Dutch art project exposes extent of surveillance, tests limits of law
By Grace Dobush, CS Monitor, April 27, 2016
Global discussions over the trade-offs that come with increasingly pervasive surveillance--whether government spying or commercial data mining--aren’t just happening at congressional hearings or in European parliamentary chambers.
More and more, it’s a conversation taking place in the world’s major galleries and museums as artists and arts collectives turn their attention to exploring the societal impacts of the massive amounts of data collection in the Digital Age.
With the advent of global surveillance, “Our world is becoming better behaved, but perhaps less human,” said Tijmen Schep, creative director of the Dutch arts collective SETUP, which for the past two years has worked on building a national database of Dutch citizens based solely on open source data.
The initial point of the project--originally known as the National Birthday Calendar--was to create a provocative, interactive site that would know every Dutch citizen’s birthday and recommend gifts based on their personal preferences. It became so easy to gather the information about people, and they collected so much that they began referring to it as the DIY NSA, a tongue-in-cheek reference to a do-it-yourself National Security Agency.
“We expected it to be easy, but it was even easier,” says Mr. Schep, creative director of SETUP, who said the goal of the project is to raise awareness about how data collection is eroding personal privacy because everyone’s personal lives are exposed and easily accessible.
“It speaks so much to the oppressive nature of these technologies,” he said earlier this year at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where he presented the project. “Privacy is the right to be imperfect. The right to not be the perfect consumer or the perfect citizen.”
For its DIY NSA project, SETUP volunteers created the database over the course of six hackathons since 2015. They scoured archived files of dead websites for personal data. Profiles from a Dutch Classmates.com analog, a defunct Dutch social network called Hyves, and a dead site for senior citizens, when cross-referenced with phone book records, were very valuable. They also found databases of all Dutch accountants, of clarinet enthusiasts, of amateur soccer players.
As the participants prepared to dig in, SETUP engaged with the national Dutch Data Protection Authority to ensure that they didn’t violate any privacy laws themselves while trying to make a point. The privacy experts they are working with had some requests: Keep the database offline in an encrypted server, don’t take the database out of the country, and omit “sensitive” data, which for them includes race, sexual orientation, and medical records.
Because of those Dutch privacy laws, the project won’t be available online. Artists who want to use the DIY NSA files to create projects must sign nondisclosure agreements before accessing the database. “We take security at the highest priority with this project,” Schep says.
