Surveillance and dataveillance
Current information technologies obviously facilitate the gathering and keeping of unprecendented amounts of information from and on larger groups of individuals than ever before. The actions and words of millions of people are now recorded by technologies that didn't exist in Jeremy Bentham's day, Orwell's time, or even for the most part while Foucault was still alive. In this lesson, I will take a close look at four different forms of surveillance: surveillance proper, dataveillance, sousveillance, and social surveillance. Let's start with the two kinds that are probably most familiar to you. Surveillance proper includes technologies like closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras. These are mostly found in the public space. Whereas dataveillance involves the recording and analysis of our interactions with digital technology, and thus is often seen as potentially monitoring more personal and private aspects of our behaviour in the world.
Surveillance
CCTV cameras are the modern version of the ghost in the central tower - their unblinking unidirectional gaze serves as a constant reminder that you could be being watched, although there's no way to look through them to verify whether anyone is actually watching. Also, in an advance on Betham's model, your actions can now be recorded for later review. The cell walls are no longer physical, but as we move out of the frame of one camera we often move into the frame of another - keeping us in a state of potentially constant visibility.
In modern London, you are on camera all the time, in a way that can be compared and contrasted with the London of Orwell's 1984. The recommended article by Kietzmann and Angell (2010) goes into detail about the proliferation of these cameras, particularly in Great Britain, where camera surveillance in public spaces is so widespread that it is frequently an important plot point in crime dramas and thrillers. The number of cameras everywhere now is troubling to some people. Many feel a panoptic stress around the fact that we can never be sure whether we are on camera at any particular moment, and whether we are being watched by an actual person or just an unthinking camera.
Technologies are coming of age that can pick an indivudual out of a crowd on video. Facial recognition technology reads the contours of the human face like a fingerprint, and transforms our features into a series of data points (Keller). This technology is already a viable part of many people's smartphones. Facebook is getting very good at recognizing my friends in my photos. The even newer technology of gait analysis (identifying a person by the way they walk) will allow software to identify who you are from a distance, or from the back (Giles).
Outside of Canada, we know that surveillance has been in the past and is now being used in some countries for social control that may be oppressive. In the former East Germany, for instance, the state secret police ran networks of informers among the ordinary citizenry to try to watch for anything it didn't approve of. China's totalitarian government has been building a "social credit" system over the last decade or so that gives power to the centralized authoritarian government (and partner institutions) through its largely unrestricted access to surveillance and dataveillance, including being able to build what people do through financial institutions and social media into what the government's picture of an individual's "social" worthiness (from whatever the government's point of view is; see for instance Kobie 2019).
Even here, where we seem to have have more rights to protect us from government scrutiny, it is worth keeping in mind the socially systemic bias in police surveillance in the public space that has been repeatedly made apparent over the last few years. Although we don't exactly live in a totalitarian police state, it has been well demonstrated that in the United States and Canada there can be racialized and economically-motivated targeting by police surveillance, such as the well-publicized action of "carding" African Canadian men in Toronto. In theory, the increased police surveillance in low-income neighbourhoods and communities of colour is because of the greater likelihood of crime, especially drug-related crime and illegal weapons, in those communities, but such crime-prevention surveillance can easily become a further form of oppression and tie in with the further white supremacist use of instititutional power against those who are already struggling to achieve true equity in our society. To the extent that technology may be used to create greater or more invasive surveillance in such communities, it is not hard to imagine how this could - intentionally or not - be a further aspect to the keeping in place of institutionalized power of white people and/or those with wealth, and a further injustice to people who aren't so privileged in our society.
The protective masks that have become standard on the street during the Covid-19 pandemic are an odd spanner in the works of technologically augmented surveillance. Those who wish to protest against the powers that be may want to look for ways of subverting supposedly law-enforcing policing surveillance such as facial recognition software. Pussy Riot, the Russian-based feminist and anti-authoritarian punk art and activism group, have put together some videos on the creative use of make-up and face-painting to disguise one's identity when involved in public protest against authorities (while creating art and having some fun at the same time)! Here's one:
In 2023, the Italian clothing label Capable released a fashion line that claims to defeat facial recognition software. Presumably, being seen in these designer clothes is to make a political as well as a fashion statement.
Surveillance in the strict sense, then, is mainly the active watching of, and listening in on, us, by municipal agencies, law enforcement, or corporations (e.g. cameras in banks or department stores), and sometimes the owners of private property (even your doorbell cam). Generally surveillance takes the form of monitoring and recording cameras. It can also include judicially sanctioned (legal) wiretaps and email monitoring, and so forth, but in theory these happen only in rare and exceptional cases. Most authorized surveillance that ordinary people experience takes place in the public space: on the street, in businesses, or at school. Much of it we are aware of.
Though in Canada we may be less worried than comforted by public surveillance a lot of the time, Zeynep Tufekci, a noted socio-technologist I'll be talking a bit more about in the next lesson on Democracy, warns that governments and even non-tech corporations have been slow to understand the potential for social monitoring and control the increasingly sophisticated technology (facial recognition, gait analysis, tie-ins with dataveillance) could put at their disposal. (Tufekci 2017) The ways such technology, combined with deep fake tampering, could be used against individuals by authorities is chillingly explored in the British series The Capture (2019- ).
Again, surveillance as discussed in this lesson is most commonly performed by government and municipal agencies such as the police, putatively for the protection of individuals. In Canada, government agencies are only supposed to use this technology to investigate and enforce laws, which are generally not oppressive by most people's standards (you're not supposed to speed, rob people, assault people, etc). In other countries, surveillance may be used in ways that could be a risk here if we are not diligent, such as discovering people violating discriminatory laws (homosexuals, for instance) or to monitor people's behaviour for a government-mandated vision of what people should be and do to be "good," such as the social credit system being advanced in China.