Henry Giroux has made some interesting arguments about shifting the terrain on which the struggle for privacy is carried out, onto a more outrightly political terrain. According to Giroux, recent resistance strategies to the surveillance state have individualised the problem by reducing it to a struggle for privacy. He argues that this approach is limited, in that it fails to address the bigger context in which the surveillance state is expanding, which is the growth in the exercise of arbitrary power. To this extent, the surveillance state is linked intimately to other techniques to increase social control, such as the militarisation of policing, the arrest and harassment of activists, the stretching of the definition of terrorism to include acts of political dissent, and the growing use of prisons to control marginalised social groups, who are disproportionately working-class and black. Citing Ariel Dorfman, Giroux argues that surveillance is about increasing power and control, and not just about violating privacy. He also argues that resistance must move beyond resistance to surveillance as such, and be channelled into the building of popular movements that have the capacity to engage in collective struggles to challenge abuses of power and, ultimately, change how power is organised in society. This may well include the establishment of an anti-capitalist party, which politicises surveillance as a systemic feature of neoliberal capitalism, and which organises to end a system that has come to rely so heavily on surveillance to achieve social control of increasingly restive populations.62
Another theorist who has grappled with how to conceptualise privacy from a Marxist perspective is Christian Fuchs. According to Fuchs, while it is important to defend privacy as a negative right, an alternative conception of privacy also needs to recognise the relations between privacy and private property, such as the use of the right to prevent the release of personal information revealing income differentials and prevent abuses of power. In order to understand these relations, Fuchs argues that it is necessary to consider privacy as a historical concept linked to the separation of social life into public and private realms. The private realm has become a realm of leisure and consumption, which creates demand for more goods and services and allows for a more effective reproduction of labour. Based as it is on liberal underpinnings, the dominant conception of privacy is highly individualistic. In order to develop the radical content of privacy, it is necessary to reconceptualise it as the right to resist surveillance by dominant groups, thereby strengthening the collective strength of subaltern groups. But in order to do so, privacy activists must emphasise the privacy rights of those at the bottom of the power structure, and they should not allow those who exercise power to conceal themselves.63
CONCLUSION: DEFINING SURVEILLANCE AND PRIVACY
Based on this foregoing discussion, my working definition of surveillance is the collection and analysis of information and the accessing of a person’s physical characteristics for the purposes of social control. Other forms of information collection and storage do not, to my mind, qualify as surveillance. Separating out these two practices is important, as it allows a more focused analysis of the problem, which is necessary for the development of appropriate resistance strategies.
When it comes to defining privacy, Fuchs’s orientation towards those aspects of privacy that allow workers, the unemployed and other subaltern groups to exercise their agency and gain social power is important, as it provides a conceptual basis for developing strategies and tactics for effective resistance, as these will move beyond addressing privacy violations as the end point of activists, to regarding them as problems epiphenomenal to a whole system of exploitation and oppression that needs to be changed if privacy is to be realised. Requiring privacy activism to occur within the context of an anti-capitalist party – as suggested by Giroux – is rather restrictive, and even dogmatic, as it prescribes the organisational form that struggles for privacy should take. Anti-capitalist parties are also few and far between in the current political period. Instead, these struggles should be waged wherever existing struggles against oppression and exploitation are taking place, and in the organisational forms that make the most sense to those engaged in them: in other words, privacy work should be ‘mainstreamed’ into these struggles. Privacy activists also need to identify the social forces that are most likely to challenge oppressive and exploitative systems successfully, and prioritise their collective efforts as the most important agents of change.
Is privacy dead? Resistance to surveillance after the Snowden disclosures
‘I think it’s important to recognise that you can’t have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience.’1 This was how US President Barack Obama responded to questions about the Snowden revelations of the NSA’s spying activities.2 Politicians have used the supposed trade-off between privacy and security as a means of legitimising privacy-invading national security measures, including communications surveillance. Never in modern world history have there been so many violations of the right to privacy. Yet, never in modern world history have there been so many privacy protections. How should this seeming contradiction be explained? This chapter will examine this issue and, in doing so, will consider the range of actors involved in resisting unaccountable surveillance, their organising concepts, strategies and tactics, and will ask whether they are ‘fit for purpose’.
THE FALL AND RISE OF MILITARY TECHNOLOGIES, PRACTICES AND LOGICS
Four per cent of companies which feature in Privacy International’s Surveillance Industry Index are also major arms producers, including BAE Systems (UK), Boeing (US) and Elbit Systems (Israel). Arms manufacturers have expanded into cybersecurity, which has proved to be a hugely lucrative area: a boon for companies that are seeing their profits decline due to governmental budget cuts on conventional arms.3 While the US ramped up its military spending in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, its withdrawal from ‘theatres of war’ like Iraq impacted negatively on arms manufacturers, as did the reduction in military spending of other governments in the wake of the 2008 global recession.4 In an attempt to adapt to this changing global situation, some of the major arms manufacturers increased their involvement in the lucrative and ever-expanding surveillance market. A case in point is BAE Systems, which expanded the intelligence and cybersecurity aspects of its business from the late 2000s onwards, acquiring existing businesses in this area. The company intensified this focus when it experienced declining revenues owing to the falling demand for conventional armaments.5 Arms manufacturer Lockheed Martin has expanded its activities to include providing intelligence-gathering and analysis capacities to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other US government agencies, and even to commercial retail giant Walmart to spy on critics of its corporate practices.6 The French company Thales, traditionally a conventional arms manufacturer, also branched out into the communications surveillance business, but it was less agile in creating much-needed local partnerships, which assisted other companies to develop local security solutions for country-specific needs, rather than expecting them to purchase off-the-shelf technology. Arms companies saw the partnership approach as essential for survival in ‘developing country’ contexts