DEFINING SURVEILLANCE
Having explored briefly some of the key theoretical trends in surveillance studies, we can now attempt a definition of surveillance. Needless to say, as befits an increasingly complex field, there are competing definitions of the word. The most significant differences of opinion turn on whether surveillance is an inherently negative phenomenon, or whether a less judgemental or more neutral approach should be taken to defining it.32 Thomas Allmer has even divided scholars into two schools of thought on the ‘problem’ of surveillance: non-panoptic and panoptic.33 Proponents of the first approach have argued that surveillance can have positive benefits too. David Lyon has, for instance, identified watching over a child or taking care of a patient as positive examples of surveillance. Banks, too, put their customers under surveillance to identify suspicious transactions and prevent fraud. CCTV can be used to identify criminals and even deter crime. No one would argue that surveillance in these contexts is bad for democracy: on the contrary. In view of these examples and others, Lyon had defined surveillance as the many contexts in which information is gathered, stored and processed by a variety of state, commercial and administrative agencies.34
Others have supported Lyon’s view that surveillance is not inherently bad. For Gary Marx, for instance, surveillance is about having regard to a person or to factors presumed to be associated with a person; an individual may be subjected to non-strategic surveillance – where information is gathered about him or her on a routine basis – or to strategic surveillance, where information is gathered consciously for particular ends, often negative.35 Roger Clarke sees surveillance as the systematic monitoring of one or more persons through the collection of information about them, their activities and their associates.36 By using such broad definitions, these theorists lean towards arguing that surveillance is an inevitable feature of modern bureaucracies. In fact, the practice has existed to different extents since time immemorial. In other words, it is impossible to conceive of societies that do not involve surveillance, neither is it desirable to do so.
Proponents of the second approach include scholars from more critical traditions, including critical political economy and Marxism, who have argued that surveillance is an inherently negative phenomenon: that is, it is about the collection and analysis of information primarily for repressive purposes. As a result, surveillance must be rejected because it impedes human emancipation. They argue that to portray surveillance as a neutral phenomenon depoliticises the problem. This portrayal is made possible by the fact that non-surveillant theorists tend to expand their definitions to include forms of information collection that should not be understood as surveillance practices at all. However, not all scholars who think like this are necessarily political economists or Marxists; that is, they do not necessarily take their analyses further and relate them to broader questions of class domination and capitalism.37
One theorist who does is Christian Fuchs, a Marxist who argues that surveillance is linked inextricably to class domination, coercion and even violence. For him, an emancipated society must necessarily be a society that frees itself from surveillance: a struggle that should be linked inextricably to the struggle against capitalism and for socialism.38 Benign forms of information collection (such as the collection of information about a person’s heart rate to monitor that person’s health or the usage of smog or air pollution early warning detectors) cannot be considered as surveillance as they are geared towards providing social benefits.39 In response to assertions that surveillance can be (and is being) practised by a broader array of social actors – in other words, surveillance is being ‘democratised’ – Fuchs points out that the state and large corporations still dominate the surveillance terrain, which means that surveillance does actually manifest a panoptic character. In fact, the Snowden revelations pointed to a dangerous concentration of executive power. While surveillance technologies may have advanced and become cheaper and hence more accessible, to infer democratisation from these developments is technologically determinist and ignores questions of how capitalism’s unequal power relations continue to structure surveillance practices. While political and economic surveillance may appear to serve different purposes, ultimately their objectives converge on making citizens available for exploitation. The Snowden revelations have also shown how internet companies and the state collude to conduct mass surveillance, although their immediate interests may diverge at different moments in history. Fuchs considers the stretching of the definition of surveillance to include non-coercive information-gathering as dangerous, as it normalises surveillance, making it less possible to mount effective resistance to it, as even benign practices are included in its remit.40
THE RIGHT TO PRIVACY AS AN ORGANISING CONCEPT
Much of the resistance to surveillance has been couched in rights-based terms, and more specifically as a violation of the right to privacy. The Snowden revelations caused outrage while they were being drip-released, as they showed just how much privacy Americans, and in fact many other citizens, had lost. The revelations triggered a huge amount of activism in defence of human rights, especially privacy. However, notwithstanding the din of outrage, a growing number of citizens appear to have become resigned to the idea of a surveillance state, arguing that privacy has become impossible to achieve in an increasingly digitised era: a phenomenon that Linna Dencik and Jonathan Cable have termed ‘surveillance realism’. This adaptation to the ‘reality’ of surveillance has been much more apparent in the UK than in America or other European countries such as Germany, where thousands of people staged mass protests in the wake of the revelations.41 ‘Surveillance realism’ has also been driven by the fact that more public and private companies are storing highly sensitive personal information in databases and mining it for a range of different uses; in fact, it is becoming increasingly impossible to transact with many institutions without being willing to part with such information. Many give up their right to privacy by handing over huge swathes of personal information to private technology companies like Facebook and Google, which then quarry this data for commercially useful information. As a result, the challenge has moved far beyond state-based forms of control. Over-sharing of personal information online has become a habit, one that feeds the surveillance beast even more. The selfie has become the leitmotif of a generation of internet users obsessed with constructing self-regarding, even narcissistic, digital identities. These practices have come to form an integral part of what David Lyon has termed ‘surveillance culture’, where people have come to accept, and even be complicit in, the collection and analysis of information about themselves.42 Until activists understand how deeply surveillance is embedded in everyday meaning-making practices of more and more people, it will be difficult, even impossible, to develop effective resistance strategies. This is because these strategies tend to focus on the legal or political dimensions of surveillance, without addressing the pay-offs that people receive for making themselves more visible (such as satisfying their need for connectedness and recognition in a world where social fragmentation has become more of a reality), and what they can do to change these practices to lessen the potential for abuse of their data.43
Given the pervasiveness and seeming inevitability of surveillance, privacy sceptics have asked why, after all, one should worry about protecting privacy if one has not done anything wrong and has nothing to hide. The problem with this argument is that citizens will never know when they need the right to privacy. Privacy violations are also irreversible. Once something is known, it cannot be un-known. Change agents, such as political activists, are in particular need of the right to privacy, as they are more likely than most to challenge how power is organised in society. As a result, they are more likely to attract the wrath of the authorities, who may be very tempted to use the surveillance capacities of the state