14 DAY TRIAL // The UK citizens are among the most watched citizens in the world. But apparently, surveillance cameras are not enough. From now on, policy makers and town planners will be able to literally have the entire UK under the form of a SimCity game. As it is today, the game incorporates data about the real UK population, recorded at the 2001 census, and includes information about car ownership, house prices and use of health, education, transport and leisure facilities.
"Historically, people have assembled data on a single PC or workstation. E-Science provides exciting opportunities to access multiple databases from remote, virtual locations, making it possible to develop highly generic simulation models which are easy to update," said Dr Mark Birkin from the University of Leeds, the coordinator of the project.
Birkin demonstrated the potential of this project last week at the UK e-Science stand at SC06, the world's largest supercomputing conference in Florida. "We're building a core model which represents the whole of the UK at the level of (synthetic) individuals and households with many attributes and behaviors," said Birkin.
The purpose of the game is to offer "social policy makers" and "town planners" a tool for testing the consequences of their policies on a virtual model of the UK which is as realistic as possible. The intentions are obviously good. But...
"We can profile populations area by area and forecast attributes such as health status, employment, and car ownership ten or twenty years ahead. In future, we'll be able to project the effects of policy change and help policymakers evaluate the impact of the decisions they take," says Dr Birkin.
This is supposed to be good news and Birkin seems to be quite proud of what they're doing. They have gathered a lot of data that has been previously widely-dispersed and uncentralized and have made it accessible using grid computing and e-Science techniques. Right now the data in this SimUK game is anonymous, but what prevents this to change?
After all, there is plenty of additional information that could be added to the grid. How about the individual's motion tracked by the surveillance cameras and the individual's traffic on the Internet? Sounds crazy? Well, the surveillance cameras are there and the EU just decided that our traffic on the Internet is not private and should be available to authorities. But is there any reason to do such things? Hm... How about the war on terror? Does this pretext sound convincing enough to you?
Read the Birkin quotes again - "We're building a core model which represents the whole of the UK at the level of (synthetic) individuals and households with many attributes and behaviors." Doesn't this sound like a useful tool in the fight against terrorism? I'm sure that some politicians would be more than happy to scrap the "anonymous" feature in Birkin's SimUK game.
In the book 1984 George Orwell imagined a nightmare world in which the government watched their citizens through their TV sets and controlled everything by maintaining a constant state of war with an enemy that sounded almost mythical. The constant state of war is already here, as politicians tell us that the war on terror will last at least for decades. And today's technology is much more advanced than Orwell could have even dreamed of. In Orwell's fantasy only people's behavior was being watched, but if one tracks your Internet traffic and searches, one gains access even to your intentions. So, Birkin might one day be remembered as the guy who finally brought the Orwellian nightmare within reach. Of course, we're far from there yet, but sometimes we should really fear those with good intentions at least as much as those who wish our destruction!
Update: Only a week after I have written this, there is some additional news from the UK. London now has a Metropolitan Police's Homicide Prevention Unit - a police department that doesn't just solves crimes but which tries to prevent them before they are happening. Sounds too sci-fi?
"Experts from London's Metropolitan Police's Homicide Prevention Unit are creating psychological profiles of likely offenders which will enable them to predict future patterns of behaviour," writes the Associated Press. "Statements from former partners, mental health workers and any previous complaints are used to compile the profiles which would identify those most likely to commit serious violent crimes. The team is currently focusing on individuals who could turn from domestic violence to murder, based on data that shows that about 25 percent of all murders are related to domestic violence."
Of course, what counts when you're trying to make predictions is not how many murders are related to domestic violence, but how many domestic violences later turn into murders. However, this idea seems to be one step beyond a cop's comprehension abilities.
The Times has a story about the subject and quotes Laura Richards (photo), the nut-case "expert" behind this initiative, who hasn't even got her PhD in criminal psychology yet, as saying: "People do some evil things and you are never going to stop all of them. But what I have a problem with is when the professionals sit by and let it happen. That is when I become a pain in the side of the authorities. I am not political. I am not in this for rank. That's what makes me a dangerous person."
She really is dangerous all right, but not because she isn't political, but because "Ms Richards hopes that [the intelligence] will help to identify murderers in the making and allow police or support agencies to intervene - for example through monitoring, social services or mental-health referrals - before a crime is committed," the Times wrote (my italics). AP described the goals as: "Once an individual has been targeted, police can decide whether to make moves towards an arrest, though the newspaper [the Times] did not specify on what grounds this could occur, or they could alert relevant social services."
