As is well known, war is good for economies, because it creates demand for armaments and industrial output more generally – an industrial strategy that has become known as ‘military Keynesianism’.8 However, what does a permanent warfare state do when the number of wars decline? It finds other markets by creating demand for related technologies. Surveillance is an excellent alternative. Wars involve bodies, which raises the cost of involvement in theatres of war, politically and socially. Ordinary citizens may begin to push back against warfare economies as the true human cost becomes visible. On the other hand, the lack of visible victims of surveillance makes it a much more difficult problem about which to raise public consciousness and, consequently, around which to organise. Small wonder that key arms-producing countries have begun to orientate their economies away from traditional industrial capitalism to what Robert McChesney and John Bellamy Foster have called surveillance capitalism, a form of capitalism that has new, distinct characteristics.9
These characteristics include the creation of huge but unstable financial surpluses, generated by financial speculation, which need to find investments but cannot turn to a favoured outlet like arms. Financialisation has also created a huge appetite for data, and these databanks themselves have offered new revenue streams to companies that can profile and target potential customers with products. More intense public–private collaboration in an industry that was traditionally dominated by governments cannot be underestimated as a key factor: as Snowden himself has observed, surveillance is the business model of the internet.10 This model has allowed unprecedented co-operation between communications companies and governments, as the former have the resources to develop and maintain huge databanks that the latter can plunder at will (at least until recently).11 The turning inward of military technologies, practices and logics through, for instance, police militarisation has also facilitated the expansion of the industry, as it has allowed governments and arms manufacturers to create new domestic markets for arms. But this expansion has required governments to blur distinctions between internal and external security, and to shift the way violence is organised in society.12 This shift would not be possible without a discursive reframing of who are considered to be ‘enemies’, which requires an expansion beyond the traditional targets of warfare (such as hostile countries) to non-traditional ones (such as internal populations that threaten existing social ‘orders’). These new state concerns have led to the importation of practices used in external intelligence-gathering, such as excessive secrecy, into internal policing. The nature of enemies has shifted – no longer are they whole nations, but fuzzier constituencies that are profiled as threats. Law enforcement concerns are being cast increasingly as national security concerns, which suggests that a less overtly violent and more disciplinary surveillance state is under construction.13 Forms of social control have shifted from who has the most tanks and guns to who has the most intelligence. These factors have created conditions for the development of an industrial base for surveillance, allowing for its rapid expansion and even universalisation.14
The increasingly powerful surveillance industry has a vested interest in keeping these new markets for its products alive, creating powerful commercial incentives to expand the trade in mass surveillance equipment. The possibility of losing massive public spending on weapons has established powerful incentives for manufacturers to shift production from military to civilian uses: hence the rise in the number of dual-use technologies. Producers of mass surveillance also play an important consultancy role for government, creating revolving doors between industry and government that are potentially replete with conflicts of interest:15 a case in point being former NSA director Mike McConnell, who later became vice chairman of Snowden’s former employer, Booz Allen Hamilton.16
Given the powerful forces at work in promoting the expansion of surveillance, individuals and organisations seeking to resist unaccountable surveillance are going to have a tough fight on their hands. They will need to have a deep understanding of the factors that have driven this expansion, a keen sense of how to create public awareness about the dangers, and highly developed advocacy skills to be able to mount an effective pushback. This chapter will explore some of the key strategies and tactics used by anti-surveillance activists, the underlying concepts they work with and the effectiveness of their activism.
CONTEMPORARY PRIVACY STRUGGLES: ACTORS, STRATEGIES AND TACTICS
Resistance to surveillance can take place at the individual and collective levels. At the individual level, tactics may range from more passive forms of resistance to more active ones. For instance, people can resist invasions of their right to privacy by engaging in what James C. Scott has termed everyday forms of resistance, where less well-organised, weaker and more peripheral citizens may use ‘foot-dragging, evasion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander and sabotage’ to express their discontent.17 When applied to the digital world, internet users may refuse to use privacy-invading applications or hardware, resist providing their voice prints or fingerprints to the authorities or ‘spoof’ fingerprints to fool biometric systems, provide no, false or misleading information, or refuse to register their subscriber information module (SIM) cards or register them under false names. For instance, in Mexico, a SIM card registration process was resisted by over seventeen million subscribers. In an act of civil disobedience, over five thousand people protested by subscribing their SIM cards under the name of the President.18
Increasingly, individual acts of resistance also include encrypting communications to make surveillance more difficult, using tools that anonymise browsing, such as TOR (software that allows users to browse anonymously on the internet), and not using company hardware or applications that take cavalier approaches to their users’ privacy. However, the use of these tools is purely voluntary and at the discretion of the individual, who may not have the technical knowledge to be able to use them or even know that they exist. While the relevant authorities may be irritated by these tactics, they are unlikely to result in substantive challenges to broader surveillant forms of governance, which would require more organised responses. Nevertheless, there are signs that more users are changing their communications practices in the wake of the Snowden revelations, with more people taking steps to hide their communications from the government.19
At the collective level, privacy advocacy has traditionally been based mainly in the US, where many of the well-funded groups are to be found (such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the EFF; the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC; and the American Civil Liberties Union, or the ACLU).20 The problem civil society faced in mounting organised opposition in the wake of the Snowden revelations was that while they could appeal to the internationally recognised right to privacy, they lacked clarity on what this right meant when applied to communications surveillance in the digital age. In an attempt to reach such clarity, they developed a set of thirteen principles called the International Principles on the Application of Human Rights to Communications Surveillance, otherwise known as the Necessary and Proportionate Principles. At their launch in 2013 at the UN Human Rights Council, over four hundred organisations worldwide endorsed them. The initiating organisations also broadened the range of anti-surveillance actors beyond those of the ‘usual suspects’, drawing support from organisations and individuals from around the world, although with a bias towards the US and Europe. While the signatories represented a broad range of actors, there was a clear bias towards media freedom and civil liberties organisations, as well as technology, digital rights and legal organisations and experts. The challenge this new movement faced was to translate this spurt of energy into an organised form and to sustain it.
The Principles were updated in 2014, to ensure that communications surveillance practices would adhere to international human rights law. The Principles state that any surveillance law needs to comply with the principle of legality, must serve a legitimate aim and be adequate for the fulfilment of this aim. It must also be necessary, proportional to the level of threat faced by a country and determined by a competent judicial authority following due process. Users have a right to be informed that their communications have been surveilled, and public oversight involving transparency must apply to communications surveillance. States should not compel communications service providers to build surveillance capacities into their systems, and they should also put in place safeguards against illegitimate access