The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age

by Kirstie Ball (Editor), Frank Webster (Editor)

Overview

Our public and private lives are under surveillance as never before. Whether we are shopping with a credit card, walking down the street or emailing a colleague at work, our activities are monitored. Surveillance has become more routine, more integrated and more intrusive. It is vital to ask how and why this should be so, and assess what the consequences are.

Since September 11th 2001 surveillance has intensified further. Yet although individuals, groups, governments and states are more closely monitored, our security is not assured.

The contributors to this volume explore the vast range of issues related to increased surveillance. What is going on in an area clouded by secrecy from the state and complacent reassurances from corporations? How do we track suspects and combat crime without also eroding our civil liberties and sacrificing our rights to privacy? Does electronic tagging of prisoners work? What are retailers up to with 'lifestyle profiling'?

Focusing on these and other issues such as paedophilia, money-laundering, information warfare, cybercrime, and related legislation, this book spotlights benefits and costs of surveillance, and suggests how it is likely to develop in the future. Experts from Europe and America offer an international perspective on what is now a worldwide issue, making this book of interest to a wide range of people including legal practitioners, law enforcement agencies, policymakers and students across the social sciences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780745319940
Publisher:	Pluto Press
Publication date:	11/20/2003
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.32(w) x 8.46(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Kirstie Ball lectures in Organisational Management in the Department of Commerce at the University of Birmingham

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Intensification of Surveillance

Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster

Surveillance involves the observation, recording and categorization of information about people, processes and institutions. It calls for the collection of information, its storage, examination and – as a rule – its transmission. It is a distinguishing feature of modernity, though until the 1980s the centrality of surveillance to the making of our world had been underestimated in social analysis. Over the years surveillance has become increasingly systematic and embedded in everyday life, particularly as state (and, latterly, supra-state) agencies and corporations have strengthened and consolidated their positions. More and more we are surveilled in quite routine activities, as we make telephone calls, pay by debit card, walk into a store and into the path of security cameras, or enter a library through electronic turnstiles. It is important that this routine character of much surveillance is registered, since commentators so often focus exclusively on the dramatic manifestations of surveillance such as communications interceptions and spy satellites in pursuit of putative and deadly enemies.

In recent decades, aided by innovations in information and communications technologies (ICTs), surveillance has expanded and deepened its reach enormously. Indeed, it is now conducted at unprecedented intensive and extensive levels while it is vastly more organized and technology-based than hitherto. Surveillance is a matter of such routine that generally it escapes our notice – who, for instance, reflects much on the traces they leave on the supermarkets' checkout, and who worries about the tracking their credit card transactions allow? Most of the time we do not even bother to notice the surveillance made possible by the generation of what has been called transactional information (Burnham, 1983) – the records we create incidentally in everyday activities such as using the telephone, logging on to the Internet, or signing a debit card bill. Furthermore, different sorts of surveillance are increasingly melded such that records collected for one purpose may be accessed and analysed for quite another: the golf club's membership list may be an attractive database for the insurance agent, address lists of subscribers to particular magazines may be especially revealing when combined with other information on consumer preferences. Such personal data are now routinely abstracted from individuals through economic transactions, and our interaction with communications networks, and the data are circulated, as data flows, between various databases via 'information superhighways'. Categorizations of these data according to lifestyle, shopping habits, viewing habits and travel preferences are made in what has been termed the 'phenetic fix' (Phillips & Curry, 2002; Lyon, 2002b), which then informs how the economic risk associated with these categories of people is managed. More generally, the globe is increasingly engulfed in media which report, expose and inflect issues from around the world, these surveillance activities having important yet paradoxical consequences on actions and our states of mind. Visibility has become a social, economic and political issue, and an indelible feature of advanced societies (Lyon, 2002b; Haggerty & Ericson, 2000).

It is this intensification of surveillance that is the subject of this book. We concentrate our attention on the aligned surveillance surrounding crime, terrorism and information warfare, not least because, as Thomas and Loader observe, 'the transforming capabilities of ICTs make it increasingly difficult to distinguish between warfare, terrorism and criminal activities' (2000, p. 3). There are vital differences between these realms, but developments have led to a decided blurring at the edges, which lends urgency to the analyses and discriminations our contributors provide here. Moreover, the compass of these ostensibly discrete areas, something that extends all the way from suspicion and prevention to pursuit and punishment, is so enormous that they compel attention. Surveillance of crime can involve anything from observation of rowdy behaviour in the street to searching bank accounts for traces of illicit financial movements; from checking the rectitude of credit card holders to tagging prisoners released from gaol; from monitoring the speeds of motor cars to tracking Internet usage of suspected paedophiles. Meanwhile the pursuit of terrorists may call for anything from assiduous examination of airline bookings, identification of hackers, to satellite monitoring of shipping thought to be ferrying weaponry. And information warfare calls for nothing less than continuous and all-seeing observation of real and putative enemies – where terrorists are major targets and where criminal activity readily becomes pertinent – using the most sophisticated technologies available.

A particular concern here, perhaps inevitably, is with the period since September 11, 2001. The destruction by terrorists of the Twin Towers in New York city has stimulated, and perhaps even more importantly, legitimated, the acceleration and expansion of surveillance trends. Moreover, it has helped promote especially acute disciplinary forms of surveillance and it has blurred still more already fuzzy boundaries between crime, terrorism and contemporary warfare. To be sure, crime and terrorism have long been of major interest to surveillance agencies, but today we are witnessing a step change whereby there is a massive increase in surveillance, an expansion of those deemed deserving of scrutiny, and an integration of this with warfare itself. In this light consider the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project, announced late in 2002. TIA has been developed as a response to September 11 and the consequent American priority of targeting terrorist threats (Goldenberg, 2002), which are now regarded as the major concern of the advanced societies' military. The TIA initiative aims to sift every electronic trail left behind in the US by terrorist suspects. The presumption is that terrorists exhibit patterns of behaviour that can be identified by 'data mining' many diverse and apparently mundane activities which are subject to surveillance of one sort or another. Accordingly, records of airline tickets, rental payments, traffic violations, bank statements, emails, immigration control, credit card receipts, parking tickets, telephone calls, ATM usage and the rest will all be accessed – and these through time so patterns may be discerned and evaluated. Similarly, video camera records from key locations (airports, monuments, public buildings etc.) and film from closed-circuit television cameras at freeway tollbooths, will be examined using facial recognition techniques to pinpoint suspicious people.

At the heart of Terrorism Information Awareness is the conviction that, by searching a vast range of databases, it will be possible to identify terrorists, even before they can strike. TIA will draw together the results of already prodigious surveillance activities in hopes that defence agencies will prove capable of spotting enemies before they cause mayhem. The premise is that, if everything can be seen, all obstacles and threats might be extinguished, and stability thereby assured. As its Mission Statement (DARPA, 2002) inelegantly puts it, the project 'will imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and proto-type, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for pre-emption; national security warning; and national security decision making'.

And who, post-9/11, might there be to object to this? There are undeniably serious terrorist threats posed to citizens, and it is surely right that all measures possible are taken against those who would perpetrate such crimes. Our main concern here would not be to resist TIA outright, but rather to draw attention to the mammoth amount of surveillance that already takes place and which is the foundation on which TIA builds. Focusing on the ordinariness of closed circuit television cameras in so many spheres of society, the ubiquity of the telephone system, the inescapability of credit card institutions, we want to emphasize the ongoing intensification of surveillance in everyday life. There are major consequences of this, to which we shall draw attention later in this introduction and to which our contributors pay heed, but at this stage we want to insist on the need to appreciate the spread of what might be thought of as ordinary and everyday surveillance.

Nevertheless, it is worth observing that, if the scale and scope of Total Information Awareness is awesome, it is neither unprecedented nor is its motivating spirit new (Bamford, 2001). Indeed, we believe that TIA is driven by a conviction that is familiar. This has it that order will be assured if all is known. If only everything can be observed, then, goes the reasoning, everything may be controlled. In this view, if surveillance can be thorough enough, then disturbances – anything from terrorist outrages to economic crisis, from late night fracas to the break-up of families – can be anticipated and appropriate action taken to remove (or at least mitigate) them. We would go even further: the thinking behind TIA expresses what might be conceived of as a compulsion to surveille, which is endemic in the modern world, where order and control are the requisites of all else.

For instance, in the early 1980s an alliance of military high-ups, elder statesmen (notably former UK prime minister Edward Heath and one-time head of the World Bank, Ford Motors, and the Department of Defence Robert McNamara), entrepreneurs and technological innovators came together to create IRIS (International Reporting Information Systems). The aim of IRIS was to sift and sort, in real time, vast information flows gathered from across the globe on matters such as commodity prices, insurgency, political machinations, and investment trends (St Jorre, 1983). The ambition of IRIS was to provide corporate and government clients with timely information, which would be accurate, immediately accessible and customized. The premise was that, to maximize effect and appeal to those who would pay the subscriptions, it was necessary to know everything, from anywhere, at any time, that might impinge upon the interests of those footing the bill.

Much the same compulsion to surveille was also evident in H.G. Wells's advocacy during the 1930s of a 'World Brain'. The science fiction enthusiast conceived this as a 'new world organ for the collection, indexing, summarising and release of knowledge' (1938, p. 159). This 'mental clearing house', the World Brain, was to Wells something to be wholeheartedly welcomed since the 'creation ... of a complete planetary memory' (p. 60) promised order and prosperity, the twins of progress. One must observe the consonance here with both the TIA and IRIS projects: surveillance is the prerequisite of effective control, and the better the surveillance, the more adequate will be the control and command that delivers progress.

From instances such as these it is not such a big step to the metaphor that is most commonly evoked when commentators think about surveillance – Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. This was an early nineteenth-century architectural design, applicable to prisons, schools and factories especially, by which people could be inspected from central points, though the inspectors themselves might not be seen by those whom they watched, while the inspected could not easily communicate one with another. The design was deliberate in its ambition to have the subjects watched, the watchers capable of seeing everything always, and the watchers unaware when the watchers might not be watching. Michel Foucault, in his enormously influential study, Discipline and Punish (1979), took the Panopticon as a central motif of modernity itself, adding that self-monitoring accompanies panopticism, with the inspected continuously feeling that they are subject to surveillance. Moreover, to Foucault the Panopticon is more than a physical place, since it also entails new 'disciplines' of order such as carefully timetabled events for each day and scrutiny of the behaviour of the inspected over time. In the Foucauldian view, when surveillance is accompanied by technologies such as computerized tills and video cameras, then we have entered an era of the Panopticon without walls (Lyon, 1994). Hence the 'carceral texture' persists and deepens in a 'disciplinary' society, though the actual walls of the prison may have been removed. Contemporary surveillance becomes here a noticeably intense and intrusive form of discipline, which depends on observation, assessment and analysis as matters of routine (Whitaker, 1999).

It might be noted that recent Foucaultian accounts of the panopticon tend to resist the suggestion that panoptic techniques have become homogenized and centralized (though it is hard to avoid precisely this conclusion from reading Discipline and Punish itself) in the hands of, say, linked transactional corporations or integrated government agencies (e.g. Bogard, 1996). Gandy (1998), for instance, asserts that it would be a mistake to assume that surveillance in practice is as complete and totalizing as the panoptic ideal type would have us believe. For instance, it may be that educational institutions and retail corporations operate as huge panoptic machines in themselves, but these are both internally differentiated and externally hard to access by others, while the surveillers within education and the retail industry are themselves surveilled by many other panoptic-like organizations such as insurance companies and tax agencies. In this sense, today's surveillance may more accurately be seen as at once more pervasive and less centralized than might have been imagined by earlier proponents of panopticism.

Another critic, James Rule (1998,p. 68),reminds us that the Panopticon may offer 'little help' in understanding new forms of electronic surveillance if the issue is whether people are subject to more or more severe forms of control. It might be emphasized here that more intensive surveillance can readily accompany an easing of direct control since careful watching may allow successful pre-emptive actions or even improved self-control from those who are aware they are being watched (Boyne, 2000). Thus contemporary panopticism may be more a question of how rather disparate individuals, organizations, state bodies and the media relate to surveillance technologies and how these influence what data is collected, where this goes, and what happens in consequence. Thereby surveillance may be increasingly intense, yet lead to less overtly punitive controls than hitherto, while it may also be more differentiated, complex and textured than earlier proponents of the Panopticon feared (or hoped).

Moreover, in electronically mediated worlds, our identities are digitally authenticated by what Lyon (2001b) calls 'tokens of trust' (e.g. an ID number), which identify individuals in the absence of face-to-face interaction. In providing these mandatory tokens of trust, the corollaries are, first, that we collude in our own surveillance, second, in doing so, we contribute to the overall movement towards greater intensification of personal surveillance, and third, we erode privacy because our autonomy in disclosing personal data is decreased.

SURVEILLANCE STUDIES

Given the raft of issues and controversies that pervade the intensification of surveillance, it is no coincidence that, over the last ten years, the sub-field of Surveillance Studies has developed. This brings together scholars from a variety of backgrounds: urbanists, sociologists, computer scientists, political scientists, and even organization theorists contribute. One of its leading lights, David Lyon, surveys the scene following September 11 in Chapter 2 here. Lyon (2002b) observes that surveillance is crucial to the identification and sorting of people and things. He helpfully distinguishes two major categories of surveillance, namely categorical suspicion and categorical seduction. We propose a further two types: categorical care and categorical exposure.

Categorical Suspicion involves surveillance that is concerned with identification of threats to law and order – with malcontents, dissidents and, at the extreme, terrorists. It reaches from disaffected and troublesome young men to organized criminals, and it extends, when it enters the realms of 'information war', to close observation and assessment of enemies within and without, using an array of advanced technologies from communications intervention devices to satellite cameras. Categorical suspicion encompasses all the policing dimensions of surveillance, and few dispute its necessity, though many are concerned about its boundaries and intrusions into the civil liberties of citizens.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

1. The intensification of surveillance Kirstie Ball (Lecturer in Organizational Management, University of Birmingham) and Frank Webster (Professor of Sociology, University of Birmingham) 2. Surveillance after September 11th David Lyon (Professor of Sociology, Queen's University, Canada) 3. Data mining and surveillance in the post 9-11 environment Oscar Gandy (Annenberg School of Communication, University of Pennsylvania) 4. Joined up surveillance? Charles Raab (Professor of Government, University of Edinburgh) 5. They Dont Even Know Were There: The Electronic Monitoring of Offenders In England and Wales Mike Nellis (Senior Lecturer in Probation Studies, University of Birmingham) 6. Information warfare, surveillance and human rights Frank Webster 7. Mapping out Cybercrimes in a Cyberspatial Surveillant Assemblage David Wall (Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice Studies, University of Leeds) 8. The constant state of emergency? Surveillance after 9/11 David Wood (Earl Grey Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Newcastle University), Eli Konvitz (PhD) and Kirstie Ball Bibliography Index