Britain is a Dataveillance Society

It seems like the issue of surveillance has finally claimed some wider public attention. The BBC are reporting an important contribution to this debate titled A Report on the Surveillance Society . This academic report was produced by the Surveillance Studies Network for the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London convened for the office of Richard Thomas the UK Information Commissioner. In their reporting the BBC note that this report touches on surveillance issues as wide as "US security agencies monitoring telecommunications traffic passing through Britain, to key stroke information used to gauge work rates and GPS information tracking company vehicles". The BBC also report the publication of statistics from Privacy International which indicate that Britain is the worst Western democracy at protecting individual privacy". You can see the worst offenders (including the UK) picked out in black on this map. It is 'nice' to see dear Old Blighty up there with the likes of China and Russia. PI describe us as being an "endemic surveillance society"( the executive summary, overview of privacy, threats to privacy, highlights and country reports of the PI report are all available online).

One of the most interesting things, for me, in all this reporting was the role sketched out for artists in the surveillance world. A Report on the Surveillance Society offers a glimpse of the world of 2016 which they capture in the metaphor 'The Hall of Mirrors'.They predict that:

Protesters, artists and surrealists all play with and resist pervasive surveillance in all sorts of ways, including disabling public surveillance devices, using ‘sousveillance’ technologies or counter surveillance."

They also sketch out the case for a new narrative form which they call 'life-logging' in which artists and others use the technologies of surveillance to record every aspect of their lives. However, they also note that :

"Life logging is also not all that is can seem and with increasingly sophisticated data management and video production software, lives can be adjusted or even entirely created for purposes from pure entertainment through subversion to fraud."

Many of these activities are already part of artistic culture. There was rash of work awhile back that exploited webcam technology. In the JenniCam project, for example, Jennifer Ringley mounted a images from her personal webcam on the internet that showed her daily life. There was also a rash of interesting spoofs of this idea of mediated ordinary life. In Online Caroline, for example,Rob Bevan and Tim Wright of XPT used "a mixture of simulated web cam feeds, personalised emails and telephone messages" to create a "BAFTA-award winning online drama about one woman’s attempt to find an online friend".However, I believe that the authors of the report are right to assume that these activities will continue to develop and to play an increasingly important role in future relationships between art and a technological society. The question than arises of how best to prepare for this world. Should one train oneself to "play with and resist pervasive" technologies? It certainly pays not to be asleep when deploying a technology. I was interested to read an article tagged on the end of the WIKIpedia entry for webcams that reports that a trojan horse program can be used by hackers to activate a computer's camera without the user's knowledge (this article by Kevin Poulsen from 2005 certainly made me think about webcams in a new way). It made me wonder about the relationship between artists and technology; about who and what is being play in this scenario.

Now remind me where did I leave the manual for my web camera?