Date: Tue, 9 Aug 1994 20:36:02 -0400
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From: crawford@cs.ucdavis.edu (Rick Crawford)
To: Multiple recipients of list <roundtable@cni.org>
Subject: Re:  info on electric utilities
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Burck Smith writes:
 > *Proponents of such activity contend that the utilities could bring
 > fiber-optics to the home cheaply by saving billions through monitoring 
 > and controlling inefficient energy consumption through a fiber-optic 
 > information network. (Such a network would only use 2% of capacity-- 
 > leaving 98% for other uses.) 
 > 
 > *Others warn of monopoly power:  What if utilities charged rate payers 
 > for corporate mistakes in the communications field?  Such activity 
 > should be restricted.


While monopoly power is a problem in any sector, the major threat from
electric utilities getting into the NII construction business is that
of SURVEILLANCE and the gradual degradation of PRIVACY.  When Realtime
Residential Power Line Surveillance ("RRPLS", euphemistically called
"Non-Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring" by the industry) scales up 
to anything approaching NII dimensions, it could become a potent 
technology of social control.  At the 1993 Conf. on Computers, Freedom, 
and Privacy, there were allegations that this has already happened in 
Northern Ireland and in the Occupied Territories.  But the major threat 
of RRPLS in the U.S. is not from the secret police, but from Big Brother 
in the private sector.

Below is an amalgam of excerpts, some from my contribution to 
"Invisible Crises", ed. by George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana, and Herb 
Schiller (Westview, 1994 forthcoming), but most are from a simplified 
magazine version of the original work.  Note particularly the 
discussion of *surveillance subsidies*.  If anyone wants to see the 
entire draft ("Computer-assisted Crises"), it can be ftp'ed from the 
International Philosophical Preprint Exchange:

  ftp Phil-Preprints.L.Chiba-U.ac.jp
  cd /pub/preprints/Political_Phil/Crawford.Computer-assisted_Crises

-rick
------

        Realtime Residential Power Line Surveillance
  ...
  ...

Many people are aware of telephone wiretapping. But few have
heard of Realtime Residential Power Line Surveillance (RRPLS).
U.S. drug enforcement officials have used a primitive form of
RRPLS for years, acquiring billing records from electric companies
to find people who are using high-powered lights to grow marijuana.
Now devices called "smart meters" are boosting the data-gathering
power. Early forms of RRPLS only took power readings.  Smart meters
are far more nosy. They can record which electrical appliances an
occupant uses, and when.  RRPLS is the latest "dataveillance"
technique in the digital surveillance arsenal.  Utilities have
already deployed it in pilot programs at thousands of U.S. homes.
Their stated aim is to reduce costs and save energy.

But the technology will also become a potent marketing tool.
Companies could buy a profile of a household's appliance
usage. One family might use their microwave oven every weekday
morning.  Suddenly, lo and behold, free samples of microwave
breakfast snacks start coming in the mail. Health insurance
companies could pool the RRPLS data from thousands of policy
holders, correlating health insurance claims with statistical
appliance usage profiles.  They might determine that morning
microwave users constitute a high risk group, and boost their
insurance premiums accordingly.

When the data from RRPLS are combined (via "computer matching") with 
data available from other commercial sources, it will become both 
possible and economical automatically to track the behavior of entire 
populations at an incredibly detailed level.

For example, an individual inadvertently may "broadcast" an illicit
sexual liaison to the commercial world via RRPLS data:  Contrary to a
household's normal pattern, one of its occupants, a 43 year old married
male (according to his driver's license data on file), arises early
one Saturday morning, showers, shaves with his electric razor, and even
irons some clothes.  He buys gas in town, then that night he pays for
2 dinners and 2 tickets to a show (all on his credit card).  After
returning home, the stereo is turned on (a rare event, according to his
RRPLS history on file at the electric utility).  The data from the water 
bed indicate an unusual night --- every time the sheets are thrown back,
the RRPLS is sensitive enough to detect the water bed heater cycling
on for a longer than normal duration (a fact).

The next morning, data indicate only one uncharacteristically long shower,
followed by 2 uses of the hair dryer.  The second use is much longer than
normal for the male occupant, indicating he shared the shower with a
long-haired person.  Interestingly, during this time, commercial transaction
records indicate the occupant's wife is halfway around the globe, on a
business trip paid for by her employer.  RRPLS data from her hotel room
also indicate an amorous overnight visitor.  Given the availability of such
detailed behavioral profiles, the couple should expect to be inundated with
targeted direct mail solicitations from divorce lawyers!  If the data are
propagated quickly enough, a florist might telephone the next day, offering
a special sale on long-stemmed roses.

Undoubtedly the greatest danger of widespread RRPLS is an invisible one,
that utility companies will *gradually degrade* the norms of privacy as
perceived by the public.  American society has an appalling tendency to
allow the monetarization of inalienable Human Rights into transferable
Corporate Property Rights.  Utility companies can "buy off" most of the
uninformed populace by offering *surveillance subsidies* --- discounts or
rebates to those who allow the sale of their private data.  These personal
surveillance contracts will be cloaked in the rhetoric of "new improved
services", and "consumer choice".  But for a utility to obtain the 
genuinely "informed consent" of its customers would require the utility 
to undertake expensive campaigns to educate its customers regarding the 
longer-term social consequences of this Panoptic surveillance.  Given the 
conflict of interest inherent in such a scheme, it is clear that once 
again, the *consent* of the technological consumer will be *manufactured*, 
rather than *informed*.

The effects of "information subsidies" have been explored extensively
elsewhere, and the power of such selective exposure to information is
well known  ...

Whereas existing information subsidies "pay" citizens to *receive* 
impersonal data from distant institutions, surveillance subsidies will 
"pay" citizens to *transmit* their own highly personal data to the 
Panoptic wardens in distant bureaucracies.  Of course, in both subsidy 
cases, citizens ultimately pay the price of the communication, since 
the subsidy costs are recovered by corporations through the cost of 
their products (or by politicians through their exercise of governmental 
power).  The content of most existing information subsidies is only as 
specific as targeting and market segmentation techniques will allow.  
Thus, information subsidies are attempts to influence relatively 
*generic* citizens or consumers.  But because the content of 
communications induced by surveillance subsidies is so highly personal, 
it allows the subsidizing institution to zero in on an individual, and 
target her with attempts at personalized manipulation designed to be 
effective for that particular individual.  Surveillance subsidies are 
by no means unique to the utility industry and RRPLS.  They will become 
more and more common as corporations "mine" the nets for useful data.

  ...

     One final economic incentive promoting the technological
evolution of RRPLS is the lure of profits from a high-speed
national information network.  It could cost tens of billions of
dollars to install "on-ramps" (e.g., fiber optic cables) from
every residence to the "Information Superhighway".  Yet utilities'
profits from RRPLS could generate enough surplus cash flow to
finance that construction.  Through Realtime Residential Power Line
Surveillance, electric utilities "can sharply reduce the future costs
of making power at the same time they are capitalizing the cost
of building the great information superhighway."[27]  Once again,
corporations are poised to internalize profits by externalizing
costs --- in this case, the social costs of utility surveillance.

Fine-grained RRPLS monitoring of entire populations is not
inevitable.  Much of the tension between privacy interests and the
need for incentives to reduce residential use of peaking power
could be resolved by limiting the "intelligence" of smart RRPLS
meters.  But the level of RRPLS surveillance acceptable to
consumers may artificially be boosted by surveillance subsidies.
Thus, given the corporate forces jockeying for position on the
emerging "Information Superhighway," electric utility surveillance
subsidies are of particular concern at the present time.  Such
Panoptic RRPLS surveillance, once frozen into the architecture
of the "Snooper-highway" as an embedded technological bias, would
have pervasive and irreversible effects on any future cultural
trajectory through the "Information Age."


27  While the Cable and Phone Companies Fight ... Look Who's
  Wiring the Home Now / S. Rivkin / New York Times Magazine / Sept.
  26, 1993