Technology and Surveillance

The the co-evolution of technologies of power and technologies of surveillance has generated various forms of criticism. In some ways, society has come to accept elements of the infamous surveillance state described by novelist George Orwell in seminal work 1984. Many argue that society in the age of information has already a surveillance society.

Keywords 360° Feedback; Biopower; Consumerism; Discipline; Digital Divide; Forms of Power; Micro Chip Tagging; Panopticon; Patriot Act; Political-Industrial-Military Complex

Society & Technology > Technology & Surveillance

Overview

There have always been critical voices in the social sciences that have viewed technological developments with skepticism and warned of their potential negative influence on the private sphere. The debate over how advancements in technology influence liberty, democracy, and autonomy has occurred for decades. Michel Foucault, in his investigations into the technologies of power, in his lectures at the Collège de France, and in his famous book Surveillenir et punir has described the invasion these technologies make, beginning from the somatic punishment of the Inquisition via Bentham's Panopticon towards the biopower and disciplining of our physical bodies, which we could nowadays supplement with the surveillance and discipline of our "neuro-chemical selves."

Social movements in the late 1960s were concerned with the influence and power wielded by governments and the political-industrial-military complex. If governments were equipped with the right devices to monitor their citizens every move, they could wield tremendous influence over citizens' lives. In the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the terrorist bombings of Madrid (2004) and London (2005), and the inception of the American Patriot Act, it has been argued that citizens are beginning to welcome restrictions on their freedom and autonomy that, they believe, will ensure their security. This, coupled with the research commercial companies undertake on the private lives and behavior of customers, has made more amendable to transparency of information.

Further, it is not just governments and companies that are using surveillance technologies: an increasing number of people are using surveillance technologies within their homes to monitor the activities of their children and spouses. In a time and age in which the polity, the economy, and the zone of infringement between the private and the public sphere are all constituted by capillaries of information made transparent by the progressive digitalization of all facts of life, modern society has come to embody a surveillance society.

Applications

Public vs. Private Sphere

The distinction of a public and a private sphere is crucial to understand surveillance as a sociological issue as well as an ethical one. Also, it must be understood that the conception of privacy, as we take it for granted today, is a modern concept. As Jürgen Habermas has shown in his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), the 18th and 19th centuries were a crucial historic time during which cultural transformations shaped the distinctions between public and private that we recognize today.

In The Civilizing Process (1939/1994), Norbert Elias cited many examples of behavior typical of prior centuries that would nowadays be considered intrusions into privacy, such as servants being present during a king's or queen's wedding night. With the emergence of privacy, however, there came the potential of using this privacy to gain and maintain control over groups of people. Of course, these groups would largely comprise people considered harmful to society: deviants, outcasts, criminals.

Panopticon

In this regard, the idea of a total control of the incarcerated was epitomized in the Panopticon, the prison Jeremy Bentham designed in 1785. The cells in such a prison are arranged in a circle around a central watchtower from which the prisoners can be observed at all times. Prisoners are unable to know, though, when they were being watched and when they are not. Because of this uncertainty, a sense of omniscience pervades the prison: since the prisoners cannot know when they are being watched, they tend to act under the assumption that they are being watched all the time.

Michel Foucault used the Benthamite Panopticon as an example for the emergence of the modern "disciplinary" society. In a disciplinary society, norms are "inscribed into the body," rather than merely taught. The discipline constructs the body. In a critical interpretation, the body is thus formed to adhere to the functions of an industrial community and of labor based capitalism.

In a historical perspective, we should be mindful of the methods that were applied by organizations such as the Gestapo, the Stasi, and the KGB to spy on their own countries' citizens in order to establish total control. Extreme historical cases of surveillance being used as a tool for oppression can be found in the Nazi's Gestapo and communist East Germany's Stasi. Both groups relied heavily on the citizens' surveillance of each other. Out of fear (or sometimes opportunism), people spied on their neighbors and friends and reported suspicious activity, which then led to the incarceration or murder of the spied upon. The Stasi meticulously documented the lives of the citizens of the German Democratic Republic through taped conversations, interrogation protocols, and other means. They developed many techniques of surveillance, a number of which were documented in the motion picture The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).

Microchips

In recent years, critical thinkers and skeptics have become highly critical of a potential surveillance method: the use of micro-chips to track citizens' movement. While many commercial products are already equipped with micro-chips to prevent theft, these chips can potentially be used for other purposes, too. By now it has become a matter of fact that new American passports are issued with an RFID chip that contains personal information. These chips can be identified within a radius of ten meters. However, similar chips have already been implanted in humans also. A few clubs and discotheques have spearheaded this use by injecting micro-chips into the arms of regular customers in order to provide them with easier access and an electronic tab that does away with the need to carry money or credit cards. Ironically, it follows that surveillance can be used not only as an implicit and secret form of control, but has been accepted in business circles as a way to provide explicit 360° feedback. This type of feedback involves the evaluation of managerial performance through auditing the entire organizational context. However, this process can give rise to micro-politics within an organization and invite denunciations and blackmail.

It has been argued that this is the perfect form of discipline in that it makes the subject of disciplinary power feel welcome and invite discipline openly. Similarly, skeptics fear that we are willingly creating the transparent human or the "Man of Glass" by laying bare every personal detail and making these details subject to control by outside forces.

Viewpoints

Foucault

Foucault's Discipline and Punish was originally published in 1975. It begins with an account of a torturous execution in the 18th century, which is then contrasted with a 19th century prisoner's schedule, a highly regulated daily routine. Taken together, the two accounts illustrate the changes that had occurred in the penal system over the course of the intervening century.

The transformation from punishment to discipline, Foucault argued, was a change from one technology of power to the other. However, Foucault's concept of power has often been gravely misunderstood. In Foucault's account, power is not a means of domination, but rather a productive force. In themselves, the bodies and practices that disciplinary power produces are not to be viewed as good or bad effects of power. Foucault is an ardent student of Nietzsche in this regard. As such, if one seeks to follow a Foucauldian analysis, one should first study the changes in surveillance techniques today, rather than study them from the point of view of domination. This, however, must not be the only perspective.

Mills

Leftist and Marxist oriented critical thinkers have held — and increasingly hold — deep reservations about the invasion of the private sphere by either the government or multinational companies. In 1956, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills warned of a conflation of the political, military and economic elites in his book The Power Elite. Delineating the emergence of a shared world view among these elites, he foresaw a military metaphysic that would guide all three institutions in a "community of interests" in a permanent "war economy."

C. Wright Mills' work on political sociology and Alvin Gouldner's on the history of social theory together drove a major shift within sociology during the 1960s and early 1970s. The classical theories of Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Talcott Parsons, the last of which had dominated sociology from the mid-1940s into the 1960s, were denounced as being authoritarian and conservative, oriented toward the establishment, and set on upholding social order and rigid social control by providing "grand theories" that offered the empty promise of an explanation for every social fact. Such views were grave misconceptions of Parsons, but they prevailed nonetheless (Stingl, 2008).

Anti-Psychiatry

A very similar development, the Anti-Psychiatry movement, was a sort of 1960s corollary rebellion against established theory in the humanities and social sciences. This movement mimicked the early Adorno's skepticism about the misuse of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy towards the domination and control of people through capitalism. Leftists Anti-Psychiatrists viewed psychiatry as a method of surveillance, while the "moderate main-stream," in the wake of Thomas Szazs and R.D. Laing (Foucault is often erroneously named in this context as well), has argued that the application of certain medical conceptions and tools in psychiatry is to a large degree too broad to be called "scientific."

The concept of the misuse of psychiatry as a tool for social control is echoed in the term "the therapeutic state," which was coined by Szazs in 1963 to refer to a state system in which unwanted emotions and thoughts among citizens are "cured" by the means of psychotherapy as a metaphor for "pseudo-medical interventions." However, Szazs himself came under scrutiny when he was found to be associated with an organization that had close ties to Scientology, a religious organization often criticized for the control and surveillance it exerts over its members.

Some critics today would claim that the political actions (e.g. the Patriot Act) after the attacks of September 11, 2001 have led to a regime in which the war economy has realized a new potential as it has come to be applied within the U.S. itself. Under Title II of the Patriot Act, options of surveillance were widely opened up to government agencies. For example, the investigation of private computer data became available through a legal redefinition of the term "protected computer" which allows law enforcement agents to access information through Internet Service Providers.

Satellite Images

One should also certainly cite the controversy over the use of satellite images by companies like Google. It has been pointed out by some critics that the detailed imagery available of Google Maps (e.g. individual homes) seem to be a clear invasion into the private sphere.

A recent development in surveillance is found in the commercial use of global positioning systems (GPS) and tracking devices, especially when children are tagged with these devices. Child locator systems use the same technology as cell phones to track the movement of people. These systems are now readily available and can be installed in a child's knapsack or clothing, though they are usually worn as wristband. But the application of this technology comes with a price, and it can be taken too far. Parents surely have legitimate concern in preventing their child from wandering off and making sure that he or she is safe on the way home from school, but at what age does a child or adolescent gain the right to a private sphere? If parents track the movement of their teenage child with a hidden chip in his or her knapsack or through a mobile phone, at some stage this technology may raise doubts about the family's ability to trust one another. Further, it can be argued that trust is the major integration factor of a family — maybe even within an entire society.

Other Surveillance

But surveillance is also an issue of commercial interests, and it is interesting to note how willing people in Western countries share personal data. One should remember that in Germany in 1987, a nation-wide census (originally planned for 1981) was the cause of a major social protest as critics thought the census would prove an invasion of privacy. Yet the questions that comprised the questionnaire were rather docile in comparison to the questions people nowadays readily answer to register with websites like Facebook and YouTube. Supermarket bonus cards are yet another way that companies gather personal information.

Early in the 20th century, novelists had begun to warn about the totalitarian potential of super-surveillance societies. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is perhaps the most famous of these, depicting a world in which all life and knowledge itself was under the surveillance and control of the thought police and a ministry of truth. With individuals in politics or the economy controlling the capillaries of information, truth, and knowledge construction and distribution, the realization of a new from of totalitarianism may not be too far.

In the digital age, the information trails we leave everywhere are not only subject to constant surveillance, but also, through this surveillance, to a new form of discrimination, as David Lyon, author of The Surveillance Society (2001), has shown. The odd consequence of surveillance is that it demarcates a new and unique form of inclusion/exclusion in society. According to Lyon, only those who have (and want) access to modern information technology, such as the Internet and cell phones, and thereby only those who actively invite the kind of surveillance these technologies impose, can fully participate in modern society. Those who have no access to this kind of technology fall on the losing side of what is called the digital divide.

Following the case that Lyons argues, it can be said that we have entered an age of post-privacy. This means that we have entered an age in which we use markers of identification to such a degree, and that — unbeknownst to us — the data collected about us has reached such a significant mass, that the concept of privacy can no longer be upheld. Consumerism itself is a driving force behind these developments. A surveillance society thus thrives on the willing participation of its members, at the very least in so far as they turn a blind eye to the consequences of the distribution of their information and the question of who controls the channels through which their information runs.

United States National Security Agency

In 2013, former U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden began providing the international media with details about the agency’s mass surveillance of American citizens and foreign countries. In order to avoid an effort by law enforcement to arrest him, Snowden flew to Russia, where he was granted official permission to reside. Snowden was formally charged with espionage and theft of government property in June 2013. Among the information leaked by Snowden to the media was evidence that the NSA collected internet activity information and phone call data from billions of people in countries all over the world. In addition to collecting data on both American and foreign citizens, the NSA has collected information on foreign leaders and their colleagues. Based on the information provided by Snowden, it became clear that employees within the NSA and government officials endorsed the surveillance efforts with the understanding that it would aid in the goal of preventing terrorist attacks and help ensure global economic security. Nevertheless, critics of the NSA programs maintain that the United States government has used the issue of terrorism as a pretext to invade the personal lives of millions of people and put them under surveillance without their knowledge.

While U.S. President Barack Obama reacted to the NSA controversy with assurances that the government does not exceed legal boundaries of privacy in its surveillance practices, the issue of government spying is likely to inform the debate about security and privacy well into the future.

Terms & Concepts

360° Feedback: 360° feedback or "multi-rater feedback"/"multi-source assessment" is a Human Resource (HR) tool that utilizes reports from a variety of sources, including supervisors, co-workers, and supervisees, to evaluate an employee's job performance. This method has been criticized as an unreliable tool because it can give rise to intensive politicking, denunciations, and peer pressure, all of which are counter-productive to a working environment. Additionally, the method has been criticized as a form of illegitimate surveillance and social control. The method, it is claimed, mirrors the strategies of the Gestapo or the Stasi, even if it is supposedly only used to "enhance" work performance in corporate contexts.

Biopower: Introduced by Michel Foucault to describe a technology of power that states apply to govern a population by subjugating the body itself to forms of discipline and a regulative regime of biopolitics.

Consumerism: Consumerism is a postmodern description of a form of society in which self-realization and happiness are identified with the ability to purchase material goods and consume services. The constitutive factor is comprised by the opportunities for consumption.

Digital Divide: The difference in access to and practical knowledge of information technology, especially the Internet. The divide exists between different kinds of groups. Internationally, it describes the differences between developing and developed nations. Within nations, it exists between rural and urban areas or between densely and sparsely populated areas that are of different economic interest to Internet service providers. Finally, it also exists between social classes.

Discipline: The term, as used by Michel Foucault, has a slightly different meaning than it does in common usage. According to Foucault, disciplinary power is the process that enables the subjectification of the individual by constructing his or her body and his or her somatic identity through a regime of practices. Disciplinary power as such, therefore, is not visible.

Forms of Power: (Marxists, Weber, Parsons, Foucault, Mann) The concept of power itself is disputed within the social and political sciences. In the common-sense understanding, it is usually synonymous with terms such as domination and influence. This usage is actually very close to the Marxist and Neomarxist definition, which equates power with domination and material ownership.

Max Weber defined power as the ability to influence or control the behavior of others. A main means of doing so lay in the ability to coerce behavior through force, whether this force is realized or merely potential. Power rests on different types of authority: charismatic (people obey on grounds of the qualities of a leader), traditional (people obey to continue a pattern or uphold a value) and rational-legal (people obey on the grounds that authority giving the order holds an institutionalized office which fulfills a function in society).

Talcott Parsons conceived of power as a social medium among three others, each, according to his AGIL-scheme (Adaption, Goal-Attainment, Integration, Latency/Pattern-Maintenance), fulfilling a specific function in society.

Power as a medium fulfills the function of Goal-Attainment in the social subsystem of the polity. Money is the medium of the economy (A), the societal community (I) works on influence, while the fiduciary system (L) applies the medium of value commitments. In a tentative description, power in Parsons' frame of reference is about the ability to set goals, while influence is all about the promotion of the goal.

Foucault's concept of power is based on the relations between power, truth, and knowledge. For Foucault, power is a force that cannot simply be equated with the intentions of people, but is rather a current in the interchanges of knowledge and a formative and productive force that even enables its own counter-forces.

For Michael Mann, power comes in four sub-forms of resources for power: military, political, economical, and ideological. He integrates these in an analysis of the logistics of distribution in networks to explain the rise of political regimes, such as the fascist regimes of the early 20th century and the phenomenon of ethnic cleansing.

Micro Chip Tagging: The application of microchips with Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and global positioning system (GPS) technology is becoming increasingly common.

The use of RFID in passports and consumer products is now very common. And while proponents of the technology claim that the operational radius of the devices is very limited, tests have shown that this radius can be easily expanded.

Panopticon: The Panopticon is a prison building designed by Jeremy Bentham. Architecture can play a central role as a technology of surveillance, and Bentham's Panopticon creates a space in which a feeling of invisible omniscience is achieved. With such a dominance over its subjects established, the prison does not simply incarcerate the body, but, as Bentham himself claimed, also exerts power over the mind. Michel Foucault used the Panopticon to illustrate the shift to disciplinary power between the 18th and 19th centuries.

Patriot Act: The U.S. Patriot Act was signed into law on October 26th 2001 in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The name is an acronym for "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001." The act increases the rights of law enforcement agencies to act within the U.S. and abroad, specifically with regard to aspects of surveillance. It also affects the Secretary of the Treasury's rights of the regulation of financial assets, including those of foreign entities. The Patriot Act is still controversial, since its critics assert that it destroys the very liberties and rights it was enacted to protect.

Political-Industrial-Military Complex: According to Sociologist C. Wright Mills (1916 — 1962), the political, military, and economic elites share an ideology that defines them as a superior sector of society that supposedly knows best and is guided by a military outlook on foreign relations and social reality. To promote the interests of their "better community," as Mills states in The Power Elite (1956), this complex works to change the structure of the general economy into a "state of war economy."

Bibliography

Ball, K. S., & Wood, D. (2013). Political economies of surveillance. Surveillance & Society, 11(1/2), 1–3. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text:http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=90656722&site=ehost-live

Bright, J. (2011). Building biometrics: Knowledge construction in the democratic control of surveillance technology. Surveillance & Society, 9(1/2), 233–247. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=87532833&site=ehost-live

Cannon, M., & Witherspoon, R. (2005). Actionable feedback: Unlocking the power of learning and performance improvement. Academy of Management Executive, 19, 120–134. Retrieved October 30, 2008 from EBSCO online database Business Source Complete: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=16965107&site=ehost-live

Eichinger, R. (2004). Patterns of rater accuracy in 360-degree feedback. Perspectives, 27, 23–25. Retrieved October 30, 2008 from EBSCO online database Business Source Complete: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=15458217&site=ehost-live

Elias, N. (1994). The civilizing process. (Edmund Jephcott, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1939).

Farman, J. (2014). Creative misuse as resistance: Surveillance, mobile technologies, and locative games. Surveillance & Society, 12, 377–388. Retrieved January 2, 2015, from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=97364930&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Fuchs, C. (2013). Societal and ideological impacts of deep packet inspection internet surveillance. Information, Communication & Society, 16, 1328–1359. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=89978624&site=ehost-live

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage.

Foucault, M. (2006). Psychiatric power. New York, NY: Picador.

Furnham, A. (1998, April). Congruence in job-performance ratings: A study of 360 degree feedback examining self, manager, peers, and consultant ratings. Human Relations, 51, 517–530.

Guru, S. (2012). Under siege: Families of counter-terrorism. British Journal of Social Work, 42, 1151–1173. Retrieved November 13, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=80237129&site=ehost-live

Habermas, J. (1962). The structural transformation of the public sphere. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Hallinan, D., Friedewald, M., Schütz, P., & de Hert, P. (2014). Neurodata and neuroprivacy: Data protection outdated?. Surveillance & Society, 12, 55–72. Retrieved January 2, 2015, from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=95395699&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Lyon, D. (2001). The surveillance society. Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press.

Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Stingl, A. (2008). The house of Parsons: The biological vernacular from Kant to James, Weber and Parsons. Lampeter, UK: Edward Mellen Press.

Suggested Reading

Elias, N. (1994). The civilizing process. (Edmund Jephcott, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell. (Original work published 1939).

Lyon, D. (2003). Surveillance as social sorting: Privacy, risk and digital discrimination. New York, NY: Routledge.

Luther, C., & Radovic, I. (2012). Perspectives on privacy, information technology and company/governmental surveillance in Japan. Surveillance & Society, 10(3/4), 263–275. Retrieved November 15, 2013 from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=87532884&site=ehost-live

Mann, M. (2004). Fascists. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Pallitto, R. M. (2013). Bargaining with the machine: A framework for describing encounters with surveillance technologies. Surveillance & Society, 11(1/2), 4–17. Retrieved January 2, 2015, from EBSCO online database SocINDEX with Full Text. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=sih&AN=90656723&site=ehost-live&scope=site

Parsons, T. (2007). American society. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

Rose, N. (2007). The politics of life itself. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Surveillance studies: An overview. (2007). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

The dark side of democracy: Explaining ethnic cleansing. (2005). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Weber, M. (1978). Economy and society. Berkeley, CA: California University Press.