"We live in a surveillance society."
So begins the report commissioned by the British Government investigating Britain's slide into a big brother state. There is an interesting section in A Surveillance Society which tries to provide a glimpse of British society under the watchful eyes of the big brother. There are fourteen vignettes, and we will publish two each day for the next week.
Identity Control
Arriving back in Britain from Florida in 2016, the Jones family face a rather different scene than the family of 2006. It is hard to know the difference between the two countries by what they experience at the border. Both Britain and the USA’s immigration and border control services, along with those of all EU countries, and other G10 industrialised countries are outsourced to the same transnational private consortium, BorderGuard. Continued fears of illegal immigration and government rhetoric about the ‘War on Terror’ led these governments to commission and implement a ‘smart border’ scheme, driven by both open and hidden surveillance
technologies.
Passport control is now a series of cameras ands scanners taking images of face, iris and fingers, which are compared to those on the standardised biometric passports, or in Britain’s case, the ID card, introduced across the G10 countries and the EU. The passport or ID card is also read by machine and the multiple data on the built-in RFID chip now include all citizenship, immigration, visa and criminal justice data, along with health information. This is instantly compared to state and transnational databases, as well as a whole raft of data-mined information on consumer transactions that BorderGuard gets on regular subscription from specialist companies.
Border Crossings
The result of smart borders is that transit happens more swiftly for some, and less so for others, depending on whether their nation of origin has signed up to the scheme. BorderGuard has made concessions, however. It has allowed citizens from non participating countries faster transit if they have biometric passports. Pakistan, although not a member of the scheme, offers biometric passports to its citizens, but at a significant financial cost that individuals must bear personally. Geeta has never bought a biometric passport and consequently has to wait for several hours and is subjected to various extra searches and questions.
Sara’s deliberately shocking fashionable teenage appearance arouses no suspicion, but Yasmin’s obviously ‘Asian’ features trigger alerts. When her ID card scan connects to her credit card records from the USA, she is pulled over for questioning. She doesn’t have to wait until she goes shopping to find out that what her cloned card has been used for. She is, however, required to explain away a whole range of dubious purchases in an area of the country that she hasn’t visited. She is allowed to go an hour or two later after the data are cross-referenced with records in Florida and it is determined that her card has been cloned. The bank will still not return the money to her account for several weeks – some things never change!
At customs, everyone is subject to a full-body scan: a virtual strip search using a millimetre wave scanner. Sara thinks she hears one of the customs officers make a lewd remark about her piercings but there’s no point in complaining as it will just draw attention to herself and mean more trouble. In any case, it’s pretty likely
that everything the officer said was recorded by the CCTV mics, which are used for work monitoring, and he may end up in trouble anyway.
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