smart city surveillance

city

Dr David Murakami WoodCanada Research Chair in Surveillance Studies, Queen’s University, Ontariodmw@queensu.ca

Control Society

• Deleuze, post-panoptic ‘Control Society’– Inculcation of morality replaced by

modulation of flows – Breaking down of people and things into

constituents: data subjects, digital sorting: “ʻdividualsʼ… made of codes”

• Alex Galloway: protocological world• ‘Spatial protocol’: highly restrictive

and controlling rules embedded within the environment

A note on theory

• Control / Discipline / Authority always exist together (in different ways)

• Resources for social ordering • Bringing Neil Smith together with

critical IPE theory, I identify an ‘uneven security development’

• Also: techno-futures as virtual (Brian Massumi), ‘fantastic’ (Jodi Dean) or Utopian (Katherine Hayles)

Smart Cities• ‘Cities like Rio de Janeiro are

integrating intelligence and smart technology into their operations to run better and make “dumb, rude, and dirty” traits of the past’. (SAP Business Trends, 2013)

• Rio Smart City

Surveillance and Smart Cities

• Promoters generally do not acknowledge central place of ‘surveillance’ within smart city projects

• But smart cities are inevitably surveillant cities: intensive management of urban flows requires information about everything that moves in the city

surveillance and smart cities

IBM 2013 report on its Smarter Cities program:

The availability of vast collections of data about all aspects of city life makes it possible for civic leaders to understand how things really work so they can make better decisions. Much of this data comes from sensors and video cameras that are being used to monitor everything from public safety to traffic jams. In addition, city agencies are increasingly sharing their data with one another and with the public. This allows leaders to get a holistic view of the city, and to unlock the value of all of that data they’re collecting. (2013: 6)

• 1990s – increasing concern about ‘unruliness’ of cities and crime / urban terrorism terrorism) + Military Operations in Urban Terrain (MOUT)

• Answers always involved surveillance: distributed sensor platforms and computer analytics

• Policing – both visual and digital turn: crime mapping, predictive policing models etc.

Securitizing Smart Cities

• Some ‘smarter City’ projects overt about security e.g. Durham, NC boasts of ‘police analytics’ reducing crime and reducing educational and economic disparities

• After 9/11 in US – demand for the immediate implementation of ubiquitous city strategies for security reasons

• Funding via Homeland Security and post-2008 stimulus - integration of CCTV, emergency services, analytics… Construction of multi-agency ‘Fusion Centers’

• Now recombination e.g.: • ‘smart border’ projects• ‘Domain Awareness’ initiatives (Oakland, NYC)

Securitizing Smart Cities

The machine-readable world

• Ubiquitous Computing (ubicomp) is ubiquitous surveillance (ubisurv) (c.f. Alberto Araya)

• You can flee the city, but… surveillance is everywhere

• Kitchen & Dodge (2011) Code/Space• Haggerty & Trottier (2013) on

‘monitoring beyond the human’• Smart homes, Smart Cities,

‘brandscapes’…

Automating Securityscapes

Rafael ADS Sentry-Tech Stationary Remote Controlled Weapon Station (Israel / Palestine)

Automating Securityscapes

EADS Cassidian integrated Border Surveillance Solution (Saudi Arabia)Station

Surveillancescapes

G-Max UPDS Perimeter Intrusion Detection system

Surveillancescapes

• Some pics and text

G-Max UPDS Perimeter Intrusion Detection system

Towards ambient government?

• Technologies of government increasingly distributed and networked

• If security is the primary purpose of government, and security can be embedded in anything, then government can be ‘ambient’ – all around us, part of the environment

• ‘Naturalization’ of government is a hiding of politics:– ‘smart cities’ building in subtle forms of

socialization and behavioral conditioning – like a digital Tony Blair.

Towards ambient government?

• Reminder: fantasies are never fully realized – unevenness, incompleteness, breakdown, failure, revelation resistance, revolution

• However, is the political already so devalued that this will not attract major resistance or even notice?

• What forms of revelation are possible? From visibility or legibility

• Privacy is not very useful either as a basis for theory or for praxis in this context

Sousveillance?

Obscurity and Illegibility?

Adam Harvey’s ‘CV Dazzle’ anti-face recognition make-up

Destruction?

German activists destroy video surveillance cameras as part of an urban ‘game’