A week in the surveillance society 2016

Don Butler, The Ottawa Citizen

Published: Saturday, January 31, 2009

Surveillance is expanding at lightning speed everywhere. “You can’t keep up with the types of changes it’s producing,” says the University of Alberta’s Kevin Haggerty.

In 2006, an international group of experts produced a report on Britain’s surveillance society for that country’s information commissioner. One section imagined the surveillance a British family could face in 2016. What follows is adapted from that section.

The Jones family — Gareth, his wife Yasmin, and their children, 18-year-old Ben, 14-year-old Sara and 10-year-old Toby — returns from a vacation in Florida.

At the airport, passport control is a series of cameras and scanners taking images of their faces, irises and fingers. Those are then compared to data on standardized biometric passports, whose built-in RFID chips contain all citizenship, immigration, visa and criminal justice data, along with health information.

At customs, everyone is subject to a full-body scan, a virtual strip search using a millimetre wave scanner. Sara thinks she hears a customs officer make a lewd remark about her piercings.

At the shopping mall, scanners log the unique identifiers found in RFID tags embedded in clothes the family is wearing. Information about their clothes — its brand, where it was purchased and by whom — is compared against consumer profiles in a huge database. Intelligent billboards at eye level display advertising in real time from a range of products aimed at their consumer profiles.

The mall mines data about consumers to offer frequent shoppers membership in its “cashless” scheme. For about $500, these “valuable consumers” can be implanted with a chip that allows them to pay by having their arm scanned. They also have access to a VIP lounge, spa and massage facilities on site and are eligible for discounts that will allow them to recoup the cost of the implant.

Like many affluent families, the Jones live in a gated community, Dobcroft Estate, patrolled and monitored by a well-equipped security firm. Since birth, everyone in Dobcroft Estate has been a “customer” of a multi-level Personal Behaviour Scheme (PBS), monitored and enforced by a private consortium called Total Social Solutions. Many have RFID implants that register with sensors installed in their homes and at the entrances of the estate.

At the moment, everyone under 18 is barred from entering or leaving Dobcroft Estate from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. because an elderly woman spotted youths causing trouble on the local video surveillance cameras. The cameras broadcast on the security channel, which includes a rogues’ gallery of those known to have infringed their PBSs.

When Gareth drives out of the estate, wrought-iron gates open automatically and his licence plate is read, noting his time of departure and the number and identity of his passengers. On the roads, automatic plate readers are so numerous there’s no longer any point in trying to avoid them.

When Ben and his friend Aaron go into the city for an anti-war protest, small remote-controlled spy planes monitor what they do. CCTV cameras, embedded in lampposts and walls at eye level, allow for efficient operation of universal facial recognition systems.