Tasers and Torture: Technology and the Expansion of Police Power

Hardly a newscycle goes by these days without two seemingly contradictory things happening: a police officer praises the “less lethal” TASER as his savior in a tight spot; and, someone gets killed or seriously injured by a TASER. It isn't unusual for this second case to occur in circumstances that shed considerable doubt on the first case, whether because of the nature of the victim (young, old, incapacitated, restrained, etc) or because of the victim was either justified in their actions or attempting to comply with police orders. What's behind this phenomenon?

Police cite the TASER as a critical weapon filling a gap in their arsenal between the billy club and the handgun. Rather than engage a suspect in close combat, cops say, the TASER allows them the flexibility to take someone down at a short distance without risking serious injury to either the officer or the arrestee. This is supposed to be more humane than merely beating or shooting someone, especially if there is some doubt as to the criminality of the victim's actions, such as when police merely desire compliance (although police rarely concede such doubts publicly). Likewise, this is alleged to be safer for the officer, who the media and police agencies almost universally portray as constant targets of violence.

But what's the truth of it? We can start by debunking two notions that underlie the case used to justify TASERs. First of all, when we get right down to it, policing isn't a very dangerous job. When ranked by the rate of on the job deaths and injury, cops don't even rank in the top ten, showing up far below truck driver, roofer and farm worker, among others [1]. Jobs we all do every day without the benefit of TASER protection (from our boss, for instance). Indeed, a recent study cited in the New York Times showed that cops are much more likely to die by their own hand than by a so-called “criminal” [2].

Secondly, the truth is that police don't use less force when they have TASERs. If TASERs were serving as a substitute for other forms of violence, or as a deterrent, we would expect the number of uses of force to drop. According to a well-documented study by Amnesty International, however, when police forces get TASERs, their propensity towards violence actually increases [3]. TASERs actually increase police violence. Indeed, Amnesty International specifically pointed out that precisely because of the short distance attack that TASERs make possible, police increasingly use them to compel obedience rather than for actual law enforcement.

Why is this? It's because the police are a tool of class oppression. They are like soldiers, only deployed here at home, enforcing the will of a small elite that is rich and powerful. As the army does in Iraq, so do the police here at home. They are defenders of the status quo, which happens to be one in which folks like us don't have much power while the elite they are defending have a lot of it. For instance, when the bank comes to enforce your foreclosure or eviction, who shows up? The police, of course, toting their TASERs and guns. But when's the last time you saw the cops TASER a yuppie in the rich part of town? That'll be the day!

So, since the police are really a domestic army, not public servants, why would we expect that giving them more weapons (i.e., TASERs) would reduce the level of violence? That's counter-intuitive. For instance, if we gave the army a new weapon, would we expect them to be less violent because of it? Clearly not. The TASER, then, is a way for the police to increase their ability to efficiently project their power or, more accurately, the power of the elite in general (the ones who make the laws and pay for the politicians, for example), onto folks like us – people who want to create our own lives and not bow down before people who don't have our best interests at heart. This explains the vigorous defense of TASERs by police agencies despite the fact that they are used too often and remain quite deadly in many circumstances [4]. They're not concerned with reducing violence. They're concerned with projecting their power.

Thus, it's obvious that all the rhetoric about TASERs doesn't match up with reality and in fact obscures a very fundamental truth: the rich and powerful want to control us so that they can get richer and more powerful. TASERs make it easier for them to do so, especially because police can hide their violence behind the cover of TASERs bogus claim of being less-violent (a claim they continue to make even as the deaths mount). But, once we see through that lie we are ourselves armed to make our arguments against the deployment of TASERs. If we want to be free, we must limit and ultimately challenge the ability of the police to project power onto us. And that means opposing TASERs and the class society they defend.


CITED:

[1] “America's most dangerous jobs”, CNN Money. com, 9 August 2007

[2] “Suicide Bigger Threat for Police Than Criminals”, New York Times, 8 April 2008

[3] “USA: Excessive and lethal force? Amnesty International's concerns about deaths and ill-treatment involving police use of tasers”, 30 November 2004, accessed at http://www. amnesty. org/en/library/info/AMR51/139/2004

[4] “Police defend use of Tasers”, Knoxville News Sentinel, 4 December 2007

###

I contributed this article to the July issue of Modesto Anarcho.

Wi-Fi's Golden Promise and the Jackboot of the State

The Chicago Times reported last week that the city has linked up all the high school surveillance cameras into a network that feeds into the city's 911 headquarters, forming a network of 4500 cameras. Already, the city's transit cameras and some private business cameras have been similarly routed to police headquarters.

Here's the thing about this article: the real news isn't the cameras being linked up. That's scary enough if you care about freedom and privacy, but it's not the real interesting bit about this. The part to pay attention to is not the cameras streaming to the 911 center, but that they can now stream to cops in their patrol cars.

In an emergency, arriving officers also will be able to view real-time images from the cameras on screens in their squad cars.

'The key is getting the information to the police officer in that car," said Mayor Richard Daley.'

How is this accomplished? The article doesn't say, but if it's like other cities, I'll bet it's with Wi-fi.

The spread of wi-fi across city landscapes has vastly increased the ability of the police to project force in their war against the poor (which is what policing is). It allows them to deploy units strategically and with increasingly pinpoint precision, which of course also increases the ability of the ruling class to impose their version of order (exploitation, prison, povery, etc) on the rest of us. Meanwhile, we are fed the lie that wi-fi is a great boon to humanity. At worst, the detractors will say it is neutral. But is something that increases the power of the ruling class to stomp our faces into a bloody pulp "neutral"? I don't think so.

Of course, knowing this perhaps now you'll look at Tempe's much-hyped neighborhood wi-fi plan a little differently now. Tempe, as you all know, is at the forefront of municipal wi-fi. At the time it was, as such things always are, boosted as a convenience for the neighborhood and the downtown business set, while in fact it was a foundation for the coming police state. But you already knew this if you read my blog, because I warned about this in 2005. Of course, folks thought I was a crazy Luddite then...

Still, poor marketing may have bought us a little time here in Tempeasy: the roll-out of Tempe's wireless police state hasn't gone as smoothly as planned. Last month the Republic reported that both Tempe and neighboring Chandler's wi-fi projects have foundered thanks to poor marketing. At it's peak, Tempe's plan only pulled in 800 subscribers and currently it's being offered free to those who can manage to pick up a signal. If the company currently running the project pulls out, Tempe may takeover the network.

Now that things aren't turning out quite as planned, city bureaucrats are reassessing the progressive spin they put on municipal wi-fi. As reported in Computer World last month:

Dave Heck, the [Tempe's] CIO, remembers how municipal Wi-Fi advocates talked about wireless networks as shining beacons that would bring Internet connectivity to the masses. But that kind of optimism is nearly gone in Tempe, and the city's network is dead in the water.

On Dec. 28, Kite Networks Inc., a division of Gobility Inc. that had been operating the network in Tempe, cut off connections and pulled the plug on its customer service phone line and Web site. Heck said subscribers have been hounding city officials to restore the Wi-Fi service. But the city's leverage over Gobility is limited, he added.

"Obviously, the city never thought this would happen, or we would have never gotten into it," Heck said. "People are pointing fingers, with some citizens thinking [the city] had more involvement than we did. Nobody could have foreseen this."

With the failure of the business end comes doubt about the government projects as well. Last year, as an in kind substitution for rents Gobility offered the city free access for fire and police, but the project's rocky future may put the elite's short-term plan for increased policing power in jeopardy, although, knowing it's potential utility in the war against the poor and working class, they continue to defend the system.

In Philadelphia, which is experiencing a similar situation as Tempe, the project is defended in both policing terms and for the so-called progressive benefits it will bring to poor people (aside from the heavier foot of the police state, I assume). Craig Settles, the author of Fighting the Good Fight for Municipal Wireless, who has written about Philadelphia's wireless experience put it this way:

Mr. Settles insists wireless can help the Nutter administration attain its goals.

"It puts more police on the street," Mr. Settles stresses, "when they don't have to go back to the station to access data and write their reports. They can do mug shot six packs. They can obtain witness identification in the streets.

"When paramedics respond in Houston and Corpus Christi, they can bring up patient data and send data and photographs ahead to the emergency room. There is more effective medicine going on in the ambulance that way. They can coordinate their efforts so the emergency room can be a better responder and treatment can move more quickly.

Settles sounds a bit desperate as he pleads with us:

"You have to use the technology," Mr. Settles emphasizes. "The wireless technology gives you the ability to work ex-offenders through some sort of computer training program."

Mr. Settles is an unabashed cheerleader for Wireless Philadelphia and its mission to bridge the digital divide with low-cost computers and training for low-income households in Philadelphia.

"Some sort of computer training program?" Like prison, perhaps? What a joke.

Sure, we're told, this will help poor people, too, even as it polices them. Indeed, the real purpose of municipal wireless becomes apparent when we consider a recent article in Information Week. Aside from subsidizing gentrification and business, we're reminded by Firetide's company spokesman (the company responsible for the wi-fi project in Los Gatos, California) that, "It's free to residents wherever they can get a signal." But what else is free?

Late last month, Firetide reported that its wireless mesh system tied a video surveillance network of cameras to the West Palm Beach Police Department in Florida. Deployed in the toughest neighborhood in the 100,000-resident city, the network is aimed at helping deter gang activity, drug dealing, and prostitution. Mesh nodes are connected to Wi-Fi-enabled laptops in police cruisers.

West Palm Beach's police communications manager Michael Cambisios said the Firetide network enabled the police force to "reach into areas not accessible by fiber or cable, extending resources without increasing manpower."

There: you couldn't have it put more clearly. Wireless is what the army calls a "force multiplier" and it's bad news for the poor and working class who, we know, never get anything for free from the elite (except a prison cell or a military uniform, perhaps). When the elite begins holding out freebies to us, we had best think twice about the deal we're getting. Municipal wi-fi is a net loser for us, and we need to recognize it as such. When the uprising comes, don't forget to take out the wi-fi. It benefits them far more than it helps us.

Progress in Iraq: Mobile Death Labs Come to Iraq

So, weapons designer Anh Duong has developed a mobile lab (it's inflatable!) chock full of high tech identification gear, such as a retina scanning devices, computers and a satellite uplink to Washington, DC. She hopes to make more efficient the decision-making process that soldiers go through every day: "Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?" Those are her words.

While the deployment of mobile high tech death labs in Iraq (set for 2008), something we've actually seen recently in China as well, is truly a sad development for humanity, I think the interesting part about this article is the way this new technology is being praised by the elite media for the way it brings more specific death to Iraq. And in a very real sense, it's being pushed as a progressive development in war-fighting.

As Robert Parry reports for Consortium News (drawing on a previous Washington Post article on the subject):

Duong justified this biometric-data program as a humanitarian way of singling out “bad guys” for elimination while sparing innocent civilians.

"I don't want My Lai in Iraq," Duong said. "The biggest difficulty in the global war on terror – just like in Vietnam – is to know who the bad guys are. How do we make sure we don't kill innocents?"

Duong, a 47 year-old refugee from Vietnam, seems to have drawn all the wrong lessons from America's imperialist wars. Driven by some twisted sense of gratitude to the country that laid indiscriminate waste to hers, she claims the experience growing up in Saigon under the shadow of Viet Cong rockets drove her on a quest to develop means of killing that avoided the massacre of innocents she had seen in her youth.

Explains, Duong in the Washington Post piece:

"My life is payback: I'm indebted to the soldiers and to Americans," she said. "I was enraged when I found out how Hollywood portrayed my American heroes and my American friends as women- and children-killers. How dare they?" As a teenager, Duong went to see "The Deer Hunter." She walked out in the middle.

Duong is still angry, though no longer helpless. "I'm here because in Vietnam, we ran out of bullets. I don't want to ever be in that position again," she said. "By building bombs, the other guys realize they shouldn't mess with us. If you have a gun, I have a bazooka. If you have a grenade, guess what? I have a bomb."

Despite her explanation, becoming a bomb maker for the US government still seems like an odd conclusion to come to in those circumstances, but what strikes me perhaps even more is her complete lack of a critique of bureaucracy and data entry -- especially for a public servant! If she had ever worked punching numbers into computers for the US Post Office like I have, she might be a little less enthusiastic about the efficiency of her new mobile techno-death-marvel. Some tired teenage soldier, hopped up on amphetamines and barely able to read, accidentally enters a 5 instead of a 6 and all of a sudden you're lying in a pool of your own brains and blood. Progress indeed!

Of course, efficiency in killing isn't the only benefit the mass application of repressive technology in Iraq will bring to the Iraqi people. Mass incarceration, too, will soon come to Iraq (again), and US occupation forces are now planning to more than triple the number of Iraqis in detention facilities, in large part made possible thanks by the new technology.

In effect, the Bush administration is transforming Iraq into a test tube for modern techniques of repression, which already include use of night-vision optics on drone aircraft, heat resonance imaging, and firepower that is both deadly and precise.

The new techniques represent a modernization of tactics used in other counterinsurgencies, such as in Vietnam in the 1960s and in Central America in the 1980s.

In Vietnam, U.S. forces planted sensors along infiltration routes for targeting bombing runs against North Vietnamese troops. In Guatemala, security forces were equipped with early laptop computers for use in identifying suspected subversives who would be dragged off buses and summarily executed.

Now, modern technologies are updating these strategies for the 21st century’s “war on terror.”

The U.S. news media mostly has reacted to these developments with gee-whiz enthusiasm, like the Post story about Duong, which breezily depicts her complicated life as a devoted mom whose personal history as a Vietnamese refugee led her to a career developing sophisticated weapons for the U.S. government.

Truly frightening, but, nevertheless, we should pay attention because Iraq's present foreshadows our future if we don't do something about it now. These technologies will come home, if they haven't already. First in disaster areas and riots. Or perhaps first in malls and on street corners. Or maybe first at sporting events and in police cars.

And the story of the mobile death lab also presents a lesson we had best not ignore about the way technology is so often presented as progressive when in fact it merely further tightens the death grip of the elite class on society. We see this at home with the broad application of Tasers and surveillance cameras. Crime fighting will be more efficient and less bloody, we are told, but we never ask just who is being policed and why? Or how they might be different from those doing the policing.

After all, who are the bad guys Duong wants to kill anyway? Without getting into their specific politics, when you get right down to it aren't they really just folks standing in the way of the American elite's imperial project in Iraq? They're folks with the nerve to think that they, not some distant imperialist in a beltway think tank, might more deserving of making decisions about what goes on in their country. The good guys, on the other hand -- according to Duong's imperialist formulation -- are the ones who stand passively by or even support the destruction and dismantlement of their country for the benefit of a small elite in the US. Truly a reversal of logic.

Now, perhaps we do understand Duong's perspective. She was against those in Vietnam who resisted imperial domination and she's against them now in Iraq. In a bizarre case of Stockholm Syndrome, Duong has embraced the country that wanted so much to keep Vietnam within the imperial domain that it was willing to mercilessly kill 2 million of her countrymen and women, often in brutal massacres like My Lai, creating the chaotic conditions that set her and her family fleeing into the arms of the US military in 1975. Of course, it's worth remembering, since Duong is so focused on carrying out specific killings as a path towards so-called success in Iraq, that the US used quite discriminate murder in Vietnam as well, such as that organized through the infamous Phoenix Program of assassination, which murdered more than 80,000 Vietnamese quite specifically.

And yet, to her, in true imperialist fashion, it's the resisters that must be eradicated, not the oppressor. When resistance to foreign domination is eradicated in Iraq, apparently, freedom will finally ring for Iraqis. It's the imperial project of the far off overlord, the goals of which we dare not name in polite company, that is the all beautiful good, and the resistance of the dominated, who's goals we also obscure lest we sympathize, that is the ultimate evil.

Bullshit.

Despite all her hand wringing about finding a better way to sort out the bad guys from the good guys, hasn't Duong really just come full circle? Remember the old Vietnam era soldiers refrain, as reported to the Winter Soldiers investigation in 1971:

The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC, VC had weapons and civilians didn't and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone they said, "How do you know he's a VC?" and the general reply would be, "He's dead," and that was sufficient.

Vietnam. Washington. Iraq. Washington.
Some things never change.

Is the Internet killing the planet?

Over at BLDGBLOG earlier this week there was an interesting article on the environmental impact of servers. It's something most folks don't think about (and neither do IT people, apparently, since a huge majority of them expressed stunning ignorance of their industry's contribution to climate collapse).


The writer at BLDGBLOG cites a recent piece from the New Scientist that revealed, among other interesting facts, these tidbits:

"Computers are seen as quite benign things sitting on your desk," says Trewin Restorick, director of the group. "But, for instance, in our charity we have one server. That server has same carbon footprint as your average SUV doing 15 miles to the gallon. Yet, whereas the SUV is seen as a villain from the environmental perspective, the server is not."

The report, An Inefficient Truth states that with more than 1 billion computers on the planet, the global IT sector is responsible for about 2% of human carbon dioxide emissions each year – a similar figure to the global airline industry.

The energy consumption is driven largely by vast amounts of customer and user data that are stored on the computer servers in most businesses. The rate at which data storage is growing surpasses the growth in the airline industry: in 2006, 48% more data storage capacity was sold in the UK than in 2005, while the number of plane passengers grew by 3%.

This massive increase in storage capacity, demanded as it is by capitalism, the state -- and the technology itself -- is having disastrous effects on the planet, as we found out today (again!) with the release of yet more dismayingly catastrophic news about the environment. While we certainly can't lay the all the blame for the rapidly increasing onset of global warming at the feet of the tech industry, I still find it curious that we have had exponential growth in computer power (and the resulting computerization of everyday life) at the same time we have seen a major escalation in the pace of ecological collapse.

Ironically, thanks to technology we are able to record the facts of our own planetary demise with unprecedented accuracy at the very same time that the technological system is driving us off a cliff. As one NASA climate scientist, Jay Zwally, said, "The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coal mine for climate warming. Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coal mines." Zwally worked in coal mines as a kid, so maybe he's someone we should listen to. "The Arctic is screaming," said another scientist.

And the pace of neither seems about to slow any time soon. Recent Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for job growth in the computer industry certainly foretell a continuation of this trend with job growth in the industry centering in data handling specialties:

The report, released Dec. 4, said network systems and data communications professionals will make up the single fastest-growing occupation between 2006 and 2016. That category will grow by an estimated 53.4 percent, followed closely by computer software applications engineers, whose ranks are expected to rise 44.6 percent in that time span.

Strong growth also is projected in computer systems analysis, 29 percent; computer software engineering, 28 percent; database administration, 27 percent; and network and computer systems administrators, 27 percent.

The news is not as good for computer programmers and computer operators, who were among the occupations with the largest projected declines - 4.1 percent and 24.7 percent, respectively.

Environmental scientists increasingly point out that we are in a ecological feedback loop.

Melting of sea ice and Greenland's ice sheets also alarms scientists because they become part of a troubling spiral.

White sea ice reflects about 80 percent of the sun's heat off Earth, NASA's Zwally said. When there is no sea ice, about 90 percent of the heat goes into the ocean which then warms everything else up. Warmer oceans then lead to more melting.

Likewise, we are in a feedback loop with regard to information technology. As storage capacity increases, it creates more demand for data, which in turn requires more storage. Indeed, where would such ambitious projects like IBM's S3 surveillance system, soon to be deployed in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics (and in Manhattan), be without the massive storage permitted by modern computer systems and servers.

The S3 system, developed by IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, combines existing network and video surveillance infrastructure with state-of-the-art Information Technology, according to IDG News Service.

"Physical security and IT security are stating to come together," said Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM. "A lot of the guys I'm meeting on the IT side are just starting to get involved on the physical side."

When the S3 system is deployed in the Beijing Olympic Games, it will scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists. The S3 uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected.

It can be used to warn security guards when someone has entered a restricted area.

Perhaps now we can see a big reason why the US is projected to require a dozen new power plants just to keep up with the growth of the server industry into 2011. The exponential growth in data handling and storage is also an exponential growth in the power of the elite class. No longer content with police records and prisons to track its mortal enemy the poor, excluded and working classes, the elite have embarked on a massive expansion of their power under the guise of supposedly neutral technology. Lacking an analysis of the class power of technology and blinded by elite arguments about "connectivity" and "family and friends" calling plans, nearly everyone has missed this massive accumulation of power in the hands of a very small elite. And all made possible by computer technology.

But it's not just security applications, of course, that are sucking up energy and pumping CO2 into the air. Indeed, we have the capitalists who perhaps are most enthusiastic about the coming Age of Omniscient Capitalism. The tech vanguard of Google and Facebook have both made headlines recently for their perhaps overzealous (for now) attempts to accumulate and harness the vast amounts of data that circulate on the internet about each of us. Not aberrations, as some liberals and libertarians might claim, these stockpiles of information are the direct result of the technology itself.

Indeed, one shocking innovation the personal computer has brought to us all is a massive increase in our ability to suck up not just data but actual resources. The globalization and consumerism we all now take for granted (whether we like it or not) is a direct result of computerization. Likewise, the growth of the Internet has opened opportunities for virtual accumulation that has increased the cost to the real world, not least in terms of ecological destruction.

Over at Rough Type there was an interesting analysis of the energy consumption of avatars in popular social networking world of Second Life. Crunching some numbers reveals that an avatar -- a virtual, often quite wishful thinking version of a real participant -- consumes more energy as an actual person in most Third World countries. In fact, one avatar uses as much power as a real Brazilian.

The vast amount of data and the demands to transmit that data (and the energy necessary to do it) that are required as part and parcel of the Internet and operations like Second Life seem to offer proof that we can take the effects of the technology on our environment as a direct result of the technology itself, not an exception to the rule. In that case, isn't it fair to ask the question: is the Internet killing the planet?

According to BLDGBLOG, the answer would seem to be maybe, but it doesn't have to be that way. S/he situates the locus of the archival instinct in ourselves, not in the technology, although s/he questions its utility in the long run. Thus, s/he thinks we could perhaps just record less data and thus avoid our dismal fate. However, in the process, s/he asks some great questions.

However, couldn't we also just store less information, save two or three – or four – hundred fewer emails, stop being mouse potatoes and go outside for a walk, leaving our servers turned off in the darkness?

Sure – or we could build our server farms in Iceland, where geothermal and hydroelectric power is easy enough to find.

In any case, I can't help but wonder if the ecological effects of this archival instinct to preserve the past at any cost – whether we store something inside air conditioned warehouses full of books that no one wants, or in the well-lit galleries of potentially unnecessary new museums, or even out on server farms somewhere in the rainy hills of Oregon – are really worth it.

And I can't help but suggest that they're not – even if that means I'll no longer have a place to save BLDGBLOG.

But we are making the earth unearthly, through the knock-on effects of global climate change, in order that we might hold onto the human past for another generation – reading old books, preserving films, saving emails.

So is the anthropological project of preserving ourselves really worth its environmental effects?

Are we saying that the planet may soon become unrecognizable, even uninhabitable, because of runaway climate change, and yet at least it'll have lots of really great archives...?

Is this the long-term historical irony of humanism – with its museums and libraries, its institutionalized nostalgia – that all these air conditioned warehouses and rural server farms don't represent the indefinite continuation of the humanist project but, rather, that project's future ecological demise?

Interesting, but there is a cost inherent in the technological mode of data storage that is not similarly built into other methods, not least of which, from the perspective of the elite class, is the ability to access it on a whim -- to cross reference it and to track and modify it according to new information. Similarly, whatever the cost to the environment of making the books and warehouse in the first place, a warehouse full of books does not need to be replaced every few years to keep up with the pace of data storage and transmission.

As we continue to speed towards the Age of Omniscient Capitalism, propelled as it is by two main forces, the elite's desire for control and the technology's capacity for storage and transmission, we will increasingly find ourselves facing the answer to this question. Can we divorce our increasingly critical ecological situation, not to mention the ever more tenuous state of what the liberals and libertarians wistfully lament as our "lost civil liberties," from the technology that delivered it to us?


***UPDATE***

Speaking of massive stockpiles of data, consider this Wired article on DARPA's plan to record, store and analyze everything we do, from emails to what you read to where you go to grab breakfast.

"The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable."

Of course, while they'll certainly assure us that it's for our own good, you have to wonder: could that amount of data be used for anything OTHER than nefarious ends?

Read it:
A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams

Technological end run leads to re-runs.

I generally support striking workers, and I'm quite sympathetic to the position of the writers on this one, especially since this appears yet again to be a case of the elite using technology to upend workers power on the job not least by attempting to cut workers out of the profit they are due by redefining the means of distribution. In essence, these new technologies have been applied as a means to do an end run around writers' traditional relationships to production.

And not for the first time. Part of the reason that writers are out this time is precisely because they feel like the transition to cable and VHS both undermined their power to challenge the boss about the distribution of the profits from their labor. In essence when the bosses brought in those new technologies, they transferred power from writers' hands into their own, and billions of dollars along with it. Writers vow not to be fooled again.

Typical of a ruling class that likes to obscure the political-economic content behind a news story, the media has treated the transition to new technologies not as an attack on workers power, but as a natural phenomenon, generally referred to in the passive voice. For instance, when they remind us that "technology revolutionizes the way entertainment is delivered." Or when, as the International Herald Tribune reports it:

The strike would pit union writers, whose position has been eroded by reality television and galloping technological change, against studios and networks that are backed by big corporate owners like General Electric and News Corp., but are also unsure of the future.

As if technology is a force that drives itself, independent of the will of the elites that fund it, develop it, distribute it and apply it. Can we really say that the "big corporate owners like General Electric" would have invested billions in new technology if it would have empowered their workers interests over theirs? Even in the IHT article, while some class analysis seeps in, the fundamental myth of neutral or naturally progressing technology is maintained. But without understanding the class nature of technology, we cannot understand the writers' strike.

Nevertheless, I do have to express some solidarity with the caller to NPR the other day who asked if the writers will start writing better quality shows when they return. That would be nice. It does feel weird supporting a striking worker who writes for Touched By An Angel. It's kind of how I feel when I hear that defense industry workers have walked out. If they're just going to go back to doing what they were doing before the strike then I have to wonder which side I'm really on this time. After all, if TV stayed in reruns, maybe less people would watch it.

Although, of course, while technology is a ruling class weapon, we are sometimes able to use it to some small benefit towards our own ends. This exception doesn't invalidate the rule, however. On that note, enjoy this short bit produced on the picket line by striking Daily Show writers.

If technology is so great, then where are all the E.T.'s?

This may not seem like the kind of question you would expect discussed here at Phoenix Insurgent, but bear with me for a moment. Why is it that despite the self-confident promises of the techno-philiac transhumanists, the constant reassuring of better things to come from our technology-loving elite and their scientist cadres, not to mention the treated-as-inevitable prognostications of the wizened researchers and science fiction writers alike -- why is it that despite all this so-called common sense about the benevolent and promising nature of technology we don't see any evidence of other high technology or space-faring civilizations anywhere in the universe?

This might be a just a thought experiment, but it sure does make you wonder doesn't it? I mean, the universe has had somewhere on the order of nearly 14 billion years to produce all the millions of space shuttling races that we see portrayed in our science fiction classics. Certainly the universe, given the myth of technology, must at least be populated with hundreds of iPod wearing slime, gas, carbon or silicon-cased creatures by now. Yet where are they? In all the years we've been listening to the skies, we haven't detected so much as a stray podcast from them.

Isn't this a bit surprising? After all, doesn't the ideology of technology as we are force fed it from day one in this society instill in us a religious-like faith in progress as manifested through our many microchips and machines? Like Jesus returning to pluck us from our Earthly hell and deliver us to paradise, we all take for granted that humanity will someday get its planetary shit together and, thanks to its technology, head off-world towards the heavens and paradise, where we'll all somehow finally manage to build an egalitarian world of mono-color jumpsuits and prime directives (and all without ever having to overthrow the bloody capitalists and politicians that have kept us from doing so up to that point - if that doesn't reveal this faith in technology as a tool of the elite than I don't know what does!). Yet despite scientists' allegedly strictly adhered to method of evidence-based research, we are left to assume that the very same science and technology which, so far, has yet to solve even the most basic problems of distribution of wealth and power, and both of which in fact adhere themselves quite willingly to existing power structures like the military and the university-corporate system, will somehow develop a heretofore undiscovered mechanism for solving all our problems in an egalitarian way - all while ceasing to cause new problems and eschewing the accountability of all except their capitalist and government masters. In other words, we're supposed to ignore all the evidence to the contrary and trust the scientists that it'll all come out all right in the end, even though there is no process for ensuring it will do so. In fact quite the opposite.

So, if it's so true (and ignoring Dennis Kucinich's midnight close encounters), how do we explain the strange absence of our celestial brothers? Said another way, where is ET?

Well, let's set aside for a moment whether there could even be something called an egalitarian technological society and consider instead what other forces might conspire to keep the universe barren of galactic civilizations and what that might mean for us. Indeed, some may be familiar with the Drake Equation, which Dr. Frank Drake developed in 1960 in an attempt to figure out just what was the likelihood of the universe spawning intelligent life that could reach out to the stars. It attempted to get a handle on a variety of variables, some quite mundane like how many stars will have planets that could support life and how many civilizations will develop the technology to communicate with us (so we can become aware of them). Interesting stuff, for sure. Alluded to, but not spoken outright, however, is perhaps the most important part of the equation: how many technological civilizations actually survive technological civilization itself? The equation doesn't get too specific on that point, opting to couch things in general terms: "L is the length of time such civilizations release detectable signals into space." In other words, how long a civilization can avoid destroying itself (or, less likely, I suppose, dodge comet impacts). That such formulations are left to euphemism and the abstract says a lot about the miasma of self-denial afflicting scientists living in the midst of the Cold War and under the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation at the hands of, well, scientists (who created the bombs to begin with, of course). Such investigations are at their heart, speculation, for sure. However, as the equation suggests, there are some knowables, and they may more broad-ranging in scope than mere atomic destruction or a meteor impact.

For instance, recent news suggests that it's not just the bullet of nuclear holocaust that we must dodge if we are to make it to the stars. Technological existence has slower but no less lethal weapons in its arsenal, too. Consider the UN's recent report on climate change, which frames itself as a last warning to humanity else we face the catastrophic collision of total ecological collapse and the steadily building crisis of over-population. As reported in the International Herald Tribune recently,

The human population is living far beyond its means and inflicting damage on the environment that could pass points of no return, according to a major report issued Thursday by the United Nations.

Climate change, the rate of extinction of species and the challenge of feeding a growing population are among the threats putting humanity at risk, the UN Environment Program said in its fourth Global Environmental Outlook since 1997.

"The human population is now so large that the amount of resources needed to sustain it exceeds what is available at current consumption patterns," Achim Steiner, the executive director of the program, said in a telephone interview. Efficient use of resources and reducing waste now are "among the greatest challenges at the beginning of 21st century," he said.

What if all civilizations faced similar inevitable crises, not despite but precisely because of their technological nature. Consider that experts have increasingly been forecasting disastrous wars over shrinking access to resources in our near future (perhaps, some contend, we are already witnessing such conflicts in Darfur and the Middle East). Indeed, a recent military think tank report suggests an increasingly willingness of reactionary elements to take these threats seriously and are already preparing for the war of the technological world against the planet of slums. Seen Children of Men? That's one vision of what we could be facing.



Then, of course, we have peak oil, which is also in the news today, as several oil-producing regimes (perhaps not to be trusted) have declared that they cannot guarantee increased production as global supplies shrink and demand rises. Likewise, China announced this week that it will reach peak oil production by 2015. Throw in increasingly virulent diseases or mutated old ones, and you have a good idea of the kind of dangers that technological society creates for itself, ironically limiting its own ability to make good on its promises and deliver us safely into the celestial bosom.

Quite impressive, really, when you consider that of 100,000 years of human history, industrialism has only really been at it in a serious way for a hundred or so. And there remain large sections of the planet's population and land that are not yet incorporated into the industrial system of production! Just wait until the entire planet is under industrial domination - if we ever get there. What would that success mean for our survivability?

All this talk is a round-about way of pointing you to Dr. Michael Byron's quite interesting recent article entitled Peak Oil and the Fermi Paradox. In it, Byron explores these very factors as they relate to the Drake equation and the likelihood of there existing any ETs out there at all. He asks,

If other civilizations exist, then it would seem reasonable that at least some would be more advanced than ours, and would presumably be able to travel to nearby star systems. After a few millions of years they ought to have colonized the entire Milky Way Galaxy. Radio astronomers have been searching ever since Frank Drake undertook the first scientific search for extraterrestrial civilizations with Project Ozma back in 1960. Yet there is no sign of extraterrestrial civilization anywhere in our galaxy. The silence across the galaxy has been deafening. So where are they?!

To which he responds that perhaps the conditions necessary for a civilization to reach interstellar heights are rare indeed - and self-limiting. Maybe developing a galactic civilization is more of a window of opportunity, not a guarantee that comes merely from avoiding immediate self-destruction. Perhaps, he wonders, in our case we had our chance to escape our Earthly bondage and have now let it slip by, distracted as we were by the Cold War and other misadventures.

The bottom line is clear: our civilization could have expanded off planet and established itself among the moons, asteroids, and in the case of Mars, even planets of our solar system. Except that we didn’t. Instead we had the Cold War, we had the Vietnam War, while Soviet Russia had its Afghan War, etc. In just the past half decade, a fraction of the monies that will ultimately be squandered on the futile Iraq war (trillions of dollars) could have, if directed by a pragmatic visionary such as Robert Zubrin, bootstrapped our species out into the solar system.

Without our realizing it, the window of opportunity for humans to expand into our solar system is rapidly closing. With all of the multiple crises which are bearing down upon our civilization—peak oil, climate change, capture of our government and our economy by rapacious, undemocratic corporate elites, etc., I do not believe that we will (pun intended) rise to the occasion.

Across our galaxy this story has likely played out multiple times during the last two billion years or so in which intelligent life might plausibly have evolved. The core problem is that the window of opportunity for solar system expansion is so very brief, that of the small number of planetary civilizations which have probably emerged in our galaxy thus far in its history, none have succeeded in taking advantage of it before the window slammed shut forever.

Interesting indeed.

Of course, I would hasten to add that in all likelihood, even a society that would successfully navigate through this window of opportunity to the stars would suffer the great tragedy of creating a civilization overwhelmed by high technology to such an extent that, if it did support human life, it would be highly unlikely to support freedom in any form that we would find recognizable. After all, as I pointed out above, the assumption that a high tech society that made it to space would be a free one is just that - an assumption. And one that flies in the face of the available evidence at that. Further, who's to say that we wouldn't just do to the universe what we have done to the Earth. As Byron puts it:

At a deeper level I have come to the conclusion that perhaps even the vast resources of our solar system are themselves ultimately limited. If a solar system wide civilization were to emerge, it would likely grow to a population of hundreds of billions. If such a civilization were to merely be an expanded version of our present day civilization, it seems likely that we would just end up consuming or destroying utterly irreplaceable resources on not just a planetary scale, but rather upon a solar system wide scale. This is not good as these resources could be put to effective use by a more culturally evolved civilization—unless they had already been senselessly trashed by cultural primitives such as ourselves.

In that case, then, perhaps it's better that we missed the window.

Technology in the active voice.

I recently became aware of a very good anarchist journal out of Britain called Voices of Resistance from Occupied London. In it they cover a wide range of topics and their first issue has a lot of interesting stuff in it. In this issue, there's a great interview with the always interesting Mike Davis about surveillance and security in the modern city. To the question, "Why aren't cameras being vandalised in London?" he responds:

That would be one of my questions too. I think that we need to propagandise and fight for the idea of a universal insurrection against surveillance state, against the erosion of civil liberties. We need to encourage people and find every way possible in which to resist, subvert and destroy the apparatus of surveillance and control. Of course, millions of teenagers do that anyway. Kevin Lynch wrote a book on vandalism; he was very interested in vandalism as an urban process, in spontaneous vandalism of all sorts. He studied it in the seventies, partially to understand how architects could combat it and partially because he was interested in its logic. He thought that anything that involved people and the built environment, including destroying it, was a good thing. If you wanted to generate a theory of participatory architecture or urbanism, vandalism seemed to be the most common and popular form of participating in the built environment by revolting against its dehumanisation, in working class council estates in American inner cities and so on.

I think we need a strategy to support each other; we should vandalise and subvert the surveillance state and the middle class that supports it. Tearing down the armed response signs from peoples' lawns freaks them out... Not that the armed response is real or reliable, but people get immense reassurance from having the sign there. If you remove it they think that all forces might mobilise against them and that they might get killed the next day. I started off vandalising lawn jockeys - these are a phenomenon of American segregation and racism. They are black jockey figures put in the lawn like the pink flamingos they put there. They are popular amongst people who are nostalgic of the old racial order, when all blacks were servants or slaves. When I went back to L.A. in the late eighties I discovered that there were quite a few of these around houses in Beverly Hills. It is something to which all the creative energy of youth needs to be applied: to find ways in which to fight back and subvert the surveillance society.

Surveillance is on the way to ubiquity as the system - and as Davis smartly points out, it's citizens - strive for the total abolition of all unregulated space. All space must be watched, goes the new ethic. Further, spaces that are not watched are considered dangerous and threatening, and not only by the State. Just look at an ad for cell phone GPS! We are all encouraged and encourage each other to voluntarily participate in these systems of surveillance, forgetting the power they have to control and regulate our behavior. Properly viewed, these technologies are not conveniences, they are interventions by the rich and powerful into our lives.

Take the case of John Halpin, now threatened with termination from his job because his employers offered him a work cell phone with the hidden objective of tracking his movements. Having used the GPS system inside to establish John's tendency to skip out of work early, an administrative trial judge recommended firing the 21-year veteran.

But here's the problem. Halpin wanted the phone. Not every worker who was offered one took them - although the secret purpose of the new phones was not revealed to anyone. So, why did he take the phone?

Some workers refused the free-phone offer, saying they preferred to use their own cells.

Richard said the unsuspecting Halpin "admitted he took the phone because he liked the walkie-talkie and other functions it has."

She dismissed concerns about whether the city had to warn Halpin in advance of the cellphone's tracking abilities.

"The department [of Education] is not expected to notify its employees of all the methods it may possibly use to uncover their misconduct," Richard decided.

"The undisputed intent of issuing the cellphone with GPS was for the department to be able to determine the whereabouts of its supervisors in the field."

In this case, Halpin had the choice whether to participate and he opted to take the phone without considering its potential for subverting his attempt to reclaim from his bosses some time from work. That's probably because, as hinted at above, he never considered that the tech would be used that way.

And why would he, after all? This society has adopted a technology that has huge implications for how we organize our lives - and how the boss and other authorities will try to organize them for us - without considering the implications. There never was a discussion about these technologies and whether we would use them. Again, we can ask why, and the answer is that we have been sold a political line that technology is neutral when in fact it is a weapon in the hand of a ruling class that seeks to control, manage and remake us so that they can maintain and expand their wealth. Because we believe the lie, we don't question when technology changes our lives. And, cleverly obscuring their power behind technology, the elite escape any blame for the dislocations technology causes to our lives. Technology's affect on our lives is discussed only in the passive voice: it's "change". What a tremendous coup for the elite!

But such technologies are not always imposed voluntarily, of course. If we don't voluntarily take them, the ruling class has no objection to forcing them on us. Take the case of Falluja which, in order that the imperialists could impose their will on the rebellious city (what is generally euphemistically referred to in the media as "succeeding in Iraq"), has been turned into the poster-child for biometric security.

The Marines have walled off Fallujah, and closed the city’s roads to traffic. The only way in is to have a badge. And the only way to get a badge is to have Marines snap your picture, scan your irises, and take all ten of your fingerprints. Only then can you get into the city.

The idea: deny insurgents “freedom of movement,” says Lieutenant Colonel Jeff Smitherman, who heads the biometric badging program for Multi-National Forces-West, here in Al-Anbar province. “Like Mao said, insurgents are like fish swimming in the sea of the people.” These are the high-tech nets, “to keep ‘em from swimming freely.”

There are still plenty of holes in the nets. The biometric systems don’t all talk to one another. Nor do they interface, really, with the other fingerprint- and iris-tracking systems used in other parts of Iraq. Getting the machines to work far, far out in the field can give a Marine migraines. (And, for today, let's not even get into the privacy and human-rights implications.) But, in combination with other measures, the badges do seem to be having an effect. After years of bombs and machine gun fire, the city of Fallujah has suddenly gone quiet.

Let's read that last part again so we don't miss it: "After years of bombs and machine gun fire, the city of Fallujah has suddenly gone quiet." This is the true objective of the ruling class with regards to the rest of the planet's people. Pacification. And their project now more than ever depends on the application and spread of technology, sold to us as neutral or even progressive, but with the sinister intent of controlling us and rendering us unable to resist them or to organize our own lives as we see fit.

And of course they sell it as a boon to human society. That's how they sell wars, strike breaking, police and prisons, too. Increasingly, technology is the ideology of the ruling class. And, as anarchists do with wars, strike breaking, police and prisons, we would be well-served to approach technology, too, with a deeply critical eye.

Taxi drivers strike against techno-tracking!

Congratulations to the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA) today for going out on strike against the installation of GPS in their vehicles, despite opposition from the city and even rival taxi organizations, some of whom have been actively intervening against the NYTWA with leafletting and other tactics, including deploying "dozens of volunteers to taxi stands at the city's airports and the main rail terminal asking drivers not to join the stoppage.". Workers cite several reasons for their strike today, which is taking place in the middle of fashion week and the US Open:

The Taxi Workers Alliance opposes the installation of high-tech touch-screen video systems that will allow passengers to watch television, make credit-card payments and — using a global-positioning device that tracks the cab — follow their ride on an electronic map.

Some drivers have said that the global-positioning devices and the automated trip recording system are an invasion of privacy, and that the use of credit cards would diminish drivers’ incomes, given the card transaction fees.

They also say they will take in less money because the system requires drivers to log on before each fare, and they object to the television noise and the heat from the monitors.

"If they're going to tell us that our voices should be silent, well then, we're going to make our engines silent," said NYTWA President, Bhairavi Desai, a history and women's studies graduate from Rutgers University who has worked hard to unite Pakistani and Indian drivers, culminating until now most notably in the one day strike of 1998.

Her declaration reminds me of a similar action by Somali taxi drivers here in Phoenix a few years ago, where drivers blocked the street in front of city hall and abandoned their cabs, keys locked safely inside. I'll never forget how great it felt to be there. What a wonderful sight to behold. Desai has declared the work stoppage "a resounding success". In an insightful comparison, she has called the GPS system "electronic anklets," a clear reference to the tracking systems increasingly used on felons and other criminals.

But, in the age of the unending War on Terror, there was a racial and religious element to the city's plan to track drivers, who are predominantly foreign and very often Muslim. Citing one flier being distributed, the Times reported:

“This is where deep racial, ethnic and religious prejudices and biases come into play,” it read. “DNA samples are obtained, scrutinised and archived. Personal and family histories are scoured for evidence of ethnic and religious fervor. Clearly, surveillance technology can be a death sentence once you are in its crosshairs.” Syed Hossain, a Bangladeshi driver, said the main problem was that cabbies feared losing money. “Number one problem is, many drivers do not report their earnings to the Internal Revenue Service,” he said. “Number two is that [the authorities] are going to be behind you all the time.”

And, of course, the drivers will have to pay for the privilege. The NYTWA estimates that the new technology will cost its members, predominantly contract drivers and thus the most precarious of the taxi fleet, an additional $1000 dollars a year and could cause them to lose fares.


He said that drivers were worried that satellite tracking technology would lead to automatic tickets if they were speeding and fines if they exceeded the 12-hour maximum shift.

The city and officials from the New York State Federation of Taxi Drivers (NYSFTD), both of which oppose the strike, cite convenience and even higher tips as reasons that drivers ought to accept this technological assault on their autonomy and power. Speaking for the NYSFTD, it's president, Fernando Mateo, denounced what he called the "radicals" of the NYTWA and took the side of the city and garage owners (the latter hopes to charge higher fees to contractor drivers and reign in its workforce).

But Mr. Mateo said that credit card capability would enable yellow-cab drivers “to keep cash customers but add on the corporate business that they lost” to livery cars that handle corporate accounts. He added that the larger credit-card fares and bigger tips “will more than compensate for the cost of the card transaction fee.”

To which, one striking driver who already has the system installed replied, "If the credit card system does not work, then we don't get paid. I have lost whole fares." At the same time, Mateo revealed his own difficult position by hoping that the city didn't call on these higher end drivers to compete with his scabs.

The city has placed police at taxi stops so as to protect workers advocating against the strike (i.e., to support the strike breakers), as well as beefing up public transportation. It will be a tough fight, as the subway strike showed a couple years ago. One article summed it up this way:

Professor Hodges said he believed that a large number of drivers would join the walkout. “I think what you’re going to see tomorrow is that the owner-drivers will turn out to work: the Lomto people and the people who own their own medallions,” he said, referring to the League of Mutual Taxi Owners, an association of individual owner-drivers. He spoke admiringly of Bhairavi Desai, the longtime activist who runs the Taxi Workers Alliance, saying: “I think she’s going to be able to put a substantial dent in turnout. She has real credibility.”

Professor Hodges, saying that he believed many drivers had a legitimate grievance, added: “This is a conditions issue: Under what conditions do I want to work? Do I want to have the thing behind me which is tracking me and which can cause me a lot of grief if it breaks down?”

But Professor Hodges also said that public attitudes toward cabdrivers may have hardened since the years of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani’s administration, when City Hall took a particularly tough stance toward drivers. Most of the drivers are immigrants from Asia, Africa and the Middle East; South Asians make up the most sizable area of origin.

“One thing I’m worried about is how sympathetic New Yorkers will be,” Professor Hodges said. “There is a more conservative population within Manhattan now. Class boundaries have widened. And New York is not quite the union town it was in the past.”

Certainly, the workers are facing an uphill battle, not least of which with their fellow workers, who are fractured along ethnic and other lines. As the professor points out, the industry in New York has changed a lot over the last 20 years. Precarity has been imposed on drivers, with the explosion of contract driving and the concomitant reduction in wages and benefits. The contract drivers increasingly suffer the bosses' externalization of the costs of driving like gas, insurance, leases and various garage fees.

From a technology perspective, this battle has several facets to it. Strategically, defending the workers' freedom from being tracked is vital both now and for the future. Right now, refusing the new technology maintains the worker's autonomy on the job. But, when the next strike comes, it also makes it harder for the boss to defend against a strike. You can be certain that, just like the automated checkout lanes that grocery bosses have embraced so enthusiastically following the strikes in California a few years back, the new GPS systems will certainly be used against striking workers to more efficiently utilize scab labor to undermine any future labor actions. That alone makes this fight vitally important. On a side note, refusing the GPS technology (and the credit card) also protects to some extent the privacy of riders, which is vital to a free society.

Beyond that, the credit card technology is without doubt an attack on the worker's control of her wage. While the billionaire mayor of New York may assure workers that their tips will go up with the new tech, what we can surely expect is that their fares will be more regulated. And that will limit the power of workers to determine their own pay when it comes time to reckon with the garage bosses. There's nothing wrong with a little dishonesty when it comes time to pay the boss his pound of flesh. As with the computerized cashout systems that more and more servers have to contend with in restaurants these days, this new system will limit a driver's ability to pocket cash and hand out freebies. And as the flier above pointed out, it will also increase the power of the government to regulate and tax drivers' incomes. You can see why the boss and the government want it so much.

Also, as several workers have pointed out in articles, the technology is unreliable. Unfortunately, this is a bad argument to make, because it only propels the capitalists' engineers to make the technology more efficient. And, as mentioned above, the credit card tech undermines the freedom of riders as well.

In support of the taxi drivers strike, I have linked below three previous articles I wrote on GPS and workers struggles, the last of which references another workers struggle in New York that recently resisted the imposition of the boss' will as imposed through technology. I sympathize greatly with the taxi drivers' struggle, being in essentially the same industry myself. The fight against technology is the class war!

(1) GPS and the attack on worker autonomy and unregulated space


(2) The anatomy of a typical article on GPS

(3) One union wakes up to the threat of technology at work

School's in forever: tracking schoolkids through their uniforms

Reading the news that one of the largest manufacturers of school uniforms in Britain is considering sewing GPS tracking devices into the clothes schoolkids are compelled to wear, just so parents can follow their kids to and from school, I can't help but notice a few things.

Of course, this isn't the first time that GPS has been sold to scared parents as a panacea to their poorly-justified fears. In this newest case, fearful parents can log into a secure website and watch their precious little ones skip about from home to school. But in Japan, for instance, GPS tagged school jackets with "panic buttons" that summon security services have been around for a couple years. In ads for car and cell phone services, GPS is routinely sold to us as protecting us from the alleged dangers of unregulated space - the places where the State and Capital have yet to institute their dream of total surveillance. Going off the map is dangerous, we are told, a sin against the new religion of techno-surveillance. After all, the system wants to track you and everything you produce - including your kids.

Still, I am struck by the way the polling numbers reveal how disproportionately terrified parents are of their children getting kidnapped, even though the odds of that actually happening are quite negligible. Polling cited in most the articles I read about the GPS-tegged uniforms "found 44 per cent of the adults were worried about the safety of their children and 59 per cent would be interested in uniforms with satellite tracking systems." And all this in Britain, the most spied-on country in the world! Clearly technology hasn't alleviated parents' anxieties. Of course, technology's promise is always for tomorrow.

This terrified attitude, propelled as it is by the police and the media's obsession with hyping kidnappings and other crimes against children - especially when they happen to white middle and upper class families - certainly reminds me of the goal of the secret NATO Gladio program in Europe, which I have been researching the last year or so. While it's highly unlikely that government or paramilitary organizations are at all involved in what the media reports as a rash of child abductions, the similarities in the result cannot be overlooked, and the benefits that accrue to the security services and the elite by the continuation of such crimes are obvious.

Considering one terrible episode from the past, under NATO's Gladio program government secret services employed criminal gangs and right-wing organizations to commit random public murders in Belgian supermarkets under the theory that a terrified population would demand for the State to be empowered to protect them by expanding police powers. Of course, this was also the objective behind the security services' interventions into the European armed ultra-left, such as the Red Brigades, as well as their employment of false flag terrorism in Italy (which included the bombing of trains and other public places).

Of course, the system also generates its own independent thugs, criminals and pranksters, which it is quite happy to publicize. But playing both sides, as we see with the arrest today of former Red Brigades member, Marina Petrella, also suits the State quite well. Stoking fear sends people running to the State for help, and that's certainly what we have seen result from the current climate of fear, regardless of its source.

Returning to GPS, I notice that in addition to being boosted as "a safety net for parents" supporters of the technology also point out that "there could be real benefits for schools who could keep a closer track on the whereabouts of their pupils, potentially reducing truancy levels." In other words, the technology can be utilized to attack the autonomy of children at school, who often use ditching and other schemes to get out of the prison that is modern, industrialized schooling and carve out space for their own lives and interests against the wishes of the school autocrats, bureaucrats and babysitters.

It's never explained this way in the mainstream despite the painful obviousness of the point, but forcing kids into public school is a way to dumb them down, to bore them, to regulate them and to make them compliant, unthinking drones. And, of course, getting kids used to being tracked young makes sense if you're an elite class that wants to track everyone. After all, indoctrinating children into the various systems of control is what schooling has always been about.

This is a tragedy for anyone, but while we tend to think of the less-academically inclined children when we think of "dumb" stoners, dropouts and ditchers, it's important to realize that plenty of so-called "smart" kids are forced into this system, too, and they are just as beaten down by it. Their options are limited, too, since the system is just as interested in controlling their choices as it is the kids it puts on the track to a trade or prison. So, using technology to herd kids of all skill levels, aptitudes and interests into the one-track, cookie-cutter school system hurts all the kids who resist and could do better - or who might become independent thinkers - outside the fences. And it turns out that that's a lot of them.

Finally, I can't help but notice the discrepancy between the desire of parents, capitalists and bureaucrats to tag the kids and the willingness of the kids themselves to be tagged. As the Telegraph reports:

[C]hildren rejected the idea of any tracking technology.

The firm interviewed 450 children aged nine to 16 and found that just a third of those under 12 were keen on the move.

It was even more unpopular among older schoolchildren.

No surprise there. Sadly, as was the case with some other former prisoners, namely the 210 paroled burglars that Connecticut plans to track via GPS (remember when it was just going to be murderers and child molesters the government wanted to track?), the system is not terribly interested in what the kids think of the plan to track them, nor is there a formalized mechanism for them to express their opposition. In fact, techno-boosters cite the statistics as proof for their business model. Trutex marketing director, Clare Rix, expressed her disdain for the opinions of students this way: "As a direct result of this survey, we are now seriously considering incorporating a device into future ranges."

But the data does show that the kids, aside from exhibiting a natural tendency towards anti-authoritarianism, surely also understand the importance of maintaining their autonomy from a system that most recognize as operating, to put it most generously, without their best interests at heart. But there's hope. In a sense this lack of a formalized structure for taking students opinions into account is a good thing, because it will leave students to come up with their own forms of creative resistance, probably centering around sabotage and refusal. Any struggle against these technologies of control that results will necessarily have to be centered on modes of organization that the youth themselves will control. Nevertheless, the extension of this technology to students would be another defeat for autonomy.

Still, one article I read, surprisingly coming from an English-language publication in Dubai, expresses the best analysis I have yet seen on the GPS controversy (and perhaps we should be thankful that for now it indeed remains controversial). Citing the alienating effects of technology, the need for youth to have freedom - even freedom to rebel - as well as casting a doubtful eye on the ability of technology to fix the problems it has created, the piece expresses a sound critique of the fate to befall students and the rest of society should they fail to resist.

The internet, and global communications nowadays, has made it easier than ever for parents to be extra-anxious about the safety of their kids. News reports of kidnappings and the continuous coverage of the recent abduction of Madeline McCann has left many parents eagerly embracing the idea of tagging their kids with technology. However, many children, especially those in their teens, are less than enthusiastic about the idea, fearing it would mean that their parents could spy on them.

One 13-year old Dubai school-goer told 7DAYS, “I reckon my parents would have some peace of mind with this device, but I wouldn't really like it 'cause I'd feel like I'd be under surveillance. I don't need a baby-sitter, so why would I need this.”

Rajeshree Singhania, a child psychologist at the Singhania Children's Clinic at Healthcare City is in two minds about tagging a child's movements by satellite. She says that parents today have a heightened sense of anxiety when it comes to their kids, but she doesn't know if tracking them is the answer for all kids.

“I understand the worry parents have about their kids. Perhaps this idea would be suitable for younger children, but for teens it is simply an invasion of privacy. I know that my kids would rebel if I asked them to wear a tracking device,” says Singhania. “I can see certain situations where it might be suitable, like for a single parent. If a single parent had to work, they might be more relaxed if they could check and see if their child got home safely from school etc.”

Growing up, all children are prone to slight rebellion and adventure, which doesn't involve their parents’ permission. If this freedom to be 'free' is taken away from them, because they have to wear a tracking device, how will it affect their personality and development?

“Knowing that you are being constantly observed and that your every movement can be checked on is bound to affect a child's personal development, because their ability to take risks is going to reduce. A child will develop anxiety to the world they live in and see it as a big-bad-world and this is not healthy,” says Singhania.

Perhaps rather than equipping children with state-of-the-art technology, we should be encouraging the idea of community, says Singhania. “In this high-tech world we tend to forget about the human factor. What we need these days is more community-type living, where people look out for other people. Here, community is nearly non-existent. How many people say 'hello' to each other? How many of your neighbours do you know?” she adds.

It concludes on a stark note indeed, issuing a clear warning: "How long before satellite tracking comes here then - it’s time to be afraid Dubai kids..."

A choice: high technology or freedom.

A case in point: China, where the government is going to blanket the city of Shenzhen (with more than 12 million residents) with a network of linked up surveillance cameras and force almost every resident to carry a computer-chipped id card that carries their work, health, residency status and criminal record, as well as a whole host of other information that might still be considered nominally "private" here in the US. Further, they have issued all the cops GPS systems so that the authorities can better use them to keep everyone in check, whether they are a criminal or a political activist.

The technology will allow for a more specific and accurate application of force by the ruling class through their armed protectors, the police, thus increasing the ability of the Chinese elite to force their will onto that of the people, many of whom have moved to the cities from rural areas and have engaged in increasingly violent and class conscious protests and insurrections against their communist and capitalist bosses (there were nearly a hundred thousand riots and other uprisings last year in China).

The interesting thing is, as even the developers of this tech (American companies, of course) admit, they're not giving the Chinese government anything special. That means that the tyrannical capabilities of the technologies are built into them - you can't separate them. Said another way, there's nothing neutral about this technology. It's a tool of the ruling class and, as they do now, they will use it to exploit and dominate us for their own selfish profit.

And this is why we have a choice: high technology or freedom. Sadly, unless we do something about it soon, we'll have no choice at all. After all, the authorities plan on using the same technology here, and they've already deployed aspects of it in many cities.

(By the way - thanks to both Andrew and my comrade Collin for each independently pointing me towards to the article below.)

Consider the future:

China Enacting a High-Tech Plan to Track People

At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

Security experts describe China’s plans as the world’s largest effort to meld cutting-edge computer technology with police work to track the activities of a population and fight crime. But they say the technology can be used to violate civil rights.

The Chinese government has ordered all large cities to apply technology to police work and to issue high-tech residency cards to 150 million people who have moved to a city but not yet acquired permanent residency.

Both steps are officially aimed at fighting crime and developing better controls on an increasingly mobile population, including the nearly 10 million peasants who move to big cities each year. But they could also help the Communist Party retain power by maintaining tight controls on an increasingly prosperous population at a time when street protests are becoming more common.

“If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits, and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future,” said Michael Lin, the vice president for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology.

Incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.

Shenzhen, a computer manufacturing center next to Hong Kong, is the first Chinese city to introduce the new residency cards. It is also taking the lead in China in the large-scale use of law enforcement surveillance cameras — a tactic that would have drawn international criticism in the years after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989.

But rising fears of terrorism have lessened public hostility to surveillance cameras in the West. This has been particularly true in Britain, where the police already install the cameras widely on lamp poles and in subway stations and are developing face recognition software as well.

New York police announced last month that they would install more than 100 security cameras to monitor license plates in Lower Manhattan by the end of the year. Police officials also said they hoped to obtain financing to establish links to 3,000 public and private cameras in the area by the end of next year; no decision has been made on whether face recognition technology has become reliable enough to use without the risk of false arrests.

Shenzhen already has 180,000 indoor and outdoor closed-circuit television cameras owned by businesses and government agencies, and the police will have the right to link them on request into the same system as the 20,000 police cameras, according to China Public Security.

Continued at the New York Times...

Eying up the future: iris scans spread to Iraq and New Jersey schools

A recent Washington Post/MSNBC article about US forces joining up with Sunni insurgents to attack Al-Qaeda contained this interesting little nugget towards the end:

Kuehl said later that he would probably supply weapons to the militiamen, but in limited amounts. The fighters have given the Americans identification, including fingerprints, addresses and retinal scans, so the soldiers believe they could track down anyone who betrayed them. "What I don't want them to do is wither on the vine," Kuehl said.

Alliances with the occupier - even alliances of convenience - aren't what they used to be in Iraq.


News of US forces using retinal scans and other forms of biometric tracking and identification aren't new. After the US forces destroyed that city, officials began requiring returning residents of Fallujah to obtain biometric ID cards and to submit to retinal scans before re-entering the city. But the security procedure has spread. Iraqi troops, forced to abandon their reliable AK-47's for American-made and much more complicated M4's, will have to submit to retinal scans as a condition of receiving the new weapons. This information, of course, can be used to track the weapon, with the intent of keeping it out of the hands of insurgents (Iraqi police and soldiers routinely either sell their weapons or work both sides of the fight). Likewise, officials hope that the massive databases they are compiling can be used to screen out potential sympathizers with the insurgency.

The scanning device of preference seems to be the PIER™ 2.3 – Portable Iris Enrollment and Recognition Device, produced by Securimetrics Incorporated. According to the spec sheet, the scanner

"is a rugged hand-held device that allows the operator to enroll and identify individuals using the highly unique patterns and textures of the human iris. The PIER™ can store a database of up to 200,000 individuals (both left and right eye) and quickly return the identity of the subject. Tethered to a PC, the device can match an unknown individual against a database of millions with extremely high accuracy."

The company's website claims that PIER has been approved and deployed by a variety of government agencies, including The Office of Law Enforcement Technology Commercialization (OLETC), seeing action in Iraq, Afghanistan and Bosnia ("the United Nations' refugee agency (UNHCR) registered the irises of 1.8 million Afghans in 2002").

With the increasing overlap of domestic policing and foreign war-fighting (Blackwater deployed in New Orleans, NY and LAPD training Iraqi police), we can almost expect such technology deployed here at home, almost certainly against marginalized or vulnerable populations.

And so, knowing that, it should come as no surprise that the technology has already spread into public schools, thanks to government subsidies (in this case a $369,000 grant from the Department of Justice). According to an ABC News article,

Parents who want to pick up their kids at school in one New Jersey district now can submit to iris scans, as the technology that helps keep our nation's airports and hotels safe begins to make its way further into American lives.

The Freehold Borough School District launched this high-tech, high-wattage security system on Monday with funding from the Department of Justice as part of a study on the system's effectiveness.

As many as four adults can be designated to pick up each child in the district, but in order to be authorized to come into school, they will be asked to register with the district's iris recognition security and visitor management system. At this point, the New Jersey program is not mandatory.

When picking up a child, the adult provides a driver's license and then submits to an eye scan. If the iris image camera recognizes his or her eyes, the door clicks open. If someone tries to slip in behind an authorized person, the system triggers a siren and red flashing lights in the front office. The entire process takes just seconds.

The superintendent of the district clearly supports the program (on a side note, check out the way that the technology breaks down normal human relationships, such as holding a door for someone or the traditional method of protecting kids from stranger dangers in which their teacher knows their parents):

Phil Meara, Freehold's superintendent, said that although it was expensive, the program would help schools across the country move into a new frontier in child protection.

"This is all part of a larger emphasis, here in New Jersey, on school safety," he said. "We chose this school because we were looking for a typical slightly urban school to launch the system."

Meara applied for a $369,000 grant on behalf of the school district and had the eye scanners installed in two grammar schools and one middle school. So far, 300 of the nearly 1,500 individuals available to pick up a student from school have registered for the eye scan system.

"The price tag was high really due to the research and program development," Meara said. "We're all aware that at that price, this system couldn't be duplicated at other schools. But most of the money paid for the development. So my prediction is that in the future, the price of this system will be much lower."

Meara said they were trying to deny entry to anyone who wasn't permitted in the building and ensure that when an adult came to take a child out of school, he or she was who they said they were. Meara was also involved with a pilot program that took place in 2003, in Plumstead Township in New Egypt, N.J.

The superintendent found that teachers and parents often held the door open for others as they entered the school, which allowed strangers to slip right in behind.

This new eye scan system, however, catches strangers. Once the iris scanner permits an individual to enter the school, it monitors how many people pass through the door.

"Biometrics is the wave of the future," Meara said. "Everything I've heard is that there will be a tremendous emphasis on making schools as safe as possible. If our school process [shows] that this system works, yes, it might just take off."

And that's not the only school. In Britain the technology has been trotted out to track kids in the lunch line and checking out library books. With the current state of fear permeating American families and schools (remember the Al-Qaeda school bus scare?), and the concomitant desire to make schools as "safe as possible", there is little doubt that, as Meara suggests, the technology "might just take off."