The Electronic Eye

The Rise of Surveillance Society - Computers and Social Control in Context

David Lyon

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745667614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book David Lyon analyses the various contexts of surveillance activity and offers a balanced account of the influence electronic information systems have on the social order today.

Part I

Situating Surveillance

1

Introduction: Body, Soul and Credit Card

‘An individual in Russia was composed of three parts; a body, a soul and a passport.’

Vladimir Medem¹

Surveillance in Everyday Life

This book, while it certainly doesn’t ignore ‘bodies and souls’ is primarily about the ‘passport’ aspect of human existence. That is to say, I focus on that dimension of social life which today is vital to most relationships and transactions, apart from those of the most intimate or familial kind. Passports get us across borders, who drivers’ licences are taken more seriously than our own word for proving who we are. In much of modern life we deal with relative strangers, and to demonstrate our identity or reliability we must produce documentary evidence. Indeed, the Russian proverb above should really be updated to indicate that human beings would now be defined more accurately as ‘body, soul and credit card’.

The other side of the coin, however, is that organizations of many kinds know us only as coded sequences of numbers and letters. This was once worked out on pieces of paper collated in folders and kept in filling cabinets, but now the same tasks - and many others, unimaginable to a Victorian clerk - are performed by computer. Precise details of our personal lives are collected, stored, retrieved and processed every day within huge computer databases belonging to big corporations and government departments. This is the ‘surveillance society’.²

No one is spying on us, exactly, although for many people that is what it feels like if and when they find out just how detailed a picture of us is available. ‘They’ know things about us, but we often don’t know what they know, why they know, or with whom else they might share their knowledge. What does this mean for our sense of identity, our life-chances, our human rights, our privacy? What are the implications for political power, social control, freedom and democracy? This book addresses just such questions.

In one, limited, sense the electronic component of surveillance is nothing new. Wiretapping and other forms of message interception have been the common currency of espionage and intelligence services for many decades. But what this book explores is how, to an unprecedented extent, ordinary people now find themselves ‘under surveillance’ in the routines of everyday life. In numerous ways what was once thought of as the exception has become the rule, as highly specialized agencies use increasingly sophisticated means of routinely collecting personal data, making us all targets of monitoring, and possibly objects of suspicion.

Surveillance, as described here, concerns the mundane, ordinary, taken-for-granted world of getting money from a bank machine, making a phone call, applying for sickness benefits, driving a car, using a credit card, receiving junk mail, picking up books from the library, or crossing a border on trips abroad. In each case mentioned, computers record our transactions, check against other known details, ensure that we and not others are billed or paid, store bits of our biographies, or assess our financial, legal or national standing. Each time we do one of these things we actually or potentially leave a trace of our doings. Computers and their associated communications systems now mediate all these kinds of relationships; to participate in modern society is to be under electronic surveillance.

All this did not develop overnight, and indeed part of what we must examine is the relatively long history of the ‘surveillance society.’ Today’s situation cannot be understood without reference to the long-term historical context. Ever since modern governments started to register births, marriages and deaths, and ever since modern businesses began to monitor work and keep accurate records of employees’ pay and progress, surveillance has been expanding. Surveillance denotes what is happening as today’s bureaucratic organizations try to keep track of increasingly complex information on a variety of populations and groups. Yet it is more than just ‘bureaucracy.’ Surveillance is strongly bound up with our compliance with the current social order, and it can be a means of social control.

At the same time, surveillance systems are meant to ensure that we are paid correctly or receive appropriate welfare benefits, that terrorism and drug-trafficking are contained, that we are made aware of the latest consumer products available, that we can be warned about risks to our health, that we can vote in elections, that we can pay for goods and sevices with plastic cards rather than with the more cumbersome cash, and so on. Most people in modern societies regard these accomplishments as contributing positively to the quality of life. So surveillance is not unambiguously good or bad; and hence the dilemmas surrounding the use of computer databases for storing and processing personal data.

Surveillance expands in subtle ways, often as the result of decisions and processes intended to pursue goals such as efficiency or productivity. Moreover, its subtlety is increased by its present-day electronic character. Most surveillance occurs literally out of sight, in the realm of digital signals. And it happens, as we have already seen, not in clandestine, conspiratorial fashion, but in the commonplace transactions of shopping, voting, phoning, driving and working. This means that people seldom know that they are subjects of surveillance, or, if they do know, they are unaware how comprehensive others’ knowledge of them actually is.

Though modern surveillance originated in specific institutions such as the army, the corporation, and the govenment department, it has grown to touch all areas of life. This was brought home to me personally during a recent move from Britain to Canada. My family and I could not fully participate in Canadian society until our details had been transferred into a number of electronic databases. This began on arrival at Toronto International Airport, as the travel-tired family lined up at Employment and Immigration Control. Details had to keyed into the computer before we could continue to our destination in Kingston, Ontario.

No sooner were we installed in Kingston than we had to obtain health care cards, Social Insurance Numbers, bank cards and a university staff card, each of which relates to personal details stored in a compouter database. We could not be employed, acquire medical or accident coverage, or obtain money without these. However much we like cycling, it is hard to get around without a car, so we had to get drivers’ licences, which again link our records by computer. Surprisingly soon after arriving, we started receiving ‘personal’ advertising mail which indicated once more that yet other computers contained data about us, gleaned from the telephone company, which also lists - and sells - essential facts about us. Other agencies than the phone company do just the same.

As soon as we began the process of buying a house, the quest for electronic verification intensified. Mortgage companies demanded details of the crucial Social Insurance Number (which would reveal immediately whether we were bona fide citizens, permanent residents or temporary workers) because such financial transactions are of interest to the tax authorities. Equipping ourselves with a cooking stove, washing machine and fridge involved similar proof of (credit-) worthiness in terms of bankcard and credit-card numbers. As a university professor, I find myself in the relatively privileged position of either possessing the right number sequences to unlock these electronic doors or of being able to explain that things will soon be in place. But the same processes are clearly experienced in quite different ways by those lacking access to the appropriate plastic cards or numbers.

In other words, participating in just about every aspect of modern life depends upon our relationship with computer databases; and to process our personal details we rely not only upon professional experts and bureaucratic systems, which have increasingly become a feature of modern life in the twentieth century, but upon electronic storage and communication devices. What difference, if any, does this make to social, political and cultural life? The answer to this crucial question draws us into a number of important debates, sometimes in disciplinary areas that are conventionally separate. I shall list these below, but thoughout the book I shall show how they must be considered together if we are properly to grasp the dimensions and implications of the ‘surveillance society.’

The genius, and the usefulness, of sociology lies in locating particular events and trends in their broader structural and historical context. In this way we can begin to distinguish between the short-term aberration from some norm and the long-term break with existing conditions, between the socially significant and the trivial or the transient. This book aspires to place elctronic surveillance - in a broad sense, rather than the narrower ‘security-and-intelligence’ sense - in just such a social and historical context, and to show where it came from, what - if anything - is new about it, what are its future prospects and wider implications, and what might seem to be appropriate responses to its development. This should become clear as we consider the various debates within which electronic surveillance is properly situated.

Surveillance in Modern Society

Until a decade ago, surveillance occupied no distinct place in the sociological lexicon. Despite the fact that James Rule’s groundbreaking study of Private Lives and Public Surveillance had appeared in the early 1970s, quickly establishing itself as the standard text,³ it was not until Michel Foucault’s celebrated, and contentious, historical studies of surveillance and discipline had appeared that mainstream social theorists began to take surveillance seriously in its own right. Surveillance, insisted Anthony Giddens⁴ and others, should be viewed not merely as a sort of reflex of capitalism (monitoring workers in the factory), or of the nation-state (keeping administrative tabs on citizens), but as a power-generator in itself.

Of course, we can now look back at many other sociological studies and see how they concerned processes very closely related to what today we call surveillance. Prominent here is work carried out in two major traditions, the Marxian and the Weberian. Karl Marx focuses special attention on surveillance as an aspect of the struggle between labour and capital. Overseeing and monitoring workers is viewed here as a means of maintaining managerial control on behalf of capital. Max Weber, on the other hand, concentrates on the ways that all modern organizations develop means of storing and retrieving data in the form of files as part of the quest of efficient practice within bureaucracy. Such files frequently contain personal information so that organizations, especially government administrators, can ‘keep tabs’ on populations.

Foucault’s more recent contribution to surveillance theory, though sophisticated, may be simply stated. Modern societies have developed rational means of ordering society that effectively dispense with traditional methods like brutal public punishment. Rather than relying on external controls and constraints, modern social institutions employ a range of disciplinary practices which ensure that life continues in a regularized, patterned way. From army drill to school uniforms, and from social welfare casework to the closely-scrutinized factory worker’s task, the processes of modern social discipline are depicted in sharp relief. Others have taken his analysis beyond the spheres he considered, for instance into the ways women are disciplined to dress and present themselves as ‘feminine’ in male-dominated society.⁵ Furthermore, as these examples imply, people co-operate and collude with the means of control.

Specialized knowledge strengthens the power of each modern agency, and taken together they seem to colonize ever-increasing tracts of so-called private life. The categories and classifications imposed, whether they be the time for performing a work-task or raising a rifle or the calculation of health or crime risk, induce, according to Foucault, progressively sharper distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. This in turn defines the ‘normal’ human individual, thus creating what we think of as social order. In this way people are produced as subjects - or, more accurately, objects.

Foucault’s role in surveillance studies is curious and paradoxical. With careful empirical studies of surveillance, such as Rule’s, available, it yet took someone who was notorious for his disdain of data to set the debate fully in motion. One of the oddest things about Foucault is his silence about that acme of rational classification, the computer. Surely, if anything accelerates the process of monitoring the routines of everyday and producing people as objects it is the computer! But the task of applying Foucault’s analysis to the social role of information technology - and quite an array of plausible interpretations is available! - has been left to others. The apparent relevance of Foucault’s analysis may be obvious, but the way that some of the connections have been made actually arouse further controversy.

For one thing, many commentators have lighted eagerly upon Foucault’s image of the Panopticon prison plan⁶ as an examplar of electronic surveillance. Some apply it only to specific social milieux, such as industrial organizations, while others glimpse here the contours of a completely new social formation, comparable to Marx’s depiction of the ‘mode of production’. At one extreme this can be taken to mean that wherever computer databases process human data we are caught up in some system of total, prisonlike domination, which seems to me to be nonsense. However, even milder versions of this idea rightly raise the question of resistance; what can be done in the face of such all-encompassing power? This is what this book tries to explore.

The idea of the ‘surveillance society’ is used to capture this particular dimension of modern social life.⁷ The perspective outlined in this book takes account of what Marx, Weber and Foucault have to say, but is not exclusively aligned with any one of them. In any case, the sociological debate has been joined by others, notably Anthony Giddens, who locate the processes of surveillance within modern society as one of its major isntitutional dimensions. His work is a useful springboard⁸ for surveillance studies, but, as we shall see, it too invites modification, particularly in the light of the electronic character of surveillance.

In the sections that follow I indicate the kinds of debates within which surveillance features. These debates overlap, and greater integration between them could only be beneficial. The order in which they are listed implies no priority.

The Social Impact of Technology

Electronic surveillance has to do with the ways that computer databases are used to store and process personal information on different kinds of populations. Examining the ‘surveillance society’ may be seen as a case study in the interaction between technology and society. I say ‘interaction’ advisedly, because there are several stances on the society/technology relationship.

Some writers place the emphasis on the ways t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Part I Situating Surveillance
• Part II Surveillance Trends
• Part III Counter-Surveillance
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index