CH_5
Surveillance in the Digital Age

SURVEILLANCE AS A FORM OF SOCIAL CONTROL

Surveillance has become the norm in the twenty-first century, and it takes many forms. Cameras record individuals making purchases at a liquor store and walking through a public park; an onboard Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver tells parents where their teenager has taken their car; software gathers information that people post to social networking sites for perusal by their employer; tape recordings are made “for quality assurance” when customers phone their insurance company; and tags embedded in products allow companies and consumers to track the movement of shipped items. These technologies are used to increase efficiency, security, and accountability in all sectors. At first blush it would seem that the privacy concern with surveillance relates to individual privacy interests. But as demonstrated in chapter 1, transparency can flow in many directions. Large organizations can use surveillance techniques to monitor the activities of individuals; however, it is possible to turn the tools of surveillance on the organization in order to ensure its accountability to customers or citizens. Issues surrounding surveillance thus manifest a familiar pattern, one that is explored in this book. In and of itself, surveillance is not necessarily a bad thing; the challenge is to determine the appropriate balance between the promotion of accessibility and the curtailment of the privacy of those from whom information is collected.

Like privacy, surveillance is not a new concept: it has been the subject of attention from political philosophers and science fiction writers alike. In the eighteenth century, the political philosopher Jeremy Bentham developed the idea of the “panopticon,” a proposal for the design of efficient prisons as an alternative to transporting felons to penal colonies like Australia. The design of these prisons allowed a single guard to keep multiple prisoners separated from one another and under twenty-four-hour surveillance while he himself remained unseen. Although a particular prisoner would not actually be observed by the guard all the time, the idea that he might be under surveillance would serve as a powerful constraint on the prisoner’s behaviour. Though Bentham’s design is often invoked as one of the earliest models of social control that curtails privacy through surveillance, Bentham addresses accountability through its emphasis on transparency. With Bentham’s model, those doing the watching are themselves watched. He says:

I take for granted as a matter of course, that under the necessary regulations for preventing interruption and disturbance, the doors of these establishments will be, as, without very special reasons to the contrary, the doors of all public establishments ought to be, thrown wide open to the body of the curious at large — the great open committee of the tribunal of the world. And who ever objects to such publicity, where it is practicable, but those whose motives for objection afford the strongest reasons for it?¹ (Emphasis in the original.)

Just as the prisoner is constrained by the possibility of being watched, so too is the guard; at any time someone might drop in unexpectedly and observe his daily routine.

Writing two centuries later, the French philosopher, sociologist, and historian Michel Foucault used Bentham’s concept of the panopticon as a metaphor to describe forms of scrutiny that developed in the wake of reforms intended to eliminate the brutal physical punishment of prisoners and that have come to characterize late-twentieth-century societies. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault argued that the modern, gentler form of disciplinary power, that of “normalization,” or the expectation that people will achieve a particular standard, is a far more pervasive and effective method of eradicating social deviance and forcing social conformity. From a Foucauldian perspective, knowledge and power are intertwined, as knowledge is critical for the exercise of power, and power is critical for knowing. The few who control the standards effectively control the many. In contrast, sociologist Thomas Mathiesen reverses the principle of the panopticon — the single agent who watches multiple people. As he points out, the advent of TV and other forms of mass communication has resulted in surveillance by the many of the few. As such, the self-control that allows individuals to fit into modern capitalist society can happen through the reverse of the panopticon: the synopticon.²

These insights give pause to privacy advocates who recognize the enormous potential for the exercise of power by those entities and individuals who are in a position to collect information. Like transparency, the object of surveillance can be inward, outward, upward, or downward. If knowledge is indeed synonymous with power, surveillance has the potential to concentrate power in the hands of the few, or distribute it into the hands of the many. As the next section demonstrates, new technologies are creating increasingly powerful tools for surveillance. These same technologies, however, are blurring the lines between the watchers and the watched. As such, surveillance can be both a tool for social control and a tool for enhancing accountability.

MODERN FORMS OF WATCHING

The theme of an all-knowing, all-controlling surveillance state was popularized by the British writer George Orwell in his book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Written during the immediate postwar period, Orwell’s novel painted a bleak picture of a dystopia in the year 1984 wherein “Big Brother” kept constant watch over citizens, monitoring and controlling every aspect of their lives. Fast forward a little more than twenty years from the year in the book’s title to a report prepared for the Information Commissioner of the United Kingdom that begins with the statement: “We live in a surveillance society.” The opening of the report conjures up Foucault’s panopticon with its observation that “the surveillance society is better thought of as the outcome of modern organizational practices, businesses, government and the military than as a covert conspiracy.”³ Whether it is done by design or by accident, the modern “surveillance society” represents a fundamental departure from the types of societies that existed in the past.

According to the report prepared for the Information Commissioner, surveillance can be thought of as a set of activities that share certain characteristics:

Where we find purposeful, routine, systematic and focused attention paid to personal details, for the sake of control, entitlement, management, influence or protection, we are looking at surveillance.

To break this down:

• The attention is first purposeful; the watching has a point that can be justified, in terms of control, entitlement, or some other publicly agreed goal.
• Then it is routine; it happens as we all go about our daily business, it’s in the weave of life.
• But surveillance is also systematic; it is planned and carried out according to a schedule that is rational, not merely random.
• Lastly, it is focused; surveillance gets down to details. While some surveillance depends on aggregate data, much refers to identifiable persons, whose data are collected, stored, transmitted, retrieved, compared, mined and traded.⁴ (Emphasis in the original.)

What this means is that walking through a tourist area videotaping your surroundings with your Handycam video recorder is not considered surveillance because it is a one-off event that records randomly selected things for your own pleasure. In contrast, a camera installed at a strategic spot along that same street to film the patrons who routinely come out of a local bar intoxicated and proceed to urinate on the street or vandalize local businesses is purposeful (identifying wrongdoers), routine, systematic, and focused. Similarly, a proud parent videotaping his child playing with her nanny in a park on a sunny Sunday afternoon would not fit the definition of surveillance. Installing a camera at a daycare to enable parents to view the interaction of their children with their caregivers on demand would be considered surveillance. Many parents insert the so-called “nanny cams” surreptitiously in items like teddy bears to ensure that their children are taken care of in a manner that they find appropriate. Instances of abuse caught by this surveillance have been posted to the Internet, creating predictable rage among those viewing the videos — an example of how panopticon surveillance can become synopticon surveillance. While the latter brings with it its own set of problems, it gives hope to those who fear that surveillance will result in the top-down surveillance described by George Orwell.

Video Cameras

Thus far, a large component of the surveillance debate has revolved around the use of video cameras. This is not surprising given that video technology is one of the oldest tools of surveillance; portable versions of these cameras have been in use since the 1970s. Cameras are used for a variety of purposes, but with respect to surveillance, they have primarily been used to enhance security. While surveillance of a child and a caregiver might result in evidence of wrongdoing that would lead to criminal charges, or at the very least reprimands or termination of employment, the utility of surveillance cameras in public places is far less clear. Some uses of cameras are not particularly contentious; they provide a clear benefit for those who may at some point themselves be filmed. Motor vehicle associations use cameras to give drivers fixed-interval camera shots of highways so they can see for themselves what road conditions and visibility are like. Skiers can check the conditions of ski slopes by looking at images of the hill. The most popular reason to use cameras in public places, however, is for law enforcement purposes. Cameras are used in lobbies of buildings that restrict access so that occupants can see who is requesting entry into the building. They are also used in stores and banks to catch thieves. Schools use them to detect people in the school who should not be there and to monitor the behaviour of students. Such examples often concern places that are public in the sense that anyone can go into them but private in the sense that they are located on privately owned property. For the most part, these uses generate limited controversy; a citizen who does not want to be caught on camera can choose to patronize a different establishment.

It is the cameras installed in purely public places for crime prevention purposes that are particularly controversial. Police use photo radar to ticket speeders and red light violators on public roadways. Cameras are also used in municipal parks, in plazas, and on sidewalks. These are all public spaces that everyone has access to. With respect to photo radar, drivers who are not breaking the law do not have to worry about their image being captured on camera. But law-abiding citizens walking through a public park or plaza have the same likelihood of having their images captured as criminals who pass through the same space. This has resulted in a debate over whether the law enforcement value of videotaping citizens is worth giving up the right to enjoy that space without privacy being compromised.

Those who support video surveillance claim that cameras that are routinely monitored have a positive effect on public safety because they serve as suspicious activity detectors that can alert law enforcement authorities to the possibility that a crime is about to be committed. Obviously, sending police officers to the scene earlier rather than later will put them in a better position to apprehend criminals. Moreover, it is argued that if criminals are aware that they are being watched via a camera, they are less likely to commit a crime. For this reason, most cameras are highly visible to the public so that there is no doubt for perpetrators that they are being watched. If a crime is committed, investigators are able to use the collected images to assist in their investigation and as evidence in their prosecution of a crime.

Critics of video surveillance as a useful tool in law enforcement point out, however, that most cameras are not monitored in “real time.” That is, no one is watching the camera as the crime is committed; rather, the videotape will be reviewed “after the fact” to assist in the investigation and prosecution of a crime. Critics claim that crime prevention is a misnomer in the case of video surveillance; crime displacement is more accurate. Accordingly, criminals will simply shift the site of their activities from the area under surveillance to one where there are no cameras. The net effect on crime reduction will thus be minimal.

In 2005, the British Home Office produced a comprehensive report assessing the impact of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras. The report included a review of existing research that painted a mixed picture of the effectiveness of CCTVs in reducing crime. On the one hand, CCTVs appear to have little impact on impulsive crimes (such as those related to alcohol) or on personal crime (such as assault). On the other hand, CCTVs do appear to reduce crimes related to property, and in particular to vehicles, especially those in parking lots. That said, even those who found a reduction in crime related to vehicles speculated that other factors might be coming into play. Crime displacement did occur, although it was not found to be that common and was more evident in relation to some crimes than others. Offenders did not seem particularly concerned with the possibility that CCTVs could be used to convict them of crimes, although offenders who had been convicted through CCTV evidence felt significantly more threatened by their presence.⁵ As the report notes, however, the difficulty with these studies is that they do not try to address the issue of effectiveness. In particular, the cost-effectiveness of installing CCTVs for the purpose of reducing crime “has been largely ignored.”⁶

Perhaps the most damning criticism of video surveillance for crime reduction is the concern that the captured images will be used for purposes other than those they were originally collected for. This phenomenon is referred to as “function creep.”⁷ Examples of function creep typically revolve around the use of personal data for advertising, marketing research, or identifying trends. This is of particular concern where the line between the public and the private becomes blurred and the public purpose of collecting information becomes mixed with the commercial purpose of using information for targeted advertising. But function creep can also refer to voyeurism, commercial entertainment, and blackmail. While most jurisdictions have clear laws with respect to the collection of personal information in the form of wiretaps for voice, legislation regarding the collection, use, and retention of visual images of citizens is far less developed. Clearly, the objectives of installing surveillance cameras must be unambiguously outlined. How these objectives are defined and by whom should be equally clear. Security firms have a vested interest in the installation of their cameras in public spaces. If the firm not only provides the cameras but is also contracted by government to operate them, this raises the troubling issue of the privatization of public spaces by businesses that might not have the same agenda as a public organization. Moreover, businesses that are contracted to provide public services are not subjected to the same level of control as their public sector equivalents.⁸

Civil libertarians are particularly vociferous opponents of video surveillance. They bemoan the limitations it places on citizens’ rights to move about and conduct their daily business without having their privacy rights infringed. In particular, they note that surveillance has a chilling effect on freedom of assembly and movement. As Nigel Waters argues: “Most people have an instinctive aversion to being watched. The chilling effect of surveillance is difficult to quantify, but is clearly recognised by the public.”⁹ Cameras can be used as an instrument of social control, monitoring the activities of those the state has deemed to be anti-social or non-conforming, even if their behaviour does not break the law. Equity issues are raised, as the rich are less likely than the poor and the marginalized to frequent public spaces that are under surveillance. Others raise the spectre of minorities being targeted by racial profiling. As Tator and Henry observe:

When we examine the histories of people of African descent in Western nations, we find that these forms of social control include intense surveillance by law enforcement authorities resulting in increased rates of interaction between police and people of African descent. These interactions have contributed to higher-than-average rates of arrests, convictions, incarcerations, and acts of violence and have resulted in physical harm and death.¹⁰

In Canada, the same observation can be made about those of Aboriginal descent and, in Europe, about those of Roma descent (that is, the gypsies). Since the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001, those who are or appear to be Middle Eastern are apt to experience more intense screening than other passengers when they pass through airport security. While it can be argued that elevated crime rates in a particular community correlate with a higher incidence of involvement in illegal activities, it is also true that more criminal activity will be detected in a particular group if proportionally more people in that group are questioned.

The dizzying speed of technological innovation has increased the significance of the observation that we live in a surveillance society. The number of new technologies coming on stream daily suggests that we can expect more surveillance in the future rather than less. As such, the utility and purpose of surveillance techniques must be scrutinized. This is particularly true given that the combination of video monitoring with new communications media opens up new and even more powerful forms of surveillance; this is the focus of the next section.

The Internet

Until a few years ago, the Internet was used primarily for peer-to-peer email communication. The advent of YouTube and social networking sites, however, represents a profound change with respect to how people communicate. Whereas a video camera used to be mainly the tool of choice of the proud parents capturing the first steps of their toddler, a huge range of people now routinely use this technology due to the combination of the increasingly portable and easy-to-use video technology with the ability to broadcast to millions quickly and cheaply. The dissemination of video clips is done for political, commercial, social, and religious purposes, but it is the marriage of video and Internet technologies that takes surveillance to new levels. This is illustrated by two commercial uses of recorded images: Internet Eyes and Google Street View.

In an attempt to make better use of the data being collected by CCTV cameras, a savvy entrepreneur launched “Internet Eyes.” This Internet game allows players to plug into Britain’s CCTV network in order to scour images for the purpose of detecting and reporting people committing crimes. Those who report the most crimes can win monthly prizes of up to one thousand pounds. The website contains a rogues’ gallery of suspected criminals, their offences, and the name of the player who caught them. While some business owners embrace the idea of posting a sign that says “Internet Eyes Patrol Here,” civil liberties groups denounce the initiative as a “snooper’s paradise” that would result in the most minor of misdemeanours being broadcast to the world. Others liken the constant watching and reporting to situations in former communist states or even Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, wherein families, neighbours, and friends would denounce one another to the authorities.

By April 2010, the site had attracted 14,659 registered gamers and the attention of the non-profit privacy advocacy groups No CCTV and Privacy International. As a result of the many questions they raised regarding the verification of who was watching and the possibility for surreptitious retention of images from the site by third parties, the company delayed the launch of this synopticon form of surveillance until Internet Eyes addressed privacy concerns raised by the UK Information Commissioner’s office.¹¹ In October 2010, the commissioner’s office gave Internet Eyes permission to launch for a three-month trial period, a decision that received condemnation from No CCTV and Privacy International. In a joint press release, Charles Farrier of No CCTV said:

The Information Commissioner has put private profit above personal privacy in allowing a private company to launch its Stasi style citizen spy game rather than defending the rights of British citizens. This is the privatisation of the surveillance society — a private company asking private individuals to spy on each other using private cameras connected to the Internet. Internet Eyes must be challenged.¹²

In January 2011, Internet Eyes announced a Canadian partnership and the launch of the game in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia.

Another synopticon form of surveillance, Google Street View, has garnered attention from privacy advocates who claim it is unacceptably privacy-invasive. Google Street View, launched in 2007, is an enhanced version of Google Maps, a web-based mapping service that uses Global Positioning System (GPS) technology to allow users to locate particular addresses. The addition of Street View allows users to actually see pictures of the houses and buildings associated with the address they type in. The service, which offers 360° horizontal and 290° vertical panoramic street views, is provided through the use of cameras perched on top of a car at a height of two and a half metres. The images recorded by the cameras are then assembled to create a 360° view and matched to a particular location using GPS devices.¹³

Although people such as tourism officials and real estate agents might find this technology helpful, privacy advocates do not. The trouble is that people and items such as licence plates that can be linked to specific people are sometimes caught in the photographs. Moreover, although the cameras are located in public space (the street), they are high enough that they can capture images of people on their private property (in their fenced backyard, for instance). A woman hiding from an abusive spouse or a couple entering an abortion clinic are just a few examples of people who might object to their images being available on Google Street View. Websites such as StreetViewFun have already popped up where “interesting” photos are posted — women sunbathing, men and women with hands over their groins or breasts “adjusting” their underwear, a woman bending over so that her thong and buttocks are exposed, men urinating at the side of the road, men walking into adult book stores and sex shops, and a man passed out drunk on the side of the road.¹⁴ Individuals can request to have images of themselves removed, but the image may already have been downloaded before it is removed from Street View, at which point Google no longer controls the image.

In response to privacy commissioners around the world expressing concern over this form of synopticon, as of May 2008 Google began blurring the faces of people and images of licence plates. Google announced in 2010, however, that its European service might be suspended because the privacy-related requirements of the European Union make the costs of the service prohibitive.¹⁵ Google Street View ran into even more trouble that same year when it was discovered that the cameras on top of its cars had been gathering data from unencrypted home WiFi networks for three years. Google called the data collection an accident and blamed the security gaffe on old code. Others, like Stephen Conroy, Australia’s Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy, are less generous. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has strongly criticized Conroy in the past for his plan to implement an Internet filter for Australia that would block certain websites (such as ones featuring child pornography). Conroy hit back by claiming that the Google data collection might be “the largest privacy breach in history across Western democracies,” and that it is “a bit creepy.”¹⁶ But for those who are concerned with personal autonomy, whether it is the government censoring what is on the Internet or Google undertaking surveillance, individual freedom is being curtailed.

What is particularly interesting about the so-called “Google WiSpy” controversy is the cultural differences among countries when it comes to surveillance and privacy. Once issues are raised, however, cultural convergence is evident, as countries tend to adopt similar views of privacy events. Google Street View was launched in the United States with barely a whisper of opposition. The privacy commissioner in Canada voiced concerns about images that had previously been collected in the US, and in response, Google notified Canadians when it began filming for Street View. Contrast this to Google’s response to much stronger criticism in Japan. To address the Japanese unease that Street View cameras were able to look over fences into private residences, Google reshot all its images with cameras that had been lowered by 40 centimetres. In Greece, the Data Protection Agency banned Google from collecting photos until the company addressed storage, retention, and consent concerns.¹⁷ Despite the already pervasive surveillance by CCTV cameras in Britain, villagers in the town of Broughton surrounded a Google camera car and refused to let it come into their town. In Switzerland, the country’s privacy watchdog asked Google to remove pictures of fenced yards and private streets, to blur the faces of people and images of licence plates, and to notify jurisdictions one week in advance of filming. Eventually, it took Google to federal court because “Google for the most part declined to comply with the requests.”¹⁸ Germany and the Czech Republic launched investigations into the WiSpy matter.

While different countries initially had different reactions to Google’s filming, issues that were raised in one jurisdiction have had a domino effect. Concern came full circle in the US on 26 May 2010, when the group Consumer Watchdog wrote the attorneys general of the states and territories and requested that they launch their own investigations. In its letter, the group charged that:

Google’s claim that its intrusive behavior was by “mistake” stretches all credulity. In fact, Google has demonstrated a history of pushing the envelope and then apologizing when its overreach is discovered. Given its recent record of privacy abuses, there is absolutely no reason to trust anything the Internet giant claims about its data collection policies.¹⁹

Undoubtedly the initial reaction to Google Street View’s activities would be different yet again if Google had started filming in China, India, Iran, or Brazil rather than North America, Europe, and Australia. Ironically, the very technology that allows easy access to images worldwide with a click of the mouse that many find so objectionable is also the technology that enables the circulation of privacy concerns worldwide. Attitudes toward privacy vary across countries, but there is also considerable convergence that results from the dissemination of concern and the subsequent globalized debate.

The combination of video and the Internet is a powerful tool for information dissemination. What is of concern is when “communication” is harnessed for the overt goal of surveillance (as in the case of Internet Eyes), or when surveillance is a by-product of the new innovation (as in the case of Google Street View). The Internet, however, can be combined with other technologies that have far greater implications for the development of the “surveillance society.” The example of radio-frequency identification tracking devices is the subject of the next section.

Radio-Frequency Identification Tracking Devices

The radio-frequency identification device (RFID) is a tracking system that can be embedded in objects. These systems can improve the efficiency of production and service processes, but they are controversial because they comprise a “hidden” system of surveillance. RFID systems consist of a transponder, a reader, and a back office system. A transponder, commonly known as an RFID tag, transmits data by emitting radio waves. This information is collected by readers, which can be mobile, such as a barcode scanner, or fixed at certain locations, such as a vehicle toll gateway. Data collected by a reader are sent to a back office or a data processing system.²⁰ RFID tags may be passive or active. Passive tags must be in the range of a reader in order to operate because they lack an internal power source. Active tags have an internal power source that allows them to emit radio waves. Active tags have a much greater “read range” than passive tags, and in some cases, can be read up to several kilometres away. As well, active tags have more memory and better processing than passive ones.²¹ An active tag, then, enables the data processing system to keep tabs on an item that is in movement. While tracking an object is is an innocuous goal, it is the tracking of the person in possession of the object that causes concern; this constitutes a sophisticated form of surveillance.

RFID tags are embedded in a growing number of personal items and identity documents such as employee and student identification cards, library books, tire pressure monitoring, parking permits, luggage in airports, mail, livestock, residential garbage pay-for-what you-dispose bins, and bracelets worn by prison inmates or guards.²² The concern over surveillance notwithstanding, RFID technology can benefit individuals in the areas of safety, convenience, and accessibility. RFID tags in enhanced driver’s licences transmit a unique code to a reader containing such personal information as nationality. An anticipated benefit of this use is the reduction in lineups at border crossings between the US and Canada. RFIDs also can be used to trace food, shorten supermarket queues, and track patients suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.

The consumer benefits from RFIDs are endless. RFID technology is being used in the development of the successor to the bar code, the Electronic Producer Code (EPC). EPCs identify each individual item that is manufactured using RFID tags, as opposed to identifying just the class of product and the manufacturer. A university student in Lethbridge, Alberta, who has purchased a computer online can now track the movement of her new computer using her old computer: from the factory that produced it in China, to the North American point of entry in Alaska, to the UPS distribution centre in Kentucky, to the American point of exit, Buffalo, to the Canadian USB distribution centre in Winnipeg, to the western Canada air hub in Calgary, and then finally, to the student’s home in Lethbridge. For the producer of the computer, the RFID tag can track the product from the point of manufacture to the point of sale, reducing inventory, labour costs, and stock losses. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of losing a wallet or a cellphone can immediately see the benefits of tagging personal possessions that can be easily mislaid. A recent report of the Australian Law Reform Commission concluded that RFIDs can be used to “benefit individuals, businesses and government.”²³

Critics of RFID technology point out that tags incorporate little security, transmitting signals to authorized and unauthorized users alike, enabling hackers to “skim” data from them. Moreover, ignorance of the RFID tagging of an item leaves people wearing or carrying them vulnerable to surreptitious surveillance. The trade-off between privacy and security in an RFID tag embedded in a teddy bear carried by a two-year-old in a daycare might seem reasonable. But what about the RFID-tagged cellphone that is carried by an eighteen-year-old high school student? Parents now have the ability to track their children’s every move, even if that child is legally an adult. RFIDs also give jealous spouses the ability to track their partners’ whereabouts and an employer the ability to determine if an employee driving a delivery truck has made an unscheduled stop to pick up dry cleaning and a takeout coffee on company time. And what about RFIDs embedded in products that the consumer buys that give unknown people the ability to track the movements of the person who purchased the product?

To date, the response to these security concerns has seen the development of voluntary codes as opposed to government regulation. EPCglobal Incorporated identifies four principles as fundamental in governing the use of RFID tags in consumer goods: consumers should be given clear notice of the use of EPC on the products or the packaging; the choices available to remove or disable EPC tags on products should be readily available; accurate information about both EPC and its applications should be provided; and no personally identifiable information should be contained, collected, or stored by the EPC.²⁴ The purpose of these guidelines is to increase consumer confidence in RFID tags by anticipating and dealing with privacy concerns as they arise. While RFID technology benefits both consumers and producers, it does present challenges for privacy protection by dramatically changing the privacy landscape. With that, RFID also has the potential to dramatically change social norms around privacy. Specifically, surveillance by “Big Brother” that a few decades ago would have been seen as so invasive as to be socially unacceptable might become the norm for those who are being watched. This is particularly true for young people who have grown accustomed to being tracked by their parents and filmed by video cameras at school.

Those concerned with the increasing use of surveillance technologies lament that innovations such as Internet Eyes, Google Street View, and RFIDs take us down a path of social control that we should avoid at all costs. The events of 11 September 2001 elevated the issue of security by heightening the sense of vulnerability of the Western world to terrorism. This insecurity has spawned a multi-billion dollar industry, referred to as the global security-industrial complex.²⁵ Security is linked tightly with surveillance and is of particular concern in relation to “mega-events” such as global political summits or sporting events such as the Olympics. When public fear of terrorism and crime is harnessed to support the new technologies to fight them, the concern for personal autonomy is considerably diminished.

Securing Mega-Events

The Olympic Games are a particularly interesting example of a mega-event where security trumps all. No global event captures the imagination (and the attention) of the global public like the Olympic Games. The eyes of the world are on the host city for the duration of the games, with spectators enthusiastically cheering on their national teams and applauding the feats of the world’s most talented athletes. But the games are far more than a sporting event — they provide a massive advertising platform both for corporations and social activists, who use them to sell products and promote social causes. The former activity, that of marketing products, is accepted as a critical component of athletic sponsorship, so much so that the power of the state is harnessed to protect the property rights of corporations with respect to the use of logos or brands that are associated with the Olympics. The platform for social activism, however, is less enthusiastically embraced. Indeed, the power of the state is used to monitor the activities of those who might use the opportunity of the mega-event to advance a particular social cause. That said, even the activists’ detractors grudgingly acknowledge that the ability to protest is a hallmark of a free and democratic society, and as such, the protesters must be tolerated. What is far more troubling is the prospect of protestors resorting to violent acts to draw attention to their cause. This concern is the unfortunate legacy of the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, where terrorists killed eleven Israeli athletes. Twenty years later two people were killed and 111 were injured from the detonation of a pipe bomb at Centennial Olympic Park during the Atlanta Olympics. Providing athletes, officials, and the general public with sufficient security to enjoy the games without fear of becoming a victim of a politically inspired act of violence has become a major preoccupation of Olympic organizers. The recent Winter Olympics in Vancouver is a case in point: the security budget for those games was close to a billion dollars.²⁶ Similarly, the combined price tag for two other mega-events, the G8 and the G20 global summits held in Ontario in June 2010, was about the same amount.²⁷

What is troubling for those concerned about privacy protection is the “security function creep” that happens as a result of hosting an Olympic event. Security contractors and police use the mega-event to introduce a technological solution for a particular security issue. While the proposed solution might not initially be considered palatable as routine security, after its use at an event it becomes far easier to employ it in more ordinary venues. The trajectory happens something like this. New technologies are devised to address the specific security needs of an Olympic Games. The public tends to be much more tolerant of new and more invasive security protection measures because they are introduced during the one-off Olympic event. The new technologies then become the standard for future games. The media coverage of the security measures serves to normalize security practices that might otherwise be deemed too privacy-invasive to be acceptable. The security contractors capitalize on the prestige they gain from their role in keeping the games safe, which enhances their credibility when they introduce new technologies in the future. As a report on security and the Vancouver Olympics put it: “Designed for the unique risks of an exceptional global sporting event and driven by the search for new markets and profits, the technologies, expertise and contracts characteristic of Olympic security therefore risk dispersing into more mundane contexts, simultaneously routinizing and intensifying security.”²⁸ Thus, one of the legacies of mega-events is usually increased surveillance. Given the immense amount of money to be made from marketing surveillance technologies, this legacy can hardly be seen as an unintended outcome of mega-events but rather an outcome that was leveraged from the opportunity the events provided.

An example of a mega-event that resulted in obvious function creep is the National Football League Super Bowl game in Tampa Florida in 2001. Every spectator’s facial image was scanned and compared to a data bank of known terrorists using a combination of cameras and biometric technology. After the event, the cameras were deployed to a Tampa neighbourhood; streets and public spaces were monitored. This was done without even informing the residents, much less asking their consent.²⁹ This type of function creep frequently happens in localities that host Olympic events, as is evidenced by the debate about what will happen with the cameras that were installed for use at the Vancouver Olympics. Although Vancouverites have resisted the installation of surveillance cameras in public places in the past, thousands of cameras were installed in the weeks preceding to the games. The billion-dollar question now is whether all these cameras will be removed or whether some will continue to be used post-Olympics for the purposes of routine law enforcement.

Surveillance cameras in public spaces may become more appealing to Vancouverites as a result of the city’s hosting the 2011 Stanley Cup hockey playoffs. The final game saw the convergence of an estimated one hundred thousand fans in downtown Vancouver to watch the game on a specially installed giant-screen TV. After the Vancouver team lost, a riot broke out. Despite the efforts of police, who used tear gas in an effort to contain the riot, the mob caused millions of dollars of damage to public property, businesses, and parked cars. Rioters brazenly took pictures and videos of themselves vandalizing and looting property and posted them to Facebook and YouTube. Afterward, the province’s vehicle insurance company, ICBC, provided police with its database of driver’s license pictures so that the police could use face recognition software to identify individuals who appeared in crowd photographs. Facebook pages sprang up asking people to post photos they’d taken on cellphones so that rioters could be identified. Names, addresses, and phone numbers were subsequently shared online, as a result of which some of the accused chose to leave their homes for fear of retribution from outraged Vancouverites who were not involved in the destruction. This incident provides yet another example of function creep (a photo taken for licensing purposes is used to determine that a citizen participated in a riot), but it also constitutes an interesting manifestation of synopticon surveillance along the lines of the Internet Eyes game discussed earlier in this chapter.³⁰

In other venues, the installation of cameras is already a fait accompli. Britain has the distinction of having the most CCTV cameras per capita of any nation in the world, with estimates ranging from 1.2 to 4.2 million CCTVs nationwide.³¹ While surveillance might increase people’s perception that the streets are safer, there are no strong indications that cameras significantly reduce crime. This is in part due to the poor quality of the images and the sheer volume of them. Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville of the London police observes that only 3 percent of London’s street robberies are solved as a result of video surveillance. Given the billions of pounds spent on installing the cameras, Neville’s assessment of the CCTV initiative is that “it’s been an utter fiasco.”³² Despite these criticisms of CCTV use and the lack of evidence supporting their effectiveness, there appears to be little political appetite for removing them from public spaces in Britain or elsewhere.

As will be illustrated in the next section, surveillance (like transparency) can operate in different directions. It is certainly true that those in positions of authority can use surveillance to exert social control over their subordinates. It is equally true, however, that the combination of surveillance with Internet technologies has the potential to force accountability on those in authority. This trend began with the proliferation of cheap, portable video cameras and has accelerated with the widespread use of the Internet as a source of social and political information.

Watching the Workers and Watching the Watchers

Surveillance as a method of increasing the productivity of workers builds naturally on the work of management theorists who subscribe to the “command and control” school of thought. This perspective is grounded in Frederick Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1967), which separates decision making from work and workers from management. Taylor saw workers as poorly educated, lazy, and uninterested in organizational goals. Their goal was to receive the maximum pay for minimal effort. Given these assumptions, managers devised various strategies to “keep workers honest” and to improve productivity. Many of these strategies involved overt surveillance. In the past, this would have consisted of a supervisor walking around the factory floor watching employees work. Today, this surveillance might be carried out with the help of video cameras. But the video camera is not the only tool by which individuals can be watched. A software program called Social Sentry allows employers to monitor employees’ social networking activities on such sites as Facebook and Twitter. This is a much more sophisticated version of previous technology that counted an employee’s keystrokes on a computer or a cash register, as Social Sentry monitors the employees’ social networking activities on any device or network, including mobile ones. Employers can now easily track posts made by an employee that are indiscreet, spill trade secrets, suggest corporate wrongdoing, or are otherwise perceived to be counter to the employer’s interests.³³

A somewhat more covert method of surveillance is the tracking of data that can be used to identify a specific individual — a practice that Roger Clarke has called “data-veillance”: the automated monitoring of people’s activities or communications through the use of information technologies.³⁴ Biometric technology relies on attributes that are unique to a particular individual, such as a fingerprint, retinal patterns, or voice. Biometrics have been used by companies to identify customers who phone in to make changes to their accounts, to provide employees with access to buildings, or to record their time of arrival at the job site via an electronically activated time clock. This technology is also popular in the realm of public security. Travellers passing through London’s Heathrow airport, for example, must routinely submit to a retinal scan. Travellers have, however, objected far less to the recording and storage of this form of personal information than they have to American “enhanced security” measures that entail asking airline customers to submit to full body scanning by means of backscatter X-ray machines. These machines produce images of travellers’ naked bodies, a procedure that clearly strikes airline customers as more invasive of personal privacy. Although security officials claim that these images are not retained, evidence to the contrary has emerged.³⁵

The international corporate grocer Whole Foods took data-veillance to a new level when it announced an additional “healthy member” staff discount for those employees whose biometric criteria met certain standards — employees “who are willing to undergo surveillance of a selection of body measures (blood pressure, cholesterol tests, and BMI calculations) and refrain from nicotine use.”³⁶ Whole Foods says the purpose of the program is to promote healthy lifestyle choices that will result in the reduction of health plan costs. The collection of biometric data for the purpose of improving the bottom line of a business is troubling for privacy advocates, however, as is the storage and monitoring of health information by an employer and the sense of ownership over employees’ personal autonomy that the company gains through this form of physical surveillance.

While surveillance in the workplace is used to increase productivity and efficiency, its benefits remain unclear. The debate between those who feel that accountability (and thus productivity) can be improved through the development of top-down external controls and those who favour fostering internal control based on individual restraint is an old one that will not be resolved here.³⁷ A modern twist to this debate, however, is that the tools of surveillance can be reversed so that the watchers become the watched.

Pessimists despair that the power of large multinational companies and nations such as the United States is unassailable; they are convinced that privacy is dead and that the conglomeration of power within large all-knowing and all-seeing entities is inevitable. But new technology can be used to reverse the direction of transparency; it allows the activities of those in authority to be easily disseminated, thus pointing the synopticon gaze in the opposite direction. Moreover, email, social networking, cellphones, and Twitter enable the mobilization and circulation of dissenters who can be everywhere and nowhere at the same, making them a difficult target for those who want to silence them. The so-called “Handycam revolution” began with a video shot in 1991. From the balcony of his apartment building, George Holliday videotaped white Los Angeles police officers beating a black man, Rodney King. Holliday gave the video to a local TV station. The video caused outrage and immediate action against the offending officers; it demonstrated the power of the individual with a recorder vis-à-vis large institutions. Everyone with a camera-equipped cellphone in his pocket now can join the ranks of those fighting hegemonic power.

The world’s most famous whistle-blower is currently Julian Assange, a former hacker who has committed himself to “radical transparency.” He is the mastermind behind the Sunshine Press, an organization that brings together civil liberty activists and computer experts to run the website WikiLeaks.com. The organization posts all kinds of documents: from diplomatic cables, protocols from Guantánamo Bay, celebrity tax returns, emails from Sarah Palin’s personal account, exposés of toxic dumping in Africa, and 9/11 pager messages. Documents are delivered to a digital dead drop — in this case a Swedish computer server that is protected by that country’s strong whistle-blowers’ protection laws. Once the data are received, WikiLeaks puts out a call on Twitter for assistance in de-encrypting classified documents. Once de-encryption is accomplished, it posts the declassified documents on its website. Because WikiLeaks.com uses servers located in various countries, the court-ordered shutdown of its US server in 2008 over the disclosure of the activities of a Swiss bank had little effect on the organization’s activities. It now boasts the posting of over a million documents. As the presiding judge in the American case noted: “We live in an age when people can do some good things and people can do some terrible things without accountability necessarily in a court of law.”³⁸

WikiLeaks gained notoriety when it posted “Collateral Murder” on its website on 5 April 2010.³⁹ This US military video shows the graphic killing of a dozen men and the wounding of two children on the streets of Baghdad in 2007. The video was taken from a US army Apache helicopter gun-sight; the helicopter was responding to a call for help from American soldiers who had been fired upon. The clip eerily resembles a first-person shooter video game. Among the victims were a twenty-two-year-old Reuters photojournalist and his assistant. The US military showed the video to Reuters immediately after the incident; Reuters asked for an investigation and sought copies of the footage by using access to information legislation. The US investigated the incident and found no wrongdoing; the video copy was provided to Reuters two and a half years after the incident.

While some claim that the dissemination of videos of the WikiLeaks genre on YouTube is a triumph for accountability in government,⁴⁰ others argue that governments have legitimate reasons for keeping some information secret, particularly that pertaining to military engagements and national security. They fear that the power to quickly disseminate classified documents to a wide audience dramatically decreases the power of states pursuing the goals of security, democracy, and justice vis-à-vis individuals pursuing their own interests, whatever those might be. In response to the 2010 release of ninety thousand classified military documents, US National Security Adviser General James Jones asserted that this information “could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk.”⁴¹ This debate aside, what is clear from this overview of surveillance tools and their objects is that surveillance in modern society is ubiquitous and serves a multitude of purposes. What is equally obvious is that the tools of surveillance can be focused on different objects, and as such, have the potential to create different outcomes with respect to how society functions.

WHITHER WATCHING?

At the outset of this chapter it was claimed that surveillance has become a twenty-first-century norm. It was demonstrated that surveillance brings a level of transparency to our personal and professional lives that was unimaginable even twenty years ago. When linked with the concern for security in the post–9/11 world, surveillance as a desirable societal norm becomes a formidable concept to argue against. This is particularly true with the growth of the security-industrial complex that profits handsomely from the fear of crime and terrorism that fuels the appetite for deployment of ever more sophisticated technological innovations. The increasing incidence of surveillance in all its varied forms incrementally (but steadily) chips away at our personal autonomy by decreasing our privacy.

As in other sectors, the flip side of privacy invasion is an increase in access to information. In this case, the filming of particular incidents and the circulation and dissemination of this information through television networks serve as powerful tools for accountability. The more recent ability of individuals to circulate this to even more people on the Internet through sites like YouTube or WikiLeaks totally bypasses media gatekeepers, giving every person the ability to publicly demand accountability from the government and other actors. Like transparency, surveillance can operate in different directions — it can focus on the individual or the organization. As such, it can be used as a form of social control or as a method of ensuring accountability. There can be no doubt that surveillance technology has gone a considerable distance in improving efficiencies in the production and dissemination of commercial goods. While surveillance typically is thought to concentrate power in the hands of the few, the combination of surveillance tools with mass communication devices like the Internet has potential to distribute power into the hands of the many. As has been discussed in other chapters, surveillance has implications for both information access and privacy protection. Ultimately, a balance must be struck, and this balance will reflect society’s view as to the proper balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of the group.