Dispatch from the Surveillance Society: Panoptic Playthings

There are many ways to approach the study and critique of the emergent surveillance society. Often, those of us who take a strong normative stance against the expansion of systems and assemblages of surveillance will engage with this discussion by drawing on Michel Foucault's work Discipline and Punish, in which he uses Bentham's concept of the Panopticon as a metaphor for disciplinary technologies and related deployments of power and reorganizations of the social. It is also popular to draw on Orwell's image of Big Brother, the embodiment of sovereign power and Argus-like surveillance in the totalitarian setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both Orwell and Foucault offer useful entry points for the study of top-down and imposed surveillance, and a good deal of contemporary literature has drawn on them to critique the expanding infrastructure of the late modern surveillance state.

But the vast expansion of state-coordinated (and otherwise top-down) systems of watching is only one component of the surveillance society. Another component, and in the long run, probably a more pernicious one, is the growing banality of surveillance - the increasing normalization of watching and being watched that has come to characterize our digitized and monitored lives in the 21st Century. Foucault and Orwell offer us resources for making sense of this dimension as well. For Foucault, it is the internalization of the panoptic gaze and ensuing processes of self-policing and voluntary docility that marks the full realization of disciplinary power. And the true horror of Orwell's dystopian and prescient work of fiction is not found in the character of Big Brother, but in the fearful obedience of the populace, the inscription of citizens as components of the overarching surveillant assemblage (Little Brothers), and the way that total surveillance is experienced as a normal part of everyday life.

Indeed, insofar as surveillance powers remain associated with the structures of government, they are at least made intelligible as components of a set of class and power relations that can be identified and resisted. This is not to say that resisting the expansion of the surveillance state is an easy or straightforward task - but compared to the current state of things, a straightforward relationship between the totalitarian watcher and the surveilled populace would at least involve a manageable cast of characters. Alas, at present, when systems of surveillance and processes of watching have become diffused throughout the range of social interactions, resistance seems comparatively far more difficult.

Today, submission to processes of monitoring has become a prerequisite for access to the full benefits of late modern society. Examples abound, and I won't review the creep of surveillant assemblages in the form of 'preferred customer' technologies, identity verification schemes, and the growth of access-controlled spaces (both virtual and real, if such a distinction can hold).

Instead, I want to spend some time thinking about the onset of the contemporary surveillance society from the perspective of those who have been born into it and who are now being socialized to its normalcy.

My question is this: How will someone who was born in the opening years of the 21st Century (or even the last decade of the 20th) read Nineteen Eighty-Four? What will the dystopian vision of Orwell look like to someone who has grown up with biometrics, CCTV cameras on street corners, RFID, interconnected personal information databases, a dominant discourse that conflates surveillance and security, Facebook, MySpace, and a culture that recognizes social experience as having 'happened' only after it has been digitally recorded and broadcast on the Internet for posterity's sake? How will privacy be understood by those who come of age at at time when the profoundly anti-democratic but nonetheless popular slogan 'nothing to hide, nothing to fear' coexists alongside forms of sociality that encourage us to live through our data doubles? Will the message of Nineteen Eighty-Four be lost on a generation for whom its vision of surveillance seems obsolete? Will the image of the telescreen on Winston's wall hold any horror for people who communicate with videophones and validate their identities with iris scans before taking a test in school?

I don't know. I'm not entirely pessimistic, and I don't want to appear dismissive of the spirit of resistance to be found in the coming generation. Perhaps it will take the widespread solidification of the most extreme forms of the surveillance society to wake up a somnambulant public; certainly, those of us who are living through its emergence are doing a bloody poor job of standing up for ourselves at the moment.

But I believe that resistance is an act of consciousness. And for there to be resistance to the growth of the surveillance society, there must be a conscious recognition of its existence, of its problematic nature, and of the possibility of alternatives. This is why I am concerned less with the growth of the surveillance state than I am with the broader development of scopophilia - a normalization (indeed, valuation) of watching and being watched, viewing and being viewed, throughout all aspects of social life in late modern society (see David Lyon's excellent essay "9/11, Synopticism, and Scopophilia in the edited volume The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility for more on scopophilia).

I get particularly concerned about the socialization of and towards surveillance when I come across things like this:

This is the Playmobil 'Airport Security Check-In' set, a toy set designed for young children. Playmobil's website says that "The figure's size is perfectly suited for the hand of a child and the pleasant facial expression makes it ideal for any play situation". Let's ignore the obvious superficial problems - the 'pleasant facial expressions' are entirely out of place given the setting, which almost universally regarded as, at best, a necessary evil; and the realism of the situation is lessened by the fact that the person about to be scanned is still sporting footwear.
At a deeper and more serious level, I wonder about what it means that we have, in the contemporary context, internalized the structures of the surveillance society to such an extent that we think nothing of making an airport security checkpoint the setting of a children's playset. What message does this impart? I would love to speak with a parent who has purchased this toy for their child. Does the security checkpoint now fall into that group of everyday life situations that we understand as normal, functional, and unproblematic? What social dynamics and power relations are being mimicked and internalized when a child interacts with this toy? For a hint, we might turn to Playmobil's description of the set:

"Every single smuggler is caught at the security check-in. With a modern X-ray machine every item not allowed on board is detected. At the same time, the passengers have to pass the passenger check-in under the watchful eyes of the security staff. Only then can they start in their hard-earned vacation."

At the risk of being accused of reading too much into this, I think it is important to note that even this short description reproduces the idea at the heart of the surveillance society - that the trade-off of privacy or personal information for some kind of benefit (in this case, permission to go on vacation) is normal and unproblematic.
Here's a breakdown of the parts in the playset:

It's all there, then. Two authority figures, some fancy and apparently infallible technology, and a citizen that need only comply in order to reap the rewards (vacation playset sold separately).

(It's unclear as to whether the second pistol is supposed to accompany the fellow with the scanner or the passenger - I'll leave that one up to the imaginations of children).

I'll close with an excerpt from Cory Doctorow's weekend article at boingboing, which is about the fingerprint readers that have become features of Walt Disney World's turnstiles, ostensibly to "keep Disney World customers from sharing or re-selling their admission tickets" (see also Clifford Shearing's classic article "From the Panopticon to Disney World: The Development of Discipline - 2002).

from Doctorow:

The readers aren't very effective at stopping admission cheats. You can choose not to register your fingertip, and to use photo ID for admission instead (I'm thinking of having a random piece of photo identification made with the words "OFFICIAL BOGUS SECURITY IDENTIFICATION FOR HOTELS, THEME PARKS AND OTHER JUNIOR G-MEN" printed on it). So it would be very easy to share your pass: the person named on the pass enters with his ID, and the person with whom he's sharing the card uses a fingertip -- you could visit with your sister's family and half of you could use the tickets in the morning while the other half hung around the pool and relaxed, then switch at lunch: the morning crew uses fingertip, the afternoon uses ID.

What these readers are effective at is conditioning kids to accept surveillance and routine searches and identity checks without particularized suspcion. One morning at Epcot Center, as we offered our ID to the castmember at the turnstile and began to argue (again -- they're very poorly trained on this point) that we could indeed opt to show ID instead of being printed, a small boy behind us chirped up, "No you have to be fingerprinted! Everybody has to be fingerprinted!"

To all those parents who worry that Disney will turn their kids into little princesses, it's time to get priorities straight: the "security" at the parks is even more effective at conditioning your children to live in a police state.

All the best,

- Mike

Regarding the Server in the Sky Project

(Jan 19 - Updates added at bottom of article)

Yesterday’s edition of The Guardian included an article entitled "FBI wants instant access to British identity data", by Owen Bowcott. The article outlines a US-initiated program called "Server in the Sky", whose objective is the development of a massive international database - which would include biometric data - for use in major crime and terrorism investigations. Bowcott reports that the program has been the subject of an international working group, including the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. This working group is called the International Information Consortium.

The project involves the linking of existing databases, and the facilitation of transnational flows of data. The Server in the Sky program is an FBI initiative, "designed to foster the advanced search an exchange of biometric information on a global scale". The system is not active yet, but a pilot project is expected to be up and running by the middle of 2008.

Server in the Sky is the most recent example of the increasingly-interconnected nature of contemporary policing, and from what little information is available, it appears that the project will streamline and expand upon already-existing data-sharing arrangements. Projects of this nature raise many important questions regarding privacy, the integrity of databases, and the ownership of personal data. Server in the Sky will act as a searchable international archive of biometric data. Times Online reports that the system will "establish three categories of suspects on the system: internationally recognised terrorists and felons; major felons and suspected terrorists; and those who are the subject of terrorist investigations or criminals with international links".

For it to be useful (and this is 'educated conjecture' on my part), it will have to be able interface with existing biometric databases, cross-checking data from crime scenes or police archives with other sources of biometric information in the hopes of finding a match. I suspect that a fully-operational Server in the Sky program would allow an FBI agent in New York to input a selection of fingerprints or DNA sample, and search for matches in a variety of foreign police databases - and probably immigration and refugee databases - and quite possibly medical databases. As more and more states move towards identity documentation systems that include biometric markers, and as more services require that users give up biometric data, the pool of possible suspects for programs like Server in the Sky increases. And we should be clear on this point - integrated surveillant assemblages that utilize biometric data-matching operate by treating all 'data doubles' (human traces translated into data - a term introduced by Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) as potentially suspicious. 

I will be following this program as it develops, and posting updates and commentary. For now, here are a few predictions. Once things have solidified, we'll see if I'm right.

Prediction 1: Regardless of who the lead agency on Server in the Sky turns out to be (and it looks to be the FBI at this point), the program itself will be developed by a private contractor. This will likely be Northrop Grumman, the company that built the UK IDENT1 database.

Prediction 2: The program will link policing databases with other sources of biometric data. If this is not a feature of the initial pilot project, it will be phased in over the next few years. Immigration and border services databases will likely be the first to link up. Britain is currently implementing a national identity card system (initially for foreign nationals, but expect it to be a population-wide requirement within the next few years), and I would be shocked if the Home Office didn't take steps to integrate this rich pool of data with the new Server in the Sky program.

Prediction 3: The program mandate will gradually creep, moving from the planned database covering the 'worst of the worst' to a general policing and security focus. This could happen through an expansion of Server in the Sky, but it is more likely that the success of this program will lead to the development of similar projects. Which will, of course, be integrated with the existing system.

All for now,

- Mike

Update (Jan 15): Today's Guardian Comment is Free section includes an article by Nick Clegg, the British Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, entitled "Let's not spy for the FBI". Clegg raises concerns about the privacy implications of giant international biometric databases, and he briefly touches on the problems associated with the safeguarding of data. 

Update (Jan 19): A few additional articles on the Server in the Sky program.

• Today's Globe and Mail offers a Canadian perspective, including some comments from Privacy Commissioner Stoddart (who first learned about the program from a media report from London, presumably the Guardian article discussed above). Stoddart expresses concern about the haste with which biometric security projects are moving forward. Also included in the Globe article is a reference to a statement from the RCMP, confirming their involvement in talks with the FBI, but denying that commitments have already been made.
• The Jan 20 Sydney Morning Herald includes an article entitled 'Space race for world's most wanted', which covers the story from an Australian perspective. As with the Globe and Mail article, the Herald sought a comment from authorities, and received a confirmation of talks but a denial of firm commitment. The article also mentions that Australia is close to completing a national DNA database. 
• A January 19 Comment is Free article at The Guardian, by Simon Ings, is entitled 'The soul stealers: Our beautiful, unique irises are to be relegated to the dystopian realm of state security'. 
• The Guardian also published an excellent article by Cory Doctorow on Jan 15, entitled 'Personal data is as hot as nuclear waste'. The article uses the nuclear waste metaphor to highlight the potential harm associated with vast databases of personal information, as well as the comparable longevity of the data. I am particularly fond of this passage: "Every gram - sorry, byte - of personal information these feckless data-packrats collect on us should be as carefully accounted for as our weapons-grade radioisotopes, because once the seals have cracked, there is no going back. Once the local sandwich shop's CCTV has been violated, once the HMRC has dumped another 25 million records, once London Underground has hiccoughup up a month's worth of travelcard data, there will be no containing it."
• The 'computing market intelligence' website Vunet.com published a brief synopsis article on Jan 15, largely based on the initial Guardian report. The Vunet.com article does make the important additional observation that the five countries involved in the International Information Consortium (and through it, Server in the Sky) - the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand - are all involved in the Echelon global eavesdropping program.
• The British website The Register posted a detailed Jan 17 article entitled 'UK.gov says no plans for FBI DNA database hookup'. The Register contacted the National Policing Improvement Agency (NPIA) for comment on the Server in the Sky program, and was informed that there are currently no plans to integrate the existing databases into an international system. Currently. The article also includes this description of the Server in the Sky program: "The idea of "Server in the Sky" is that the traditional intelligence/security axis run by the Anglophone nations of the former British empire - the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - would be extended into regular law enforcement. Most significantly perhaps, the cooperation might go as far as the interlinking of national biometrics databases. An FBI agent on a case might be able to check DNA from a crime scene and get a hit from the UK database, for instance. Or a British plod might likewise get one from the States, though America holds much less data." The Rgister article also gives a more specific account of the members of the International Information Consortium - rather than citing the nations involved, it lists the member agencies: FBI, RCMP, NPIA (UK), CRIMTRAC (Aus) and NZ Policing.