PassWord – 16th September 2015

Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren. Bringing you the programme that deep dives into the future of technology while also looking at its impact on the here and now. In today’s programme, the critical national infrastructure and why it’s called that. And though we’re more used to hearing how drones are being used offensively by the military, how the United Nations is deploying them in peace missions. How German artists are demanding a bit of distance from our networked world and saying that we should stop participating in the digitisation that is sucking the life out of us. And finally, a ray of hope. A Dutch architectural company has come up with a tower that eats the smog in our cities and turns it into jewellery, and it’s coming to London. But first, it’s called the CNI, the Critical National Infrastructure, and it’s just as important to us as our central nervous system because we all depend on it in the same way. The CNI is the network of computer-controlled services that we use. Water, electricity, gas, transport, phones, buildings— virtually everything in our modern world is now controlled by an intricate web of sensors and controllers linked to central computers. And that complexity is about to increase because of the rollout of the Internet of Things. It has been hailed by the high-tech companies as a move that will immeasurably improve our lives, as nearly everything from the soil to our ourselves is linked to the internet. Everything will become smart, from our phones to our cities, and by 2020 there will be more messages sent by machines through the internet than by humans. What could possibly go wrong? Well, according to Patricia Lewis, Research Director for International Security at the influential international think tank Chatham House, quite a lot. She’s also the respected co-director of the Global Commission on Internet Governance, and she told me why we might not be too smart after all to depend so much on our systems.

Speaker B: The way I am increasingly thinking about the way we think about risks and problems is that we are preoccupying ourselves in the risk matrix with all of the stuff that is quite high frequency but quite low impact, and we’re not paying enough attention to the other end of the spectrum, which is low frequency, considered perhaps highly improbable, but very high impact. And there’s a lot of new mathematics which is being looked at, which looks at how in fact our assessment of probability might be quite wrong. So these things might be more probable than we understand. So we have to assume, I think, a more worst-case analysis and say perhaps they are more probable than we think. And because they’re high impact, we ought to be taking notice of them anyway, however improbable they are.

Speaker A: So do you want to give me a few examples of that then?

Speaker B: Well, I mean, one example would be a massive cyber attack on the energy grid that could have an impact of lasting for days or weeks, in which case you haven’t just got, you know, no television and radio and internet connection and all that kind of thing. What you’ve got is a serious situation with emergency services, with obviously transport, but also hospitals. Another high-impact event would be that multiplied by a large number of countries in Europe. A worse event in some respects might be an attack on a nuclear, civil nuclear facility, and actually affect the way in which the nuclear reactor operates, and possibly even leading to a release of radioactive material. This is not beyond the bounds of possibility. And so what are we doing to look at that, and how are we thinking about it, and how are we, how are we putting things in place to reduce the likelihood of that happening? But if it does happen, how will we recognize that that’s what’s happening? And also, if it does happen, how will we respond to it? And it seems to me that this is a discussion that we need to have in everyday life. This is not a discussion just for experts or a discussion for, you know, those in charge of the facilities or in government. This is something that every single person needs to be thinking about and how they respond, just as we do for fire drills. You know, we need to think about these things. Another possibility would be a complete shutdown of our communication systems. You could do that, for example, through satellite attacks, and this is one thing we’ve been looking at the vulnerabilities within our space-based assets. We’re highly reliant on that for GPS, for example. We’re highly reliant on it for our normal telecommunications, reliant on it for all sorts of other communications. Some of our communications can go through cable, but a lot are entirely dependent on space. And space is a very vulnerable area in the sense that quite a lot of the stuff up there has been sitting up there for quite a while, and it’s old technology, and it was never cyberprotected. So it seems to me that one of the things we need to look at is the older technology that’s now integrated and connected, but was never, never had security by design, and never had security built in from the beginning, and people didn’t think about it. Because as we know, when you sort of bolt on security modules, they’re never as good as if you built in security from the beginning, just as a matter of engineering principle.

Speaker A: Interestingly, it’s an area that while all of those risks exist, you know, the issue with security is that people don’t like it. They want to have instant access to communications. If you put a password on someone’s mobile phone, they resent it.

Speaker B: Yes, and I think a lot of it depends on how much it makes sense to people. So up until recently on many flights we were told that we couldn’t use our iPhones and iPads even when flight mode enabled while during takeoff and landing. Why? Makes no sense. So everybody disobeyed it. It was a ludicrous thing and they’ve now removed it and everyone knows Now essentially they’ve admitted it made no sense. Now presumably what they were doing is trying to reduce the number of people who forgot to switch their things to flight mode. I suspect that what they discovered is that they increased that risk because people just disobeyed it and didn’t think about switching it to flight mode. Whereas if you switched it to flight mode and then you can sit and read and nobody will come away and say put that away or switch it off or whatever, then you’ve got a much more sensible more transparent. People, I think, are generally more willing to comply with things that make sense to them.

Speaker A: Because, I mean, a lot of people are arguing that actually all of these insecurities have been created by a technology industry that, and to take your airplane analogy, they’ve actually put you on the right plane flyer. They’ve put you on the first bit.

Speaker B: Sometimes I think they have. Yeah, I mean, you know, I think they do need to step that up, and part of that is about how much people are willing to accept accept in terms of their vulnerability and the sort of protections that they want and the security features that they want online, and they need to demand it.

Speaker A: That was Chatham House’s Patricia Lewis, who leads the think tank’s research into cybersecurity, on why we should go into the new world of the Internet of Things with our eyes wide open. Now, a couple of weeks after the Prime Minister controversially revealed to Parliament that drones had been used to kill two British persons fighting for the Islamic State, who David Cameron said had been planning terrorist atrocities in the UK, attention has once again centred on the use of these unmanned aerial vehicles. And now the UN is also to use them, though not to monitor the peace.

Speaker C: It is used for surveillance, but it is mainly used for the safety of the peacekeeping troops. And also, so basically as a way for the peacekeeping troops to, before they go out, know what is out there and keep themselves safe and be able to respond more effectively. So it’s not so much about monitoring a peace agreement or a ceasefire. It’s much more about the safety of the peacekeeping troops and the operational planning of the peacekeeping troops.

Speaker D: Do you think that there will be an extension of the role of drones? Obviously drones are being used more and more and more. Is it almost inevitable then that they too will be used to enforce peace agreements?

Speaker C: I think it looks like the Department of Peacekeeping Operations will continue using them. I think the payload capabilities, so that basically translating stuff is something that is being explored more and more also by the crisis response parts of the United Nations. So by the World Food Programme and by various other responders to transport medicine, to transport small payloads basically.

Speaker D: It does beg an interesting question, doesn’t it? Because hitherto we’ve used United Nations observers, we’ve used United Nations peacekeeping forces to actually be there physically. In a sense, you could actually use drones as a remote method of doing that without needing to call on countries to supply troops.

Speaker C: I don’t think I agree with that statement. I think that what you’re saying there is if you have the drones and that’s enough not only to surveil but also to play the deterrence factor, right? The main reason that peacekeepers are in a place— well, there’s three main reasons. One is to monitor, the other one is to deter, and the other one is to protect civilians. So I’m not sure. I believe that drones can do the other two. I think that they’re a great tool for peacekeeping troops to use. I think there are problems with their use, and that’s the main— the bulk of the paper that Patrick and I wrote are to point out some of the questions, the difficult questions that we need to ask if we’re going to use drones.

Speaker D: So what are those problems? What are the difficult questions that we need to ask?

Speaker C: I think there’s one that is around consent and privacy. So I think that if you’re going to be flying a surveillance device over conflict-affected populations, you have a responsibility, or the United Nations has a responsibility to at least ask the questions around what kind of consent do we need to ask of populations. I think the second problem has to do with tackling issues of fear and of confusion that can be brought about by a technology that is visible and that is associated in certain places with armed strikes. And so I think that that means that places again a responsibility on the UN to inform people of what these what drones are doing, and also to be very careful about not blurring the line with the humanitarian actors on the ground. If humanitarian actors are using information from drones, and there’s a number of NGOs that have stated that they’re concerned about this, if they’re using information from drones that the UN is flying, they could potentially be seen to be collaborating with a body that is at least perceived to be military. And I think that that is something that we need to be careful with. And then I think the third issue is an issue around the way that the data is handled. And at the moment, The UN is working on data standards that are up to the task of managing the kind of data that drones collect. But we need to be clear about who is going to receive that data, what data they are going to receive, at what resolution, and for how long it will be kept. So these are all, I think, key questions that we need to be asking.

Speaker D: Very interesting that such a convergence is going on at the moment. Many of the points that you make are ones that the European Union will be making in its new changes to the data protection Protection Act, that data should only be kept for relevant amount of time. And relevance is the absolute key.

Speaker C: Absolutely. And I mean, in fact, I think a lot of the questions that we raise around drones, I mean, some of them are specific to drones. So, you know, for example, with drones, you can actually make them visible and you can make them— you can help people hear them so that you’re very transparent about the fact that this is what you’re doing. If you’re going to be surveilling, don’t be sneaky about it, basically, because the UN doesn’t need to be sneaky about what it’s doing in its use of drones. But I think a lot of the questions about the data are very similar to the questions that we would ask about CCTV cameras or that we would ask about satellite imagery. It’s not actually that different, right?

Speaker D: But I mean, obviously, this is the new world, isn’t it? So it’s in the same way that that George Clooney has suggested that he should use, or he is financing satellites to try to enforce peace or to help in particular situations. This is new technology moving into conflict. And in the same way, as you say, that we’re seeing drones that are actually going and killing people, this is the inevitable follow-through of that where we’re going to see drones performing other functions.

Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting that you mentioned the Satellite Sentinel Project, which is the project that George Clooney has supported specifically, because I actually think that that is a very problematic project. What the Satellite Sentinel Project says is that by making this information available, this information basically these satellite images that show the result of mass atrocities or the amassment of troops, they can actually deter governments from taking action. I don’t believe that’s true. I don’t think that the satellite imagery deters anybody. I think it provides evidence, and that’s important, but I don’t think it deters anybody. I don’t think the Sudanese government is looking at the satellite imagery and going, okay, well, we better not attack because we’re being watched. I can tell you what my kind of hope is for this. This isn’t happening yet, but I think it could happen, which is that I’ll be very interested when it’s not just the UN flying drones around surveilling things, but communities flying their own drones around surveilling things. That could potentially be a game changer for people on the ground. So we’re already seeing a lot of peacebuilding organizations that are using other technologies that are starting to look at data visualizations and data analysis to make their own points about what is happening in context. And I guess I have a question in my head about what happens when drones become so democratized that you have people flying their own drones. There’s a couple of projects that are already doing that. We cite one in the paper. It’s called the Syria Airlift Project. They’re building drones in Turkey in Syrian refugee camps, or in refugee camps with Syrians, and flying them. I believe they started flying them into Syria carrying very small payloads. The drones that they’re building are pretty small, and they’re basically made out of trash or simple, very simple materials. So I think they can make wars more remote, but in a way they can also make a lot of the sort of, you know, the surveillance of conflict maybe more democratized.

Speaker A: Helena Lararai on the new drones, proving that the problem is not the drones, it’s what they are told to do. Coming up next, are there times when the digital world demands too much from you? Sharing, liking, joining. It can soak up all your time and suck the life out of you. Well, artists and musicians in Germany are pinging back at what they call the nightmare of participation in a high-tech installation named Control Mode Feedback. Some of them have just stuck their names on the gallery wall. You have to download an app to see the pictures they’ve created. And Passwords’ Jane Wyatt spoke to London artist Sach Hoyt with his array of microphones, each with a different acoustic footprint, all suspended from the ceiling of a derelict cotton mill. Sach explained how he had made a soundscape that lets the audience talk back at the media and change the story.

Speaker E: The exhibition is about feedback and mode of communication. In many ways, this donut shell suspended with the 17 microphones on it is a platform for freedom of speech where I ask the viewer to enter inside and actually interact with the soundscape. Soundscape being some samples from Apocalypse Now. Very important to me as well is there’s two eyewitnesses as the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and also again witnesses at the Eric Garner strangulation of the police in New York.

Speaker C: So those are the voices we can hear?

Speaker E: Those are the voices that you can hear. You know, one woman screams, “Where’s the ambulance? Where’s the ambulance?” And the guy says, “Hey man, you know, ain’t no ambulance. He’s gone, he’s gone, he’s gone.” And then he talks about how they shot him. They kept on shooting him even when he was down. With the Ghana sound sample, you can actually hear him say, “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.” And the cops had harassed him just for selling illegal cigarettes on the street. So yeah, the work is political, but it goes into a lot of areas of sound in regards to, as I said, some drone-type sounds from Apocalypse Now. It ends up with an excerpt from Hendrix, Jimi Hendrix’s Star-Spangled Banner. On the Rainbow Bridge album. And I’m playing with like, you know, radios and sansas, kalimbas, African kalimbas. And that’s basically what this sound is. What’s very important is that it’s sort of in line with like a very important work of mine called Say It Loud, which is a stepladder basically covered in books. And then on the top book there’s a microphone and the viewer is invited to ascend the stairwell and actually interact with the sound example of James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud,” but I’ve actually omitted the word black so people can actually fill that space with however they feel, you know. So it— both of these works encourage critique and encourage critical thought and just a platform where you can express, you know, how you feel, you know, about whatever situation is troubling you or making you feel elated at this particular moment when you enter, you know.

Speaker C: And are you watching how your public here is interacting with them?

Speaker E: Yeah.

Speaker C: And what have you noticed?

Speaker E: Well, I’ve noticed that, you know, they go in and many, many people, you know, interact in a very different way. There’s a certain kind of shyness, I feel, to this particular public. Some of them are actually interacting with the microphones, but a lot of people don’t. But I just like the fact that they’re actually going in there and interacting, you know, just having some kind of a rapport with of the piece, which is, I think, extremely important.

Speaker C: Would you mind stepping into the donut and having a bit of an interaction so we can hear what happens? Yeah, no problem. There, that turned a few heads. I think you may have inspired them now. Suddenly they get it.

Speaker E: So that’s the feedback from like the guitar. I recorded this last week in the studio with Dirk Leijers, who’s part of my Sonic Shadow performance team. Dirk Leijers and Earl Harvin, an amazing drummer. Last September I did a Sonic Shadow performance at Berghain Canteen. I did another one in February at the Gallery Wedding where I had a solo show called Riding Celestial Chariots.

Speaker C: Is there any chance that a London public might get to experience this?

Speaker E: Well, when the UK gives me some love, yeah. What can I tell you? I’m ready, I’m ready, I, I, I’m ready. I’ve done very, very few exhibitions in London. For the commemoration of the abolition of the slave trade, I had a solo show in St. Paul’s. I did a big piece at the Tate Liverpool. At the Barbican, I had the great privilege to be in the Fela show. I don’t know if you saw that, the Black President Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the life and legacy of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti. But yeah, I have not done very much work in the UK. Stand accused of being a black Brit? I should, so give me some love!

Speaker A: And while the internet is sucking the life out of our souls, smog is choking the life in our cities. Within the last few months, it has been revealed that pollution in London is responsible for the deaths of 10,000 people a year. And as one of the contenders in the London mayoral election stated, if that was represented by bodies on the street, something would be done about it, and fast. So it’s good news then that a 7-meter-high smog-eating tower could be rolled out in the nation’s capital if talks between the Dutch inventor Dan Rosengaarde and the mayor’s office work out. Here’s Dan to tell us how it works.

Speaker F: The Smog Free Tower is a project we as a design firm, Rosengaarde, based in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, have been working on for the last 2 years. Where we actually question ourselves why do we accept air pollution, smog. As a citizen, can we not sort of connect technologies and creative thinking to build the cleanest places in the city? So last weekend we realized the first smog-free tower, a 7-meter-high tower which sucks up dirty air, cleans it on a nano level, and spits out the clean air So how does that work then?

Speaker D: I mean, this is obviously not simply just building a tower, is it? There’s got to be something in that.

Speaker F: Exactly, yeah. Yeah, so I became fascinated with pollution in that way, and especially the small particles. So we started to do an inventory of what is already there, realizing that existing filter systems do not capture the small PM2.5 particles, which actually, you know, damage the human body a lot. So we worked with scientists and a professor from the Technical University Delft to work on a system of positive ionization which allows us to purify 30,000 cubic meters per hour using no more electricity than a water boiler or an existing standard vacuum cleaner, like 1,100-1,200 watts, and at the same time does not create side effects such as ozone. And we realized the first tower this weekend, so in a way it’s about making a statement. This is how we want a whole city to feel like, to be like. We don’t want to wait for government, we don’t want to wait 10, 15 years before all the clean technology and electrical car movement really kicks in. We are infiltrating, and I think that’s the best way to work within the now and not wait.

Speaker D: I mean, it sounds amazing, doesn’t it? Here in London last week it was revealed that the figures are something like 10,000 people a year are dying of pollution-related illnesses in London alone. So—

Speaker F: Absolutely.

Speaker D: This is a wonderful idea. Why aren’t more people doing it?

Speaker F: Well, you know what it is? It’s invisible. This is the problem. The particles which damage you cannot be seen by the naked eye. You cannot smell them. You cannot feel them. But it is a silent death in that way. I love progress. I love future. I love innovation. But sometimes the technology and our desire for mobility, for making things, has side effects that you and I never imagined, and pollution is one of them. Therefore, I think it’s interesting as a designer to work with that. If Van Gogh has his paint, maybe I have my smog particles. And so by creating a place where you can sense the difference, it’s a statement about the future, but also we learn from the process. So the, the, the smog particles we’re sucking up from the sky, and you should see that, I have a bag in my hands, it’s like you You do not want to put this in your morning coffee. We’re not throwing that away because I believe that in the future waste should not exist. The waste for the one should be food for the other, the notion of circular thinking. And so we’re compressing them for 30 minutes by hand and then it sort of starts to crystallize and we’re making now smoke jewelry, smoke-free rings, smoke-free cufflinks out of them. And that’s something you can go online now, it’s a Kickstarter project. More than 1,300 people have supported the project. And so the profit we make with the jewellery helps us to finance the park and make sure that it travels to different cities all around the world who need it. But the first tower is now realised in Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and I’m looking at it right now.

Speaker D: Yeah, so you have this jewellery made out of carbon, and that’s going to subsidise the building of more of these things, but they must— it must need more money than that. The solution can’t be that simple, surely?

Speaker F: Oh yeah, absolutely. I think the first Smog Free Tower, we financed it partly ourselves from the studio. The city of Rotterdam pushed it, and the final part came from the crowd, from the Kickstarter campaign, between €500 and €1,500, and they’ve done it. Many, many people have supported it actually in the last week, over 1,400 people in just a couple of days. So I think the real essence of the Smog Free project is that people are tired of being treated as a consumer. But they want to be a maker. They want to make decisions. They want to make their own inventions, their own solutions. And a project like this is A, a solution on a local level, but B, to become part of a movement where we say we don’t accept this anymore. We want clean air. It’s symbolic action in a way, as the famous Canadian author Marshall McLuhan once said at Spacecraft Earth, there are no passengers, we are all crew. And so that’s incredibly important if we talk about smart cities, if we talk about cities of today, of tomorrow, to engage people in that way. And that creates a movement, hopefully, that in 8 to 10 years these kind of inventions are not necessary anymore. So how much do they cost then?

Speaker D: How much does a Smog3 tower cost?

Speaker F: Oh, we’re figuring out the logistics as we speak. It’s going to tour. I mean, it was a project of much, much more amount than that, but we built the first one in Rotterdam. Realized it, it’s been tested, it’s been approved by the Dutch Health Organization, so the measurements are certified now. And the coming weeks we’re organizing a tour. So I was in Mumbai last weekend, Beijing has shown interest, but also London, the city itself is aware of the problematics from that. So people can sort of call us and commission us to do an exhibition.

Speaker D: And you say you’re in talks with the authorities in London, so you’re speaking to the mayor’s office in London, or is it the Department of the Environment?

Speaker F: Yeah, yes, I’m the founder and the creative head, so our business developers are working on it, and I’m going to be in London the 21st of September, I think. It will be great to do it in Hyde Park or maybe around Serpentine Gallery. It’s just a personal fascination that I have. I think that’s one of the most beautiful and needed places in London to do it. So that would be good to do that somewhere at the end of this year or beginning early 2016.

Speaker A: That was Daan Roosegaarde telling us how he will turn the poison in our city’s air into rings and jewellery with a smog-eating tower that has been clearing the air in Rotterdam since the start of this month. You are listening to Password with Peter Warren on Resonance FM, and if you’ve just tuned in, unfortunately you’ve missed it. But if you want to learn more about these stories and technology in general, log on to our website, Future Intelligence, at www.futureintelligence.co.uk. Password is brought to you by Angel Media Productions. Goodbye.