We See It All: Liberty and Justice in an Age of Perpetual Surveillance

by Jon Fasman

Overview

This investigation into the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how the police and justice system use surveillance technology asks the question: what are citizens of a free country willing to tolerate in the name of public safety?

As we rethink the scope of police power, Jon Fasman’s chilling examination of how the police and the justice system use the unparalleled power of surveillance technology—how it affects privacy, liberty, and civil rights—becomes more urgent by the day. Embedding himself within police departments on both coasts, Fasman explores the moral, legal, and political questions posed by these techniques and tools.

By zeroing in on how facial recognition, automatic license-plate readers, drones, predictive algorithms, and encryption affect us personally, Fasman vividly illustrates what is at stake and explains how to think through issues of privacy rights, civil liberties, and public safety. How do these technologies impact how police operate in our society? How should archaic privacy laws written for an obsolete era—that of the landline and postbox—be updated?

Fasman looks closely at what can happen when surveillance technologies are combined and put in the hands of governments with scant regard for citizens’ civil liberties, pushing us to ask: Is our democratic culture strong enough to stop us from turning into China, with its architecture of control?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781541730687
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	01/26/2021
Sold by:	Hachette Digital, Inc.
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	801,054
File size:	863 KB

About the Author

Jon Fasman is the Washington correspondent of the Economist, having previously been South-East Asia bureau chief and Atlanta correspondent. In addition to his work for the Economist, he is also the author of two novels, both published by The Penguin Press: The Geographer's Library, was a New York Times bestseller in 2005 and has been translated into more than a dozen languages; and The Unpossessed City, which was published in autumn of 2018, was a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lions Fiction Award. Fasman resides in Westchester County, N.Y.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Prologue: "A perfect architecture of control" 1

1 Technology and Democracy 7

How much state surveillance and control are you willing to tolerate in the name of public safety?

2 Expanding the Platform 33

"Facebook and WhatsApp are spying on us anyway," he said, holding up his phone. "Privacy is dead."

3 Watching Each Other 61

"It is the Interest, and ought to be the Ambition, of all honest Magistrates, to have their Deeds openly examined, and publicly scann'd."

4 Mission Creep 91

"You can tell me who you are. But give me fifteen minutes with your phone and I'll tell you who you really are."

5 The End of Anonymity 113

"The history of surveillance is the history of powerful surveillance systems being abused."

6 Eyes in the Sky 139

"Where law enforcement leaders see a wonderful new tool for controlling crime and increasing public safety, a portion of the public sees the potential for a massive invasion of privacy."

7 Widening the Net 153

"The public doesn't look at people with ankle monitors and say, 'There's an innocent person.' They say, 'What did that person do?'"

8 The Black Box of Justice 165

"In a racially stratified world, any method of prediction will project the inequalities of the past into the future."

9 The China Problem 183

"We can now have a perfect architecture of control. What democratic practices do we need to not become China?"

10 The Oakland Solution 207

"We just started showing up."

Conclusion: The case for optimism 223

Acknowledgments 231

Notes 235

Index 249

Editorial Reviews

09/28/2020

Journalist Fasman (The Unpossessed City) delivers a deeply reported and sometimes chilling look at mass surveillance technologies in the American justice system. He notes that police departments in more than 100 cities use Shotspotter, an app that employs acoustic sensors mounted on traffic lights to identify and locate the sound of gunfire; speaks to an aeronautical engineer whose company makes drone-mounted camera systems that can surveil an entire city; and visits an Israeli security firm wanting to equip cameras that automatically read license plates with voice and facial recognition software and sell them to private citizens. Because many of these technologies are new, Fasman explains, there are few policies in place to regulate them, and even fewer penalties for ignoring the policies that do exist. A section on China’s “tech-enabled repression” of Uyghur Muslims and its financing and building of Ecuador’s emergency response network illustrates the threat of mass surveillance in countries with “weak institutions or scant regard for civil liberties,” while a portrait of citizen activists in Oakland, Calif., who fought back against a planned citywide monitoring system offers lessons on how to “forestall the surveillance state.” Fasman avoids alarmism while making a strong case for greater public awareness and tighter regulations around these technologies. This illuminating account issues an essential warning about a rising threat to America’s civil liberties. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

"If you want to understand the stakes and the landscape of surveillance in your life—yes, yours right now—We See It All is an outstanding place to start. Fasman walks his readers through a meticulously balanced review of how police, corporations, local businesses, governments, and ordinary people conspire to exchange real privacy for the feeling of safety. An evocative storyteller, Fasman lays out his case that, because government regulation lags impossibly behind technological advances, the only salve for our predicament is collective awareness. And collective action. The writing is sober and sobering. And, though the recent fires of Minneapolis, Atlanta, Portland, and the nation have not centered squarely on surveillance, Fasman argues convincingly that the next ones very well might."—Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity and professor of African American studies and psychology at Yale University

"This powerful, engrossing book will challenge your assumptions about persistent surveillance. Jon Fasman makes a clear case for civil liberties and explains how our laws and public safety infrastructure must keep pace with the advancement of technology. It's a must-read for anyone interested in the future and the unintended consequences of artificial intelligence, data, encryption and recognition technology." —Amy Webb, founder of The Future Today Institute, author of The Big Nine and The Signals are Talking

“Jon Fasman has given us a stellar account of the use of surveillance technologies by the police. It’s comprehensive, even-handed, informative, and fun to read."—Barry Friedman, Jacob D. Fuchsberg Professor, New York University School of Law

"An urgent examination of police-state intrusions on the privacy of lawful and law-abiding citizens."—Kirkus Reviews

"A deeply reported and sometimes chilling look at mass surveillance technologies in the American justice system....This illuminating account issues an essential warning about the rising threat to America's civil liberties."
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

2020-10-13
A cogent critique of the age of ubiquitous surveillance.

By Economist correspondent Fasman’s account, much of the present inventory of tools used by various police agencies is a threat to our civil liberties. Take the cameras, for instance, with which police vehicles are ever more frequently equipped, ones that take photographs of license plates and feed those images into a vast database. Now, the author points out more than once, if a human police photographer were to wander up and down a street taking photographs of license plates, we would want to know why; so how has this less intrusive technology become so widespread and so little contested? Similarly, he suggests, facial recognition technologies normalize the workings of a police state in the making. It’s not just the police: As Fasman writes, a Chinese entrepreneur has made a fortune with an app called Clearview, which, while widely used by police agencies, allows nearly anyone to gather private information about anyone else. That same technology was developed by Google—and, says its former chairman, was “the only technology that Google has built and, after looking at it…decided to stop,” since the possibilities of its being put to bad uses were immediately obvious. It would not surprise readers to know that the National Security Agency can eavesdrop on anyone’s cellphone conversations, but it certainly should surprise everyone to know that even the smallest police department can do it. Similarly, any police agency can send a drone to photograph a perfectly legal demonstration. The overarching question such abilities raise, Fasman notes provocatively, is a simple one: “How much state surveillance are you willing to tolerate for improved public safety?” Anything more than the minimum is dangerous, he answers, for “that way China lies.”

An urgent examination of police-state intrusions on the privacy of lawful and law-abiding citizens.

Kirkus Reviews