Greek author Dimitris Nollas wrote Anyone’s Time, a novel charting the life and times of a clandestine anarchist cell in 1990s Athens. One memorable description traces a communist guerrilla as he infiltrates a city, dispatches his political opponent and then returns to his mountain fastness to sally forth another day. That was then.
We used to live in the Present. It would come, pass by, and then be consigned to the irretrievable past. But as public surveillance technology increasingly encroaches upon what used to be within the realm of the private, we increasingly live in a semi-permanent age where that which has passed remains forever accessible. Not just electronic records, mind you, but billions and billions of hours of vivid Technicolor video of our everyday lives’ blandest or most intimate details.
Today, killers can be retroactively identified. We witnessed a demonstration of this earlier this year in Dubai when a Hamas militant was killed by alleged Mossad assassins. The Dubai police held an investigation that combed through hundreds of thousands of hours of video to piece together a frame-by-frame reconstruction of the execution squad’s positioning movements around the emirate’s malls and luxury hotels. As they supplied stills and video of the killers to the international media, intelligence experts spoke of the end of clandestine operations.
Now, new technologies such as Deep Learning go a step further into the realm of pre-emptive law enforcement. Deep Learning is a computer code currently in development that unobtrusively works in the background. It identifies potential future threats by spotting specific objects, divining attitudes and locking onto repetitive actions. Here’s hoping that, unlike the lethal test-drive of a mechanized policeman in the film “Robocop,” it does not malfunction.
We are only at the beginning of a process of transferring the business of law enforcement away from humans to intelligent computers. Darpa, the Pentagon’s “mad science” laboratory, has given a $4 million grant to two scientists currently developing a system that can spot socially unusual human activities. They could be anything from sweating and agitation in a temperature-controlled environment, to performing repetitive actions or running through crowded halls. “The final version of the software will operate unsupervised, having been programmed to hold itself accountable for errors—and then auto-correct them at each algorithmic layer,” notes Katie Drummond, a writer for Wired magazine.
This is the kind of technology that, when married with all-pervasive surveillance grids, cuts past the sloppiness of the proverbial doughnut-chewing lax policeman, whether he belongs to a state that holds itself popularly accountable to its people or a dictatorship that exercises naked coercion. Equally, the harnessing of such technology by authoritarian states could bear terrifying results.
Assuming that persons of interest have already been tagged by the authorities, today’s technology can alert law enforcement agencies to an assassin’s whereabouts, then score a facial match the next time they pass in front of a camera that would allow for his eventual geo-location. The assassin’s only hope of eluding detection is to remain outside the urban camera grid, for the rest of his life or adopt some pretty radical disguises.
Such technology already exists or will be available in the very near future (Deep Learning is slated for release by 2013). Depending on where you live, facial recognition could already be functioning at a street corner near you. But despite becoming pervasive, we know negligible amounts about its capabilities. Last year, a British cameraman told me of his surprise while filming inside a British police station control room when an officer flicked a button, populating a live feed from a busy street with the passport numbers of hundreds of passers-by. Once again, it was facial recognition software that made the matchup possible.
Spreading surveillance
Those ugly, metal-necked birds with the eyeless, all-seeing spherical blue heads hanging off vertical steel poles or off the sides of buildings are not just the preserve of Western city centers. In Istanbul, they have been creeping up in recent years as part of a security system called MOBESE. Earlier this summer, participants in an ethnic riot in a middling Turkish town were arrested after they had left the scene by cops who identified them via MOBESE.
Istanbul’s crowded Istiklal shopping avenue is being outfitted with up to 64 cameras capable of scanning 15,000 faces per second in a moving crowd. This comes after the two bridges over the Bosphorus became passable only with a mandatory windscreen-mounted electronic pass, and mandatory biometric ID cards for all Turkish citizens are being imposed. In Turkey, which is hitting the headlines for allegedly returning to its Islam-first Ottoman roots, this is being touted as progress and modernity.
Increasingly, urban camera grids are sprouting up across Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Whether in historical capitals like Damascus and Cairo or high-technology skyscraper villas like Dubai or Riyadh, new audiovisual grids governed from secret control rooms not subject to oversight are invisibly sectoring off public places. During the 2008 Olympics, veritable thickets of surveillance cameras sprouted from stadiums, advertising kiosks or Beijing airport’s soaring roof.
The military occupations of Baghdad and Kabul have allowed the US military to take its surveillance experiments a step further. White zeppelins hover over these cities with the capacity to record across such a staggeringly wide geographic area that authorities can piece together a suicide bomber’s progression through the city after his self-detonation. Though too late to pre-empt the event, the new tool allows them to scroll back through time, revealing his network and their safe houses.
Alongside software such as Deep Learning, there are other artificial intelligence programs that can carry out the work of humans, automatically picking out individuals of interest long before they are brought to an analyst’s attention. Google, a company which collects enormous amounts of data about every one of its users, has joint invested with In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investment arm, in Recorded Future, a company that has developed software that scours tens of thousands of websites, blogs and Twitter accounts to deduce the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents as a way of predicting the future.
All these tools will make for unprecedentedly powerful governments in the imminent future. How responsibly will they wield their new abilities? How will pro-democracy campaigners driven to militancy by relentless state oppression get round the death of anonymity? The careless abandon with which Tehran’s 2009 “green revolution” unspooled was outdated even as it happened. Even as Iran’s pro-democracy crowds were in the streets demonstrating, intelligence officials were scouring still photographs and Youtube videos to identify organizers. They uploaded stills of those they could not find onto websites and urged the public to identify them.
Tehran 2009 was one of the last contemporary urban confrontations that the unblinking eyes of CCTV networks did not record. But where the state was slow, global consumers filled in: the revolution was neither CCTVed nor was it televised. But it was viewed internationally on furtive, fear-saturated videos secreted from Tehran onto Youtube over agonizingly slow upload speeds.
A little like the “Demolition Man” movie, where post-violent humans inhabited a dystopian technologically sophisticated future society while freedom-fighters fought a guerrilla war from the sewers below, the world may soon be separated into those who live within the grid, and those few and vilified who reject the Big Brother 24/7 surveillance society and opt out. But that is still in the future. For the moment, what is truly chilling is the almost non-existent level of public information available about the society towards which we are hurtling. So enjoy the past while it lasts. Very soon, it might be creating some unpleasant surprises.
Iason Athanasiadis – Journalist who has lived in some of our world’s most surveilled cities, from London to Tehran, Boston to Damascus, He is currently based out of Istanbul.
