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Stalking
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skies
This page considers questions regarding aerial and satellite
photography, geospatial services such as GoogleEarth and
the emergence of practices such as moshing.
It covers -
introduction
It is increasingly common to encounter concerns about
Google Earth and other online map services that allow
users to graze satellite images that are often of high
quality.
We can expect more of those services, for two reasons.
The first is recognition among governments that selling
satellite photos - whether en masse or on a shot by shot
(location by location) basis - is an effective way of
offsetting the costs of getting the 'birds' into the sky
and keeping them there. Mark Monmonier, whose 2002 Spying
with Maps: Surveillance Technologies and the Future of
Privacy is an elegant introduction to visual surveillance,
notes increasing acceptance after France's success with
SPOT
imagery.
Satellite photos - in a range of formats and resolutions
- have been commercially available for some time. Their
availability has been publicised online and in the print
media, with a vogue during 2003-2005 for newspapers to
offer colour 'spies in the skies' snaps of their reader's
neighbourhoods.
We can expect supply to increase as states (such as China)
with offworld ambitions follow the French model and offset
satellite program costs by building and retailing digital
landscapes and as data processing costs continue to decline
(facilitating generation of digital three dimensional
landscapes and overlay of non-photographic information).
The second reason is the perception that there is a deep
and broad demand among business, government and individuals
for historic and realtime geospatial information.
That extends beyond curiosity
value - "what does my house look like from space"
or "can I spot Elvis and the UFOs at Area 51"
- to encompass such applications as -
- directions
about the quickest way to get across town,
- mapping
the extent of a locust outbreak,
-
determining whether a paddock needs more irrigation,
- proving
your favourite multinational has unloaded toxic waste
into a waterway overnight,
- tracking
which traffic snarl has your parcel,
- sussing
out 'the best neighbourhood' with Internet-based Neighbourhood
Information Systems (IBNIS)
- or
enabling your local government computer to send letters
of demand to those homeowners who evaded the tax on
backyard pools.
Eyes
in the skies are not necessarily objectionable or even
that new.
As noted in discussion elsewhere on this site regarding
privacy,
people have been using their ingenuity for several hundred
years to get a sense of what's happening on the other
side of the fence or behind the hedge.
Surveillance has thus involved planes, balloons and even
the humble step ladder. The landmark 1937 privacy and
intellectual property Victoria Park case by Australia's
High Court - (Victoria Park Racing & Recreation Grounds
Co Ltd v Taylor (58 CLR 479) - for example involved
a radio station that successfully evaded restrictions
on access to a racecourse by simply perching its race
caller on a stand that overlooked the course but was outside
the boundaries of that property.
And for some civil libertarians the overhead cameras are
less worrisome than very recent innovations such as 'drive
by' thermal imaging, with some US police forces for example
cruising the streets looking for the heat signatures that
might indicate a householder is keeping the marijuana
plants - rather than the family pets - warm in winter.
Services such as Google Earth are significant because
they embody a digital landscape, one in which it is possible
to integrate huge collections of images with other data
collections. For us that 'leverage' is the salient concern,
rather than the availability of images per se.
It is a counterpart of the large-scale data mining undertaken
by commercial profiling agencies for credit reference
or other purposes - using machines to quickly assemble
and parse disparate information sets that in isolation
are innocuous but when integrated build a detailed (and
often misleading) picture that might be abused by organisations
and individuals.
At a more mundane level another concern is the absence
of an informed debate about public access to (and the
terms of commercialisation of) existing public sector
geospatial databases. Licensing or outright sale of information
collected by government - often collected on a mandatory
basis - is recurrently identified as an easy source of
revenue. Experience overseas suggests that some agencies
have sold too cheaply or without appropriate attention
to restrictions that would protect privacy.
You do not, to the amazement of some readers of Clarke's
paper, have an excusive right in images of your dwelling
or outdoor activity taken by planes, dirigibles, satellites,
kites, skydivers or even pigeons equipped with the fabled
Minox camera. In most jurisdictions you arguably have
no rights.
That has attracted attention from legal practitioners
and theorists, in cases such as the action by Barbra Streisand
and others, highlighted in earlier pages of this site,
against an enthusiast who sought to publish his aerial
photos of the entire California coastline. No no! said
residents of some of the more expensive realestate - publication
is a breach of our privacy, will facilitate burglary,
lead to kidnapping of our children or pets, erode our
property value ...
Action becomes even more complicated when the camera is
located in orbit, rather than in a light plane, and its
operator (or merely the publisher) is located in another
jurisdiction. You can send a scary letter to the local
geek who's using a wireless connection to send photos
from a balloon but will Microsoft or Google deign to even
open your correspondence? Will the people behind the cash
registers in Paris simply ROFL, as the digital mission
civilatrice does not recognise the jurisdiction of
courts in Australia? (Complaints from New Zealand will
presumably be addressed through another Rainbow Warrior
bombing by the French Secret Service.)
Perhaps expectations about such imaging systems will evolve
in pace with the development of personality
rights (aka rights of publicity), situated at the
intersection of privacy and intellectual property law,
not explicitly recognised in most jurisdictions and exploited
primarily by celebrities.
In the forseeable future there is no reason to believe
that Google and its peers will adopt one enthusiast's
suggestion that image service providers notify the authorities
if someone buys an image of an address (so much for the
consumer's privacy) and pass on a share of the proceeds
to the building owner/resident.
studies
Pointers to debate about cctv,
geospatial system and
other surveillance feature elsewhere on this site. They
include Roger Clarke's paper
on Vis Surveillance and Privacy.
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