by Peter J. Cornwell

Towards a Typology of Surveillance

Surveillance of Assailants is an installation work, which creates a simulacrum of the apparatus of urban surveillance systems using artificial intelligence and high performance parallel computing techniques. By analysing video in real time, the work synthesises a virtual surveillance camera through 3D modelling and incorporates live reflections from the installation space. This virtual camera responds directly to the behaviour of viewers.

The result is the palpable presence of an independent software agency in the gallery, which continuously builds a knowledge of viewers and their actions: whether they are watching or looking elsewhere. The virtual camera plays a game of »hide and seek«; feigning disinterest when people stare at it. Alternately, it mercilessly pursues an individual until he or she is out of sight, while ignoring everybody else. Sometimes appearing humorous, the work also parallels potentially sinister technological developments, which are being exploited for surveillance purposes, increasingly beyond the control of any one state or organisation.

Phenomenologically the work produces an image that clearly and overtly scrutinises those who encounter it - that of a solid camera moving in response to viewers' gestures and carrying their reflection from the real world. However, this is achieved by gathering visual information, analysing it and determining how to respond, and then generating moving imagery; all so fast as to appear instantaneous. The techniques and computing power employed by Surveillance of Assailants could also be used to recognise individuals from a database of facial features, enabling the cross-referencing of information about us that is held in government and corporate data structures distributed around the world.

Persistent Data

To reveal more clearly the growing primacy of information in social power structures and the extent to which data about individuals has escaped human control, it is necessary to look, as Thomas Levin identifies: »[beyond] more traditional imaging and tracking technologies to the largely invisible but infinitely more powerful practices of what is referred to as 'dataveillance' - that today constitutes the extensive arsenal of social control«. Surveillance machinery has conventionally pre-supposed a clear beneficiary of the information gained. A conspicuous early example of electronic surveillance was the development of early warning radar during WWII, and today the renewed appetite for very costly space-borne systems to detect and potentially intercept missiles in flight attests to the perceived deterrent value of the risk of detection. However, the surveillance machinery that acquired a peculiar glamour during the cold war and much military spying technology in general, is covert. Concealed cameras, in the same way as movement sensors and microphones - the bugging that pre-occupied films like The Conversation and the Watergate investigation of the same period - fail what we might call a »Panoptic test«. They do not establish a disciplinary power structure through continual awareness of the possibility of discovery and ensuing self-regulation of behaviour, as does Bentham's spatial design. Rather, discovery is not anticipated, as was the case following the Tiananmen Square demonstrations when footage from street cameras that were previously considered innocuous was used to deadly effect by the Chinese government.

Whether covert or otherwise, the correlation of surveillance data and beneficiary is no longer so clear. The intersection of ubiquitous data communications and technologies gathering every possible kind of information imaginable into a common digital representation, has created a global trade in information about each of us as individuals. Some repositories, such as banking, insurance, law enforcement, medical, property, taxation and vehicle information are directly accessible only to governments and institutions. Others, built from daily transactions on credit cards, loyalty cards and travel are openly traded; each pigeon-holing us ever more accurately as targets for everything from window frame sales to television license investigation. Even when national legislation attempts to protect information in these databases they are scarcely hermetic. Information about us leaks continually into new data structures: our conversation with the doctor is temporarily secure, but the medication prescribed, the date and the location are immediately loaded on to the pharmacy computers. More information still is accrued by implication. The bar codes on our groceries contribute to the profile of the district in which we live, betraying us even when we resort to cash purchases and enabling the creation of meta-data from other information known about us as individuals.

It is the internet that has etched this individual information fingerprint most deeply. Secure digital financial instruments have made internet retail commonplace and data-mining and autonomous search robots - freely roaming programs charged to search without costly human intervention for as long as necessary - have made the trade in information truly global, beyond the control of governments or corporations [the internet provided the only live and uncensored coverage of events in Tiananmen Square to the rest of the world]. The involuntary traces that we leave everywhere on the internet are also more difficult to recognise, and almost impossible to recall. Many internet sites that we visit, especially those of technology companies, secretly interrogate our computers; analysing our habits, reporting the serial numbers of products that we have loaded and leaving information for later exploitation. Our information fingerprint is now a persistent and monotonically expanding trace of our lives, distributed among countless computers across the globe and in space and independent of any specific surveillance agenda. We can no longer determine all of the information that is recorded about us and it will continue to accrue long after our lives are completely forgotten by distant descendants.

Intelligent Imagers

However, in contrast to transaction-based data gathering, surveillance imagery is a much more potent source of information about the individual. Combined with the ability to search and cross-reference globally distributed databases, automated image analysis is poised to revolutionise information privacy. The current explosion in numbers of camera installations in public spaces for the »safety of the individual« is only a faint intimation of the forthcoming integration of intelligent imagers with every possible appliance, structure and vehicle.

Closed circuit television cameras have been replaced by the semiconductor imager - the camera on a chip - that is already part computer. Fabricated in hundreds of millions of units from cheap raw materials through the economies of the electronics industry, these computer cameras have become ubiquitous, emulating older analogue equipment where necessary to gain wider market share. However, instead of a television picture waveform, the native format of semiconductor imagers is data, of potentially very high resolution, and they consume very little power. Gone are the colour errors and limited resolution of analogue electronics and expensive conversion equipment for computers. Already it is possible to purchase a computer camera which has only a network address and which is never intended to produce a video tape or printed image, for less than $300.

Once in digital form, image information can be manipulated mathematically; analysed using an armory of software and duplicated without error, almost instantly, on the other side of the world. For example, instead of sending an image of a speeding car, the license plate can be »read« from the image and just those characters, plus the speed, time and location forwarded for automatic issue of a fine. The symbolic information about the car occupies less than one thousandth of the space of the original image. Offences can be transmitted and processed immediately; but every car passing every camera can be relentlessly recorded, each event remaining accessible for future analysis by unknown agencies.