BIT ENGINEERS REPORT:
Antiterror line installed by Bureau engineers,
Haarlem NL, May 8 2009.
This service enables any phone to act as a networked microphone for collecting live audio data on civil liberty infringements and other arbitrary exercises of power.
HOW IT WORKS
You phone in and leave a message. Message may be spoken report or in-progress recording of an antiterror attack. UPHONE uplinks your audio recording direct to an online audio database, an accumulation of micro-incidents which individually may be inactionable but en masse could provide evidence for a definitive response.
The bit UPHONE is a standalone system designed to withstand the militarisation of other communications networks. The collected audio files are held in an open database and may be monitored, syndicated, remixed or reused. Bureau provides a full report and system maintenance.
[ INSTRUCTIONS ]
set PHONE TO AUTODIAL your national Antiterror number,
Netherlands 08587 80854
------- PLEASE LEAVE YOUR ANTITERROR MESSAGE
------- IN THE LANGUAGE OF YOUR CHOICE.
-------
------- THE SYSTEM WILL BEGIN RECORDING
------- SWIFTLY AFTER ANSWER
------- WITH NO FURTHER VOICE PROMPTS OR BEEPS
-------
------- ON COMPLETING YOUR RECORDING YOU ARE THEN
------- ADVISED TO HANG UP. YOUR CALL WILL BE
------- UPLOADED AUTOMATICALLY TO
------- WWW.BUREAUIT.ORG/ANTITERROR/NL
------- FOR LISTENING AT ANY TIME
-------
------- ALL PHONES MAY ACCESS THE SYSTEM
------- ALTHOUGH BUREAU OBSERVATION
------- FINDS THAT ANALOG PHONES AND LAND LINES
------- PROVIDE FOR A HIGHER SOUND QUALITY
-------
------- UNCLEAR RECORDINGS CAN BE ANNOTATED
BIT advises members of the public to report individuals or activity that may be directly or indirectly associated with antiterrorist activity. Public telephone booths provide the most effective anonymizing device for those who would prefer to remain unidentified. Individuals uploading information will not be re-contacted but authorship can be credited.
The Antiterror Line is a project that addresses the increased incursions into civil liberties that have become ubiquitous in the post September 11th context: the arbitrary exercises of power that go on in the name of antiterrorism. Incidents such as being detained at Heathrow airport for over an hour for wearing a t-shirt with a gun on it by British Airways security staff concerned "for the well-being of the other passengers". Often these attacks are minor inconveniences. However as a distributed phenomonon they are worth assessing, which is what the Bureau has done with the Antiterror Line.
The Antiterror Line is a public audio database and national phone number (UK and US). The next time you are under antiterror attack you can dial the number discretely and use your phone to record events - or you can call in later to report an antiterror incident experienced. Within 5 minutes, the recording will upload to a publicly available, read-writeable database, marked by the date and time of the event. Later you can go to the site and annotate it, or not, or anyone else can - but it is there, compiling your testimony or experience with everyone else's. A database of civil liberties infringements that by themselves might be trivial but accumulated, accreted, amassed, may amount to something more.
In 2002 the US Attorney General John Ashcroft set up a similar line under the US Patriot Act, called the Terrorist Information Prevention System or TIPS. This was a hotline that recruited thousands of Americans, "TIPS volunteers", to report suspicious activity. They were volunteers because they were not paid to assume the the risks of reporting on their neighbours and friends; and of not knowing what would happen to that data. Reporting a suspicion can incur substantial personal risks, and in other informant programmes that the Federal and State governments run they both pay and carefully ensure the safety of informants. In this case, volunteers were just expected to tear at the social fabric of trust that underscores and underwrites daily interactions voluntarily.
The BIT Antiterror project was set up very much in contrast to Ashcroft's TIPS project and has a number of features that are different, crucially with respect to the structure of participation.
The central question is who gets to produce the information and who gets to interpret it. With Ashcroft's TIPS Line, only CIA or Federal agents get to interpret the information. In the case of the Antiterror line the database is public: anyone can listen to the calls as they are deposited in the online database; annotate the system, reuse the samples, or reinterpret them.
msgJun30_161503 UK "Ah hi it's me calling again from Heathrow airport um I've been detained at the gate for ah almost 45 minutes for wearing a tshirt with a picture of a gun on it. But the security told me that I couldn't leave the desk, couldn't make phonecalls, that I couldn't um sit down, I had to stand there and wait while the security officer went and spoke with his superiors he said he checked with the police and he checked with his superiors and he said it was up to British Air CLICK"
Who assumes the risk and who assumes the costs in both cases is quite different. In the case of the TIPS line, it is an 800 number - a free call - but affords no other protection or assurances. In the case of the Antiterror line you do have to assume the cost of a local phone call, the costs are distributed. This also marks the absence of that power asymmetry - that there's not a centralised agency that is bearing the costs or doing the interpretation or exclusively reusing the work.
[ FAQ ]
 |