We live in a surveillance society. Whether on the streets or in the privacy of our own homes, states pay public money to private companies to spy on us.
State espionage is nothing new – governments have a long history of spying on unruly populations to preempt and stamp out potential threats before they become a reality. Advances in digital technology in recent decades, however, have paved the way for states to surveil entire populations to an unprecedented and deeply concerning level. Whereas before governments spied on specific targets, digital technology means that they are now equipped to spy on all of us, all the time: everyone is a suspect, and no one is safe.
George Orwell warned of a dystopian future where there were “always eyes watching you … asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors … [where] nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.” This dystopian future is now a reality.
The development of digital surveillance and an ever-expanding market for high-tech wares, coupled with a seemingly unquestionable national security narrative and a tendency towards the privatization of public services, has meant that states now rely on multiple digital tools to monitor and control society. Facial recognition technology, phone data extraction tools, drones and CCTV cameras, among other surveillance technologies, are now routinely deployed to police populations, regardless of their impact on privacy and civil liberties.
Since its onset, governments have used Covid-19 to justify an even greater reliance on digital surveillance, arguing that it is necessary to enforce social distancing measures. Drone flights have increased, including some with thermal imaging, Covid-19 tracker apps can monitor our every move and huge amounts of data are gathered about our daily lives. This is state surveillance on steroids. Similarly, profit hungry, high-tech companies have been quick to claim that biometric tools, such as facial recognition or retina scanners are as reliable and as necessary as ever before, taking advantage of a global health crisis to market their surveillance tools as part of the solution to a health problem.
We all have a right to privacy. When this right is violated there are significant knock-on effects for the realization of other fundamental rights, such as the right to family life, freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, movement, and religion. For those who are active in social movements, the knowledge that our every step is potentially being monitored can have a chilling effect on our activism and the form our political struggles take.
This project focuses on three countries – France, Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) – where surveillance technologies have been routinely incorporated and normalised in policing, often reinforcing negative class and racial biases, without any meaningful public debate. We discuss the technologies used and their impact on a politically active civil society. We expose the massive profits being made by companies. Finally, we outline some recommendations that, if implemented, could turn the tide on mass surveillance.
States have used Covid-19 as a pretext to justify an even greater reliance on digital surveillance, which is often implemented in a classed and racialised way.
COUNTRIES UNDER STUDY
- The Covid-19 pandemic has been used as a pretext to accelerate processes and policies regarding digital technologies and tools, although prior to Covid-19, the Spanish state had already taken steps to turn its security model into a model for mass surveillance
- The concept of the “Smart City” is an excuse to apply surveillance technologies on people that have been normalized and legitimized during the Health Crisis.
- Since 2018, Spain has participated in a project called AI MARS that aims to implement a surveillance and control system based on 5G, artificial intelligenceand facial recognition technology to identify “irregular” behaviour. Law Enforcement Agencies play a key role in this process.
- Surveillance and Control technologies have the potential to be connected to police centres of command and control, conferring more power upon the state and law enforcement agencies to control populations .
- The pandemic has served as a pretext for the deployment of new surveillance technologies, in particular drones. These devices have also been used to monitor demonstrations.
- The global security bill, which strengthens the powers of surveillance of many security actors in France, is denounced by many NGOs as a killer of freedom. The Bill will also legalise drone surveillance. the Council of State has already sanctioned the French police for having used this technology illegally several times.
- Facial recognition technology is still illegal in France but experimental use of this technology is increasing with the approach of the Olympic Games in Paris in 2024. Algorithms are now being deployed in many cities which – coupled with video surveillance – make it possible to identify vehicles or people.
- At the end of 2020, several decrees extended the powers of the intelligence services who can present extremely detailed files on people on the basis of their political ideas or for their simple participation in a demonstration.
- The United Kingdom (UK) has a reputation as a surveillance state, and with good reason: London has one CCTV camera for every 14 residents.
- The use of surveillance by the British state is nothing new. As a colonial power, the British Empire relied heavily on state surveillance for many centuries to bring occupied peoples under its control and pacify them. Today, surveillance is used in a racialised and classed way, to control certain populations within the UK
- There has been a legal framework in the UK since 2016 that gives police officers and intelligence officials the right to hack into computers, servers, networks or mobile devices, to download the data from mobile phones or use keyboard logging software that monitors every letter you type.
- Police are using terror legislation to carry out a ‘digital strip search’ of political organisers at UK borders. Police are using data extraction and cloud extraction technology to investigate seized devices. These technologies can retrieve data from third party server services. Private contractors working for UK police are also advertising that they can hack into secure messaging services such as Telegram.
- There is currently no law restricting the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in the UK and therefore the technology has been deployed in crowded public streets by British police forces and a London council.
- The British Police are aware that Live Facial Recognition is inaccurate when identifying People of Colour, but this dangerously flawed technology is still being used.
- UK police forces have massively increased their use of drone technology during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Drones are now used routinely to monitor political protest.
- IMSI catchers are used to intercept mobile phone data of demonstrators in the UK. At least nine UK police forces are equipped with IMSI catcher technology.
Drone flights have increased, Covid-19 tracking applications have been implemented, which are liable to monitor all of our movements and get huge amounts of data about people’s daily lives. One of the most invasive technologies is the use of biometric facial recognition tools or retinal scanners.
TECHNOLOGIES
CASE STUDIES
The southern city of Nice – France’s fifth largest city, in terms of population – is today the most closely guarded in France with more than 3,000 CCTV cameras.
In 2008, its mayor, Christian Estrosi, made digital surveillance a priority. In 2016, after the attacks of July 14 which left 86 people dead in Nice, he took a new step and relied on more intrusive technologies.
The city uses several automatic image analysis software packages. The community has installed dozens of alert buttons at local merchants and attempted to deploy a reporting application. Nice was the first city to have experimented with facial recognition in France in 2019. The city was also involved in a failed facial recognition project in high schools.
During lockdown in Spain several law enforcement agencies have been using drone technology to control and surveil population. Drones have been used by many local police forces to inform citizens as well as monitor evictions and mass events. Some of the drones that have been set in motion, such as those of the Municipal Police of Madrid, are even equipped with thermal imaging cameras, capable of measuring body temperature to detect people with fever, regardless of whether this was the result of Covid-19 or other more frequent infections.
But the pandemic has only exacerbated the growing trend of the use of drones as a control mechanism, which, in the Spanish State, began in 2018 when the Catalan police used drones to control airspace during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In October 2019, the regional police used their six DJI drones to monitor large demonstrations against the sentencing that condemned Catalan politicians and sovereigntist leaders to prison. These remotely controlled aircraft provide complementary images to those of the police helicopter, which is also equipped with high-resolution cameras.
Police in the UK have already Live Facial Recognition (LFR) to monitor political protest, and at the policing of large public events.
For example, South Wales Police has used LFR on at least 61 occasions since 2017 at concerts, shopping centres, sporting events and at least one political protest. In 2018, this police force arrested 22 people after they were identified through facial recognition technology.
The use of LFR against antimilitarist demonstrators at a protest held outside the DPRTE arms exhibition at Cardiff’s Motorpoint Arena signalled a new phase of high-tech police repression of protest in the UK and made clear that one of the functions of LFR for police forces in the UK is the control of political dissent.
Additionally, all UK police forces currently have the ability to make searches of the Police National Database (PND) using facial recognition technology, that gives police the capability to match CCTV images with images stored on the PND. This is referred to as ‘facial searching’. The database includes images of people who have never been convicted of any crime.
When people are arrested, stopped at UK borders or their houses are raided, the police often use powers to seize phones, tablets, computers, memory cards and SIM cards, and keep them to try to extract information. This procedure amounts to a ‘digital strip search’ by police officers. The extraction procedure is carried out with software developed by companies such as the Israeli company Cellebrite, used by many police forces around the world to unlock smartphones and extract data.
British police are making use of Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act to seize devices at UK borders. Schedule 7 came into force as part of the UK’s Terrorism Act in 2000 and allows the police to stop people on arrival to, or departure from, the UK and question them in order to determine whether they might be involved preparing terrorist acts. Unlike other powers of police questioning, under Schedule 7 it is illegal to answer ‘No Comment’ or not to respond. People may be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned if they refuse to give an answer.
Although – in theory – the questions have to be related to the investigation of terrorism, in reality people have been asked questions on a range of subjects unrelated to outlawed ‘terrorist’ organisations. For example, people have been questioned about their religious beliefs, personal life, participation in protests and political organising. Under Schedule 7, the police also have the power to confiscate electronic devices and demand passwords, and have the power to arrest if passwords are not given.
According to Kevin Blowe, coordinator of Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol): “By far the greatest use of Schedule 7 is against Muslims with political views, especially on foreign policy or security issues. It is a fundamentally Islamophobic policing power. However, as a tool, this power is targeting surveillance at anyone whose politics have the imagination to look beyond borders: so solidarity with migrants or independence struggles, such as the Palestinians or the Kurds. This also means gatherings of campaigners from different countries who reject capitalism’s role in solutions to climate change, conflict or global poverty. This is why it is impossible to see the use of Schedule 7 as anything other than blatant political policing.”
The monitoring of activists by the police forces in Spain is far from being an anecdote. However, some cases deserve special mention because of their seriousness and their enormously damaging consequences for the right to privacy and the secrecy of communications. Surveillance through the interception of communications and the extraction of data from personal devices, such as mobile phones, tablets and computers has been particularly harsh against politically organized anarchism and Basque and Catalan pro-independence movements, although also union leaders and other political activists have been monitored in this way.
Between 2013 and 2015, 68 people were arrested in a series of macro-operations against anarchist groups. Some of the people arrested had been subjected for a long time, even for years, to particularly invasive and damaging police tapping, where most of the conversations presented as evidence in court were of an intimate nature or related to her affective and friendship networks. Another of the most recent cases of police wiretapping of political dissidents was the investigation against the so-called Committees in Defence of the Republic (CDR), Catalan pro-independence grassroots groups, which involved the placement of GPS devices on vehicles in order to to track their movements.
Catalan regional police have admitted that they stole personal objects -such as toothbrushes- from political activists, in order to extract their DNA. The use of this method by the police in Catalonia to increase control over social movements was just a rumour until it was corroborated in the trial against Lisa, a German anarchist accused of a bank robbery. According to her lawyers, genetic profiles were obtained potentially illegally and without the authorisation of a judge. But the testing ground for collecting DNA for political reasons has historically been the Basque country, where police began to use -in the early 2000’s- genetic testing to indict dozens of young people in court proceedings, which have resulted in some of these people still serving long prison sentences of 20 and 30 years.
In the summer of 2020, an investigation from CitizenLab exposed the use of “Pegasus spyware” to spy on the archives, photographs, web browsing history, emails and other data of pro-independence Catalan politicians and activists, including the Catalan Parliament president Roger Torrent. President Torrent’s phone would have been infiltrated through a missed call to his Whatsapp in 2019, and he immediately pointed out that the Spanish state was behind the attack on his phone, and that he believed it had most likely occurred without a court order. In fact, according to a former NSO employee, the spyware was acquired by Spanish security services through its Ministry of Interior in 2015.
The NSO Group itself offered states, as part of the pandemic management services, a new big data analysis tool to map the movement of people and their contacts, with the aim of helping to curb the virus. In recent times, activists and lawyers have detected an adaptation of classic techniques such as police monitoring of the digital environment through the use of phishing technologies, mail spoofing and digital infiltration through e-mail and messaging networks such as Whatsapp or Telegram. In October 2020, the grassroots Catalan newspaper La Directa released information concerning the spoofing of at least 11 email accounts of political organisations, youth movements, community meeting places and housing unions. More than 60 fake emails were sent with the clear objective of gathering information on the activities and internal documents of these organisations.
COMPANIES
High-tech companies have been quick to claim that biometric tools, such as facial recognition or retina scanners are as reliable and as necessary as ever before, taking advantage of a global health crisis to market their surveillance tools as part of the solution to a health problem.
A ROADMAP
TO DIGITAL
HUMAN SECURITY
25 years after the UNDP Human Development Report which provided a fundamental Human Security Framework based on two dimensions: freedom from fear, intrinsically related to any threat to human life and physical integrity; and freedom from want understood as the fulfilment of basic human needs (food, health and education). However, we are still today struggling to incorporate new notions of security interrelated with human rights and development. One of the reasons for this challenge is the symbiotic relation between governments and the industrial military-complex, which imposes a military and technical security approach to confront the threats that humanity is facing, marginalizing more sustainable non-military, nonviolent and conflict transformation solutions. Hence, the emergency crisis of Covid-19 has created the opportunity for these types of public-private partnerships to accelerate the penetration of military technologies to surveil and control dissident voices, undermining civil liberties and digital rights. But the relationship with technology can be either an experience of violation or it could be transformative. The digital realm is empowering activists, connecting struggles and providing spaces for the sharing of alternative narratives to the hegemonic discourse, organizing advocacy action and movement building. Thus, we should build safe and radically democratic digital environments to exercise our human rights and fulfil our human needs.
Recommendations addressed to public authorities:
● Protect digital rights: We demand the use of democratic technologies in public spaces that respect the right to privacy, recognition and data agency by citizens.
● Ban Biometric Mass Surveillance: Facial Recognition technologies and other tools that utilise biometric data are highly intrusive to the daily life of people and violate fundamental rights.
● Ban invasive mobile data extraction practices that are used to target social movement activists, racialized communities and migrants.
● Increase transparency of the methodologies, processes and applications of digital technologies to understand which information is used and which decisions are going to be taken.
● Ban technologies “tested in combat” against unarmed civilian population in armed conflicts and occupation contexts by assessing the innovation, manufacturing and exporting processes of products from military, security and cyber security companies by public and civil society initiatives.
● Limit the access of Israeli military, security and cybersecurity companies to EU and member states public procurement processes by considering the UN database of business involved in illegal Israeli settlements and its relation with the occupation of Palestine.
● Curb corporate influence on public security and create spaces for further cooperation with civil society sector in this domain and especially in the development of Smart City and Safe City models. Civil society approaches to security could integrate social and political dynamics analysis; non-military, mediation and nonviolent strategies; and bottom-up processes including the voice of vulnerable groups in societies.
Recommendations addressed to social movements, activists and general public:
- Protect yourself from the surveillance state by improving digital competences and security. More information at: www.privacytools.io; www.eff.org/pages/tools; www.securityinabox.org/en
- Promote and participate public debates in your community on: how surveillance digital technologies are designed and operate; which data is collected and how is processed; and which impact they have on civil liberties;
- Demand the use of democratic technologies in your community and municipality by claiming responsible public procurement that promote human rights and environmental protection;