The Aid road to surveillance is paved with good intentions – and warning signs

The road to surveillance is paved with good intentions – and warning signs

Iris scanning and GPS tracking are increasingly central to the delivery of aid. The consequences could be devastating

Carly Nyst 

Many refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict have had their irises scanned, as technology becomes more central to the delivery of aid. Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty Images

From databases to mobile phone apps and SMS systems, GPS tracking and humanitarian drones to biometric registration, new technologies are rapidly becoming central to the delivery of humanitarian and development aid.

Refugees fleeing the Syrian conflict are having their irises scanned and their identity documents digitised. Nurses in Nigeria are using SMS systems to communicate HIV test results to health facilities. Cash is being delivered to those living in Kenya's slums through the M-Pesa mobile-phone banking system.

The drive behind this technological and data evangelism is well intentioned. The usefulness of these tools has played out repeatedly on the humanitarian stage, be it through the use of Twitter analysis to map the spread of cholera in Haiti or the distribution of smart cards to flood-affected populations in Pakistan. New technologies have made delivering a id faster, easier and cheaper.

Yet the technological revolution in foreign aid – like many other well-meaning innovations – is not without risk. A clear implication of adopting new technologies is the creation of previously unimagined amounts of data about the individuals who receive humanitarian and development assistance.

Often, the collection and retention of data is an objective of the intervention – as with biometric identity registration systems in refugee camps, for example, or the establishment of a database of HIV-infected pregnant women to monitor transmission rates. But in many more cases, it is incidental to the use of technology.

Mobile phones generate call and SMS records that not only contain troves of data, but produce dramatically larger stores of information about an individual's location, routines, contacts and network. When mobile phones are used in health-monitoring programmes, or for crisis mapping of human rights violations, they also facilitate the generation of particularly sensitive information.

The collection, digitisation and dissemination of personal data raises serious issues about the ability of humanitarian organisations to protect such information. Organisations of this nature operate in complex environments with outdated information security practices and inconsistent access to electricity. Data protection standards are virtually non-existent and data is shared fluidly between organisations, agencies, donors, and NGOs. Most disconcertingly, data is also often shared with (or accessible by) two entities that do not necessarily operate under the same humanitarian ethics and with the same well-intentioned objectives – the private sector, and the state.

There is a real danger that the aid community is laying the groundwork for pervasive – and potentially devastating – surveillance. By encouraging the sharing of incredibly sensitive information through insecure mobile networks, the establishment of national centralised databases of invasive biometric information, the analysis of location data derived from mobile phones, or the use of private-public partnerships to deliver mobile access to financial services, these organisations are providing the building blocks for surveillance states.

If governments access this information – either because humanitarian partners provide it to them, or they demand access – they could build profiles based on data about location, ethnicity, religion, gender, land ownership, political affiliation, financial status or health. Victims who report human rights violations might be the subject of reprisals, people living with HIV could be exposed, members of particular ethnic groups monitored.

Centralised identity databases have a tragic legacy of being used to facilitate mass human rights violations – look no further than the role ofRwanda's ID cards (pdf) in facilitating the 1994 genocide, or the way in which South Africa's 1950 Population Registration Act laid the foundations for apartheid. Imagine the implications of government access to the data collected by refugee agencies, peacekeeping forces, or NGOs monitoring violence against women.

The use of these technologies for the collation of data is particularly worrying given the lack of any effective data protection framework in most developing countries. Of course, such programmes are only possible because of the absence of legal protections; it would be impossible for any European-based enterprise to collect location data on minorities, require SMS-reporting about drug adherence, or establish large databases of sensitive information without safeguards.

This illustrates the curious double standard applied to the adoption of new technologies in developing countries and humanitarian emergencies. Whereas similar ID systems, biometric databases, and health registers have met serious resistance in the UK, Germany and Israel, and national condemnation of state surveillance reverberated around the US and Europe in the aftermath of the Snowden revelations, these same surveillance-facilitating technologies are being promoted by foreign aid donors hailing from western states. Funds have even been earmarked particularly for technology-based interventions by the US aid agency USAid, World Bank, the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) and EuropeAid.

The very real danger of aid facilitating surveillance was highlighted by the revelation that EuropeAid, to which DfiD is a contributor, has been used to support the security forces of Belarus, Europe's last dictatorship, with the aim of enhancing border security.

But the implications of aid are not always so obvious. Whether it might be helping to create a legacy of state surveillance in developing countries is a crucial question that needs to be asked of DfiD and other aid agencies. The road to surveillance may be paved with good intentions, but the warning signs are everywhere. The challenge now is to heed them.

Carly Nyst is head of international advocacy at Privacy International. This blog draws on the organisation's report, Aiding Surveillance, published on Tuesday, which explores how development and humanitarian aid initiatives are enabling surveillance in developing countries.

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/nov/12/surveillance-aid-iris-scanning-gps-tracking