The Freedom of Disguise

I never thought I'd find myself praising the burkha, though I understand its value for privacy (a value which doesn't mean its imposition is acceptable). Generally westerners think of it as imprisoning, yet in today's environment of mass-surveillance by CCTV it might represent freedom. Modern life is ironic, that way.

When spy cameras are installed in the halls and entrances of apartment buildings (against the pleas of those who value privacy), it puts us in mind of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon (1791) -- a jail where prisoners might be spied on at any time by guards without knowing when they would be, so they behaved as if they were at all times. Correction officers did the spying, and "correctness" rules our lives today; we are monitored in more ways than one. 

Today, CCTV surveillance is used in schools, asylums, workplaces, streets ... There's no escape. Hats and hoodies aren't enough, we need some sort of mobile tent to hide within if we want real privacy when we go out beyond our own front door. 

But wait! That mobile tent already exists: the burkha. No wonder women is some countries put it on with a sense of relief. That is counter-intuitive to us westerners, but privacy and anonymity too are forms of freedom, which is going extinct .

So now I see the point of burkhas, for their wearers. It's for disguise, a place from which you can see but not be seen, and in that there's a freedom we lack as we come and go down residential hallways, minding our own business but being tracked like criminals.

Who knew a primitive length of cloth with some very negative associations could become a tool of freedom in the also-negative metamorphoses of modern public spaces? You might not know who's wearing one. "Burkhas For Privacy"? Take that, spies!

The Haunted Car

Some homeless people live in cars or vans. It's more cosy and private than a tent on the street, but are they living in a haunted vehicle? Those ones are the recent models. 

Some low-income folk drive old cars, with their lovely old atmosphere. You can roll up the window, switch on the analogue radio, cruise along, enjoy the view, dog in the passenger seat, backpack in the back ... 

By contrast, new vehicles which are to be eventually government-mandated, are haunted. Nothing comes out of the exhaust pipe, and everything going into the car is digital and monitored: haunted by ghostly digital spies. 

Electric means demon-filled. E-car spy devices know (and tell authorities) by "global positioning" where you are, and where you've been. They know when you got into the driver's seat, when you got out, where you got charged up, what sites you listened to online, who you texted, whether you drank alcohol, whether you exceeded the speed limit. Eventually, will police agencies be able to lock your door and stop your engine remotely? Who needs an old-fashioned police chase when you can be arrested by remote?

It's bad enough for those living in high-tech houses bristling with digital devices (spy techware smuggled in under the label of "convenience"); soon we'll be forced to drive demonic cars as well. Ghouls and evil apparitions will travel abroad -- as our stowaway passengers.

🎃 🎃 🎃

For a description of the Digitally-Haunted House -- a story: 

https://treewatchvictoria.blogspot.com/2022/10/haunted-house-on-digital-halloween-night.html

Here's a tale of the old-fashioned ghost:   https://www.shorthumour.org.uk/10writersshowcase/everyday.htm

Oh no ... it says here we're being replaced by computers!

The problem with public transport is the public

If a crush of messy, noisy, shoving, coughing, backpack-swinging-in-your-face crowds wasn't in them, buses would be fine. 

I once lived in a small town where the bus was often almost empty, or even totally empty (that was bliss, like having a private chauffeur), because most people living there used cars. They could do that because streets were quiet and spacious, and parking plentiful and free. No problem getting right to the shop or business you needed, which was great for the businesses. 

The town enjoyed these civilized circumstances because it had a low population -- and that largely senior or retired, which meant a population with a certain calm tolerant seen-it-all, just-calm-down mentality not frequently seen in growing, thrusting, densely populated urban centres.

What quality exists in a life spent in a high-rise shoe-box, coming and going via crowded elevators to catch a crowded bus to a crowded workplace? Might the "quiet quitting" phenomenon and the preference for working from home really be not about quitting, but about avoiding too much human proximity? Is it about a Hardy-esque desire to get farther from the madding crowd? Against a background of rising world population that need will only get stronger. 

Overcrowding is a predictor of violence and aggressive behaviour. Among rats in labs, scientists have documented more aggression when a certain ratio of space to individual is reduced, regardless of food supply. The resource the rats are competing for is private space. 

In human society too, privacy is becoming scarce. In London and other European capitals with fast-growing populations in the 18th and 19th centuries this was understood, and large tracks of land were put aside as park space whether by the Crown or conservation societies. Perhaps, being closer to a rural past, the city-designers of the time were used to the lingering longing for natural spaces. Today in parts of Canada, we seem to be filling open spaces in, in a futile quest to make housing affordable by making it denser. Yet, the less space available, the higher its price and the greater a developer's investment will cost. It seems that affordability will only come when population control comes, i.e. not when supply goes up (and only the wealthy can access the supply) but when demand goes down. Should that ever happen the supply of mental and physical health-giving privacy will also go up.

We need to change more than Earth's atmospheric climate; the crisis starts with the climate of urban overcrowding. An end to meat-farming, forest destruction and fossil fuel burning would help, but ultimately Earth's resources are only saved by not drawing them down through the over-consumption which over-population causes.

It's ironic that by allotting less space per person (as world population grows), we consume more nature per bio-region.

The planetary bus is full.

 

City Life -- What do we want in a next door neighbour?

The Ideal Neighbour

-- never whistles

-- has a dog who doesn't bark

-- has a cute kid or two who wave over the fence but never shriek 

-- grows foliage in his garden 

-- has no surveillance cameras 

-- doesn't put an officious Neighbourhood Watch sign in the window 

-- keeps to himself which lives he thinks matter

-- doesn't put election signs on the lawn

-- waters the lawn

-- hates loud music

-- thinks "hip-hop" is what robins do on the lawn after he waters it

-- possesses no leaf blower, chainsaw or drill

-- has a good high hedge

-- doesn't keep saying we should get together

-- doesn't move away

-- continues never to whistle 

SMART is the Scariest Word

Nothing should strike fear in our hearts like the adjective “smart”. In the virtual world it describes things and situations which we permit when we are being exceedingly stupid. 

Apart from clever, “smart” used to mean well-dressed; now the smart-tech revolution has dressed a somnolent public in a clown suit. (Probably the healthiest thing to do is laugh.)

The “smart” things accumulate in our lives as one cancerous mass impairing freedom and privacy public and personal. First came the smart phone, which tracks and stalks us and spills personal data to all and sundry; then the smart car and house (run by robots much cleverer than us, with their impenetrably artificial intelligence) in the smart city, where residents are trapped by nets of surveillance. Now it's “smart borders and airports” to prevent free movement from one country to another without “proof of vaccination”. Oh great: we've transformed the world into a series of armed camps with borders bristling with police. We need to download an app to prove our vaccination. What next “proof” will be demanded, with the inevitability of function-creep?

Smart apps groom us for stupidity. How stupid, how over-policed, is the community that consents to apps that outwit self-interest? It's not a fashionable question, in a time of pandemics, but there always will be pandemics, and the question might be worth asking if we don't also want an epidemic of totalitarian social control.

See "Haunted House", 

.

Vaccine Passports Turn the World Into a Series of Armed Camps

When the herd panics, a stampede results: a common scenario in the animal kingdom. Is it happening with COVID vaccination in Canada? It's hardly surprising that COVID has caused panic, but where will a stampede toward vaccination take us? “Safety” is the destination, but as the virus continues to mutate, safety from illness may elude us while safety from official coercion might disappear altogether.

Canada's Constitution protects Canadians' right to security of the person, which includes the right to control the substances inserted into one's bloodstream. In addition, provincial privacy laws offer some protection against having to reveal personal health information, such as whether one's been vaccinated or not. Are these legal defences strong enough to withstand intrusion on individual freedom of choice through COVID vaccination “passports”?

According to Health-Infobase, by early June 2021, 61% of Canadians had received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. Safety studies continue to flip-flop: is Astrazenica safe? As first dose? Second? Should second doses consist of a product different from the first? Should the time between doses be lengthened (or shortened)? Can the Pfizer vaccine be stored at warmer temperatures after all? What are the long-term effects of vaccines, how many people are experiencing the short-term effects, and how do they affect people differently with different genetic susceptibilities? It is hardly surprising if the “reasonable person”, defined in law as someone who exhibits “ordinary, reasonable and prudent” conduct and judgment, would decline to be part of a mass medical experiment. (1)

There are good reasons to get vaccinated and good reasons not to, such as pre-existing illness which precludes it. Obviously, then, it's a matter of personal choice, yet media and medical officials pressure citizens to persuade acquaintances to get vaccinated. Many people don't want non-vaccinated people anywhere near them, but when the right to be safe from infection conflicts with the right to access necessities like housing, education and groceries, a more refined policy around vaccination choice needs to be crafted.

The digitality of this passport control will be another intrusion on top of the intrusion of substances into the body. It will involve smartphones, or palm or facial recognition, which will create a pandemic of surveillance.

Facial recognition uses biometric software to map facial features and store them as a face-print. Corporations get this under our privacy defences with a promise of push-button “convenience”: Apple for instance uses it to let customers unlock their cell phones, and Amazon to facilitate easy customer payments. It has turned up in shopping malls where crowd-sourced face images could be passed on to police, in case someone non-vaccinated illegally turns up in the mall. We're not there yet, but the first Trojans are already spilling out of the horse.

Yuan Stevens, Policy Lead for the Cybersecure Policy Exchange at Ryerson University, tells us that “in Canada it is currently possible to collect and share facial images for identification purposes without consent, and without adequate legal procedures, including the right to challenge decisions made with this technology” (Stevens, Solomun: Facial recognition tech speeds up; privacy law lags | Ottawa Citizen). This might include decisions by government and business to exclude the non-vaccinated from resources and services; in other words to create an underclass, ostracized and having fewer rights than other Canadians enjoy.

Most of the hesitant are neither anti-vax fundamentalists nor anti-science. Rather, they find it ironic that intellectual property privacy for vaccine manufacturers is protected (they needn't reveal the ingredients in their vaccine), yet personal privacy for patients is not.

Hesitancy used to be considered rational. “Hesitant” means cautious. It means being scrupulous, a word derived from the Latin noun for pebble: “scrupulus”. Small points of hesitancy are like moral or practical pebbles on the path, grating and niggling. There are many pebbles on the road to mass inoculation, and those who notice them must, if the civil right to freedom of choice means anything, be allowed to hesitate and perhaps take a different route.

Vaccine-bullying in the workplace occurs in every country. A human resources firm in Australia, weighing the religious, personal and medical reasons for remaining non-vaccinated, warns that “mandatory vaccinations ... open up the risk of separating (non-vaccinated) employees from the rest of their colleagues, causing knock-on effects on their mental health and wellbeing”. (2)

Surveillance is itself bullying, but Canada's federal Privacy Act does not forbid it, and provincial privacy commissioners merely declared in May 2021 that forced disclosure of personal health information for vaccine certification “is an encroachment on civil liberties that should be taken only after careful consideration” -- a rather feeble response to such an egregious loss of a basic civil right.

While we longed for the return of indoor restaurants and hockey games, a darker legacy of COVID rolled out beneath our radar. The Public Health Agency of Canada working with other G7 countries will now demand digital proof of COVID vaccination which Canadians will need in order to travel. The data management platform being designed uses smartphones, opening the door to general tracking of individuals' movements within our country and across international borders. Everyone will be forced to own a smartphone -- a herding device (conveniently for the communications companies which charge higher smartphone rates in Canada than anywhere else in the world). The planet will become a series of digitally guarded camps. Entering and exiting them will be exactly like entering and exiting maximum security prisons, as managed in Canada today.

This is not the result of the pandemic. The world has always had pandemics, lock-downs, guarded borders and No Entry zones, but the turning of the whole world into a series of armed camps is a result of advances in the surveillance cyber-technology which make it possible. Anonymity will henceforth not be possible, and privacy a quaint notion from the past.

Karen Eltis, Professor of Law at the University of Ottawa (and past director of the University of Ottawa Human Rights Centre), sounds more alarmed about this than do the privacy commissioners. She warns against policy makers' attitude that ‘this is about life and death, forget about privacy’.” It’s not only about privacy, she says, “it’s about democratic governance ...” (Privacy concerns complicate vaccine passports - iPolitics)

After the recent theft of patient information from Life Labs in BC and Ontario, fifteen million patients’ electronic health records were exposed. Michael McEvoy, Information and Privacy Commissioner for BC, adds that “these kind of attacks ... are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Even if an organization does everything right, there is no guarantee that they will not fall victim to a cyberattack.”

Canadians learned how smartphones track our physical location as well as our data trail, when the controversial “smart city” deal between Toronto and Google-owned Sidewalk Labs collapsed partly due to fears about civic surveillance. Vaccination certification has the same “huge data-mining potential of an app whose use would create many otherwise unobtainable very large data sets … An amazing gold mine for data extractivism”, warns Mariana Valverde in What have we learned from the Sidewalk Labs saga? Smart city plans in Toronto | Centre for Free Expression (ryerson.ca).

We will never fully banish corona-virus, but a virulent epidemic of privacy invasion could be controlled, if we had the will. We need the legal equivalent of a privacy plexi-glass shield. Which agency though is actively protecting the public against vaccine dictatorship and policies that wipe out privacy faster than you can say “extractivism”? Provincial ombudsperson offices are wobbly. Although BC's Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry continually urges the public to get vaccinated, she also comes out clearly against the imposition of internal vaccination certification, citing its potential to create inequities which will do more harm than good. In this she is stauncher than is the provincial ombuds-office, which only recommends “guidance” for governments. Even Dr. Henry's doubts about the wisdom of certification however will be overwhelmed by the pressure of international travel certification, which will bleed into the national realm from the international one.

The Angus Reid Institute reports that as of May 17, 2021 only about 10% of Canadians definitely refuse the vaccine, although more in some provinces and more if the vaccine is Astrazeneca. Will the 10 to 24% who refuse, be denied a “passport” to access the full benefits of Canadian citizenship?

To date, 79% of Canadians support the use of vaccine passports for international travel, but 41% oppose them for accessing public places. Clearly, if 59% still don't oppose them at home, the non-vaccinated have work to do to protect themselves against loss of privileges and privacy (words, let it be noted, with a common root). Among public officials they have few allies to work with. We lack a “Private Lives Matter” movement. Even the Canadian Civil Liberties Association only goes so far as to say “serious consideration on ethical, moral, social, health, and legal grounds needs to be given before moving forward” with certification.

We know that free speech, security of the person, and privacy rights are the three pillars that hold up a democracy. We should not be stampeded by emergency thinking into consenting to give up any of them. In the wake of vaccine passport pressure, one legacy of COVID could be a resolve to strengthen our civil liberty and privacy organizations -- if it's not already too late.

1 The Reasonable Person (lawnow.org)

2 Will workplace bullying rise as a result of COVID-19 vaccines? | HRD Asia (hcamag.com)

3 Canada’s privacy commissioners issue guidance as country mulls COVID-19 vaccine passports - National | Globalnews.ca

4 FAQ: Vaccine Passports – CCLA

5 Office of the Ombudsperson | Province of British Columbia (bcombudsperson.ca)

6 FAQ: Vaccine Passports – CCLA