Chirs Piederson--Reader's Digest Canada
Welcome to the age of anywhere, anytime, anybody surveillance. Technologies first conceived by national spy agencies and the military are now being retooled as security products for home and business. Civilian programmers have been creating new breeds of spyware to exploit the inherent vulnerabilities of the digital environment. And as hardware prices drop and software flits effortlessly across the Net, privacy-busting tools are turning up in the 7-Eleven, the office cubicle—and the bedroom.
While it is true that new technologies for surveillance and concealment have naturally found fans among criminals, creeps and perverts, companies are also spying—on their workers and their customers. The American Management Association says two out of every three major U.S. companies monitor employees on-line. And governments in several countries have given themselves new rights to snoop on their citizens. Even as fearless a fellow as former RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster, who now runs KPMG Investigation and Security Inc., admits, “There’s a point where one needs to be concerned Big Brother is watching.”
Unlike the malignant state agency of George Orwell’s fiction, though, the new millennium has democratized surveillance. Anyone can spy. That is particularly evident in the plummeting price and widening availability of covert audio- and video-surveillance devices. A video camera about the size of a pack of matches retailed for $800 a decade ago but today costs less than $150. Sound recorders connected to microphones hidden in pens go for under $200. Drop in at Spy-Central, in Vancouver—or any store like it in any Canadian city—and you might stroll out with a charming art-deco mantel clock. Concealed behind the face is a video camera. Cost: about $300.
Other new technologies are extending the capabilities of those ubiquitous video security monitors. By one estimate, they record the image of every urban Canadian up to 15 times a day. Biometric software can then be used to match the images to vast police databases of photo IDs. Indeed, many casinos deploy similar software to identify and keep out known cheats. At last January’s Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., authorities scanned the faces of 100,000 people entering the stadium, identifying 19 possible matches to individuals with criminal records.
Your cellular phone can also be used to track you down. Several companies are racing to perfect location technology. When a person places a call, carriers record which cell, or transmitter area, the call is coming from. The telephone number of the caller, the number called and the length of the call are logged for billing. With a court order, all of these data can provide a record of someone’s movements. Even now, the exact location of a wireless call can be pinpointed to within three metres using a built-in Global Positioning System, or within 30 to 60 metres using triangulation on the cell network. Fleet companies in Calgary recently tested Cell-Loc equipment to track their staff during business hours.
While criminals hide their own identity on-line, they can also steal yours—or at least enough personal information to masquerade as you. Data banks containing credit-card information are high on hacker target lists—and are routinely breached. Last January police heard from three Halifax computer companies that someone was using credit-card accounts to make unauthorized purchases. The card numbers, it turned out, had been stolen from databases in the United States and Britain—by hackers in eastern Europe.
Not everyone sneaking around on-line is a bad guy, however. The same anonymity that empowers predators on the Net can be put to use by their pursuers. Police in every major country have pressed for new powers to intercept what travels over the Internet. In 1999 Australia gave its authorities the right to hack into suspects’ computers. More recently, British and U.S. police won government blessing for their plans to install eavesdropping devices on Internet service providers’ premises. The devices—ominously code-named Carnivore in the American case—act much like telephone taps, allowing police to intercept e-mail messages to and from a specified Internet address. Canada has yet to give its police similar authority, but a report declassified in 2000 by the normally secretive federal Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and obtained by Southam News, argued that e-mail interception “may be required” for the CSE to protect government computer networks against viruses.
Your boss’s right to spy on you is, legally speaking, well-nigh unassailable. “It has always been cause for dismissal if you’re not using company time to do company work,” explains Paul Kent-Snowsell, a Vancouver lawyer who specializes in Internet cases. During the summer of 2000, Dow Chemical Co. fired 61 employees in Texas and Michigan for using their computers to circulate pornography—joining the 27 percent of surveyed U.S. companies that have fired workers for e-mail or Internet abuse.
Norman Inkster, the former Mountie, worries that the reach of surveillance technology is expanding faster than most ordinary citizens know—and that it could soon become more frighteningly all-embracing. To Inkster, controlling the criminals means accepting new means of surveillance, but with checks and balances to protect privacy. “In the past, we could sometimes make a certain assumption of privacy,” Inkster reflects, “because we knew the technology couldn’t be there. Now the technology is there. The question becomes, Will the law ever catch up?”
To retired Toronto businessman Wilson Markle, who has installed software on the PCs of his two children to monitor what they access on-line, there’s no doubt: The race is over and technology has won. “Anybody who doesn’t have a thing to hide has no problem,” he says. “Those who do have something to hide will have a problem. I take comfort in that.”
Welcome to the age of anywhere, anytime, anybody surveillance. Technologies first conceived by national spy agencies and the military are now being retooled as security products for home and business. Civilian programmers have been creating new breeds of spyware to exploit the inherent vulnerabilities of the digital environment. And as hardware prices drop and software flits effortlessly across the Net, privacy-busting tools are turning up in the 7-Eleven, the office cubicle—and the bedroom.
While it is true that new technologies for surveillance and concealment have naturally found fans among criminals, creeps and perverts, companies are also spying—on their workers and their customers. The American Management Association says two out of every three major U.S. companies monitor employees on-line. And governments in several countries have given themselves new rights to snoop on their citizens. Even as fearless a fellow as former RCMP commissioner Norman Inkster, who now runs KPMG Investigation and Security Inc., admits, “There’s a point where one needs to be concerned Big Brother is watching.”
Unlike the malignant state agency of George Orwell’s fiction, though, the new millennium has democratized surveillance. Anyone can spy. That is particularly evident in the plummeting price and widening availability of covert audio- and video-surveillance devices. A video camera about the size of a pack of matches retailed for $800 a decade ago but today costs less than $150. Sound recorders connected to microphones hidden in pens go for under $200. Drop in at Spy-Central, in Vancouver—or any store like it in any Canadian city—and you might stroll out with a charming art-deco mantel clock. Concealed behind the face is a video camera. Cost: about $300.
Other new technologies are extending the capabilities of those ubiquitous video security monitors. By one estimate, they record the image of every urban Canadian up to 15 times a day. Biometric software can then be used to match the images to vast police databases of photo IDs. Indeed, many casinos deploy similar software to identify and keep out known cheats. At last January’s Super Bowl in Tampa, Fla., authorities scanned the faces of 100,000 people entering the stadium, identifying 19 possible matches to individuals with criminal records.
Your cellular phone can also be used to track you down. Several companies are racing to perfect location technology. When a person places a call, carriers record which cell, or transmitter area, the call is coming from. The telephone number of the caller, the number called and the length of the call are logged for billing. With a court order, all of these data can provide a record of someone’s movements. Even now, the exact location of a wireless call can be pinpointed to within three metres using a built-in Global Positioning System, or within 30 to 60 metres using triangulation on the cell network. Fleet companies in Calgary recently tested Cell-Loc equipment to track their staff during business hours.
While criminals hide their own identity on-line, they can also steal yours—or at least enough personal information to masquerade as you. Data banks containing credit-card information are high on hacker target lists—and are routinely breached. Last January police heard from three Halifax computer companies that someone was using credit-card accounts to make unauthorized purchases. The card numbers, it turned out, had been stolen from databases in the United States and Britain—by hackers in eastern Europe.
Not everyone sneaking around on-line is a bad guy, however. The same anonymity that empowers predators on the Net can be put to use by their pursuers. Police in every major country have pressed for new powers to intercept what travels over the Internet. In 1999 Australia gave its authorities the right to hack into suspects’ computers. More recently, British and U.S. police won government blessing for their plans to install eavesdropping devices on Internet service providers’ premises. The devices—ominously code-named Carnivore in the American case—act much like telephone taps, allowing police to intercept e-mail messages to and from a specified Internet address. Canada has yet to give its police similar authority, but a report declassified in 2000 by the normally secretive federal Communications Security Establishment (CSE), and obtained by Southam News, argued that e-mail interception “may be required” for the CSE to protect government computer networks against viruses.
Your boss’s right to spy on you is, legally speaking, well-nigh unassailable. “It has always been cause for dismissal if you’re not using company time to do company work,” explains Paul Kent-Snowsell, a Vancouver lawyer who specializes in Internet cases. During the summer of 2000, Dow Chemical Co. fired 61 employees in Texas and Michigan for using their computers to circulate pornography—joining the 27 percent of surveyed U.S. companies that have fired workers for e-mail or Internet abuse.
Norman Inkster, the former Mountie, worries that the reach of surveillance technology is expanding faster than most ordinary citizens know—and that it could soon become more frighteningly all-embracing. To Inkster, controlling the criminals means accepting new means of surveillance, but with checks and balances to protect privacy. “In the past, we could sometimes make a certain assumption of privacy,” Inkster reflects, “because we knew the technology couldn’t be there. Now the technology is there. The question becomes, Will the law ever catch up?”
To retired Toronto businessman Wilson Markle, who has installed software on the PCs of his two children to monitor what they access on-line, there’s no doubt: The race is over and technology has won. “Anybody who doesn’t have a thing to hide has no problem,” he says. “Those who do have something to hide will have a problem. I take comfort in that.”
