Modern surveillance technologies and new paradigms of social control

Javier Truchero

Nowadays western developed societies rely strongly on technology and information. New communication technologies together with the evolution of computers have created networks, through which massive amounts of information and personal data flow. In parallel with this process, there has been a significant advancement of surveillance technology, now capable of making knowable virtually everything—activities, personal data, tastes, possessions, etc—about everyone. A decentralized, nearly invisible “panoptic” gaze, from which there is “no place to hide.”ⁱ

The ways such knowledge is being used to influence or manage people is unsettling, to say the least. “Control technologies have become available that previously existed only in the dystopic imaginations of science fiction writers.”ⁱⁱ Arguably, surveillance has always been present in society, and it has always been a practice of government, thus, new technologies only do make a difference of degree. It is true that conventional, “physical,” means of surveillance are not recent phenomena, although they are now more advanced and sophisticatedⁱⁱⁱ. However, increasingly, surveillance relies on collection and analysis of data.

Global communication surveillance dovetailed with massive collection and analysis of data yields a significantly different scenario. The new picture is one of capital, rather than labor intensive surveillance, able to overcome distance, time and other physical barriers. Increasingly, the architecture of control has morphed from a centralized and hierarchical apparatus of the state to a decentralized monitoring not of individuals but of data about them. “Data-veillance”^iv involves abstracting human bodies from their “physical” setting, assembling fragments of data by many agencies from many different sources to be processed and profiled. This “digital persona” has emerged as “model of an individual's public personality based on data and maintained by transactions, and intended for use as a proxy for the individual.”^v Suddenly, we have found that in technological societies our daily life is mediated by a computerized representation of ourselves.^vi

The rise of these new technologies has led to even more pervasive intrusion into our private lives, and, perhaps more importantly, has generated new forms of social control. Indeed, surveillance today is more than watching and monitoring, it is a “calculated practice for managing and manipulating human behavior.”^vii Understanding its effect in our lives requires us to broaden the scope of analysis to encompass not only individual violations of privacy but also the larger, systemic context in which new structures of power and control operate.

As noted in the follow-up report of the Scientific Technological Optional Assessment (STOA) for the European Parliament (EU),^viii there are serious privacy concerns associated both with personal and massive dataveillance, yet risks inherited in the latter impinge not only on individual-arbitrariness; witch hunts; ex-ante discrimination and guilt prediction, etc-^ix, but also on society-inequitable application of the law, reduction in the meaningfulness of individual actions, etc.-^x Endless possibilities for behavior prediction an social engineering are now available, recasting the very notion of freedom and self determination.

In coming to grips with surveillance and social control, segmentation and targeting of population are revealing practices. Virtual images are used to sort society into categories a commonplace in commercial and governmental practices: customer's profiles serve for direct marketing, banks and insurance companies treat clients according to database risk assessments and police targets specific groups and areas. In all those processes there is an underlying logic of security; a rationale of risk identification and control. “Surveillance has become increasingly bound up with the mediation of risk.”^xi

The possibilities of profiling and risk management yields a new paradigm of control focused on prevention rather than restoration, on actors, rather than actions. Often, Foucault's view of the “panopticon” is used to explain the process. In Kim's words, the new paradigm is “a model that initiates the transition from traditional to modern control, moving from overt, external and punitive to covert, internal and preventive, which can be subsumed under the thesis “from reactive to proactive social control.”^xii That shift has deep consequences for freedom.

By moving the line of accepted behavior backwards, the scope of freedom reduces dramatically. There is a veiled inversion of the onus of proof and a general climate of suspicion. No longer is respecting the norms enough but compliance with certain patterns of conduct is required to avoid negative consequences; you ought to have a credit card and pay your bills in time in order to generate good credit records, without which your loan opportunities are seriously hindered.

Moreover, the burden of surveillance is unequally distributed among citizens. Through this social sorting process, different subpopulations or categories are defined and treated differently, in ways that affect real life chances. As stated in the STOA report for the EU Parliament, prevention and individualization of risks means that “police control is harnessed to target certain strata or class of people. (...) The majority is ignored and policing resources are more tightly focused on certain groups.”^xiii No doubt this is an unjustified form of discrimination, which emerges out of statistical and mathematical calculations.

Categories are not neutral. They embed the perspective of those that draw the lines; accepted behaviors are tailored to the majority. “The way in which categories are defined and who defines them tells a story of power.”^xiv The Global War on Terrorism provides a good example of irrational and racist categorization of individuals, yet we don't need to pick on such an extreme case. Henman, in his explanation of the Australian social security system, shows the discriminatory effect of allocating employment benefits according to profiles.

In yet another turn, advanced social control in the information society seriously jeopardizes democracy. Proper public discourse is based on free and equal communication and access to information. Surveillance technologies render huge inequalities in the distribution of information and hinder free communication. A few powerful speakers haunt the public deliberation, hence hindering democracy.

Softly, imperceptibly, our scope of freedom and determination is narrowed. Social groups are encapsulated in artificial categories, and individuals, like livestock, are tagged with arbitrary definitions of security, risk, worth, etc. Surveillance, in that view, is a practice of social control, yet its massive capacity easily could endanger well-established architectures of power and decision making. In its potential, it spurs political repression and discrimination, and generates unbecoming “technopolitics of exclusion.”^xv Bleak perspectives await if we buy into the risk rationale and trade off some little advantages as consumers for larger control and autonomy as persons.