Captured

I’m the only for­eigner in the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment,” Ital­ian, Francesca Bria used to some­times say when in­tro­duc­ing her­self to a pub­lic au­di­ence. In the two years lead­ing up to the pan­demic, her team’s work on “dig­i­tal sov­er­eignty” for peo­ple liv­ing in the Cata­lan cap­i­tal might prove to be as im­por­tant as oth­ers’ ef­forts on po­lit­i­cal sov­er­eignty.

A Fi­nan­cial Times ar­ti­cle gave her the cringe-in­duc­ing title “Barcelona’s Robin Hood of Data” but Bria’s of­fi­cial job title was CTO (Chief Tech­nol­ogy Of­fi­cer) for the city. Along with Am­s­ter­dam, under Brias’ charge, Barcelona was one of the two big cities that ran a pilot pro­gramme ti­tled DE­CODE that aimed to “pro­vide tools that put in­di­vid­u­als in con­trol of whether they keep their per­sonal data pri­vate or share it for the pub­lic good.” It was funded by the Eu­ro­pean Union’s Hori­zon 2020 Pro­gramme.

In­vited to take up this po­si­tion by Mayor Ada Colau, the legal frame­work her team pro­duced might just have helped pre­vent the mis­takes of other Eu­ro­pean cities and coun­tries where the rights of cit­i­zens are fast being snatched by cor­po­ra­tions op­er­at­ing hand in hand with gov­ern­ments and their agen­cies.

Re­cent gov­ern­ment at­tempts to au­tho­rise drone sur­veil­lance by po­lice in France were only barely de­feated by pub­lic pres­sure. Their use for the so-called pub­lic good in the fight against ter­ror­ism and to en­sure na­tional se­cu­rity came out of the usual con­ser­v­a­tive ar­gu­ments that don’t admit that new tech­nol­ogy can vi­o­late basic human rights. With con­ser­v­a­tives, the ends al­ways jus­tify the means, ex­cept when it hurts the most fi­nan­cially well off in so­ci­ety.

Echo­ing the his­tory of es­pe­cially the last four years in Cat­alo­nia, con­sul­tant and cu­ra­tor at “Fu­turi­bile” Marta Ar­ni­ani (who has worked with Francesca Bria) said to me, “There have been cases of po­lice beat­ings and if it’s a case of an in­di­vid­ual cit­i­zen’s voice against the po­lice, we know where power lies. That’s why it’s very im­por­tant to [be able] to film the po­lice. This is valid for France, for Cat­alo­nia, for Eu­rope. It’s a mat­ter of mak­ing these sys­tems ac­count­able. One way this could be done is that peo­ple who work in civil rights, lawyers for ex­am­ple, should be able to ac­cess which al­go­rithms and sur­veil­lance tools are utilised so there’s pub­lic reg­istries. What is hap­pen­ing today is they launch a pub­lic pro­cure­ment process, a pri­vate com­pany in­stalls the tech­nol­ogy but there’s no real knowl­edge in­side the pub­lic bod­ies, most of the time. There’s no in­de­pen­dent val­i­da­tion. We have the idea that we can apply tech­nol­ogy to solve prob­lems but it just re­it­er­ates them be­cause it’s based on bi­ased or in­com­plete data and ends up “au­tomat­ing in­equal­i­ties. That’s the title of a very good book, by the way!”

I very much share ex­perts like Marta’s con­cerns. Po­lice and pri­vate drones are al­ready fly­ing with min­i­mal legal re­stric­tions in Barcelona but late last year the Span­ish gov­ern­ment ap­proved the use of fly­ing air taxis in Barcelona (and San­ti­ago de Com­postela; cu­ri­ously both places being major for­eign tourist des­ti­na­tions.)

My first ques­tion with this and every pro­posed legal or tech­no­log­i­cal change is:”Does it ben­e­fit the av­er­age per­son in any way? If not, then who does it ben­e­fit and who does it dis­ad­van­tage?” Ex­pen­sive he­li­copter rides only ben­e­fit those who can af­ford them and cause noise and vi­sual pol­lu­tion for every­one else.

The same basic ques­tion needs to be asked about new tech­nol­ogy, in­clud­ing “bio­met­ric” fa­cial recog­ni­tion cam­eras. In my opin­ion, the an­swer is sim­i­lar: the rich­est 1% (or 5%) of the pop­u­la­tion are those who gain from it. As usual.