The Reality Bubble

by Ziya Tong

  Beyond LEO, MEO, and GEO, however, there are still other orbits that for security reasons have no published schedules. These are the secret paths of the spy satellites. The CIA has been launching “Keyhole” (KH) class reconnaissance satellites since the 1960s. They have powerful lenses that can zoom in on the tiniest details on Earth and yet remain invisible to the general public. As was the case with GPS, the capabilities of civilian craft are several years behind what the military can do. In April 2018, Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd. announced that the United Kingdom’s Carbonite-2 satellite was able to record full-colour HD video from 505 kilometres away. By stacking the frames in much the same way macro photographers do, experts can use the data to resolve an image from space down to sixty centimetres. And this is a civilian craft. With some US government restrictions relaxed, commercial imaging satellites like the ones Google uses will now be able to show images at twenty-five centimetres of resolution. That’s the ability to see your face—from space.

  The latest spy satellites are even more powerful. Keyhole electro-optical imaging satellites of the KH-12 class are said to have a primary mirror on board that is 2.4 metres in diameter. That’s the same size as the mirror used on the Hubble Space Telescope, which is used to image objects ten to fifteen billion kilometres away. We can only imagine the resolution this class of reconnaissance satellites has when its lenses are turned not on outer space but on Earth.*4 Not much is revealed about the Keyhole satellites, but we do know that launches are managed by the National Reconnaissance Office with a heavily funded budget of an estimated $10 billion a year. The satellites usually follow polar elliptical orbits, allowing them to scan all of Earth from pole to pole, passing over the equator at a different longitude each time as the planet beneath spins from day to night.

  Even declassified documents about spy satellites are heavily redacted, so what we know about their locations comes largely from hobbyists who track their trajectories from Earth. These amateur astronomers have their eyes trained on the top secret machines. They are, in essence, the only eyes that watch the watchers. Communicating through a mailing list called SeeSat-L, this small group of observers from around the world uses stopwatches, telescopes, and cameras to monitor the orbital planes of approximately four hundred military satellites. As one member of the group, Marco Langbroek, puts it, “Just like the Earth has a coordinate grid, with latitude and longitude, the sky has a coordinate grid, and every star has a coordinate within that grid. And by using stars as a reference point you can determine the coordinates of a satellite in the sky.”

  For most of us, these satellites are out of sight and out of mind, but the reality is there are thousands of highly advanced commercial, scientific, and military eyes that hover and swoop in the skies above us performing duties that are critical to the functioning of modern society. As geostrategist Nayef Al-Rodhan writes,

  Any accidental interruption or deliberate severance of space-based services would cause immense financial losses and other disruptions. Indeed, a single day without access to space would have disastrous consequences worldwide. Approximately $1.5 trillion worth of financial market transactions per day would be stifled, throwing global markets into disarray. According to statistics provided by the International Air Transport Association, over 100,000 commercial flights crisscross the planet daily. Evidently such flights would be interrupted by communication disruptions, and deliveries of emergency health services would be severely hampered. Additionally, coordinating effective responses to crises would become nearly impossible. Due to the fundamentally transnational nature of almost all outer space activities, any conflict in outer space—even a limited one—would have disastrous consequences for the large amount of civilians globally who depend on the provision of outer space services. Contemporary strategists warn that command and control structures of modern militaries are also becoming critically dependent on space-based assets for communication, coordination, reconnaissance, surveillance, high-precision targeting and other critical military activities. This increasing indispensability of space for modern military activities makes satellites ideal targets in future conflicts.

  The targeting of satellites makes everyone on Earth—especially the most developed and technologically advanced nations—exceptionally vulnerable. One incident in particular has shown the potential for serious disruption in space. On January 11, 2007, China launched a ballistic missile from Xichang Space Center. Its target was innocuous, the Fengyun-1C, an old Chinese weather satellite travelling at around 27,000 kilometres an hour. The missile carried a kinetic kill vehicle,*5 which it released toward the weather satellite, coming in from the opposite direction at a relative velocity of 32,400 kilometres an hour. The head-on impact destroyed the satellite instantly, shattering it into a cloud of debris that sent over 35,000 shards into orbit, where they still circle like a ring of daggers around the planet. The threat of the space debris to other orbiting satellites is certainly dangerous, but the mission made something else crystal clear. While ostensibly China was decommissioning an aging satellite, it also proved to the world it had the capacity to destroy a satellite in orbit and blind another nation’s eyes.

  The Eyes Around Us

  “TO THE LADY in the brown dress,” the voice from the CCTV camera said, “blond hair, with the male in the black suit, could you please pick that cup up and put it in the bin.” The speaking camera is one of a network of 144 such surveillance devices in the town of Middlesbrough, England. There are over twenty towns in England where Big Brother doesn’t just watch over you, he barks out orders and literally tells you what to do. For stopping litterbugs, the approach seems harmless. In North London, however, where similar cameras are installed on public housing developments, they are oppressive, especially when people standing outside their own homes are told they are loitering. But this type of talking surveillance is not just in poor or middle-class areas either. In Mandelieu-la-Napoule, one of the French Riviera’s wealthiest towns, talking CCTV cameras were installed to reprimand people for infractions including bad parking, not picking up dog poop, littering, and other antisocial behaviours. As the deputy director of Le Parisien newspaper wrote, the new system is like “a voice from the heavens to warn you not to step out of line.”

  All of us are surrounded by cameras today, most of them silent. The United Kingdom, home of George Orwell, has the dubious honour of having the greatest number of surveillance cameras in Europe per capita, with over six million CCTVs, or about one for every ten people. The United Kingdom also utilizes automatic number plate recognition, and with approximately nine thousand cameras, it captures up to forty million pieces of data in the form of number plates per day and is currently holding about twenty billion records. As a report by the UK government’s independent Surveillance Camera Commissioner notes, this makes it “one of the largest non military databases in the UK.”

  China has not surpassed the United Kingdom’s number of surveillance cameras per capita, but with its massive population it certainly has the greatest number in operation of any nation. There are more than 170 million CCTV cameras installed in the country, and that number is expected to jump to between four hundred million and six hundred million by 2020.

  Networked with artificial intelligence (AI) and facial recognition, the new surveillance hubs in China—with towering floor-to-ceiling digital screens and glowing semicircular command and control desks—are as sleek as anything you might see in a futuristic sci-fi film. In one of these hubs, in the city of Guiyang, the database contains a digital image of every single resident. For local citizens, the networked cameras track a person’s face from their ID card and trace their movements back through the city over a timeline of one week. Connecting a person’s face to their licence plates, and expanding through their contact list of friends and family, the system also knows “who you are and who you frequently meet.” In addition to recognizing individual faces, some systems can estimate age, ethnicity, and gender.

  To see how the Guiyang
system works, the BBC designed a clever “Where’s Waldo?”–type experiment. They set their reporter John Sudworth free in the streets to find out how long it took to track him down. Flagged as a “suspect” for the purposes of the trial, Sudworth was no match for the AI powered eyes. He was tracked down and apprehended in just seven minutes.

  But we are not only tracked outdoors. If you walk through any shopping mall, office, or commercial space and look up, you will see the ubiquitous black domes. They are tinted so that the camera can look out but you can’t see where the lens is pointed.

  Increasingly, our conversations are also recorded by invisible ears. As William G. Staples writes in Everyday Surveillance, “Public buses in San Francisco; Athens, Georgia; Baltimore; Eugene, Oregon; Traverse City, Michigan; Hartford, Connecticut; and Columbus, Ohio, have been equipped with sophisticated audio surveillance systems to listen in on the conversations of passengers.” And in Las Vegas, Detroit, and Chicago, the Intellistreets system has been installed. These are street lights and lampposts with embedded microphones and cameras that are capable of secretly recording pedestrians’ conversations.

  At our workplaces, even office cubicles are increasingly surveilled. As an article in MIT Technology Review notes, this form of high-tech office surveillance is invisible, because “sensors are hidden in lights, on walls, under desks—anywhere that allows them to measure things like where people are and how much they are talking or moving.” All of this, of course, is under the guise of improving productivity and cost savings. Companies like Humanyze provide what they call “people analytics.” Workers are given ID badges with embedded microphones, Bluetooth sensors, and accelerometers, and data is quietly collected behind the scenes as people go about their day. The idea is that by tracking where the workers are, who they are talking to, and for how long, management can, for instance, understand which departments have the best information flows and make strategic decisions as a result, even improving communication through floor planning. The system also tells managers how productive people are by analyzing how much time a person spends socializing at work. Eerily, the devices can even track “how long an individual goes without uttering a word to anyone—and when that word does come, where does it happen and to whom is it addressed.”

  Right now, a full three-quarters of US companies subject their employees to regular workplace surveillance. In many ways, we are revisiting a high-tech remake of the extreme Taylorism that we saw in Chapter Seven, where the minutiae of labour productivity are “guided” by principles of scientific management. The cameras, sensors, and smart systems are in themselves a form of “super vision” for supervision. And with the current video surveillance market worth US$36 billion and projected to reach US$68 billion by 2023, surveillance is constantly being sold to us as a tool that enhances efficiency, safety, and security. But behind these promises there is a darker, less benign force at work. As Staples writes, modern surveillance strategies are “used by both public and private organizations to influence our choices, change our habits, ‘keep us in line,’ monitor our performance, gather knowledge or evidence about us, assess deviations, and in some cases, exact penalties.”

  It is not said often enough: what is most eroded in a surveillance society is human trust. Instead of trusting each other, we put that trust in spying eyes, GPS trackers, and networked machines. As employees who work offsite, commercial truckers experience this kind of insidious monitoring on a daily basis. Electronic monitoring has become a high-tech way for managers to watch over their performance. And fleet owners do make a good argument for the case: monitoring results in more frequent seatbelt use, higher productivity, less speeding, less overtime, and lower fuel usage and thus a lower carbon footprint. On paper, this sounds great, but drivers tell a different tale. For them, being constantly tracked by telematics is dehumanizing and oppressive.

  Telematics refers to the recording and tracking of long-distance data, primarily vehicle data—which includes mapping and routes, driving speed, idling time, acceleration and braking, and seatbelt usage, to name a few—and is designed to keep workers constantly on task and operating optimally, essentially behaving like human robots. After each shift, the data is uploaded to a computer and then transmitted to a data centre, where it is algorithmically analyzed. While it’s good for business, for the drivers to have to explain any deviation from the path or time misspent is humiliating. As one driver put it, telematics “should be known as Harassamatics.” Another stated that the data made him look guilty when he was innocent: “They assume that every driver is cheating and stealing from the company, they just haven’t caught them yet. Telematics brings a whole new perspective to this world of assumption….Every time Telematics has been thrown in my face, it has been presented to me that I was ‘taking [an] extra break without recording it.’ In fact, I was dealing with irate or disgruntled customers to the company’s benefit. Of course the assumption was that I was stealing from the company.”

  Telematics may seem intrusive, but it is nothing compared to the new brain surveillance system in China. Here, workers are given special caps, some with cameras attached, that monitor the brainwaves of the worker. According to an article in the South China Morning Post, “Concealed in regular safety helmets or uniform hats, these lightweight, wireless sensors constantly monitor the wearer’s brainwaves and stream the data to computers that use artificial intelligence algorithms to detect emotional spikes such as depression, anxiety or rage.” The technology is already in wide-scale use and has been deployed in the military, public transport, factories, and in state-owned companies. Proponents of the system argue that it has boosted efficiency and workers make fewer mistakes. Opponents say that even emotions must be limited for high productivity. It is turning human workers into machines.

  We are being watched, indoors and out, at work and at home. There is no sphere in which we are free of surveillance. And while our fears tend to be directed to hackers spying through baby monitors, or peeping Toms peering through our windows, the biggest window into our private worlds stares right at us every day: the black pinhole of our webcams.

  In 2014, Edward Snowden revealed that the United Kingdom’s GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) had been tapping into British citizens’ home webcams under a program called Optic Nerve.*6 For six months in 2008, over 1.8 million Yahoo! chat accounts were compromised as agents siphoned millions of images through home laptop and desktop computer cameras. In this most private of spheres, ordinary, innocent citizens were the targets. The system gobbled up whatever was before it, snapping a photo once every five minutes. This was a test bed for facial recognition experiments.*7 People at home were unaware, of course, that they were being watched by the government, and as a result 11 percent of the images captured by officials contained nudity and were marked as explicit. Snowden’s leaked documents revealed only what was swept up in half a year.

  Together, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States form the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, with capabilities to surveil vast populations across the globe. We still have no way of knowing how much access they have to our private video and audio communications, but we do know that their systems grow more sophisticated, more expansive, and more intrusive every year.

  The Eyes in Our Heads

  TODAY, THERE ARE EYES in the sky, eyes that surround us on the ground, and even eyes prying into our minds. Social media is, on its surface, where we post content to connect with others in our lives. It’s where we share images of our babies and pets, our food and vacations, as well as our likes and dislikes, our dreams and aspirations. But for the companies that collect our data, our profiles are really digital dossiers. They reveal our preferences, our sexual orientations, our religious outlooks, and our political alliances. Kept on file, they prove that what we say can be used against us, even if we haven’t been arrested. This is why in 2018 the US State Department proposed a new form for all visa applicants to the country. In an effort to sip
hon more data for background checks, applicants must now submit a full list of their social media handles so that government officials can pre-screen them on their various social media platforms. That our public posts are scanned by police and other authorities is not new. A 2013 survey by the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that 96 percent of police forces use social media in some capacity, with the most common use (86 percent) being for criminal investigations. But in a wide-sweeping dragnet there are always false positives. In the documentary Terms and Conditions May Apply, New York comedian Joe Lipari felt the effects of this first-hand when he paraphrased a line from the film Fight Club and posted it to Facebook.*8 Say the wrong thing and there can be serious consequences. Two hours later, a SWAT team arrived at his door, and he spent a year in court in order to prove he was not, in fact, a terrorist. As a U.S. Army vet, Lipari said, “I always thought we were on the side of the people. Now, I see the government looks at all of us as potential threats, no matter how meritorious our civilian lives or military careers.”