An essay on the history of the chair finds devices on the borderline between deportment and torture:

During the nineteenth century, when primary education became obligatory and children spent more and more time sitting in the classroom, researchers proposed a variety of chair-desk combinations intended to improve posture. Some of the designs included seat belts, forehead restraints, and face rests, although it is hard to imagine that such Draconian devices were ever actually used.

—

And possibly the most hipster form of addiction: getting hooked on opium as a side-effect of collecting antique opium pipes:

I had this bright idea—bright at the time, I thought. I said to him, “Well, you’ve got this high-quality opium for smoking, the type that isn’t even being produced anymore. You’re the only one that’s got it, and I’ve got all this great, old paraphernalia, some of it in pristine condition.” So I asked him if he’d be interested in combining the two.

I had a conversation earlier about Situationism earlier. I tried and failed to explain why Situationist ideas still get me high. They weren’t unique in theorizing a post-scarcity society. That was common at the end of the

Trente Glorieuses.

It seemed that the economy was on an ever-upward trajectory, and we hadn’t yet reached the society-wide application of Parkinson’s law, as increasingly obscure work expanded to fill the labour power available.

It’s the situationists, though, who will always stand out for me in their fervid, semi-coherent optimism. Also because their ideas resemble those bubbling through the collective unconscious of the most delightfully

fun

communities I’ve encountered.

So at the risk  of posting Yet.Another.Manifesto, here’s a call to creativity:

Against the spectacle, the realized situationist culture introduces total participation.

Against preserved art, it is the organization of the directly lived moment.



…

Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction.



…



At a higher stage, everyone will become an artist, i.e., inseparably a producer-consumer of total culture creation, which will help the rapid dissolution of the linear criteria of novelty. Everyone will be a situationist so to speak, with a multidimensional inflation of tendencies, experiences, or radically different “schools” — not successively, but simultaneously.

If anybody is groping towards a manifesto for their life, you could do much worse that dedicating  yourself towards becoming a

total participant

in the

organization of the directly lived moment

I’m reading with delight Geoff Manaugh‘s

Burglar’s Guide to the City

.

It’s a trek through urban design and crime, based on the conceit of burglary as a form of architectural criticism. So you have criminals like “Roofman”, who broke through the identical roofs of identical McDonalds franchises, relying on their identical layouts and shift patterns to empty the cash registers and go. Or George Leonidas Leslie, the 19th-century architect turned criminal mastermind — who would build replicas of bank vaults, then train his team to rob them against a stopwatch.

Or my favourite: the gloriously nerdy Jack Dakswin, champion of the fire code:

A retired burglar based in Toronto, Dakswin amazed me with tales of his extensive, homeschooled expertise in the city’s fire code, explaining how the city’s own regulations can be read from the outside-in by astute burglars, turning Toronto’s fire code into a kind of targeting system. Simply by looking at the regulated placement of fire escapes on the sides of residential high-rises, Dakswin could deduce which floors had fewer apartments (fewer would mean larger, more expensive apartments, more likely to be filled with luxury goods) and even where, on each floor, you might expect to find elevator shafts and apartment entrances. He could thus build up a surprisingly accurate mental map of a building’s interior simply by looking at its fire escapes, a virtuoso act of anticipatory architectural interpretation that most architects today would be hard-pressed to replicate.

The futurists had all the best manifestos.

Here’s an entrancingly over-the-top Ukrainian anarcho-futurist manifesto from 1919:

The Children of Nature springing from the black soil kindle the passions of naked, lustful, bodies. They press them all in one spawning, pregnant cup! The skin is inflamed by hot, insatiable, gnawing caresses. Teeth sink with hatred into warm succulent lovers’ flesh! Wide, staring eyes follow the pregnant, burning dance of lust! Everything is strange, uninhibited, elemental. Convulsions – flesh – life – death – everything! Everything!

Such is the poetry of our love! Powerful, immortal, and terrible are we in our love! The north wind rages in the heads of the Children of Nature.

That “North Wind” bit is presumably because they anarch0-futurists also gave themselves the even more wonderful name “anarcho-hyperboreans“, people of the mythical land in the distant north:

Long live the international intellectual revolution!

An open road for the Anarcho-Futurists, Anarcho-Hyperboreans, and Neo-Nihilists!

Death to World Civilization!

We’ve just (re-)launched Aleph, the project I’ve been working on with OpenOil. It’s a specialized search engine for oil, gas and mining, aimed at helping activists, journalists and government officials make sense of the torrent of regulatory and financial information that comes out of those industries.

Julien Bach made a beautiful video to explain what’s going on:

Big thanks also to Friedrich, whose work with OCCRP supplied a huge proportion of the underlying code.

I don’t 100% believe this, but it tickles me anyway.

Supposedly, car-based flirting in Iran avoids the (potentially illegal) need to be alone with a member of the opposite sex:

Rules of the game? Pile in a car and head with your same sex possie to one of the city’s flirt strips, cruise up and down until you spot a likely target, being careful to pick a car that’s broadly your car’s equal and then aggressively use tail lights, fog lights and rear windscreen wipers to initiate the courting ritual. A response is equivilent to a pick-up and the cars cruise side by side to arrange later rendezvous through open windows and over the sound of preferred music tastes.

The advanced version involves engineering an accident as an excuse to get contact details.

Downside: it’s only a matter of time until the Pick-Up Artists get hold of this and start systematically rear-ending girls’ cars.

For twenty years, many color laser printers have included a hidden tracking code on each page they print. Made of microscopic yellow dots, the code can reveal to the police the unique identity of your printer.

The EFF and others have reverse engineered a few of these codes, shedding light on how the system works technically.

What they have not explained is how it happened. How do twenty governments and an entire industry collaborate to build a secret tracking system, in the total absence of any public discussion?

This is an attempt to piece together the history of the yellow dots. It’s based almost entirely on government documents — some obtained from the US Federal Reserve by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, others made available by the European Union.

The response to technology is surveillance

It begins in the early 1990s. The central banks of Europe are scared. Technological change is making color printing, once limited to large-scale professional enterprises, accessible to small businesses and even homes. When color printing reaches the masses, it won’t be long until the masses begin printing fake banknotes.

The printer manufacturers are also scared. If their products become tools for counterfeiting, their entire industry might be shut down, or regulated into insignificance.

So they look for a compromise. It turns out, you

can

have both fancy printers and secure currency. The only cost is the creation of a subtle system of mass surveillance — but if you don’t tell anybody about that, they won’t complain. The yellow dots are born.

To understand the document trail, we’ll need a bit of jargon. On the government side, the Europeans are running the show, through a “Special Study Group” on color copying within the

European Banknote Printers Conference

. Soon reformulated into the “

SSG-2

” to accommodate Japan and North America, this will be the clearing-house for negotiations with manufacturers. The industry, being at this point almost entirely Japanese, works through something called the Japan Business Machine Makers Association (JBMA). Non-Japanese manufacturers are also represented here, with Lexmark

reportedly

joining in 2008. The yellow dot arrangement will be called either

BITMAP

or the

Tracing System

.

A “voluntary arrangement”

The JBMA propose a “

voluntary arrangement

” – though this is clearly the kind of volunteering you do to avoid ever finding out what compulsory looks like. Each manufacturer rigs their copiers and printers to put those microscopic dots onto each page. Every year they send a list of codes to the JBMA, which compiles them for the law enforcement agencies.

This system seems to come into operation in 1993.

The anti-counterfeiters aren’t expected to look at fake banknotes with a magnifying glass. The manufacturers cook up something they call BITMAP – a software package to match the code to the printer. All you need is a standard PC and a scanner. And a floppy disk drive – this piece of secret spy tech comes on floppies as late as 1998. You fire up BITMAP, scan your counterfeit, and it tells you the manufacturer of the machine it was printed on.

Fingering your customers: a free after-sales service

The BITMAP software appears to only tell you the manufacturer. To find out the specific machine, you need to go to the manufacturer. “

Copier manufacturers

”, according to SSG-2, “

will continue to provide assistance in identifying specific copiers at no additional cost

”.

So each of the manufacturers is deeply involved in this process through the nineties. Canon, Xerox, Konica — all have a designated contact person, responsible for secretly responding to police requests to identify their customers. BITMAP comes with a list of their names and contact information, one per manufacturer.

Admittedly, not all manufacturers play along with full enthusiasm. By 1997 the SSG-2 was collecting information about which companies were dragging their feet.

One set of minutes asks members to “

let the SSG-2 Working Group know if they encountered problems with getting information front any individual copier manufacturers

”. And the US Secret Service were instructed that “

concerns with the response time for providing copier information, should be referred to the JBMA

”.

Grumbles aside, the system worked. By 1998, some 23 countries were receiving their BITMAP floppy disks from Japan.

A European model of surveillance

European countries were among the first to push for printer tracking dots, and they have continued to be enthusiastic users of the system. In 2000, Europol reported early work towards euro-centralisation of printer tracing:

Work progressed on the European Union Counterfeit Currency Situation Report, as well as on the bitmap register for the collation of information on counterfeit currency produced by traceable colour copiers.

By 2003 they had persuaded the Council of the European Union to fund a centralised printer-tracing service within Europol:

setting up a BITMAP intelligence centre at Europol. This common database should contain bitmap related information and it could serve as the Bitmap co-ordination centre in the European Union. The database shall contain the relevant (technical) data on decoded bitmap-information, investigative data including personal data of companies and persons related with the bitmap subject. EU Member States are asked to supply, in accordance with their national legislation, all existing Bitmap data to the Bitmap intelligence centre

It’s not clear how fully the Council were informed about what they were agreeing to fund. The document used the full force of bureaucratic vagueness to describe BITMAP, explaining it as being “

based on an identification of offset processes that are used, inter alia, for counterfeiting banknotes

”.

By 2009, Europol described its work on “centralising and processing” printer-tracking requests:

This service provides requesting countries with swift and relevant

information on equipment being used by counterfeiters. Europol is

also in a position to offer in-house decoding of bitmap as well as

relevant training.

The training took place extensively, with events in Brussels,

Lisbon

and Romania. Germany’s police forces are apparently Europe’s top experts on printer surveillance. The BKA, the federal police service, was intended to provide advanced (“second level”) training to the rest of Europe.

Europol’s BITMAP services have not been limited to EU member-states. According to experts within the Czech police, Ukraine and Turkey have been among the countries most frequently asking for Europol’s help. Even the Russian police received BITMAP training “

supported by instructors from the Europol’s Forgery of Money Unit

”

And by this point, Europol’s BTIMAP activities were not limited to cunterfeiting. Although the system had been developed to identify banknotes, there was no technical reason not to use it to trace back any color-printed document to the source. By 2007, Europol

were handling

more requests relating to documents than to forged Euros. This off-label was never part of the original justification of the tracking-dot system. It’s just a typical example of how surveillance tends to expand within institutions, especially in the absence of any public constraints.

Unintended Consequences

This whole history is an example of what can go wrong when small groups of experts try to solve their own problems, without reference to the wider political context.

A large-scale surveillance system was built as the solution to a technical problem. There was never any public debate, and no evidence of elected officials considering the pros and cons of the system. Senior officials were given vague descriptions of what was being developed, without enough information for them to understand its dangers.

Police and central banks, governments and manufacturers, all worked together across the world and over two decades — but at no point did anybody consider asking the public whether they wanted their printers monitored.

Some of the more important documents on the printer tracking system are:

• 
  Documents obtained by the EFF under FOIA
  
  (details)
• 
  Establishment of Europols “BITMAP Intelligence Center”
  
• 
  Discussion of the tracking system in a Czech law enforcement journal
  
• I’ve not talked about a parallel system, of dot-patterns that allow software to recognize — and refuse to copy — banknotes.

Metal is the true cultural heritage of Scandinavia. Proof is the Arab merchant who visited 10th century Denmark and reported:

“Never before I have heard uglier songs than those of the Vikings in Slesvig (in Denmark). The growling sound coming from their throats reminds me of dogs howling, only more untamed.”

[This is the immediate source, though it seems to be one of those too-good-to-be-true quotations that floats round online]

Reminiscences of New York in the 70s, and how it came to be that way. Broke, with the Federal government out to destroy it, and where the police were handing out leaflets entitled “

Welcome to Fear City

“:

One consequence of New York’s forty-year transition from junkie to preppy overachiever is that our stereotypes are out of date. Hence the continual problems for location scout Nick Carr — directors want to film in the rough parts of New York, but there aren’t any left

The designer was undeterred. “You know what I mean – the bad neighbourhoods! Burning barrels! Trash everywhere! Homeless people in the street! Where do we find it?”

That’s when I realised we were looking for something that only exists in the movies.

I’m enough of a FOI nerd to occasionally delve into the collection of released information at What Do They Know. Here are a few that caught my eye from the MoD:

• Of the UK military trainers in Iraq, none speak Arabic or Kurdish
• The Minister of Defense can classify civilian aircraft as military. He apparently has not done so; this request would be worth repeating in a few years.
• Service personnel AWOL — overwhelmingly an army issue, with spikes in 2007 and 2010.
• List of MoD InfoSec policies
• Gulf war veterans furious that the drugs they were given were ‘voluntary’
• UK military assistance to Ukraine. Helmets, goggles, first aid kits and laptops
• The MOD has only recorded 6 cases of sexual harrassment in the last 5 years. This seems to be a case where reprhrasing a question can have a different result — there were at least 253 reports of rape and sexual assault in the 4 years to 2013