PHYSICAL CYBERSECURITY Semester 1
Mick Jongeling
Digital Transformation Designer m.jongeling@hva.nl
DIGITAL SOCIETY SCHOOL
In smart cities, technological solutions to increase efficiency and the quality of life, for example, to improve traffic flow, monitor air quality, or recognize violent offenders, are increasingly being deployed[1]. However, the implementation of technologies such as biometric recognition software and digital passports will expose citizens to potentially undesirable consequences of these ubiquitous technologies[2].
The challenge
Through our research, we see an increasing number of examples where citizens use physical means to protect themselves from said technologies. Counter-surveillance culture (CSC) offers a unique glimpse into the values of modern-day citizens. CSC uses creative, often critical, security measures to protect the identity of individual citizens[3]. From relatively simple face masks, t-shirt prints that trick facial recognition algorithms, the grassroots approach of CSC challenges the current paradigm of the Smart City. It is expected that with the increasing presence of ubiquitous technologies in the smart city, citizens will adopt measures pioneered by CSC.
. photo credits: Antony Xia via Unsplash
Thus, cyber security is becoming more mainstream, more accessible as well as more physical. Anyone interested in cyber security in the smart city, should therefore not only be concerned with network security , the use of safe passwords, geofencing and NFC skimming, but also with the physical security measures that are being implemented by citizens. Questions such as when such measures are legitimate and when they are considered fraudulent, the effectiveness of these measures, and which new physical cybersecurity measures are expected to arise in the near future, are paramount to consider in the future development of the smart city.
[1]
“Smart cities: Digital solutions for a more livable future”, Ed Pilkington, The Guardian https://mck.co/2Jq8ccn
[2]
“Digital dystopia: how algorithms punish the poor”, McKinsey Global Institute https://bit.ly/2BcTqz7
[3]
“Fashion that will hide you from face-recognition technology”, Lauren Davis, Gizmodo https://bit.ly/2nwT6HN
About Digital Society School 01 The Context 02 Cities of the Future, Optimised or Data Hungry? The Conict within Digital Identity
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Where to Start? 07 Speculative Design, Sensemaking & Ethics 08 Future Plans 09
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About DIGITAL SOCIETY SCHOOL We are a diverse group of designers, developers and researchers that shape tomorrow’s society through digital technology, using human-centered design approaches. We are explicitly open, placing our findings at the world’s disposal. We believe that our digitally fuelled future can -and should- be inclusive, intelligent and involve us all. We invite students and professionals from creative industries to join us on our mission. Digital Society School is an educational institution, where we seek to research the impact of technology on society, develop the skills necessary to guide the transformation and pass on this knowledge and these skills to a new generation of professionals. They are ready to begin work on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for 2030. They will be the architects of transformation, across the world as well as in your organisation
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The DSS Amsterdam Digital Transformation Intensive Programme is hands-on learning at its best, involving practice-based work with a touch of research. Multidisciplinary teams of designers, programmers, social/digital media experts, researchers, copywriters and storytellers work together on a design brief provided by an industry partner, to develop a working prototype.
By 2030, the global population will rise to 8.6 billion, and 2/3 of them will live in cities. When it comes to global urbanization, megacities are growing exponentially. Futurologists predict that by 2030 up to 5 billion people will live their lives in cities.
The context
With an ever-increasing number of people depending on reliable public systems and infrastructures for their daily activities, it seems to be a logical move for municipal governments to start looking into automating public service systems to support the smooth-running of everyday life in the metropolis. Self-driving cars, top-up cards for transportation, hyperpersonalised advertising with facial recognition, peer-to-peer sharing and contactless payment systems are being introduced in the ecosystem of the smart city.
Smart systems are implemented within city perimeters, transferring to the citizen’s fingertips the possibility to request almost any service and make decisions about wants and needs independent from another human. These interactions require a Digital Identity, a replicate of the user consisting of pixels, attributes, and credentials, that communicates with the digital architecture of the city and creates transactions that are intangible and that are hard to comprehend for the average citizen [4].
Can the values of citizens be safeguarded by rapidly upscaling cities?
[4] “Over het Digitale Identiteitslab”, Waag Society https://digitaleidentiteit.waag.org/over/
A render of a city with automated cars and public transport.
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photo credits: Unknown
Cities of the future: optimised or data-hungry? Alphabet has founded Sidewalk Labs[5], an urban development department aimed at reimagining cities in order to improve quality of life. Quayside, is a pilot project proposing to build a utopian neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront that has met resistance due to privacy concerns[6]. Sidewalk Labs proposed Quayside as the solution to every major problem in emerging megacities by building the neighbourhood ‘from the internet up’. New Songdo[7] in South-Korea utilises new technologies to solve long-standing problems such as traffic and waste management. ‘Smart’ cities should continue to seek solutions to such problems from the perspective of increased efficiency.
Through mechanisms such as payment cards, heat maps and real-time analytics, it has never been easier for public institutions as well as private companies to source the needed information, allowing them to be able to quickly adapt their service according to the needs of their users. An advantage of ubiquitous computing is the automation of information processes and the contribution towards making certain services more effective and efficient.
[5] “Sidewalk Labs”, Alphabet https://www.sidewalklabs.com/ [6]
“'Surveillance capitalism': critic urges Toronto to abandon smart city project”, The Guardian https://bit.ly/2IKGDau [7]
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“'South Korea Conceptualizes the Ultimate Smart City”, New Cities https://bit.ly/2kYeyF0
NVIDIA Metropolis is an edge-to-cloud platform for intelligent video analytics, designed to pave the way to smarter, safer cities. photo credits: nvidianews.nvidia.com
However, such technologies are already being implemented on a smaller scale and could be much closer than you think. ‘Data-hungry smart cities’ are already an up-and-running concept in existing and new urban development projects. Surveillance cameras (CCTV) are already using facial recognition to cross-reference against previously collected images and help identify an individual. An example: Dubai Airport has already installed the first facial recognition tunnel aimed at facilitating the process of passing through border security for departing passengers [8].
The conflict in the ‘smart’ city is between engineers aiming to improve the accuracy of their algorithms and the citizens denying their effort by removing themselves from the process. In the same sphere as the #DeleteFacebook campaign, users who opt out of the bad product, indirectly also opt out of making the better product. The new digital divide will be between people who are living with an algorithm and people who rebel against it. Should a ‘data-hungry city’ be allowed to harvest more information than actually needed to improve the lives of the citizen?
The embedded systems in our city of the (near?) future could start making decisions based on the prejudices of its owners — no technology is neutral.
How can we co-exist with digital technology that interacts with our Digital Twin? [8]
Facial Recognition Technology in use in Leicester Square, London.
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credits: Unknown
“Dubai Airport is going to use face-scanning virtual aquariums as security checkpoints”, Thuy Ong, The Verge https://bit.ly/2y9nzx0
The Smart Enough City
Sustainable Development Goal n.11 aims to make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable by 2030.
How will the city of the future look like when there is harmony between citizens and technological enterprises?
Check-out free shopping offers consumers the opportunity to pay automatically with their digital profile and biometric data for verification.
Drones can offer a more secure method of delivering messages, packages or aid to others.
Cameras can find purpetrators of traffic regulations and use biometric datasets to track down and fine.
Self-Driving Cars transport citizens to predetermined location. These automated vehicles use adaptive technology to prevent accidents with citizens.
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The Conflict within Digital Identity Daily digital activity has enabled governments and companies to create a detailed digital profile of citizens. Personal Identifiable Information (P.I.I.) consists of all digital elements and attributes that contribute to identifying an individual in cyberspace. It contains our login names, passwords, demographic data, and new biometric identification technologies, such as fingerprints, facial and iris scans. On the 25th of May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was activated in the European Union [5] and with it, people received the right to see, modify, retrieve and/or delete their P.I.I. For many, this was a first introduction to the vast digital data sets that have been collected [5]
“The GDPR: Everything you wanted to know”, GDPRexplained.eu https://bit.ly/2lgIgVI
[6]
“Your digital identity has three layers, and you can only protect one of them”, Katarzyna Szymielewicz https://bit.ly/2S9sk6d
[7]
“What is data exhaust”, Margaret Rouse https://bit.ly/2mXYXpk
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about individual citizens since the rapid emergence of the information age. This introduction was followed by an awe from the citizens whom have created these profiles. It was later revealed that tech companies had been implementing data harvesting algorithms to not only gather the necessary data needed to operate their systems, but also to train future algorithms to nudge citizens in decisions with commercial intentions. Citizens collectively became the source for the so-called ‘data exhaust’ — the byproduct of our connected actions, movements and decisions [7]. As a result, many decisions are informed by the interpretation of our profiles rather than our personal and daily views. This creates challenging situations because we, as general users, currently lack oversight on the process of profiling and acting algorithms [6] which shape these profiles.
“Your digital identity has three layers, and you can only protect one of them” - Katarzyna Szymielewicz[6] Digital Identity is made up of (at least) three layers, one of them consisting of our actions. What do we allow the system to know about us and what do we reveal in our interactions with it? The second is created through behavioural observations. These are harvested from tracking technologies, such as the infamous Facebook pixel and surveillance technolgies to analyse activity patterns. The last is composed of the learnings gathered from a combination of the previous two and are assumptions about our next steps.
While the introduction of GDPR has offered some regulations and restrictions, few solutions exist for current, let alone (near) future, ubiquitous technologies that are found in smart cities. With the increasing presence of cyber infrastructure (e.g., facial recognition camera systems) in smart cities it seems inevitable that our digital profiles will start to interact with such infrastructures and become exposed to new risks and potentially harmful techniques, designed to extract P.I.I. It is therefore important to consider the ways in which our digital profiles can be protected from increasingly bigger and elaborate cyber security threats in the smart city. What could be the implications of a citizenship which fully relies on daily interactions between smart systems and digital profiles?
Where to start? MIT’s Moral Machine is a online experimental platform that uses participatory research to collect the values and ethics of people about the ‘Trolley Problem’. By collecting the users preferences, a research paper was released that shared global moral preferences, individual variations in different demographics, cross-cultural ethical variation and the correlation with modern institutions and deep cultural traits.
We identified opportunities in the field of cybersecurity: The incomprehensability of the semantics, the prejudice of the implementation of new technologies and the teachings from Counter-Surveillance Culture .
website: http://moralmachine.mit.edu/
The challenge to research how life with cybersecurity will be can start from making probing work that researches, frames and evoke future cybersecurity threats.
The micro-processor can be implanted in one’s hand, creating NFC connections with sensors to give access or transfer payment.
We believe that the starting point for this research has to be searched in small actions and products that create tangible objects of conversation. They can serve as a vector to learn public values and conceptions about the emergence of cyberthreats, ethics of sensing products and the evolution of smart cities.
By identifying the citizens’ values on their digital profile, ubiquitous computing in the city and available (public) services, this could become a big step towards a harmonious smart city. Counter-surveillance measurements are the resistance towards the new society, but there are learnings to be extracted from them that can be used to create human-centered, value-driven designs for cybersecurity products of the near future. 07
Protection of the digital profile will become more prevalant with the evolution towards a digital life, with the emergence of better detection algorithms, hacking methods and invisible automation.
A masked protester in Hong Kong (2019) spray paints the dome of a surveillance camera black. Surrounded by peers carrying an umbrella to prevent their biometric data being gathered, analysed and processed. These examples fit under the overarching term ‘counter-surveillance’ and are mostly used as a form of protest. But what are the true values of the protesters that the city fails to appease? photo credits: Bobby Yip/AP
Speculative Design, Sensemaking & Ethics Speculative Design is an approach that offers tools to map the future in a meaningful way[9]. Speculative design imagines how developments change over time and effect the future. This approach raises the critical vision to the rich assemblages of possible futures and questions our own imaginative horizon and finds the alternatives most needed in the world. The design methods within this school of thought help identify future opportunities of technologies and work towards an open discussion about a future that could become a reality.
Sensemaking is the practice of identifying and constructing tangible shared experiences[10]. ]This approach can help collect feelings, thoughts or a general understanding of a situation that is ambiguous or undefined.
Debates on ethics of smart cities are mostly about biometrics and identification. Self-driving cars can recognize street signs, adjust driving speed based on the neighbourhood and park intelligent without interference in busy streets. Biometric data will involuntarily be handed over to the vehicles. It is an argument to give up privacy knowing we could improve the system in the long haul. As of now, the smart solutions of the future are met with resistance due to their inability to be ethical and create tangible concepts that end-users can relate to.
We see promise in these methods to investigate the present-day interpretations of cyber security and to identify values of citizens that we can utilize and create tangible pieces of conversation. By creating these pieces of work, we hope to look into the zeitgeist of citizens and identify new conversations in the field of cyber security, counter-surveillance, ethics, policy making, digital identity and the semantics of life in the smart city.
Cybersecurity, with its visual language and terminology, has become particulary hard to grasp for the regular customer. Using sensemaking, we can work towards a paradigm of cybersecurity. What does it look like? What are the real threats? What are safety measurements? We need to start making these things tangible, to obtain a conversational object.
Chapeau privée: Protection against surveillance
Project KOVR bag: A wearable countermovement
Source: Marije Kanis. http://marijekanis.com
Source: Project KOVR. https://projectkovr.com/
The Virtual Watchers: Volunteers surveilling the US-Mexico border. Source:The Virtual Watchers . https://bit.ly/2mTzZrk
[9]
[10]
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“Speculative Everything’, Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby
“Physical sensemaking: Crafting for an invisible world of data”, Marije Kanis
Security in the Data Era Spring2019 We developed a board to generate data with our research group. Participants could chose options about safety preferences, feelings about the Police and their interpretation of digital technologies.
Future plans As part of Digital Society School, our role is to research an ethical future city and apply our skills to inspire and activate other citizens to make the vision come true. The possible outcomes that we imagine vary from new ways of communicating about the topic, the development of futuristic objects and research methodologies. We want to investigate what the role of human-centered design, speculative design and sensemaking could be in these actions.
What are the ethics of physical sensing objects and can they be used to keep us safe? 09
In the past year at Digital Society School Amsterdam, we’ve been working with the Dutch Police Force to understand the values of millenials about the implementation of A.I.. We also founded the ‘Speculative Futures’ chapter of Amsterdam to create a community of future thinkers and practitioners. We would like to combine our expertise in human-centered design, applied research, critical theory and speculative design into a project that researches protective products for a life in the smart city.
What can we learn from countersurveillance culture (Hong Kong Protests)?
We see opportunities for a collaboration that researches current cybersecurity issues and solutions and creates tangible outcomes. We would like to address rapid technological shifts in society and devising ways of protecting the citizens’ privacy and digital profile. In this process, we aim to position cybersecurity as a necessity for the citizen of the future.
What are the opportunities if we start designing for the needs of the Digital Twin?
Can we create tangible represenations of cybersecurity concepts?
What is the future of cybersecurity in a city of automation?
Mick Jongeling
Digital Transformation Designer m.jongeling@hva.nl
DIGITAL SOCIETY SCHOOL