel invasions of the female body. Using an example much in the news recently--criminal penalties against pregnant women on crack--Balsamo argues that such technologies assist the development of a cultural logic of surveillance, where the relationship of women's pregnant bodies to overall public health comes under new scrutiny. Such heightened examination turns pregnancy from an individual to a public experience, allowing doctors and even strangers on the street into the reproductive process. Using Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Balsamo reveals how this logic of surveillance could easily expand beyond society's have-nots, who represent an ideological testing ground of sorts, to general prescriptions defining all female bodies as "potentially maternal bodies and all pregnant bodies as inherently duplicitous and possible threatening to public health" (14).

The questions this raises:

• How do the very things we ascribe as benefits of surveillance come to be in the interest of "the public"? should it be so? how is that debate wrapped up in our cultural ideas of individualism vs communitarianism? (This is the tension between Etzioni and, say, the EFF.)
  
• How are certain people assigned the blame or responsibility for these matters of "public interest" and thus jusitified as subjects of surveillance? For example, why do we surveill suspected political activists to try to prevent terrorism rather than interrogate our public policies that might be the underlying cause of at least some terrorist activities?
• How does surveillance as a informational form appeal to our culture more than other modes of intervening in situations? How has a culture of spectacle, and especially a digital or quantifiable spectacle of manageable information, developed?
  

Software and the mundane management of air travel

Software and the mundane management of air travel in First Monday

Abstract: Over the past thirty years, the practices of everyday life have become increasingly infused with and mediated by software and captured in code. Software is increasingly embedded into objects and systems as a means to enhance and manage usage and to link together disparate and distanciated parts of an infrastructure, enabling new and refined processes. In some cases, such as air transportation, this embedding has become so pervasive and vital that if the software crashes one part of the system grinds to a halt, subsequently disrupting other aspects of air travel. In this article, we examine one part of this system, the profiling and screening of passengers, to argue that the use of software has engendered a new form of governmentality — mundane management — that is having a profound effect on the operation and regulation of air travel. The development of distributed information systems has enabled governments and air travel businesses to capture, cross–reference and regulate the ongoing status of individuals in ways that were previously difficult, if not impossible. By linking these capta together, a dense rhizomic assemblage of power/knowledge is being created; what is at best oligoptic (partial and selective) in nature is becoming more panoptic (all–seeing ). This is especially the case given the trend towards increased granularity (resolution) and uniqueness (unique identification based on biometrics) of capta, and the fact that capta stored are unlikely ever to be deleted. These systems are not without their problems, particularly with regard to civil liberties. However, new procedures and technologies have largely been greeted by the public with ambivalence or welcomed, rather than resisted.

Britain leads in surveillance among democratic states

Guardian writer calls for bounding hands of surveillance, rather than post-hoc oversight

Surveillance for safety?

Is sousveillance in which I strategically reveal my self-recordings an adequate counterprotection against spurious charges from out-of-context quotes that may be brought against me by a surveillance state?

Part of me wonders if decrying surveillance is missing the root of the problem which is that a government no longer trusts its citizens, which also misses the point that the government is supposed to work for it's citizens, at least in the US. Or that the things we surveill to protect ourselves are caused by certain policies that make some people want to aggress against us.

So if surveillance is merely mechanism employed in other causal circumstances, what are the dimensions of properties of that mechanism?

1. transparency - do people know they are being surveilled? do they know when they are being surveilled? can they find out after the fact?
2. permanence - how long will records be kept?
3. accountability - who controls the surveillance apparatus? how do they attain that position? what legal recourse is their against them?
4. context of repression - how clearly understood and enforced are laws? are laws irregularly enforced and ever changing, which means that surveillance effective acts as a mechanism for enforcing on whim?

What am I missing?

Spock seriously creeps me out

Spock.com has surmised my existence by aggregating my internet fragments

Now, juxtaposed, are my Linked In, Friendster, Livejournal, Flickr, and a bunch of other digital fragments that I rather like having just far enough apart that it requires work to get from one to another. Now, rather than having Linked In be the presumed-appropriate canonical place to find my professional info and Facebook the presumed-appropriate canonical place to find my personal info (both are services which mostly give me control over what shows up), Spock goes and mashes them all up.

Particularly irritating is that it performs what the company surely believes is a valuable service without me asking and without asking me to opt in. Instead, I discovered it one day when a contact invited me to their "spock trust" network. I felt like I'd been let in on the secret that there was a dossier out there on me that I didn't know about. From the company's strategic point of view, they feel like they have to do this because they're building social software that derives value from the completeness of the social network, so making those nodes and edges wait until the referent user opts in slows down their great plans.

The other weird thing about Spock is that other people can add information about you and vote on info that others have added. So at some level, it's almost as people were to be invited to write wikipedia articles on you. This idea of others adding information about me into the public sphere seems like both thoughtlessness and the presumption of exhibitionism.

So instead, I've taken to misinforming it. I've told it that I'm male. I don't really add information to it. I wonder what it would take to confuse it.

The Secret Life of Secrets

Paul wrote a cute piece titled
The Secret Life of Secrets for the latest issue of Ambidextrous that I read today.

In the recording technologies class, we've been focusing largely on legal perspectives and aspects of self-presentation and identity construction on information behavior and privacy. Paul's article, instead, highlights the relational value of secrets. The power of secrets is that they can be shared, but if they are shared with everyone, they lose their cache.

This gets me thinking about the various ways in which I publish semi-passive traces of my digital activities -- for example, facebook news feeds, del.icio.us, and friendfeed. I say semi-passive because when I save things to these various services, I am aware that it is getting posted to a public place and in some cases, that is precisely why I am posting it. But in some cases, I simply want to save the thing for later reference but it isn't worth the complexity to figure out a private way to save it. When I think about these services that publish my traces, I do have an imagined audience of the friends I know subscribe to those feeds or remark on what I do there. But inevitably, unfamiliar people begin to follow the feeds as well and the feeds lose the interpersonal communicative value I once invested them with. When I posted to twitter, I used to know I was posting to Phil, Chris, Chad, Charles, Kenneth, Kevin, and a handful of others. Now I'm posting to them and at least 6 or 7 people I don't know.

And yet, the services that attempt to get around this by letting me add contacts to groups like "friends" and "family" are too rigid. These sets of people I have some shared context with are fairly fluid and often depend on the kind of information that I want to post. And yet picking a unique set of people every time I post an item is also untractable. Livejournal handles this decently well in that it lets me create custom group ("cousins" and "closest friends") for me, and also lets me restrict certain posts as visible only to people I've listed as a friend. Thus, it isn't sufficient for someone to follow me to see posts that I choose to restrict to those I have some awareness of.

This issue seems mostly closely related to the Goffman we've read. Our social interactions are largely made up scripted performances between two individuals, but the personal broadcast model implies unawareness of who your audience is. This seems fundamentally flawed. Most people, I believe, don't care because they operate under security by obscurity and they do not use Web 2.0 services enough to get into these sorts of issues. They put up their photo, share it with a friend, and rarely amass enough data to cause an long-term self-presentation issue. Facebook has, however, engaged the mainstream's anger when they suddenly start included new information in news feeds that was not there before, changing the rules of the self-presentation game. The Beacon and News Feeds were big examples of this.

Thus, it seems there are two aspects to self-presentation in the digital realm: information and audience. And yet, that dualism is also false. Information only gets meaning within a particular audience. Sarcasm, for example, or irony has to be interpreted as such, often in the context of prior knowledge of the ironist.

Many Web 2.0 services separate information and audience into two orthogonal dimensions.
Is this necessarily a flaw? Or does our culture of conspicuous consumption and self-esteem "I'm okay!" actually sit well with the separation of these two domains?

The big brother scenario has already been happening for years

AT&T creates secret room where ALL OF ITS INTERNET TRAFFIC gets copied for the government to peruse at will

The whistleblower is the technician, now retired, who installed the wiring in the room. He described his shock that he was hooking up "the big brother machine." Not only has the government partnered with several telecom companies to copy telecom traffic (only Qwest communications refused to collaborate), but Bush is pushing for retroactive immunity for the telcos that "may or may not have" collaborated.

Please see Keith Olbermann's intelligent and scating critique

Olbermann makes many good points, but one of them is that now the Bush administration has information it could look at to see who looked at porn, who bought what on eBay, and (chillingly, for me) who donated to Democrats.

I really don't put it past the government to target everyone who watches al Jazeera, a high-quality news network comparable to CNN and in many ways more substantive as it lacks the "breaking news" drivel and gossip news. This is the same government that allegedly traced falafel sales to find suspects. I suspect that this government might have had me on some secondary screening list for a while because between 2003 and 2004, when I was attending anti-war protests, I had a good, long run of 4 "random" screens.

What is most amazing to me about all this is that I'm really not sure Americans care. This "secret room" whistleblowing happened over a year ago. Those who read the news and care about politics are paying attention, but I'm sure more people are thinking about Heath Ledger. Sometimes I think it is the immigrant kids and the kids who payed attention in US History who are most sold on the idea of the US as a constitutional nation and the rest think it is a commercial nation, a christian nation, a white nation, or whatever else seems descriptive and contextually convenient.

It's one thing to try and design technologies that provide adequate affordances for flexible, privacy maintaining behaviors that don't get in the way. That largely gets used with immediate privacy concerns in local, everyday life in mind -- will my parents discover my drinking pics? Will I want the potential employers I wrote to this week seeing this? But the scenarios of domestic traffic surveillance seem too large and abstract for people to grasp. They feel that they're not doing anything wrong and this belief that their behavior protects them is maintained by a government who has media mouthpieces that will construct the case of why public, surveillance-enabled crackdowns are justified -- why they are wrong. But more sinister is the uncertainty that lingers when much of what the government might do with the data is unknown, unaccountable, and unprovable. My experience with secondary screening, for example is part of this.

What are we to do then? Encrypt all of our internet / phone traffic as a matter of technopolicy, in a way creating code that preserves constitutional rights? Would there be some body that had the key to decrypt and would do so if given warrants? At least such a public office would be more accountable than relying on megatelcos and their armies of well-funded lawyers and paper shredders.

Other ideas?

It's a little like Brazil

Ramak Fazel - Storefront for Art and Architecture - Art - New York Times

IN a recent morning interview in a Midtown Manhattan office Ramak Fazel came across as the quintessential world citizen: tall, slim and elegant, his English tinged with an untraceable accent and peppered here and there with an Italian phrase

He also exuded the weariness of a frequent flier, having arrived the afternoon before at Newark Liberty Airport, where he was delayed for nearly three hours while United States Customs and Border Protection agents questioned him about the purpose of his trip, searched his baggage and photocopied the pages of his personal agenda.

That routine is something that Mr. Fazel, a 42-year-old freelance photographer who lives in Milan, Italy, has come to know well, and he takes pains to come across as favorably as possible. For starters, he makes sure his face is always immaculately cleanshaven.

“I have become the poster boy for Gillette,” he said, somewhat ruefully.

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Reading the story linked to above is like reading The Trial. This man happens to be my good friend's cousin and it makes a reality the fears that I always joked about as an Iranian-American who was vocally anti-war and anti-Bush. As Fazel, a naturalized American citizen, went about working on his project of sending postcards from each state capitol with stamps from his childhood stamp collection, he came under the suspicious eye of government anti-terrorist forces. Apparently, a vigilante airline passenger to whom he described his project photographed him while he was sleeping and reported him to authorities. For the rest of his trip, Fazel was interrogated, prevented from parking his car in certain places, and prevented bodily access to some government buildings.

The echoes of Kafka make his story frightening. He was unable to get investigators to tell him why he was being stopped or how he could prove his innocence. He was simply on the watch list, subject to trial by investigator whenever the government was inclined. Fazel's only recourse was to act pleasant and get the names of each investigator he talked to, perhaps as a way of wielding accountability as a way of restraining investigators' excesses.

Under similar circumstances, Hasan Elahi, a middle eastern man framed by coincidence, "fought back" by putting his entire life online. His motives were alternately proving that he had nothing to hide, enlisting the government as his ally rather than interrogator, and by toying with overloading the government with information. However, divulging all really a solution, even if it causes information overload today? As long as the recording body stores the volunteered information, it threatens to gain the information processing capacity at some point in the future unknown to the subject of surveillance. Like in "The Trial," the review of one's records and scheduling of a trial can happen at any time. This would seem to have the same effect as the panopticon, where one is being surveilled some of the time but they cannot be sure when.

Surveillance justice

Paraplegic man dumped in LA gutter sues hospital

Thu Jan 17, 2008 7:52pm EST

By Jill Serjeant

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A mentally ill paraplegic man filed a lawsuit on Thursday against a hospital that dumped him in a gutter on Los Angeles' "Skid Row" -- a case that highlighted the plight of the city's vast homeless population.

Gabino Olvera, 42, sued the Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center for negligence after it discharged him in February 2007, took him across town in a van and left him in a soiled hospital gown without a wheelchair in the heart of the city's homeless area.

Witnesses who came to Olvera's aid said they saw him dragging himself on the ground with hospital papers and documents clenched in his teeth while the driver sat in her van and applied makeup before driving off.

The incident was captured by security cameras at a nearby homeless shelter.

Hernan Vera, a lawyer with Public Counsel, which helped bring the lawsuit on behalf on Olvera, called it "the most obscene and callous example of this practice that we have seen."

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Wow. In this case, surveillance seems to function in several ways:

• add authority to the account of Olivera's dramatic and callous dumping
• provide theatrical, rich details that grab public attention ("applying the make up")

The blog formerly known as Google Notebook

My privacy class blog used to be a published Google Notebook but I'm copying it into a blog so you can comment.