A
citizenry that’s constantly on guard for secret, unaccountable
surveillance is one that’s constantly being remade along the lines the
state would prefer.
The logo of the National
Security Agency hangs at the Threat Operations Center inside the NSA in
the Washington suburb of Fort Meade, Maryland, on 25 January 2006.
June 10, 2013
|
The reaction to the National Security Agency (NSA)’s secret
online spying program, PRISM, has been polarized between seething
outrage and some variant on “what did you expect?” Some have gone so far
as to say this program
helps open the door to fascism, while others have downplayed it as in line with the way that
we already let corporations get ahold of our personal data.
That
second reaction illustrates precisely why this program is so troubling.
The more we accept perpetual government and corporate surveillance as
the norm, the more we change our actions and behavior to fit that
expectation — subtly but inexorably corrupting the liberal ideal that
each person should be free to live life as they choose without fear of
anyone else interfering with it.
Put differently, George Orwell
isn’t who you should be reading to understand the dangers inherent to
the NSA’s dragnet. You’d be better off turning to famous French social
theorist Michel Foucault.
The basic concern with the PRISM program
is that it is undoubtedly collecting information on significant numbers
of Americans, in secret, who may not have any real connection to the
case the Agency is pursuing. PRISM
sifts through tech
giants’ databases to cull information about suspected national security
threats. However, since it uses a 51 percent confidence threshold for
determining whether a target is foreign, and likely extends to
individuals that are “two degrees of separation” from the original
target, the chances are extraordinarily high that this program is spying
on a significant number of Americans.
A citizenry that’s
constantly on guard for secret, unaccountable surveillance is one that’s
constantly being remade along the lines the state would prefer. Foucault illustrated this point by reference to a hypothetical prison
called the Panopticon. Designed by utilitarian philosopher Jeremy
Bentham, the Panopticon is a prison where all cells can be seen from a
central tower shielded such that the guards can see out but the
prisoners can’t see in. The prisoners in the Panopticon could thus never
know whether they were being surveilled, meaning that they have to, if
they want to avoid running the risk of severe punishment, assume that
they were being watched at all times. Thus, the Panopticon functioned as
an effective tool of social control even when it wasn’t being staffed
by a single guard.
In his famous Discipline and Punish, Foucault
argues that we live in a world where the state exercises power in the
same fashion as the Panopticon’s guards. Foucault called it
“disciplinary power;” the basic idea is that the omnipresent fear of
being watched by the state or judged according to prevailing social
norms caused people to adjust the way they acted and even thought
without ever actually punished. People had become “self-regulating”
agents, people who “voluntarily” changed who they were to fit social and
political expectations without any need for actual coercion.
Online
privacy advocates have long worried that government surveillance
programs could end up disciplining internet users in precisely this
fashion. In 1997, the FBI began using something called Project
Carnivore, an online surveillance data tool designed to mimic
traditional wiretaps, but for email. However, because online information
is not like a phone number in several basic senses, Carnivore ended up
capturing far more information than it was intended to. It also had
virtually no oversight outside of the FBI.
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation
told Congress
in 2000, “Systems like Carnivore have the potential to turn into mass
surveillance systems that will harm our free and open society…Once
individuals realize that they have a lowered expectation of privacy on
the Net, they may not visit particular web sites that they may otherwise
have visited.” Writing in 2004, a group of scholars drew a straight
line from this analysis to Foucault’s theory of disciplinary power.
“Resembling the ever-present powers of the central watchtower in a
prison modeled after the Panopticon,” they
wrote “the
very fact that the FBI has the potential to monitor communications on a
website may lead Internet users to believe that they are constantly
being watched.”
We know now that this hypothetical fear about
Carnivore has become a reality, courtesy of the NSA. The more people
come to see mass online surveillance as a norm, rather than something
used only on specific subjects of investigation, the more they’ll tailor
their online habits to it. Since people understandably don’t want the
government looking at their private information, that’ll mean the
internet will over time slowly become less of a place for vibrant
self-expression. That should trouble anyone who believes that the best
society is one in which people are most free to be themselves in
whatever way they find most meaningful. In essence, that should trouble
anyone committed to the basic liberal project.
Foucault’s point
wasn’t that disciplinary power was intrinsically bad; the idea that, for
example, pedophiles might be deterred from accessing child pornography
for fear of state surveillance of child porn sites shouldn’t bother
anyone. Rather, Foucault warned, disciplinary power was dangerous — used
in certain fashions, it could be subtly corrosive of exactly the sorts
of freedoms of expression and self-identity that liberal democracies
purportedly protected absolutely. The NSA program, especially as its
breadth becomes clear, is exactly the sort of overreach his work should warn us against.
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