Living Under Surveillance
We live in a surveillance society. It is pointless to talk about
surveillance society in the future tense. In all the rich countries of
the world everyday life is suffused with surveillance encounters, not
merely from dawn to dusk but 24/7. Some encounters obtrude into
the routine, like when we get a ticket for running a red light when
no one was around but the camera. But the majority are now just
part of the fabric of daily life. Unremarkable.
"Report on the Surveillance Society" Surveillance Studies Network, 2006
Everyone on the political spectrum, from free-market anarchists to
totalitarians, has some vision of what is meant by the phrase,
"surveillance society." Is the idea of a surveillance society in
today's world "unremarkable?" Consider:
The UK is now the world's most watched country, having upwards of five
million closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras keeping a watchful eye on the
public, with the average citizen being caught on camera around 300
times per day. Upwards of 1.5 million automobiles can now be tracked
and located anywhere in the United States, or in fact anywhere on
Earth, using OnStar, General Motor's onboard car-to-mobile-phone-network
communications system.
Telecom giant AT&T has allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to
set up what could only be called a "spy room" on AT&T property to make
routine monitoring of phone calls easier. Marijuana farmers in Wisconsin now
must fear not only conventional law enforcement methods, but also the
Internet. Satellite images from Google Earth, yes that Google
Earth, have been used to locate farms and arrest farmers. The trend of
one-to-one marketing has driven businesses to be more aggressive in
both discovering and remembering facts about their customers.
Firms like Donnelly Marketing, which keeps dossiers on over 90 percent of
American households, collect and manage massive files regarding each
family's preferences in everything from pets to politics.
Face-recognition software was successfully tested during Super Bowl
XXXV in Tampa, Florida, with approximately 100,000 faces being scanned
and identified. (Several law-breakers, mostly ticket scalpers, were
noticed, but no arrests were made, since it was just a "dry run"!) The
FBI, apparently unsatisfied with their success using data mining, is
issuing so many National Security Letters (NSLs,) administrative
subpoenas that require no probable cause while simultaneously
precluding the recipient from ever disclosing that the letter was
issued, that they plan to automate the process of tracking them.
Clearly this presents a challenge to a free society. That challenge
stems from the imbalance in power between the state and the people
where surveillance is concerned. That imbalance must be addressed if
freedom is to be maintained.
Conflicting Views - The odds are pretty good that most people, when
asked what that term means, would think of some image from the Will
Smith movie, Enemy of the State, in which an innocent man is pursued
relentlessly by a federal security apparatus employing the latest
high-tech surveillance gadgetry. Many would agree, also, with the
movie's tagline, "It's not paranoia if they really are after you."
It does seem these days that "they" really are after "us." The
question is not whether or not a surveillance society will occur,
particularly in Western societies like the United States and the
United Kingdom. That horse is out of sight already. The question is
more what the unavoidable ubiquity of surveillance will mean to the
individual and the collective. The question is how society should
deal, how society will deal, with routine, widespread, nearly
constant surveillance, not just by government but by private entities
as well, now that surveillance technology is quite clearly not only
common but also here to stay.
But how much surveillance is too much? Such questions amount to
quibbling over price. No one can prevent the proliferation of
surveillance tech, and no one can preclude "bad people," including
some agents of the State, from also having it. That much is certain.
Can freedom and privacy coexist with the surveillance society?
Absolutely. However, one cannot determine the proper amount of
surveillance by the government if one has already ceded the entire
decision to that government.
Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? So far, Americans seem to favor
surveillance over privacy. For example, a recent survey by ABC News
found that most Americans favor increased use of police surveillance
cameras to "fight crime." This, despite the fact that precious little
data illustrates that cameras do anything to reduce crime. Indeed,
despite the lack of real security benefits, publication of a single
story illustrating that a heinous killer was caught via video can
justify almost any infringement upon the privacy of ordinary citizens.
Security expert Bruce Schneier calls this effect, within the realm of
surveillance psychology, the "availability heuristic." Most people
would rather all their deepest secrets be posted on the Internet
tomorrow than have a psychopathic serial killer escape capture today,
assuming that's the trade-off. Of course, it's not quite that simple.
Today's "I've got nothing to hide" can turn into tomorrow's "but I
didn't know that was against the law!" That's particularly the case
when a government moves in the direction of imposing more and more
laws and regulations on its citizens, denying the right to keep and
bear arms, for instance.
While the bulk of the American public seems convinced that more
surveillance is a good thing, both for safety and convenience, the
technorati are not as uniform in their view. Schneier thinks
legislation is the only methodology for curtailing, or at least
somewhat stemming, the advance of surveillance and the corresponding
loss of privacy. In a recent blog entry he says:
We're never going to stop the march of technology, but we can enact
legislation to protect our privacy: comprehensive laws regulating what
can be done with personal information about us, and more privacy
protection from the police. Today, personal information about you is
not yours; it's owned by the collector. There are laws protecting
specific pieces of personal data, videotape rental records, health
care information, but nothing like the broad privacy protection laws
you find in European countries. That's really the only solution;
leaving the market to sort this out will result in even more invasive
wholesale surveillance.
It is ironic that Schneier speaks of the protection available in
European countries, given the number of times per day that a typical
citizen of the UK is caught on camera. Another person worried about
increased surveillance is author Naomi Wolfe. According to Wolfe's
The End of America, the United States is well on its way to becoming a
fascist empire due to the fact that creating a surveillance society is
one of the "Ten Steps to Fascism." The Bush administration claims to
have a legitimate reason for massive privacy infringement: protecting
the U.S. public from the ever-present specter of terrorism, but are
its arguments legitimate?
Surveillance and Power The Bush administration (like many U.S.
administrations before it) is enamored with monitoring ordinary
citizens, under the guise of protecting the freedom of those they
watch. The fact that their "improvements" in security have resulted
in limited actual performance improvements is apparently lost in the
shuffle. Is there anyone who believes that the privacy normal
Americans have given up has directly precluded further terrorist
attacks? Is there anyone, anyone, who actually believes that if a
terrorist wanted to attack an arena, a stadium, a shopping center, or
even an airport, that such an attack could not have taken place
despite the so-called protections put in place after 9/11? From
Future of Freedom Foundation columnist Anthony Gregory, we find this
accurate commentary:
The real threat to American liberty, the defense of which the
administration still insists is the purpose of the war on terror, is a
federal government without strict checks and limits on its power,
whose executives feel comfortable using the military to spy on
peaceful Americans, while telling the media not to report their secret
and unconstitutional surveillance activities. The use of a military
intelligence agency against the American people, with or without
judicial oversight, is far more a "shameful act" than reporting such
activities to the American people, who have a right to know.
Clearly we have a right to know, but that point aside, the State is
exactly the wrong organization to have the power of unfettered
surveillance for other reasons. The tendency, nay the likelihood,
that evil will flourish in a bureaucratic environment where risk can
be externalized is unassailable. Bureaucracies are almost always
inefficient. Bureaucracies are almost always wasteful. Bureaucracies
are almost always caught somewhere between the Keystone Cops
and the Three Stooges when their performance is measured.
If this assessment sounds too harsh, please consider who the real
heroes of 9/11 were: they were the citizen-soldiers who attempted to
stop the terrorists aboard United Airlines Flight 93; they were the
local firemen and policemen who willingly and selflessly rushed into
the doomed WTC towers; and they were the field FBI agents who reported
important pieces of the 9/11 plans to their superiors in Washington,
only to have the information ignored. The entity that failed most
grossly to protect us on 9/11 was the Washington bureaucracy itself,
and yet we are supposed to prevent future 9/11s by transferring more
power to that bureaucracy?
The number of times airport security has been breached since the
supposed improvements in airport security should put the myths to
rest. The Seattle Times published a report of all the airport
security breaches they had found between 2002 and 2004. The list was
far from inconsequential, although the Times evidently stopped
collecting reports after the number reached 100. According to the
Times, "Screeners say that's [only] a fraction of the incidents, and
most are never disclosed." The reported incidents included one
instance when five DHS investigators posing as passengers managed to
get knives, a gun and a bomb in their carry-on baggage through
security checkpoints without being detected.
Clearly, the increase in state intrusion on the privacy of the citizen
does not result in a net increase in the safety of that citizen from
terrorist attack. But, if the State were more skilled, could
surveillance be used to thwart some future terrorist attack? No. The
reason: The basic mathematics of finding a needle in a haystack.
Says Institute for Political Economy Chairman Paul Craig Roberts from
a 2006 column on libertarian website LewRockwell.com:
Floyd Rudmin, a professor at a Norwegian university, applie[d] the
mathematics of conditional probability, known as Bayes' Theorem, to
demonstrate that the NSA's surveillance cannot successfully detect
terrorists unless both the percentage of terrorists in the population
and the accuracy rate of their identification are far higher than they
are. He correctly concludes that "NSA's surveillance system is
useless for finding terrorists."
The mathematics mentioned absolutely prove that monitoring every phone
call, every e-mail, and every instant message of every American will
not result in a reduction of terrorist attacks. In fact, using the
most generous estimates for both the number of terrorists in the U.S.
population, and the NSA's ability to find them, Rudmin concludes:
The probability that people are terrorists given that NSA's system of
surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is
far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA's domestic
monitoring of everyone's email and phone calls is useless for finding
terrorists.
So while one would have to be incurably naive to think the NSA will
stop monitoring U.S. communications, something they've been doing
for over 40 years, at least we know what this practice cannot
accomplish, no matter what we are told. What can we do about it?
Maybe those being watched can fight back. David Brin, scientist and
best-selling author of science fiction novels, certainly thinks so.
In his 2004 Salon piece, "Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!"
he stated as much:
Swiss researcher Marc Langheinrich's personal digital assistant
application detects nearby sensors and then lists what kind of
information they're collecting. At a more radical and polemical
level, there is the sousveillance movement, led by University of
Toronto professor Steve Mann. Playing off "surveillance" (overlooking
from above), Mann's coined term suggests that we should all get in the
habit of looking from below, proving that we are sovereign and alert
citizens down here, not helpless sheep. Mann contends that private
individuals will be empowered to do this by new senses, dramatically
augmented by wearable electronic devices.
Columnist David Leo Veksler, webmaster at the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggested a strategy in a 2007
column:
There are a number of limitations of the power of the state. Foremost
is that the same technologies that make ubiquitous surveillance
possible also allow ubiquitous secrecy.... Government's attempts at
limiting the spread of encryption and introducing loopholes into
encryption programs failed miserably because information is nearly
impossible to contain in our connected world.
Veksler continues:
There's no guarantee that life will remain private in the future. We
can only be certain that the potential to communicate securely will
grow along with the potential to monitor unsecured communications. If
we value privacy, the tools will be there.
Adam Perenberg, technology columnist for Slate, agrees with Veksler.
"Just because cameras are getting smaller, more powerful, and
surveillance is becoming ubiquitous, that doesn't necessarily mean Big
Brother wins." In fact, he's on record suggesting that what all this
powerful computation and image capture means is that anyone can turn
the tables on the government.
If the experience of users of Google Earth in the UK is any indication
where they actually used a Google Earth plug-in to obtain the
locations of speed cameras, surveillance tech can be used against the
State just as successfully as it can be used by it. Perenberg and
others may be correct, although the imbalance in power between the
government and a typical citizen still needs to be considered.
Surveillance Psychology Should we be hopeful or cautious? Should we
be more convinced that the State will take away our anonymity or
comforted by the fact that we can fight back? Should we be cowering
in the corner, awestruck by the imbalance of power, or should we be
laughing at the Beverly Hillbillies trying to master some new gadget?
The answer lies someplace in between.
Some researchers, like Erving Goffman, conclude that surveillance can
subconsciously coerce people, leading to docile, stay-below-the-radar
behavior from those who are surveilled, meaning possibly fewer
societal problems.
Such an acquiescent attitude might become common under constant
surveillance. One could also argue that the urge to become famous, if
even for a moment, will drive the type of semi-ludicrous behavior that
is a staple of reality television in the population at large.
Brin describes the tendency to put these issues into "yes/no" terms as
a devil's dichotomy. It's either "big brother is out to get us!" or
"without complete transparency the terrorists will win!" Hogwash.
When one allows a vibrant panorama of choices to be reduced to such an
absurd and simplistic yes-or-no debate, he misses the point
completely. The question of surveillance technology is more
complicated than simply good or bad. It is entirely possible that
increased surveillance can lead to positive results on occasion. Does
that mean that everyone should just "roll over" and accept more
invasive surveillance when the next terrorist attack is used to peel
away more privacy? Of course not.
The real problem lies not with the nature of the technology itself,
but with the way the technology is used. Most people have a tendency
to blame the hammer when the nail goes in crooked. The gun-rights
debate coined an interesting term, "It's the criminals, stupid."
While falling prey to sloganeering is always a danger when analyzing
such a complex issue, that sentiment remains solid.
Imagine what would happen if, in response to the development of better
guns, we passed laws that attempted to control access to these
firearms, laws that ultimately resulted in only two groups having
those weapons: the State and the crooks. This would not prevent the
technology, the guns in this case, from being misused. Instead, we'd
just be left with large groups of people ripe for violence with no
alternative. That place exists. In the United States it's called the
inner city.
The same analysis can be applied to the proliferation of surveillance
tech, and the State's tendency to abuse it, as can be applied to most
other concerns about the State abusing its power: understand that the
State, and our tendency to trust it and its agents too much, is the
problem! When we lament the fact that some random person could wield
the power of surveillance in an evil way, we must remember this fact:
we've only got people. If we want to lessen the imbalance of power
between those who rule and the ruled, the most viable option is having
fewer rulers. The most viable option is a higher degree of
self-government, and checks and balances throughout.
The imbalance in power can only be maintained or exacerbated if two
things happen. One, if we allow those who rule us to take away the
instruments by which our freedom can be maintained. Two, if we forget
that we must require both responsibility and accountability of anyone
who purports to protect us. Your safety and security has always been,
and will always be, your responsibility. Let's make sure we don't
forget that.
And for heaven's sake, let's keep watching the watchers. If we fail
to do so, all the checks and balances built into the syste, from the
Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and
seizures to habeas corpus, will ultimately be totally lost along with
freedom.
Thanks goes to Wilton D. Alston for the above. |
