Why Are Smart Cities Being Shoved In The Public's Throat?
By Aayush Anand
02 February, 2016
Countercurrents.org
While The government is trying to serve the smart cities in a platter garnished with promises of adequate water supply, assured electric supply among other modern exemplaries, there is a facet that has escaped attention and debate. Smart City is not a new idea. It has been implemented worldwide. Though the most benefited from this development seem to be the state forces, which is in complete contradiction to the claims of the same. The concept of smart cities is inherently tied to mass surveillance and predictive policing. With open secret projects like Central Monitoring System and NATGRID already in operation, government trying to impose a shamelessly authoritarian encryption policy followed by initiation of smart cities project is what,if not a chain of events the masses should be more wary about?
To deliver the seemingly lucrative features of e governance and communication viability, the state will invariably have to come in bed with private players. If History accounts for anything, new forms of suppression are often devised from such partnership. Mr. Barrett Brown, an American Journalist is facing a sentence of 105 years for blowing cover off a similar alliance of the State and Private Information Technology Firms which had resorted to scrupulous pro grammes like Persona Management which was a software to facilitate the use of multiple fake online personas, generally for the use of propaganda, disinformation, or as a surveillance method by which to discover details of a human target via social interactions.. His investigative journalism, memorialized at the crowdsourced research outfit with an associated wiki, Project PM, brought to light extremely important findings on the issue of private firms and public surveillance. The question though unraised so far is, do we want the corporations to continue to develop a stranglehold on new technology? We could go down a more state-regulated path, but then we need to weigh the balance if the state runs out of control. These are the debates we need to have, as technology moves on faster and faster, and this increasing integration between the intelligence agencies, the military-security complex and the corporations too.
The very core of benefits derived from Smart City technology is dependent on constant data flows captured and aggregated by sensors, cameras and tracking applications. There is no urban anonymity whatsoever possible in a society where every information can be extrapolated by analyzing together the multiple data streams. For more than 50 years we've known that surveillance encourages conformity to social norms. Whatever be the claims that the government is making with its Skill India or 10000 Startups program, a government that engages in mass surveillance cannot hold innovation, critical thinking and originality in high regard.
Not only privacy but autonomy is also at risk in the normalization of the collection and aggregation of big data by government in smart cities Much of the concern involves the inconvenience and inability of citizens to opt out of new technologies where they form part of essential government services. Being off grid becomes very tedious and even extreme of measures can only reduce the data footprint and not completely eliminate it. The storage of data by one governmental agency has the potential for cross-sharing data across other services which often means that data is accessible by parties that the provider did not intend to share the data with.Not much is required to do but the use of essential urban services and infrastructure to place an individual at risk of having their data shared amongst multiple platforms and users. The individually trivial data becomes very derivative in collection and can be considered personally identifiable information which falls under strict privacy laws. The constitutional provision to intercept an individual’s communication is in section 5[2] of Indian Telegraph Act, 1885. The Draft Rule 419B allows for the disclosure of “message related information”/Call Data Records to Indian authorities. Call data records in its definition describes details about the telecommunication transaction, but not the content of that transaction. It excludes what was said/sent during the electronic communication between the two parties.The Central Monitoring System too is running clearly in its violation and it would not be surprising if the Smart Cities are implemented in violation too.
The glitz and glimmer of Smart Cities is a marketing gimmick. What they are actually selling to us is a dark authoritarian landscape in which the definition of appropriate behavior will become so narrow that even the most finical violation of norms will be met with exclusion from the society. Everything shiny is not progress and Smart City is definitely not.
Aayush Anand is a feature writer. Blog at – www.beyond-the-static.com, twitter at twitter @theaayushanand