Tag Archives: Surveillance

We will always have our secret thoughts

28 Mar

Give-No-Privacy

 

I once met a man who told me he had no privacy.

I found this difficult to comprehend. A life without privacy?

But I will always have my secret thoughts, he told me with grim satisfaction. As if he was engaged in ongoing battle with an intruder who demanded full knowledge, and was winning with his secrecy what could only have been a Pyrrhic victory.

The high cost of concealment, not because of choice, but because of necessity.

This week we have all lost our privacy, with the passing of metadata retention legislation that enables the state and its agents to access our online lives without a warrant, and at their whim. We have now become citizens who are assumed by our government to be guilty until proven innocent, a monumental inversion of our legal process that has passed largely unremarked. We have now become possible subjects of pre-emptive, not after-the-fact investigation by the state. We are instructed to trust the state not to abuse the privileges it has  awarded itself, and turn them against us. We have been infantilised to an unprecedented degree. In the eyes of the state, grown citizens now are the equivalent of toddlers.

I think about how an individual’s life is impoverished by a lack of privacy. Not because the individual necessarily has anything he or she wants or needs to hide, but because if we are to attain maturity as autonomous human beings we must have private time in which to achieve this. We must have private time for our thoughts, desires, imaginings, innovations, failures. We must have a door that we can close, a space in which we can claim ownership of our selves that is uninterrupted, and unadulterated by the presence and expectations of another. Privacy is one of the resources a human being needs to flourish. In conditions of diminished privacy, the capacity for critical subjectivity is equally diminished. A healthy individual and a healthy society need privacy if they are to thrive.

If, as I have argued, the capacity for critical subjectivity shrinks in conditions of diminished privacy, what happens to the capacity for democratic self-government? Conditions of diminished privacy shrink the latter capacity as well, because they impair both the capacity and the scope for the practice of citizenship. But a liberal democratic society cannot sustain itself without citizens who possess the capacity for democratic self-government. A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of surveillance infrastructures cannot hope to remain a liberal democracy. Under such conditions, liberal democracy as a form of government is replaced, gradually but surely, by a different form of government that I will call modulated democracy because it relies on a form of surveillance that operates by modulation. Modulation and modulated democracy emerge as networked surveillance technologies take root within democratic societies characterized by advanced systems of informational capitalism. Citizens within modulated democracies—citizens who are subject to pervasively distributed surveillance and modulation by powerful commercial and political interests—increasingly will lack the capacity to form and pursue meaningful agendas for human flourishing. Julie E Cohen. What Privacy is For.

An individual or government driven to the exercise of crude power over another in the form of surveillance, is an individual or government driven by fear, and deceived by the illusion of control. Like the man who told me he had no privacy but will always have his secret thoughts, subjects, whether in their capacity as citizens or as relating individuals, will be compelled to resist invasive surveillance conducted by the state or another in their lives, or they will mentally dis-integrate, and cease to thrive.

We have always had our secret thoughts, however, the difference now is that those secret thoughts are no longer entirely ours by choice, but by necessity, if we are to protect ourselves from pre-emptive investigation by the state and its agents. The need for a  whole new level of secrecy has been added to our lives, since we are now a surveilled people and our online lives are an open book. Every move we make online is no longer our own business, but the business of any state-sanctioned authority who chooses to make us the subject of their enquiries. This power disparity cannot help but change our natures, and not for the better. We will be forced to engage in an ongoing battle with the surveilling authorities, or we will dis-integrate.

And the majority of us apparently don’t care.

Snowden

 

 

 

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Meta data. The effects of surveillance

19 Feb

 

SurveillanceLogo

Proposed mandatory data retention legislation might well see citizens regressing to cold war practices of leaving notes in hollowed-out trees and chalk marks on park benches, in an effort to escape the scrutiny of law enforcement agencies.

Labouring under the assumption that every citizen ought to be surveilled, the Abbott government wants to introduce legislation that will require Internet and phone providers to store meta data for up to two years, for access by law enforcement agencies without a warrant.

Meta data is the footprint that reveals where you have been, but not the content of your visit. I understand it will remain necessary to obtain a warrant to access content. Until it doesn’t.

Aggravating the dodgy nature of this proposed escalation of State intrusion into our private lives, is the lack of a legal definition of meta data in the proposed legislation. This sounds suspiciously like a deliberate omission that will permit a broad interpretation, according to what a law enforcement agency wants to obtain at any particular time.

Attorney-General George Brandis doesn’t know what meta data is, while Prime Minister Tony Abbott likens it to what’s on the front of an envelope, rather than the envelope’s contents. As the two prime movers of this legislation can’t coherently explain what it is actually about, they likely ought to proceed with caution.

Abbott has argued the necessity for the proposed legislation in order to prevent terrorism, crime and Internet pedophilia. Without mass surveillance there will be “an explosion in unsolved crime,” he warned, and added that we all want to stop the horrible offence of child abuse, don’t we, much of which occurs online.

In the absence of a war or a terrorist attack he can manipulate to get him out of the abyss of unpopularity into which he continues to plunge, national security, crime explosions and child abuse will have to do. Abbott is pressuring Labor to bring forward debate on the proposed meta data legislation, rather than take the time needed to properly examine the possible repercussions. These could be many, particularly for journalists, whistleblowers, and freedom of speech.

So what are the effects on individuals and societies of constant surveillance by the state?

As Michel Foucault puts it in “Discipline and Punish:”

He [sic] who is subjected to a field of visibility and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

In other words if you believe yourself to be constantly surveilled it hardly matters whether you are or not. Your behaviour will be controlled by that belief, and there will be little need for exterior monitoring. You are experiencing …the division of the subject into a judging authority and an accused individual. You will have adjusted your way of being in the world according to the belief that you are constantly visible, and so will regulate your own behaviour by becoming both the observer and the observed. Power over you will function automatically, and corrupt your sense of autonomy.

This dynamic operates whether the surveillance is within the family, or imposed by the State or religions. “God is watching you” has a determining effect on how someone behaves if they believe there is a god who wants to keep them under constant surveillance. In families where boundaries aren’t respected a child or partner can be subjected to surveillance that intrudes upon their sense of independence, and they often self-regulate to accommodate the demands of the more powerful parent or partner, and not according to their own wishes.

Of course as Foucault also pointed out, where there is power there is also resistance, and humans tend to resist external control, but the point is, why should we have to when the will to control originates in the democratic State?

With the proposed new legislation, law enforcement agencies will access without a warrant information about where you have been on your phone and your Internet. They will know who you’ve emailed and when, but not the content of the email. They will know who you’ve sent texts to and when, but not the content of the text. If you get drunk and text your ex they will know where you were when you did it, and how many times. The government believes it is reasonable for it to gather such information about every single one of its citizens, because that is the way it will protect us from terrorism, crime, and pedophiles.

If the only way the State can combat terrorism, crime and pedophilia is to subject every one of its citizens to constant surveillance, then the State is incompetent. It is reckless to trust any government to that extent, but this one?

The State is presuming all its citizens to be guilty until proven innocent, and demanding by law that we relinquish our individual privacy for the government’s perception of the common good.  This trade-off between freedom and protection is a false dichotomy, and one that conceals the totalitarian impulses born of power exercised without due concern for citizens’ rights.

Not only will Abbott refuse people who might be a threat to Australia the “benefit of the doubt,” he’s denying every one of us the benefit of the doubt.

Actually, I have no idea what he means about denying potential security threats the benefit of the doubt, and I don’t think he has either.

You cannot argue that it is necessary to surveil everyone  in order to ensure our safety, or to control everyone in order to control those who would do harm. That is a ludicrous position to take. So what does the government want with all this information on all of its citizens?

Surveillance is never neutral. It is never innocent. It presumes potential deviance, according to the watchers’ definitions of that term, and if it happens with our meta data, it will change the way we think about ourselves, and live our daily lives.

 

 

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