We live in a surveillance society. It is pointless to talk about surveillance society in the future tense. In all the rich countries of the world everyday life is suffused with surveillance encounters, not merely from dawn to dusk but 24/7. Some encounters obtrude into the routine, like when we get a ticket for running a red light when no one was around but the camera. But the majority are now just part of the fabric of daily life. Unremarkable.
— “Report on the Surveillance Society”
Surveillance Studies Network, 2006

Everyone on the political spectrum — from free-market anarchists to totalitarians — has some vision of what is meant by the phrase, “surveillance society.” Is the idea of a surveillance society in today’s world “unremarkable?” Consider:

• The UK is now the world’s most watched country, having upwards of five million closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras keeping a watchful eye on the public, with the average citizen being caught on camera around 300 times per day.
• Upwards of 1.5 million automobiles can now be tracked and located anywhere in the United States — or in fact anywhere on Earth — using OnStar, General Motor’s onboard car-to-mobile-phone-network communications system.
• Telecom giant AT&T has allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to set up what could only be called a “spy room” on AT&T property to make routine monitoring of phone calls easier.
• Marijuana farmers in Wisconsin now must fear not only conventional law enforcement methods, but also the Internet. Satellite images from Google Earth — yes that Google Earth — have been used to locate farms and arrest farmers.
• The trend of one-to-one marketing has driven businesses to be more aggressive in both discovering and remembering facts about their customers. Firms like Donnelly Marketing, which keeps dossiers on over 90 percent of American households, collect and manage massive files regarding each family’s preferences in everything from pets to politics.
• Face-recognition software was successfully tested during Super Bowl XXXV in Tampa, Florida, with approximately 100,000 faces being scanned and identified. (Several law-breakers — mostly ticket scalpers — were noticed, but no arrests were made, since it was just a “dry run”!)
• The FBI, apparently unsatisfied with their success using data mining, is issuing so many National Security Letters (NSLs) — administrative subpoenas that require no probable cause while simultaneously precluding the recipient from ever disclosing that the letter was issued — that they plan to automate the process of tracking them.

Clearly this presents a challenge to a free society. That challenge stems from the imbalance in power between the state and the people where surveillance is concerned. That imbalance must be addressed if freedom is to be maintained.

Conflicting Views

The odds are pretty good that most people, when asked what that term means, would think of some image from the Will Smith movie, Enemy of the State, in which an innocent man is pursued relentlessly by a federal security apparatus employing the latest high-tech surveillance gadgetry. Many would agree, also, with the movie’s tagline, “It’s not paranoia if they really are after you.”

It does seem these days that “they” really are after “us.” The question is not whether or not a surveillance society will occur, particularly in Western societies like the United States and the United Kingdom. That horse is out of sight already. The question is more what the unavoidable ubiquity of surveillance will mean to the individual and the collective. The question is how society should deal — how society will deal — with routine, widespread, nearly constant surveillance, not just by government but by private entities as well, now that surveillance technology is quite clearly not only common but also here to stay.

But how much surveillance is too much? Such questions amount to quibbling over price. No one can prevent the proliferation of surveillance tech, and no one can preclude “bad people,” including some agents of the State, from also having it. That much is certain. Can freedom and privacy coexist with the surveillance society? Absolutely. However, one cannot determine the proper amount of surveillance by the government if one has already ceded the entire decision to that government.

Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?

So far, Americans seem to favor surveillance over privacy. For example, a recent survey by ABC News found that most Americans favor increased use of police surveillance cameras to “fight crime.” This, despite the fact that precious little data illustrates that cameras do anything to reduce crime. Indeed, despite the lack of real security benefits, publication of a single story illustrating that a heinous killer was caught via video can justify almost any infringement upon the privacy of ordinary citizens.

Security expert Bruce Schneier calls this effect, within the realm of surveillance psychology, the “availability heuristic.” Most people would rather all their deepest secrets be posted on the Internet tomorrow than have a psychopathic serial killer escape capture today, assuming that’s the trade-off. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. Today’s “I’ve got nothing to hide” can turn into tomorrow’s “but I didn’t know that was against the law!” That’s particularly the case when a government moves in the direction of imposing more and more laws and regulations on its citizens — denying the right to keep and bear arms, for instance.

While the bulk of the American public seems convinced that more surveillance is a good thing, both for safety and convenience, the technorati are not as uniform in their view. Schneier thinks legislation is the only methodology for curtailing, or at least somewhat stemming, the advance of surveillance and the corresponding loss of privacy. In a recent blog entry he says:

We’re never going to stop the march of technology, but we can enact legislation to protect our privacy: comprehensive laws regulating what can be done with personal information about us, and more privacy protection from the police. Today, personal information about you is not yours; it’s owned by the collector. There are laws protecting specific pieces of personal data — videotape rental records, health care information — but nothing like the broad privacy protection laws you find in European countries. That’s really the only solution; leaving the market to sort this out will result in even more invasive wholesale surveillance.

It is ironic that Schneier speaks of the protection available in European countries, given the number of times per day that a typical citizen of the UK is caught on camera. Another person worried about increased surveillance is author Naomi Wolfe. According to Wolfe’s The End of America, the United States is well on its way to becoming a fascist empire due to the fact that creating a surveillance society is one of the “Ten Steps to Fascism.” The Bush administration claims to have a legitimate reason for massive privacy infringement: protecting the U.S. public from the ever-present specter of terrorism, but are its arguments legitimate?

Surveillance and Power

The Bush administration (like many U.S. administrations before it) is enamored with monitoring ordinary citizens, under the guise of protecting the freedom of those they watch. The fact that their “improvements” in security have resulted in limited actual performance improvements is apparently lost in the shuffle. Is there anyone who believes that the privacy normal Americans have given up has directly precluded further terrorist attacks? Is there anyone — anyone — who actually believes that if a terrorist wanted to attack an arena, a stadium, a shopping center, or even an airport, that such an attack could not have taken place despite the so-called protections put in place after 9/11? From Future of Freedom Foundation columnist Anthony Gregory, we find this accurate commentary:

The real threat to American liberty, the defense of which the administration still insists is the purpose of the war on terror, is a federal government without strict checks and limits on its power, whose executives feel comfortable using the military to spy on peaceful Americans, while telling the media not to report their secret and unconstitutional surveillance activities. The use of a military intelligence agency against the American people, with or without judicial oversight, is far more a “shameful act” than reporting such activities to the American people, who have a right to know.

Clearly we have a right to know, but that point aside, the State is exactly the wrong organization to have the power of unfettered surveillance for other reasons. The tendency, nay the likelihood, that evil will flourish in a bureaucratic environment where risk can be externalized is unassailable. Bureaucracies are almost always inefficient. Bureaucracies are almost always wasteful. Bureaucracies are almost always caught somewhere between the Keystone Cops and the Three Stooges when their performance is measured.

If this assessment sounds too harsh, please consider who the real heroes of 9/11 were: they were the citizen-soldiers who attempted to stop the terrorists aboard United Airlines Flight 93; they were the local firemen and policemen who willingly and selflessly rushed into the doomed WTC towers; and they were the field FBI agents who reported important pieces of the 9/11 plans to their superiors in Washington, only to have the information ignored. The entity that failed most grossly to protect us on 9/11 was the Washington bureaucracy itself, and yet we are supposed to prevent future 9/11s by transferring more power to that bureaucracy?

The number of times airport security has been breached since the supposed improvements in airport security should put the myths to rest. The Seattle Times published a report of all the airport security breaches they had found between 2002 and 2004. The list was far from inconsequential, although the Times evidently stopped collecting reports after the number reached 100. According to the Times, “Screeners say that’s [only] a fraction of the incidents, and most are never disclosed.” The reported incidents included one instance when five DHS investigators posing as passengers managed to get knives, a gun and a bomb in their carry-on baggage through security checkpoints without being detected.

Clearly, the increase in state intrusion on the privacy of the citizen does not result in a net increase in the safety of that citizen from terrorist attack. But, if the State were more skilled, could surveillance be used to thwart some future terrorist attack? No. The reason: The basic mathematics of finding a needle in a haystack.

Says Institute for Political Economy Chairman Paul Craig Roberts from a 2006 column on libertarian website LewRockwell.com:

Floyd Rudmin, a professor at a Norwegian university, applie[d] the mathematics of conditional probability, known as Bayes’ Theorem, to demonstrate that the NSA’s surveillance cannot successfully detect terrorists unless both the percentage of terrorists in the population and the accuracy rate of their identification are far higher than they are. He correctly concludes that “NSA’s surveillance system is useless for finding terrorists.”

The mathematics mentioned absolutely prove that monitoring every phone call, every e-mail, and every instant message of every American will not result in a reduction of terrorist attacks. In fact, using the most generous estimates for both the number of terrorists in the U.S. population, and the NSA’s ability to find them, Rudmin concludes:

The probability that people are terrorists given that NSA’s system of surveillance identifies them as terrorists is only p=0.2308, which is far from one and well below flipping a coin. NSA’s domestic monitoring of everyone’s email and phone calls is useless for finding terrorists.

So while one would have to be incurably naïve to think the NSA will stop monitoring U.S. communications — something they’ve been doing for over 40 years — at least we know what this practice cannot accomplish, no matter what we are told. What can we do about it? Maybe those being watched can fight back. David Brin, scientist and best-selling author of science fiction novels, certainly thinks so. In his 2004 Salon piece, “Three cheers for the Surveillance Society!” he stated as much:

Swiss researcher Marc Langheinrich’s personal digital assistant application detects nearby sensors and then lists what kind of information they’re collecting. At a more radical and polemical level, there is the sousveillance movement, led by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann. Playing off “surveillance” (overlooking from above), Mann’s coined term suggests that we should all get in the habit of looking from below, proving that we are sovereign and alert citizens down here, not helpless sheep. Mann contends that private individuals will be empowered to do this by new senses, dramatically augmented by wearable electronic devices.

Columnist David Leo Veksler — webmaster at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank — suggested a strategy in a 2007 column:

There are a number of limitations of the power of the state. Foremost is that the same technologies that make ubiquitous surveillance possible also allow ubiquitous secrecy.... Government’s attempts at limiting the spread of encryption and introducing loopholes into encryption programs failed miserably because information is nearly impossible to contain in our connected world.

Veksler continues:

There’s no guarantee that life will remain private in the future. We can only be certain that the potential to communicate securely will grow along with the potential to monitor unsecured communications. If we value privacy, the tools will be there.

Adam Perenberg, technology columnist for Slate, agrees with Veksler. “Just because cameras are getting smaller, more powerful, and surveillance is becoming ubiquitous, that doesn’t necessarily mean Big Brother wins.” In fact, he’s on record suggesting that what all this powerful computation and image capture means is that anyone can turn the tables on the government.

If the experience of users of Google Earth in the UK is any indication — where they actually used a Google Earth plug-in to obtain the locations of speed cameras — surveillance tech can be used against the State just as successfully as it can be used by it. Perenberg and others may be correct, although the imbalance in power between the government and a typical citizen still needs to be considered.

Surveillance Psychology

Should we be hopeful or cautious? Should we be more convinced that the State will take away our anonymity or comforted by the fact that we can fight back? Should we be cowering in the corner, awestruck by the imbalance of power, or should we be laughing at the Beverly Hillbillies trying to master some new gadget? The answer lies someplace in between.

Some researchers, like Erving Goffman, conclude that surveillance can subconsciously coerce people, leading to docile, stay-below-the-radar behavior from those who are surveilled — meaning possibly fewer societal problems.

Such an acquiescent attitude might become common under constant surveillance. One could also argue that the urge to become famous, if even for a moment, will drive the type of semi-ludicrous behavior that is a staple of reality television in the population at large.

Brin describes the tendency to put these issues into “yes/no” terms as a devil’s dichotomy. It’s either “big brother is out to get us!” or “without complete transparency the terrorists will win!” Hogwash. When one allows a vibrant panorama of choices to be reduced to such an absurd and simplistic yes-or-no debate, he misses the point completely. The question of surveillance technology is more complicated than simply good or bad. It is entirely possible that increased surveillance can lead to positive results on occasion. Does that mean that everyone should just “roll over” and accept more invasive surveillance when the next terrorist attack is used to peel away more privacy? Of course not.

The real problem lies not with the nature of the technology itself, but with the way the technology is used. Most people have a tendency to blame the hammer when the nail goes in crooked. The gun-rights debate coined an interesting term, “It’s the criminals, stupid.” While falling prey to sloganeering is always a danger when analyzing such a complex issue, that sentiment remains solid.

Imagine what would happen if, in response to the development of better guns, we passed laws that attempted to control access to these firearms, laws that ultimately resulted in only two groups having those weapons: the State and the crooks. This would not prevent the technology, the guns in this case, from being misused. Instead, we’d just be left with large groups of people ripe for violence with no alternative. That place exists. In the United States it’s called the inner city.

The same analysis can be applied to the proliferation of surveillance tech, and the State’s tendency to abuse it, as can be applied to most other concerns about the State abusing its power: understand that the State, and our tendency to trust it and its agents too much, is the problem! When we lament the fact that some random person could wield the power of surveillance in an evil way, we must remember this fact: we’ve only got people. If we want to lessen the imbalance of power between those who rule and the ruled, the most viable option is having fewer rulers. The most viable option is a higher degree of self-government, and checks and balances throughout.

The imbalance in power can only be maintained or exacerbated if two things happen. One, if we allow those who rule us to take away the instruments by which our freedom can be maintained. Two, if we forget that we must require both responsibility and accountability of anyone who purports to protect us. Your safety and security has always been, and will always be, your responsibility. Let’s make sure we don’t forget that.

And for heaven’s sake, let’s keep watching the watchers. If we fail to do so, all the checks and balances built into the system — from the Fourth Amendment prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures to habeas corpus — will ultimately be totally lost along with freedom.

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Wilton D. Alston, a libertarian activist and writer, is a principal research scientist working in the field of transportation safety.