Surveillance and its discontents

Surveillance in the sense of gathering information about people existed throughout history, a simple example can be given from the Roman Empire when Caesar Augustus issued a decree for taking census throughout the empire, in order to maintain the functioning of the Empire and collect taxes (Claytor & Bagnall, 215; Lyon, 1994, p. 22). Therefore, since it’s an old social event, one wonders what’s the matter with surveillance today? Why so much attention is increasing in regards to surveillance since the last decade? Are there any differences between the surveillance since the times of the Roman Empire with surveillance today? And if so what are they? All these questions will be answered in this paper. It will begin by attempting to define what is surveillance, then it will examine the 2009 House of Lords Report (HOL) on this subject, then it will critically examine some of the issues raised in the report; particularly how surveillance shapes the relationship between the citizens and the state, the Public-Private sectors relationship, and abuses of surveillance.

As stated in the introduction surveillance has always existed, however, historical developments changed the way and expanded the scope of surveillance (Lyon, 1994), that conceiving surveillance as only gathering information doesn’t suffice, as these developments allowed surveillance to reach areas which were thought unimaginable decades ago like; wiretapping (Nunn, 2010), or videotaping using closed circuit television (CCTV) (2009, para. 18), or even watching-through-wall technologies (Hiranandani, 2010).

In the HOL report, Surveillance is understood as monitoring the behaviour of persons, objects, or systems using a variaty of technologies (2009, para. 18). Gary T. Marx provided a very similar definition of surveillance as “the use of technical means to extract or create personal data. This may be taken from individuals or contexts” (2002, p. 12). From these definitions, it can be seen how surveillance in the modern time is inextricably linked with Technology. Thus, with the technological developments such as the three examples stated above, surveillance expand its scope like an octobus streching its arms as far as possible. A third definition of surveillance, which will be employed in this paper, is “the performative creation of suspect subjectivities”, in this definition, Matzner introduces positive and negative connotations concerning those under surveillance, rather than attributing these connotations to surveillance itself (Matzner, 2016, p. 200).

The HOL report came as an outcome of increasing concerns about privacy, security and discrimination resulting from surveillance. These increasing concerns came hand in hand with the UK government’s massive usage of surveillance technologies. The report indicates that the government had “some £500 million of public money invested in CCTV in the decade up to 2006” (2009, para. 70) along with “The National DNA Database (NDNAD) is rapidly growing, and now contains millions of samples taken from individuals and crime scenes” (2009, para. 49). This increase in usage of surveillnace technologies are also combined with instances of data loss such as; the November 2007 Government announcement that “the child benefit details of 25 million people had been lost after an Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) computer disc went missing”; and the December 2007 news “that a computer hard drive with the details of 3 million UK learner drivers had gone missing in the USA, and that the details of 7,500 vehicles and their owners had been lost by the Driver and Vehicle Agency (DVA) in Northern Ireland” (2009, p. 7). The report states that data loss undermines the trust between the citizens and the state, which in turn could lead to disobedience of the citizens to the law (2009, para.108) Last but not least, the report also pointed out that the relation between public and private sectors is not in favour of UK citizens (2009, para. 55). Having summarized the report, this paper will examine how the issues raised above in the summary affect the citizen-state relationship.

The government’s extensive incorporation of CCTV throughout the UK, doesn’t translate into the success of CCTV in reducing crime and increasing welfare. As the report indicated that despite all this enormous budget on CCTV, its effectiveness is dubious (Stedmon, 2011, p. 532). Surveillance is not just monitoring people, it’s also about creating subjectivities. However, this creation doesn’t lie in the machine, it is created by humans. The extensive use of CCTV blinded the government from noticing the human factor, Stedmon presents a case study where he and his wife got fined for crossing a bus lane during un-permitted hours. After examining the information he was provided and his research, he found out that they were innocent and that they shouldn’t be fined as they didn’t break the rules. He argues that the human factor plays an important role in the functioning of the system, as he states that “operators are typically expected to view a high number of monitors simultaneously, vigilance deteriorates as a function of the number of screens being attended to” (Stedmon, 2011, p. 533).

Wiretapping is no better than CCTV, human factors also play a crucial role in determining the outcome of surveillance, one of these factors is the bias that takes place by the police when intercepting telephone conversations -wiretapping. Nunn, in his analysis of The United States, Indianapolis police wiretapping activities and comparing their translations, stated that there does exist a bias in the police where “terms of conversational exchanges that might appear ambiguous in nature […] are re-structured by the police translations to be, in contrast, completely unambiguous examples of criminal communications” (Nunn, 2010, p. 40).

The report implies the huge reliance of government on surveillance technologies as a means to retain security, order and peace; rights that citizens expect from their government. However, it never mentions how the government uses surveillance in maintaining these rights, the report is mainly explanatory and provides the means through which government conduct its surveillance, yet one must question whether surveillance technologies do indeed fulfill these rights? In an answer to this question, this paper examines Matzner argument that surveillance, perceiving it as performative, based on big data, creates suspects as well as friends (Matzner, 2016). Many actions of the government stated in the report related to expanding surveillance amount to what can be called “Big data surveillance”, which “refers to both the unprecedented size of contemporary databases and the emerging techniques for making sense of them” (Andrejevic & Gates, 2014). But what does the government do with all this data? In his paper, Matzner, challenges the representationalist view of Big data surveillance -that is, the purpose of data is to represent the world, by arguing that the way data is being gathered doesn’t represent the world, but in fact has a performative features that allows surveillance to create suspects (Matzner, 2016). This performative feature, Martzner states, is structured by power relations. Relying on Foucauldian theories, he argues that power uses this performtive feature of big data to produce subjects (Matzner, 2016, p. 206). Matzner employs Judith butler’s concept of “citationality” in providing an understanding of how power produces subjects through big data. According to Butler, a citation is a speech act that only describes things, and “the meaning and the performative power of the speech act stem from its relation to similar acts, where particular structures of power and authority are already established” (Matzner, 2016, p. 205).

Matzner’s emphasis on how the way people appear on digital communication affects who they are (2016, p. 205), rests on the relation between, on the one hand, ‘Hidden generation of information’ and ‘information given voluntarily’  modes (2016, p. 201), and on the other hand, citationality. When someone publishes things about who they are -which is the secomd mode of information gathering, these information are being processed covertly through the first mode where access is only limited to the authorities. This processing of information subjectifies individuals as “it singles out suspects as potential or possible future wrong doers” (Matzner, 2016, p. 202). This being said, Matzner’s work puts the citizens in a vulnerable position in front of the state power, by defining surveillance as “creating suspects” this implies that the function of the state is not protect the citizens from wrongdoers only, but also it can also create them.

A further important point explored Harbisher (2015), who in his paper he questions the relationship between public and private sectors and shows with evidences how radical narratives were used by these sectors in order to legitimise surveillance, by assigning terms such as “extremism” not just to terrorist groups, but also to British campaigners. Harbisher argues that ‘fusion centres’ -organisations that result out from the relationship between public and private sectors, act according to the interests of their stakeholders rather than the public good (Harbisher, 2015, p. 478). The change in context of Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) to the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (GSAVE) had an impact on the UK domestic affairs, that the UK government Research Information and Communications Unit (RICU) was responsible for regulating all public communications. The RICU, generated what is known as ‘Britain’s “strategic dialogue” against terrorism’ (Harbisher, 2015, p. 479), this ‘Strategic Dialogue’ encompassed undesirable activities against the state under the banner of PREVENT strand of the 2003 CONTEST programme set out by the government to counter terrorism. Under such dialogue even political activists, protest groups could can be considered extremists, an example of that is the undermining of anti-capitalism campaigners in the London by the police as posing the ‘greatest threat of all to British society’ along with International terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda (Harbisher, 2015, p. 480).

Harbisher, points out that “The Civil Contingencies Act enabled Britain’s governing authorities to establish a series of networks that fused together both private and public interests who identify and mitigate the risks posed to each individual catchment” (Harbisher, 2015, p. 482). However, this relationship must be questioned since private organizations act for the interests of their principals and not in the interests of the public. The report mentions that the boundary between the public and private sector “is becoming increasingly blurred as public services are provided through partnerships and other joint arrangements” (2009, para. 55). The reason behind the incorporation of the private sector in surveillance is based on the argument that their expertiese can be used in favour of inhancing state surveillance, therefore, a mutual co-ordination between the two sectors is for the benefit of all (2009, para. 55) (Helgesson, 2011, p. 475).

However, Helgesson argues that while the function of the state is to work in favour of the general public, its relation with the private sector is dubious for in the realm of business, “surveillance is intertwined with systems of corporate governance and control” (2011, p. 472), therefore, surveillance conduct by the private actor is restricted in favour of the owner, which in turn raises the issue of the accountability of the private sector towards the government, or the other way around? Given the example of the 2006 “Operation Harmony” the North Yorkshire Local Resilience Forum (LRF), contained a mass protest in Selby and was considered “the first time that domestic extremisim had taken place in the county” (Harbisher, 2015, p. 484).

In Conclusion, This paper discussed the main themes in the HOL report, and then tried to examine some of these themes; mainly the relationship between the citizens and the state, and the public-private sector relationship. It tried to show that surveillance is much more than just a way of monitoring and gathering data. The case study by Stedmon and Nunn’s analysis, proves one of the vulnerabilities that CCTV and Telecommunication intercepting systems faces, the paper argued that human factors have an influence over the processing of data. It then turned to Matzner’s work who argued that Surveillance is a way of creating suspects as well as friends. Matzner based introduced his argument against the representationalist view, arguing that surveillance doesn’t just represents how the world is but also acts as performative that creates subjectivities. In presenting Harbisher’s work the paper aimed at showing how surveillance could be abused easily and can lead to unfavoured results, such as totalitarianism by considering any dissenting voices as being an act of extremism and falls under terrorism, and also by bringing in Helgesson emphasis on how the relationship between the public and private sectors is dubious, the aim was to link Harbisher’s and Helgesson’s works in an attempt to indicate how private sectors can alter surveillance in their favour. In short, this paper tried to expose how that the problem is not in surveillance in essense, but the way that surveillance is used, Matzner’s analysis and his argument is very irritating and poses lots of questions on the relationship between the citizens and the state.

References

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