purposes. If you ever get involved in a lawsuit, the first question of the lawyer from the other side should be — do you have a Gmail account? Because, if you do, your life sits open for review.
V-mail
If e-mail becomes a permanent record, why not v-mail? Voice mail systems archive messages and record the communication attributes of the conversations. As technologies for voice recognition improve, so does the ability to search voice records. As voice mail systems shift to digital systems, archiving content on central servers rather than $50 devices connected to the phone at home, they become practical search resources. In principle, every night the government could scan all the stored voice recordings at every telephone company in the nation. This search would impose no burden on the user; it could be targeted on and limited to specific topics, and it could operate in the background without anyone ever knowing.
Voice
And why stop with recordings? According to one report, the NSA monitors over 650 million telephone conversations a day[7]. That monitoring is automatic. It used to be of foreigners only, but now apparently the system monitors an extraordinary range of communication, searching for that bit or clue that triggers investigative concern. The system produces something akin to a weather report as well as particularized indicators. There are, for example, measures of “chatter” that may signal a storm.
This monitoring, like each of the examples before, creates no burden for those using a telephone. Those using the phone don’t know something is listening on the other end. Instead, the system works quietly in the background, searching this monitored communication in real time.
Video
In each of the examples so far, someone has chosen to use a technology, and that technology has made their privacy vulnerable. The change is produced as that technology evolves to make it simpler to monitor and search behavior.
But the same evolution is happening outside networks as well. Indeed, it is happening in the quintessentially public place — the streets, or in public venues. This monitoring is the production of the current version of video technology. Originally, video cameras were a relatively benign form of monitoring. Because the product of their monitoring relied solely upon human interpretation, there were relatively few contexts in which it paid to have someone watch. And where someone wasn’t watching in real time, then the use of these technologies is to trace bad behavior after it happens. Few seem upset when a convenience store video camera makes it possible to identify the criminal who has murdered the attendant.
Digital technology has changed the video, however. It is now a tool of intelligence, not just a tool to record. In London, as I’ve described, cameras are spread through the city to monitor which cars drive in the city. This is because nonresidents must pay a special tax to drive in “congestion zones.” The cameras record and interpret license places, and then determine whether the right tax was paid for that car. The objective of the system was to minimize congestion in London. Its consequence is a database of every car that enters London, tied to a particular time and location.
But the more ambitious use of video surveillance is human face recognition. While the technology received some very bad press when first introduced in Tampa[8], the government continues to encourage companies to develop the capacity to identify who someone is while that someone is in a traditionally anonymous place. As one vendor advertises, “face recognition technology is the least intrusive and fastest biometric technology. . . . There is no intrusion or delay, and in most cases the subjects are entirely unaware of the process. They do not feel ‘under surveillance’ or that their privacy has been invaded[9]”.
These technologies aren’t yet reliable. But they continue to be funded by both private investors and the government. Indeed, the government runs evaluation tests bi-annually to rate the reliability of the technologies[10]. There must at least be someone who expects that someday it will possible to use a camera to identify who is in a crowd, or who boarded a train.
Body Parts
Criminals leave evidence behind, both because they’re usually not terribly rational and because it’s extremely hard not to. And technology is only making it harder not to. With DNA technology, it becomes increasingly difficult for a criminal to avoid leaving his mark, and increasingly easy for law enforcement to identify with extremely high confidence whether X did Y.
Some nations have begun to capitalize on this new advantage. And again, Britain is in the lead[11]. Beginning in 1995, the British government started collecting DNA samples to include in a national registry. The program was initially promoted as a way to fight terrorism. But in a decade, its use has become much less discriminating.
In December 2005, while riding public transportation in London, I read the following on a public announcement poster:
Abuse, Assault, Arrest: Our staff are here to help you. Spitting on DLR staff is classified as an assault and is a criminal offence. Saliva Recovery Kits are now held on every train and will be used to identi fy offenders against the national DNA database.
And why not? Spitting may be harmless. But it is insulting. And if the tools exist to identify the perpetrator of the insult, why not use them?
In all these cases, technologies designed either without monitoring as their aim or with just limited monitoring as their capacity have now become expert technologies for monitoring. The aggregate of these technologies produces an extraordinary range of searchable data. And, more importantly, as these technologies mature, there will be essentially no way for anyone living within ordinary society to escape this monitoring. Monitoring to produce searchable data will become the default architecture for public space, as standard as street lights. From the simple ability to trace back to an individual, to the more troubling ability to know what that
