Cyberspace in Prison: Communication, Community and Human Rights Cyberspace: The 'Colorline' of the 21st Century Alejandro Luis

Molina The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line. Thus, as early as 1903,WEB DuBois succinctly defined the paradigm for struggle at the beginning of the 20th Century. Rather the same could be said about struggle for freedom in the 21st century and technology. It carries with it the same connotations of race and class privilege, and although on the access level this is dwindling, again, the colonial nature of the multifaceted relationships between the US power structure and internally oppressed nations is pointed out in startling fashion. In this presentation I will make the following two assertions: The social direction of technology continues to head in a direction which can best be described as alarming militaristic, intrusive and with enormous potential for abuse. Characteristic of this direction are the gathering and centralizing of information, enhancing existing relationships between repressive agencies, the dropping of bureaucratic borders between states, law-enforcement agencies, and right-wing movements, increasing cooperation in the drafting of policy and strategy between European governments and the US in the planning of repression against dissent and resistance movements. The struggle for human rights shapes, as well as is partially shaped in, cyberspace. Cyberspace and Communication Witness the growing trends for information technology: the prisons and the military. The first, politically cutting edge attempt was the Lexington Womens High Security Unit,

built in Lexington Kentucky in the late 1980s. This specialized political prison had 16 beds and was built at a cost of over $1,000,000.00 The first inmates to occupy the prison were political prisoners, North American Anti-Imperialists Susan Rosenberg and Italian National Silvia Baraldini and Puerto Rican Prisoner of War Alejandrina Torres. A social prisoner, Susan Brown, was transferred to the unit later. The objective of the prison was simple: its very existence served as a threat (as did Marion Penitentiary in Illinois and later Florence, Colorado, for male prisoners.) for the federally incarcerated female population to behave or else, be transferred to Lexington. The Goal: social and political dislocation of the prisoner, both as an individual and as an extension of the movement that they represent in prison. The means for control: technologically advanced social control and isolation methods, laid out at a secret conference in Puerto Rico in 1978, with representatives from Europe and the US to discuss the growth of domestic terrorism. Not coincidentally, these representatives also brought their experience from Europe to the table, from Stammheim prison in Germany where the norm for prisoner control was State-induced suicide and Long Kesh prison in Ireland, at that time, only 2 years away from the heroic hunger strike that was to claim the lives of 10 IRA political prisoners, as well as Latin America, from Uruguay where the States battle against the Tupamaros was in full flower. The methods to be used in the handling of these prisoners? Classic counter-insurgency methods, that is to say, isolation from friends and family, sensory deprivation, a controlled environment in which the goal is to break the prisoner of identifying with any institution or social movement except that of the State. Only now, years later, is the US distilling and implementing the social control aspects of the technology employed on a widespread basis. Note the multi-layered system at work here, both of the prison system as a system of social control for people of color and the role of technology in filtering and tracking all of the prison population, with an emphasis on political prisoners, prisoner activists and others labeled troublemakers. Florence ASP, located in Florence, Colorado is the latest effort at cutting edge torture. Florence is a Federal complex consisting of 4 prisons in which the idea is for the prisoner

to work his way out of the highest level of security (Administrative Segregation Prison) to the lowest-Prison Camp. Florence replaced Marion USP as the US only level 6 rating prison in the early 1990s. Maximum-security prisons typically evoke images of unscalable walls rather than scalable IT systems. But iron bars and hard-nosed guards only go so far in keeping society safe. According to the government, the role of technology is a safe, reassuring one: assigning convicts to the right place, keeping gang members apart and making sure inmates aren't released too soon. This is a model which both states and to alesser extent, the Federal government have integrated into the Criminal Justice structure with dizzying speed during the decade of the 90s. This system of segregation seems straightforward, but it rests on a balance maintained by appropriate inmate classification. According to corrections CIOs, stick enemies in the same place and warfare could ensue. Put child molesters, convicted cops or snitches anywhere in "general population," and expect assaults, gang rapes or worse.1 What is unmentioned but eminently practible is the adaptation of this system of classification to include political prisoners, those prisoners who come from movements which struggle for self-determination, those prisoners deemed to have too much influence, over other prisoners, those prisoners who wont go along to get along. What is the 21st Century response to this dilemma? One of them is the CMIS (Criminal Management Information System), launched in New Mexico in1999. The system allows corrections officers in any of the state's eight prisons, as well as probation and parole officers, to pull up on their desktops a comprehensive inmate profile that includes information such as criminal records, psychological profile, distinguishing marks, institutional history, allies and enemies, visitors, work assignments, and restrictions. It also tracks "cautions," such as sex-offender or informant status, martial-arts expertise, gang affiliation or escape risk. Officers simply click on icons to determine whether the prisoner is a new arrival or an inmate already in their custody. And they can update the files whenever incidents occur. 2

It is only a matter of time until the next version promises us a checkbox for political affiliation, organization, association as well as several links: the Red Squad or FBI files that have been compiled on the prisoner; another to the fedeal DNA database, first on all prisoners, soon on all arrestees; another to the political chronology of his/her time while on the outside, and still more hyperlinks to the dossiers on the organizations and affiliates. Add an encoded space for comments to be seen only by the wardens or regional managers of the BOP and up, and the relevant emails and other contact information of the state and federal agents involved in the past cases against this prisoner and/or their movement, and you have a minimum idea of the present-day normal direction of technology in the US. Not right wing, normal. Other uses for the data collected include, but are not limited to classifying inmates according to risk, sharing data with state police and other public agencies. Can we spell the growing threat of domestic terrorism? Cooperation with law enforcement is rapidly becoming an important sell point for bolstering budget presentations to state and federal legislators in their quest to fund the growing national prison information system. State law enforcement agencies in Florida post inmate information on an extranet, CJNet. "If they have information on a crime where the perpetrator had a tattoo of a red heart, they can search our mainframe repository for inmates and parolees with red heart tattoos," According to Fred Roessel, Floridas Chief of Classification. "They can search by scar, mark, tattoo, alias or criminal (read political) history." 3 This is criminal profiling, with the next step being the profiling of a criminal or terrorist mentality. Central to the concept of digital linkage between repressive agencies is the integration of the populace into a partnership of the watchdog role essential for any mass-based fascist movement. Example: the Florida Department of Corrections maintains a public website, www.dc.state.fl.us, which averages 125,000 visitors a month. On the site, visitors can do everything from taking a virtual tour of death row to keeping tabs on

inmate movement. Anyone who wants to know when a certain prisoner is getting out, can easily go to the site and check. One thing is clear: the State routinely targets those prisoners men and women who represent a threat. The means by which that is carried out has only become more sophisticated. At the other end of the spectrum, inspired by fresh lessons from Afghanistan, laboratories across the U.S. are creating tools for the battlefields of the future. They include such esoterica as robots that can crawl into caves, sniff out people and explosives, and radio their findings to U.S. commanders miles away; helmets fitted with communications gear and computer displays; and bombs that can serve as sensors, computers and communications devices in the seconds before they explode. 4 IT is tying these disparate technologies together for what the U.S. Navy calls network-centric warfare (NCW). The idea is to link every war-fighting asset so that information can be quickly shared, analyzed and acted on. NCW rests on two technological underpinnings. The first is the network itself - "a self describing, self healing, self-annealing network," explains John Robusto, director of NCW at the Naval Air Systems Command. In this scenario, virtually every military asset, from sensor to ship to soldier, will have two-way IP ports, and many will communicate on a peer-to-peer basis. Communications hardware and software will be embedded in them, and they will automatically add themselves to a wireless network when they power up, Robusto says. "You'll have thousands of these things interacting in mobile, ad hoc, self-organizing networks," says Carl O'Berry, vice president for strategic architecture at Boeing Space and Communications in Seal Beach, Calif. "The networks' membership changes, and the relationship between members may be only a few milliseconds."5

The second component of NCW is the analysis that's performed on the flood of information moving through the network. Robusto says the military will use inferencing engines; agent based computing and neural networks to turn raw data into battlefield interpretations and suggested combat actions, or "kill chains. 6 Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., says it hopes to develop by 2010 "a high-tech soldier with 20 times the capability of today's warrior." His helmet will be fitted with wireless communications gear, 3-D visual displays and software that tells him precisely where he is and where friendly and unfriendly forces are. The helmet will support voice command retrieval of data from sensors and other sources using intelligent software agents. Meanwhile, robots are being developed that can operate in the air, underwater and in hostile battlefield conditions, including minefields. The US is moving toward building systems that can listen, communicate, think, move and explode - all while resisting attack. Cyberspace and Community Meanwhile in the struggle by oppressed communities to develop their own resources, to stop from being destroyed in the name of urban renewal, activists are using a modern day tool, Geographic Information Systems (GIS), which are already in place in several states. GIS systems let interested parties rapidly and accurately take stock of the social capital in the communities, and develop a plan on how to create, assess, and harvest this capital. The struggle against gentrification and spatial deconcentration, while ultimately dependent on the array of forces aligned against each other, are boosted tremendously by the thorough absorption and manipulation of knowledge. 7 In Chicago, where a broad group of activists, community members, academics have worked together and strategized a multi-layered plan that has as its cornerstone an understanding of gentrification as spatial deconcentration. This term: spatial deconcentration centers the analysis, adopted and projected by a large part of the activist community, squarely in the language of

counter-insurgency and equips the aforementioned grouping with the political starting point to integrate technology at various levels, as a part of individual and organizational communication and also part of an enhanced possibility to build community. Here then, is the immediate realizable potential of Cyberspace: The possibilities for connecting, for communication, for partnership, for publicity, for alliances that transcend our material limitations and lastly and most importantly, as mentioned earlier, the building of community that refers to location as a political space that contains collective memory in the struggle for self-determination. We can internationalize our struggles with very few resources, political or material. Witness the issue of Vieques. The future of Vieques could very well depend on getting information on the next US Navy exercises to as many places as possible as fast as possible. The struggle of Vieques as a modern-day David against a military machine Goliath helps us understand the present geopolitical moment. The US Navy counter-arguments, posted on its Web site, were taken down immediately after Vieques activists capitalized on the One stop shopping for all your bombing needs ad to its NATO allies. A country that considers the country of Afghanistan an enemy to be crushed. Afghanistan, which lists slingshots among its arsenal. Welcome to the counter-terror mindset of the US in the millennium. The possibility of expanding peoples knowledge of our struggles, on a worldwide basis is of immense interest to all activists. Add to this the more recent possibilities of accessing pictures, sound and even movies in the World Wide Web. The possibilities for broadcasting the immediate arrest of the latest wave of activists, or where interested parties can write to them, or, send them commissary, or for those incarcerated in the states, where to visit them, is an incredible empowering tool. It is the information that becomes available and therefore useful because of its timeliness.

Merely conducting a search using the phrase Vieques on the Google search engine gave up 112,000 hits! The first 20 included web pages dedicated to the issue of removing the US Navy from Vieques, Vieques and tourism, a history of Vieques, etc.

Examples of Vieques sites: http://www.geocities.com/viequeswar/ http://www.viequeslibre.org/ http://www.vieques-island.com/hisindx.html http://members.aol.com/deozarks/myhomepage/Sobre-Vieques.htm

Cyberspace and Human Rights Cyberspace has been represented as a race-blind environment, yet we dont shed our social identities or escape racism just because we go on-line. Prof. Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. It is a horrible reality check to understand that there are more Internet connections in New York City than there are in all of Africa. One of the bones of contention among those of us that struggle with the digital divide in our communities hinges on whether the divide is about access to the Internet: I would submit that access is only symptomatic of the divide, that the real divide lies in the ability to construct knowledge and so the divide grows wider and deeper, with generational consequences. The Hi-Tech Romans and the Savage Brutes. 8 This reality of course, starkly demonstrates the lack of an indigenous information technology culture in our communities in order to assist us to be able to progress in an information-rich society. The struggle for Human Rights must be taken to the Internet and many movements, organizations and individuals are busy doing just that. Moreover, the landscape of Human

Rights struggles must incorporate the Digital Divide as an important core component of its definition. Such a politically charged issue with such profound social consequences cannot be relegated to the activist back burner. To sum up, Cyberspace is another plane on which the struggles for freedom take place and which in turn, by its very character as a social medium, also shapes the social terrain on from which the activists must wage battle. I will finish with a quote drawn from, fittingly, The Souls of Black Folk. No sooner have Northern armies touched Southern soil than this old question, newly guised, sprang from the Earth What shall be done with the Negroes? This, of course, is the question which our struggle has yet to answer.

1. CIO Magazine, IT and prisons, Eric Berkman, March 2002 2. ibid 3. ibid 4. ComputerWorld, IT Goes to War, Gary Anthes, March 2002 5. ibid 6. ibid 7. Lastra, Sarai: Harvesting Community Knowledge 8. Resnick, Mitchel, Rethinking Learning in the Digital Age, The Media Laboratory, MIT Also used as background material, although not quoted directly: WIRED Magazine: Astrocop March 2002, Bruce Sterling Gustafson, Karen: Technologies of Liberation and Consumption: Shifting Discourses Surrounding the Internet (submitted to the International Communication Association Conference, Communication and Technology)