Mood:
don't askNow Playing: Apple's Strike Against Free Speech - Kill Switch for Camera Phones
Topic: MEDIA
Apple's Pre-Emptive Strike Against Free Speech
So you think you control your smartphone? Think again.
Late last week reports uncovered a plan by Apple, manufacturer of the iPhone, to patent technology that can detect when people are using their phone cameras and shut them down.
Apple says this technology was intended to stop people from recording video at live concerts, which should worry the creative commons crowd. But a remote "kill switch" has far more sinister applications in the hands of repressive governments. And it further raises concerns about the power new media companies hold over our right to connect and communicate.
Imagine if Apple's device had been available to the Mubarak regime earlier this year, and Egyptian security forces had deployed it around Tahrir Square to disable cameras just before they sent in their thugs to disperse the crowd.
Would the global outcry that helped drive Mubarak from office have occurred if a blackout of protest videos had prevented us from viewing the crackdown?
What would we know of Neda had it not been for one witness holding up a cellphone?
This is more than speculation. Thousands of people across the Middle East and North Africa have used cellphone cameras to document human rights abuses and share them with millions via social media.
In a February speech, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton credited the viral spread of a cellphone video depicting the shooting death of a young Iranian woman named Neda for bringing world attention to the human rights abuses of the regime.
What would we know of Neda's shocking death had Iranian security forces disabled that camera?
Social Media's Wild West
But here's the rub. The First Amendment and Article 19 of the U.N.'s Declaration on Human Rights don't really apply to the corporations that build these cellphones and run these social networks. Free speech rules don't apply to Silicon Valley.
And while platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr might enable individual expression more than governments do, many governments are at least accountable by law for protecting your right to speech and assembly.
The social networks are only beholden to their terms of service, which in most cases extend them the power to take down your communications "for any or no reason."
That's why Flickr got away with taking down the photographs and files of Egyptian security officers, which were posted by a local activist wanting to draw attention to their crimes. That's why Amazon.com could kick Wikileaks off its hosting platform after it released a series of diplomatic cables that exposed abuses of power by American agents. And that's why Facebook could shut down the pages of any anonymous political protester who decides to use the network to build a community of like-minded activists.
Rochester: Where using a cellphone camera will get you arrested
"Hosting your political movement on YouTube is a little like trying to hold a rally in a shopping mall. It looks like a public space, but it's not," writes Ethan Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center.
"Even if YouTube's rulers take their function as a free speech platform seriously and work to ensure you've got rights to post content, they're a benevolent despot, not a representative government."
A Pre-emptive Strike
What Apple is proposing to develop is worse in many ways. Its cellphone camera kill switch can be used as a pre-emptive strike against free speech.
In its patent application, Apple describes the technology as making it impossible to capture video or pictures at events where cameras and video recorders are prohibited. Your phone determines whether an image includes an infrared beam with encoded data. This data is sent from an emitter that directs the cellphone or a similar device to shut down image capture. Disabling emitters could be mounted on stages, throughout public squares or, conceivably, on police helmets.
While the technology might not be available now, the grave consequences of its use far outweigh any worry Apple and its entertainment industry allies have about video piracy.
More than ten thousand people have already signed a letter imploring Apple CEO Steve Jobs to pull the plug on this technology.
Smartphones like the iPhone and Droid are becoming extensions of ourselves. They are not simply tools to connect with friends and family, but a means to document the world around us, engage in political issues and organize with others. They literally put the power of the media in our own hands.
Apple's proposed technology would take that power away.
Join the discussion:
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
30 Comments so far
Show AllAnother reason not to buy Apple. I have been peripherally involved with Apple on and off for years and I can tell you that there exists no company on the planet, Microsoft included, that wants to control your experience and YOU more than Apple. Their vision of the electronic world will have you making micro-payments to them in one form or another for every video, every song, every transaction. All they want is a penny a transaction.... from everyone on the planet... every day.
Apple stuff is cool and it is good, but you end up a Lotus Eater in the end if you go down their path.
Apple is proving to be quite a fascist operation.
Operating under the guise of "coolness" (er, like Obama the Murderer) both are proving to be more dubious by the day. Get the kids and you've got the future.
"Get the kids and you've got the future."
Hitler couldn't have said it better. Come to think of it, he did!
So did Loyola. Oops, Stalin, too.
"Get the kids and you've got the future."
Hitler couldn't have said it better. Come to think of it, he did!
So did Loyola. Oops, Stalin, too.
But this article uses Apple as a starting point. The whole elctronic internet is basically the private property of the web hosting and server owners - and the US First Amandment or the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights does not apply for practical purposes on private property. To see the significance - try exercising you first amendment rights by holding a demonstration or passing out leaflets in a shopping mall.
Excesive reliance on the internet is potentially very dangerous for organized activism. It needs to be backed-up by traditional organizing methods - posters, flyers, portable electronic media and phone-trees using ordinary copper-wire land lines - which are still covered by common-carrier and state public utility comission laws, and therefore to some degree, public space. Also, mass organizing will continue to remain far more effectvie in urban spaces - where public spaces exist. Mobilizing suburban spaces - especially the outer sprawling sun-belt style suburbs, will always be very difficult.
Good points pjd. All of them.
One electronic "alternative", still in its infancy, is Wire. Link at: ( http://wire.0xf.nl ) Right now its merely a shell. I log on here and there to see what updates have been added and whatnot. I think it will be interesting to watch grow at the very least and could be very useful to activists in the near future.
It offers service based on the originator's servers or the source code is open source and available for download to be tweaked as you wish and hosted on your own servers. It won't get the publicity face book does. But, with everything you mentioned why would anyone really want that anyway?
Very well said. Apple is to Microsoft as Democrats are to Republicans.
We see it again and again. Capitalism starts out with new ideas and technologies spread between innovative companies. Then, over time, thanks to mergers and acquisitions, we end up with a few 'too big to fail' companies and very few choices. Next, Big Companies and Big Government become interchangeable.
In addition to this, the amount of meaningful innovation that Apple is responsible for is basically zero. They make good (often excellent) products that people buy, and sometimes popularize some marginally interesting technology, but they've invented nothing.
I am not aware that Apple makes anything. Most of their garbage comes from Foxconn, who makes much better and cheaper things without the Apple label on them.
They make the software and the "design", the "intellectual property". A typical "hollow corporation", you're right about that.
Well, as long as you feel safe, that's all that matters. Will you ever feel safe enough?
well, the camera is good for documenting abuse, but doesn't really do much regarding stopping the abuse...
our technological window is closing, as the natural world is losing the ability to support...
soon, we will be back to watching cops beat us, rather than capturing a digital data stream of them doing so...
what's the difference, really?
one of the founding features of Heaven must be Internal Censure...
I don't like and will never use anything made by apple. I didn't like their OS back in the system7 days, and see no reason to think it's any better now. They have exhibited as closed minded a philosophy as possible for a tech company, and haven't been a friend to even their own users. If it's MY machine, and I PAID for it, making it MY machine, then you have no business telling me what I can and can't do with it. This is the same reason why Sony is on my never buy list as well. Why tech companies think that the rules of ownership should be different for them, I will never understand. Just like the whole idea of "leasing" MS software. You don't actually OWN that, you know. Next to NO rights to speak of, just the right to PAY for it.
No thanks. I don't need, want, or trust companies like Apple. And the friendlier they try to make themselves look, the LESS I trust them.
Think this WON'T be abused by every cop station in the country that wants to screw you one way or another? COUNT ON IT.
Activists please note...
Film cameras work just fine
And...you can develop film yourself
Apple- bringin' back the super 8.
It's an interesting turnaround since cell phones are regularly used to spy on us, can be activated remotely as a eye or ear with no trouble at all, but now they'll kill them if endangering the entrenched system. The lady being arrested is pretty disturbing since police have guns and the right to kill citizens while this poor woman, on her own property, had a camera. There is no justice, no freedom of speech, no bill of rights in America any longer in spite of the cardboard cutout parade. Apple is only one of the tools of the current regime.
So, Apple is now "Junior Neighborhood Patrol".
"Pant, pant...Sir, can I have a *badge*, please Sir?"
Technology always has the potential to be abused, and this is just one example. The way to stop this one: simple. Stop buying Apple cellphones. That's one message Jobs will hear. And do Canadians a favour: buy a Blackberry instead, and help out Research In Motion (RIM). As for the comment that capturing images doesn't stop abuse: that's not true. At the Toronto G20 debacle last summer, the major media were all ready to demonize peaceful protesters and cheer the police for arresting ordinary citizens, but attitudes began to change when photos and video footage from citizen witnesses showed clearly that police were allowed to suspend the law. This has raised all sorts of unnerving questions about the degree to which we have given up our liberties -- questions we need to ask.
Missing from this dialogue is the absurd idea that anyone taking a picture or video at some venue, like a concert, is going to deprive anyone of their desperate income. I originally had this discussion with a lawyer friend revolving around the copying of software. The idea that "X" number of dollars are lost to pirates is a stretch because you'd have to prove that anyone who had received a copy of some software was going to buy it for full value to start with. Most people forget that full retail costs for something like Microsoft Office Pro is $500. As for shutting off cameras during a concert, I don't get it. I guess the logic is that someone will watch a crappy, shaky, video with shitty sound over actually going to a concert? I've been to a few and you go because it's a live performance. If I want to see Katy Perry or Rod Stewart live I go to the concert, if not, I can watch the over 200,000 videos of Katy Perry on YouTube.
At last an undeniable and memorably vivid demonstration of the Big Lies of Internet "freedom" and its potential for "revolution."
As I have been saying for years, any medium that can be suppressed merely by the flick of a switch offers neither freedom nor revolutionary potential.
Indeed the primary function of the computer and its associated technologies is to further enslave us: tens of millions of jobs abolished forever, the advent of surveillance technologies of which the Nazis could only dream. Why else would the Ruling Class have so enthusiastically embraced it?
As I myself can attest, in the fields of journalism, publishing and graphic arts alone, the advent of the computer reduced employment by as much as 75 percent: a single newspaper reporter now, thanks to computers, does all the work formerly done by at least five people: copy editor, linotype operator, engraver, stereotyper, proof reader: all these jobs gone forever, the workers typically flung into permanent under-employment or unemployment, their skills and careers sacrificed on the altar of capitalist greed.
Meanwhile by our consumeroid acceptance of not just computers but every other associated gew-gaw we have imposed on ourselves a surveillance network that enables the government and/or the Ruling Class to not only monitor us 24/7 but -- literally by the aforementioned flick -- render us deaf, mute, blind and therefore utterly powerless.
Somewhere in Hell, Heinrich Himmler is surely cackling with glee.
You want maybe someone else should hold the patent?
You think M$, Sony, who exactly, is going to listen to your complaints? http://www.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/customer_service_2010.html Apple's A+ at #3, no other computer companies in the top 25.
I love Apple, and the twenty years of help and support their products have given me. (disclaimer: I am not a cell/i-phone user.)
Hate/Love aside, what alternative is there to the Apple patent?
You want to make the technology illegal? Good luck (honest!)
It can't be uninvented.
I don't want it in the phone. I don't want it in the world;
but the genie is released.
1) lobby Apple not to use it.
2) don't buy the iPhone.
or
3) fume.
I have not and will not purchase any of Apple's WAY OVERPRICED crap.
What the hell are you talking about? Just like there are regulations for cars, there are regulations for cell phones, and the use of this quite trivial "technology" could simply be disallowed or mandated. Nothing to invent or uninvent, it's a question of social decision, not technology.
I think I'll keep my old SLR (film) camera awhile longer...
I think that everyone living in urban merka should continue to buy their apple iphones and lexus suvs, continue to vote demoks into power, and continue to pretend that everything's kosher in urban merka.
This is story about Apple, but I would like to say something about the XBOX 360 Kinect.
In George Orwell's book "1984", you got to watch the TV, but the TV had a camera that watches you. The book did not mention what would happen to you if you covered the camera lens with duct tape. The fiction seemed implausible, because I could not imagine why people would put up with Big Brother watching inside their own home.
But wait, the XBOX 360 is as good as that, and more. The Kinect has a camera (or two) and a microphone. Although it is to be used for games, there is absolutely nothing to stop Microsoft from straming information back to wherever, should the government request that of Microsoft.
Microsoft have insisted that they wont peek through the camera. That sounds a bit re-assuring, you may think, until you read the End User License, that you have agreed to by using the XBOX 360, and realise that you have agreed that Microsoft is permitted to catch any photos and video that they please, and furthermore, you have agreed that they have the right to pass those photos or videos on to commercial partners.
Once the XBOX is connected to the internet (via ethernet cable or wireless), it automatically connects to Microsoft. Once connected, Microsoft will update your XBOX 360 software with anything that Microsoft chooses to put on it. That software can (and most likely does) include backdoors for spying for use by the CIA, Homeland security, etc. Microsoft have been caught before with some of their backdoors, that permit Big Brother to have secret internet access to Microsoft Windows. There is also nothing to stop special software being targeted to a particular IP address (your home).
The XBOX 360 has a hypervisor, which means that it simply will not run any software that has not been approved and digitally signed by Microsoft. For example, if you attempt to run Linux on your XBOX 360, you will find that you cannot. There has been a game between pro-Linux hackers and Microsoft, and Microsoft has basically won. Any useful wires have been hidden where a hardware hacker cannot connect to it, and nobody has been able to crack the hypervisor. This means that Microsoft have complete control over what software can run on the machine and you, on the other hand, have no control.
In summary, the XBOX 360 with Kinect is a games machine that doubles as a spy camera for your living room, and comes with its own license which makes it legal for them to do the spying. And yet the general public have payed money to put this machine in their living room. Given what it can do, it seems that Homeland Security should have purchased this and given one to every household for free.
I would recommend disconnecting the XBOX 360 from the internet except where needed. I would recommend disconnecting the Kinect, except where you actually were going to use it.
Well, you know, since SCOTUS has declared that corporations are people now, it seems to me that these "people" ought to also do what most of the rest of us do: OBEY THE LAW! (no duh)
This so called "kill switch" is about protecting Apple users from mal-ware, not about Big Brother deciding when we can use our phones and when we can't. If you you feel paranoid, and don't want it built into your phone, it'll take about 5 secs to google hack sites that will tell you how to disable it. Personally I prefer to know my software will work properly. Haven't we got enough real civil liberty issues to worry about, without re-inventing the somewhat liberal Steve Jobs and his seemingly very benign company, as a monster of depravity? Come on folks - keep it real
Re: "...Your phone determines whether an image includes an infrared beam with encoded data..."
Solution: YOU determine whether an infrared beam enters YOUR lens... by attaching a little optical filter...
From: http://www.optics-online.com/irc.asp :
"... An IR cut-off filter blocks the transmission of the infrared while passing the visible. This can be done with two optical techniques: absorption or reflection. Absorptive filters are made with special optical glass that absorbs near infrared radiation. Reflection type filters are short-pass interference filters that reflect infrared light with high efficiency..."
I expect to see a snap-on filter in their inventory the week of Apple's rollout.
Boo-ya!