short answer

Chapter 11

We Know What You’re Doing. . . . The Surveillance Society Has Arrived

Objectives

To understand:

How the transition from broadcasting to narrowcasting is a symptom and an effect of increasing public surveillance

What we mean by surveillance society

What forms public surveillance can take and what issues are emerging from the use of technology to monitor people

How the shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting is symptomatic of the surveillance society

How the commercial media play an important role in legitimizing social surveillance

Big Brother Comes to Canada

Canada’s Bill C-30 would require Internet service providers (ISPs) to store all of their clients’ personal information, and make that available, upon request, to the police

Concept of Big Brother is one way of thinking about surveillance and the political economic and social conditions that have contributed to its mimetic spread

I Spy with My Little Eye: Who Was Big Brother?

Orwell’s Nineteen Eight-Four

Parallels currently developing between the fictional world of Nineteen Eight-Four and the surveillance society of the twenty-first century

Nineteen Eighty-Four Today

If surveillance society is defined simply by the quantity of photographs, televisions, camera phones, videos, and security cameras available, we are already experiencing it

Global shift away from the freedoms we have taken for granted in the past and away from an automatic presumption of privacy

If we log on to the Internet, watch cable TV, use the telephone, or use GPS; someone, something, somewhere has access to a record of that transaction

Nineteen Eighty-Four Today, cont’d

In Western societies, we have learned to accept a certain amount of surveillance and inconvenience in return for what we perceive to be the security offered by governments

Countries like China seek to move into the global economy while retaining strong grip on the actions and communications of their population

Surveillance Societies in the West

Myth of individual liberty and freedom derives from both the French and the American revolutions, tends to disguise the autocratic and rigid class structure of capitalism

Monarchy may have been overthrown, but the class structure was not

The class system is one that benefits a few at the expense of many

Favours concentrations of wealth and power (1%) compared with the rest (99%)

We’ve internalized the myth that capitalism is still the best system, despite its flaws

Surveillance Societies in the West, cont’d

Like many reporters working for the commercial media, we may self-censor our hopes, dreams, and frustrations, believing that if we adhere to the myths just a little while longer, we will be all right

Commercial media and popular culture are replete with these myths

History and current experiences suggest that mimetic ideology is so powerful that anyone who attempts to argue against them is humoured for awhile and encouraged to grow out of it

Failing that, they are shunned and ostracized

A Nation of Suspects and Spies?

Throughout Canadian history, governments have used their powers to keep peace and order,

They have identified individuals or groups who are considered to be threats

Surveillance is one way the state has identified who is or is not a threat

People are targeted because of ethnicity, race, religious affiliation, and/or political association

Individuals and groups are categorized, stereotyped, and marginalized as separate

Practice of narrowcasting by the state

Permanent Crisis?

In periods of crisis, the state’s increase in powers may be considered justified

Can also be used as an excuse to increase and solidify its powers

CSIS Act allows CSIS to monitor a range of activities in Canada that are possibly a threat of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious, or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state

Permanent Crisis? cont’d

Government surveillance and military integration through intelligence-sharing agreements between the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand:

Defence agreements such as NORAD

Political alliances such as NATO

Overlap with economic agreements such as NAFTA—facilitating commercial trade and large corporate expansion

Government priorities have added “computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,” or C4ISR

Cyberspace militarized as the new “battle-space”

Lawful Access?

The more technological convergence and the more dependent we become on using computers, the more vulnerable it becomes as an interlocking system

Possibility of a breakdown or attack (hacking)

Access to information on the public in cooperation with the government would mean that every electronic communication could be monitored, compiling databases of information on individuals and groups

C-50, C-51, and C-52 are bills that would make this a real possibility in Canada, all without the individual’s knowledge

Michel Foucault and the Surveillance Society

Michel Foucault was the first to write about the rise of the surveillance society

Argued that by the nineteenth century, modern Western capitalism had become a punitive society that relied on prisons and repression to keep populations under control

Policing of society through regimentation, surveillance, and categorizing the population into a hierarchy

Perfected by the prison system, where a regime of total surveillance could be instituted

Michel Foucault and the Surveillance Society, cont’d

Use of examination—three functions:

To classify objects and people according to some visible means or arrangement

To situate people within socially and ideologically determined fields of “normal” behaviour or performance

To document an individual’s “progress” or “condition” through meticulous record-keeping

In the almost 40 years since Foucault wrote, we have seen the technologies and techniques of surveillance and profiling move out of the prison system and into civil society

Michel Foucault and the Surveillance Society, cont’d

As surveillance extended to more spaces, differences between the spaces begin to disappear

What is private and what is public space?

Differences between people are accentuated

Who is normal and who is suspect?

Implication that by owning surveillance technology you too can control your own space

Similar to argument that by introducing the personal computer, you can control cyberspace

Putting low-cost surveillance equipment into hands of consumers, “democratizes” the surveillance society

State Surveillance: A Question of Cost and Benefits?

When national security is breached, politicians need to be seen to be doing something: technological fixes which promise the appearance, if not the reality, of security are highly appealing

Public resources are diverted to technology rather than people

Technology becomes the problem-solver rather than social interactions where discussion, prevention, and human judgement are all part of the environment

Public surveillance tends to be identified with crime deterrence, despite controversy and evidence to the contrary

Media plays a role in this myth-building

Naturalizing the Surveillance Society

Reliance on the security communities affects media agenda setting and framing—justifying the use of surveillance and in helping to shape public understandings of surveillance

News coverage of CCTV surveillance very rarely explores the financial costs, technical efficacy, and reliability of these systems,

Ethical implications of what surveillance might mean for our understanding of notions of community and trust are ignored

Naturalizing the Surveillance Society, cont’d

Journalistic self-censorship: preventing release of sensitive or embarrassing information, especially during wartime

In Canada and United States, government and corporate support for new and invasive forms of surveillance technology strong

If media are supportive of new surveillance technologies saving lives and protecting freedom, then there is less question of their validity

Communicating and Normalizing Narrowcasting

Surveillance technology comes out of entertainment and the military–industrial complex and into routines of human movement (on the street, in school, or in travel)

As practices become routine, they become less questioned, and more difficult to challenge

PIPEDA is a set of ground rules for how private sector organizations may collect, use or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activities

Narrowcasting at the airport—people are also divided into categories by physical appearance or by information stored in a database

Communicating and Normalizing Narrowcasting, cont’d

People become increasingly spatially segregated

Question whom the security is for exactly, and what security really is:

Is security located in a camera, the monitoring station, the corporation, the government, or our collective well-being?

Is security having access to basic needs such as clean water and air, food, and a roof over one’s head?

Is security in personal freedom of movement, of expression, of association?