Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [43]
Once this piece of information is in hand, it's possible to ask questions like Who is allowed to be here? and What is he or she allowed to do here?, questions that enable just about any defensible space to enforce its own accesscontrol policy—not just on the level of gross admission, either, but of finely grained differential permissioning. What is currently done with guards, signage, and physical barriers ranging from velvet rope to razor wire, can still more effectively be accomplished when those measures are supplemented by gradients of access and permission—a "defense in depth" that has the additional appeal of being more or less subtle.
If you're having trouble getting a grip on how this would work in practice, consider the ease with which an individual's networked currency cards, transit passes and keys can be traced or disabled, remotely—in fact, this already happens.* But there's a panoply of ubiquitous security measures both actual and potential that are subtler still: navigation systems that omit all paths through an area where a National Special Security Event is transpiring, for example, or subways and buses that are automatically routed past. Elevators that won't accept requests for floors you're not accredited for; retail items, from liquor to ammunition to Sudafed, that won't let you purchase them, that simply cannot be rung up.
* If you purchase a New York City MetroCard with a credit or debit card, your identity is associated with it, and it can be used to track your movements. The NYPD tracked alleged rapist Peter Braunstein this way.
Context-aware differential permissioning used as a security tool will mean that certain options simply do not appear as available to you, like grayedout items on a desktop menu—in fact, you won't get even that backhanded notification—you won't even know the options ever existed.
Such interventions are only a small sampling of the spectrum of control techniques that become available in a ubiquitously networked world. MIT sociologist Gary T. Marx sees the widest possible scope for security applications in an "engineered society" like ours, where "the goal is to eliminate or limit violations by control of the physical and social environment."
Marx identifies six broad social-engineering strategies as key to this control, and it should surprise no one that everyware facilitates them all.
We all understand the strategy of target removal: "something that is not there cannot be taken," and so cash and even human-readable credit and debit cards are replaced with invisible, heavily encrypted services like PayPass.
Target devaluation seeks to make vulnerable items less desirable to those who would steal them, and this is certainly the case where self-identifying, self-describing devices or vehicles can be tracked via their network connection.
For that matter, why even try to steal something that becomes useless in the absence of a unique biometric identifier, key or access code? This is the goal of offender incapacitation, a strategy also involved in attempts to lock out the purchase of denied items.
Target insulation and exclusion are addressed via the defense in depth we've already discussed—the gauntlet of networked sensors, alarms, and cameras around any target of interest, as well as all the subtler measures that make such places harder to get to.
And finally there is the identification of offenders or potential offenders, achieved via remote iris scanning or facial recognition systems like the one currently deployed in the Newham borough of London.
Who's driving the demand for ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and control? Obviously, the law-enforcement and other agencies charged with maintaining the peace, as well as various more shadowy sorts of government security