I'LL BE WATCHING YOU: REFLECTIONS ON THE NEW SURVEILLANCE
Marx, Gary
Popular culture is sometimes far ahead of academic analysis in identifying important social currents. This is true of the hit song Every Breath You Take, sung by a celebrated rock group known as...
...odor, pressure, and contraband sensors...
...Such agreement is unusual and suggests that copying occurred...
...With a more repressive government and a more intolerant public?\perhaps upset over severe economic downturns, large waves of immigration, social dislocations, or foreign policy setbacks?\these devices could easily be used against those with the "wrong" political beliefs, against racial, ethnic, or religious minorities, and those with life styles that offend the majority...
...THE REAL ACTION, in the future, will be with nonhuman informers: a 400-pound, bulletproof mobile robot "guard" has been developed...
...Retinal patterns are said to be more individual than thumbprints, offering greater certainty of identification...
...The agency is beyond the usual judicial and legislative controls and can disseminate its information to other government agencies without a warrant.' The 1968 wiretap law makes it a felony for a third party to place an electronic listening 27 device on a telephone or in a room...
...The increased number of watchers (whether human or electronic) and self-monitoring devices have recreated, in today's metropolis, some of the dense controls characteristic of the small, closely watched village...
...WeTiP, Inc., a nonprofit organization, offers a general, nationwide 24-hour toll-free hot line for reporting suspicious activities...
...Information can be converted into a form that makes it portable, easily reproducible, and transferable across vast distances...
...everyone is also a potential watcher...
...Another "mobile robotic sentry," resembling a miniature tank, patrols an area and identifies intruders...
...Amber or mirrored surfaces hide where the cameras are aimed...
...its records can easily be stored, retrieved, combined, analyzed, and communicated...
...Congress, Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, 98th Congress, Second Session, Report: FBI Undercover Operations (Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1984...
...Many basic facts about the computerization of credit, banking, medical, educational, employment, tax, welfare, telephone, and criminaljustice records are well known...
...6 Broad new categories of persons and behavior have become subjects for information collection and analysis, and as the pool of persons watched expands, so does the pool of watchers...
...To MENTION, BRIEFLY, some other, major negative aspects of the new surveillance: It may violate the spirit of the Fourth Amendment...
...Thus data sharing, on an immense scale, becomes possible...
...Another surveillance use of the telephone involves the expansion of hot lines for anonymous reporting...
...3, pp...
...In the mid-1970s the FBI began using undercover agents in criminal investigations...
...At this point, less than one state in five has laws requiring binding standards for the collection, maintenance, and dissemination of personal information...
...There also is a danger of presumption of guilt by association or statistical artifact...
...Alcohol intake can be assessed without a suspect's consent, and voice stress analysis administered without the subject's awareness...
...The information-gathering powers of the state and private organizations are extending ever deeper into the social fabric...
...citizens' increased feeling of safety when video surveillance is installed...
...Mini-Awacs" and satellites that can spot a car or a person from 30,000 feet up have been used for surveillance of drug traffickers...
...The camera, the tape recorder, the identity card, the metal detector, the obligatory tax form that must be filled out even if one has no income, and, of course, the computer make all who come within their province reasonable targets for surveillance...
...I shall attempt here to (1) describe some of the major types of this new surveillance...
...Technical impossibility and, to some extent, inefficiency have lost their roles as unplanned protectors of liberty...
...phony cases entered into the criminal-justice system to test if prosecutors and judges would accept bribes...
...Employees may be required to carry an ID card with a magnetic stripe and check in and out as they go to various "stations...
...The potential for harm may be so great, should social conditions change, that we must hesitate before creating even apparently justified surveillance systems (such as linkages between all federal and state data banks, or a mandatory national identification system...
...My point is not to advance some romantic neo-Luddite world view, or to deny the complexity of the moral judgments and trade-offs 31 involved...
...Although the causes, nature, and consequences of the various new surveillance methods I have described differ from each other, they do share, to varying degrees, nine characteristics that distinguish them from traditional ones...
...From this song we can draw hints of what can be called "the new surveillance...
...5) One of its major concerns is the prevention of violations...
...Yet more is at stake than privacy...
...The robot can find its way through a strange building...
...The most desirable support of our individual privacy and autonomy surely is public awareness...
...agents acting as guides for big game hunters and then arresting them for killing protected species or animals out of season...
...Chemical analysis, which can detect drugs in a person's body, cannot determine how they got there?\if a person, for instance, smoked marijuana or simply was around others who did?\or whether a drug was taken on or off the job...
...Among the new techniques that permit intrusions that only recently were in the realm of science fiction, or not even envisioned there, are new or improved lasers, parabolic mikes and other bugs with still more powerful transmitters, subminiature tape recorders, remotecamera and videotape systems...
...and into the inner intellectual, emotional, and physical regions of the individual...
...All 19 federal inspectorgenerals and some state and local agencies have hot lines for receiving allegations...
...And, because of the technical nature of the surveillance and its distancing aspects, the accused may (at least initially) be unable to face the accuser...
...Often, clues are sought that will increase the probability of discovering violations...
...Computer matching, for instance, can be no better than the data it is fed, which may be dated or wrong, and is often blunt and acontextual...
...Conformity and uniformity may increase?\squashing diversity, innovation, and vitality...
...The interior of many stores is monitored by closedcircuit TV...
...Stirring examples of its effectiveness are readily available...
...The radio signal it emits is picked up by a receiver connected to the telephone in the wearer's home...
...A number of distinct data items are correlated in order to assess how close an event or person comes to a predetermined model of known violations or violators...
...Sound and video can be transmitted over vast distances, infrared and light-amplifying technologies pierce the dark, intrusive technologies can "see" through doors, suitcases, fog...
...Thus control is extended to ever more features of society and its surroundings...
...Surveillance is decentralized in the sense that national data resources are available to widely dispersed local officials...
...Some of these, ironically, will rely in part on products of the system's technologies (such as coded or scrambled communications, antiradar and debugging devices...
...With much of the new technology, however, many of these simply cease to be barriers...
...5 When stored, it is available for instant analysis many years after the fact and in totally different interpretive contexts...
...In the technical implementation of Kafka's nightmare, modern society suspects everyone...
...It is equipped with a sonar range finder, sonic and infrared sensors, and an odor detector for locating humans...
...339-63...
...Or, in Stan Cohen's imagery, the mesh of the fishing net has not only become finer and more pliable, the net itself now is wider...
...Many issues?\such as privacy, civil liberties, uses of and control over information, unauthorized access, errors, and the rights of the person about whom information is gathered?are raised by the computer-matching and -profiling operations that have come into increased prominence in the last decade.' Matching involves the comparison of information from two or more distinct data sources...
...Telephone voice communications will increasingly be sent this way...
...Aside from the annoyance factor, the somewhat "personalized" yet standardized word-processed solicitations can leave one asking "How do they know this about me...
...the saving of taxpayers' dollars because of computer-matching programs...
...Making the means of anonymous denunciation easily available can lead to false and malicious accusations, and efforts to create a "myth of surveillance" may backfire and create a degree of inhibition, fear, and anxiety unbecoming a democratic society...
...serious crimes have been solved as a result of tips received on hot lines...
...The last decade has seen the increased use of supposedly scientific "inference" or "personal truth technology" based on body clues (such as the polygraph, voice stress analysis, the stomach pump, the "passive alcohol detector," and blood or urine analysis for drugs...
...We are also witnessing an expansion and joining of intensive forms of monitoring traditionally used only in the investigation and surveillance of criminal and espionage suspects, or prisoners, with the more shallow forms of categorical monitoring directed at broad populations...
...Technology, however, has gradually made these intrusions easier...
...Because these are often subtle, indirect, invisible, diffuse and deceptive and shrouded in benign justifications, this is clearly the more difficult task...
...The monitor need not literally be attending at the instant of transmission to be able to use it...
...Even if laws were to be passed granting this information the same protection as voice conversations, the information can easily be picked up without leaving a trace by anyone with even modest snooping equipment...
...The judge receives a daily copy of the printout, and any errant behavior must be explained...
...The issue, instead, is, Should the system be there to begin with?' Once these new surveillance systems are institutionalized and taken for granted in a democratic society, they can be used for harmful ends...
...Many of the points that follow relate to these economic changes that facilitate expanded surveillance...
...What the computer did not know was that the money was held in trust for a local funeral director, to be used for her burial expenses...
...Not only might anyone be watched...
...From this perspective, framing the policy debate around how to reform such systems is misguided...
...For it can trigger fishing expeditions and searches where there is no specific evidence of wrongdoing...
...David Burnham, The Rise of the Computer State (New York: Random House, 1983) offers a useful discussion of this and other salient themes...
...A statistical review had "found close agreement of your answers with those on another answer sheet from the same test center...
...Students were told that in two weeks their scores would be canceled and colleges notified, unless they provided "additional information" to prove they had not cheated...
...In some major American corporations communication flows (memo circulation, use of internal phone systems) now are closely tracked...
...The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning, but without understanding.?‹ The first task of a society that would have liberty and privacy is to guard against the misuse of physical coercion by the state and private parties...
...As a result of recent technical developments, more than half of all long-distance telephone calls are now transmitted from point to point in digital form and then converted back to a familiar voice sound...
...In the past, the FBI viewed undercover operations as too risky and costly (for both individuals and the agency's reputation) for use in routine investigations of conventional criminal activity...
...It has become much less expensive per unit watched, because technical developments have dramatically altered the economics of surveillance...
...Mass surveillance has become a reality...
...tracking devices and voice stress analyzers...
...U.S., 277 U.S...
...Consider the following examples: ?E A Massachusetts nursing-home resident lost her eligibility for government medical assistance because of a match of bank and welfare records...
...Employee theft of expensive components or tools may be deterred by embedded sensors that emit a signal when taken through a barrier...
...it makes many of the constraints that made privacy possible irrelevant...
...29 The New Surveillance: (1) It transcends distance, darkness, and physical barriers...
...These examples?\and we could add many more?\surely make clear that it is a new ball game, and that its players are sometimes beyond meaningful restraint...
...Thus it becomes ever more difficult to ascertain when and whether or not we are being watched and who is doing the watching...
...Some Issues Raised by the New Police Undercover Work," Crime and Delinquency, April 1982...
...Previously unconnected surveillance threads now are woven into gigantic tapestries of information...
...Unlike the infrared devices developed earlier, it does not give off a tell-tale glow...
...I Some of fiction's imaginary surveillance technology, like the two-way television that George Orwell described, is now reality...
...According to some observers, video-telephone communication is likely to be widespread in private homes by the year 2000...
...While deterring or discovering some offenders, the routinization of surveillance, ironically, may grant an almost guaranteed means for successful violations and theft to those who gain knowledge of the system and take action to neutralize and exploit it...
...The new surveillance goes beyond merely invading privacy, as this term has been understood...
...tax agents stationed in banks and businesses posing as prospective buyers or clients to gain information...
...Such devices, along with new organizational forms based on theories of diversion and deinstitutionalization (such as halfway houses and community treatment centers), diffuse the surveillance of the prison into the community...
...2) It transcends time...
...K. Krajick, "Electronic Surveillance Makes a Comeback," Police Magazine, March 1983...
...To be sure, we are far from such a society, but the direction in which the new surveillance points is clear...
...The negative aspects of these new trends have not received sufficient attention...
...Organizational memories are extended over time and across space...
...But beyond the increased amount of information they make available, computers have altered the very nature of surveillance...
...It does have many attractive features...
...There is no escape from the prying eyes and ears and whirring data-processing machines of government and business...
...In the U.S., a parking meter has recently been patented that registers inserted coins and then radios police when the time has run out...
...There are also radio and newspaper versions...
...Some of the positive anonymity involving the right to be left alone and unnoticed, so characteristic of modern society, is diminished...
...E See, for example, G. Marx and N. Reichman, "Routinizing the Discovery of Secrets: Computers as Informants," American Behavioral Scientist, March 1984...
...There is no longer the need to enter a room surreptitiously to plant a bugging device, when a microphone aimed at a window a hundred yards away can accomplish the same end...
...Who are they...
...The "starlight scope" light amplifier, developed for the Vietnam War, can be used with a variety of cameras and binoculars...
...Yet this law refers only to aurally transmitted "conversations...
...One need not be a Franz Kafka character to feel uneasy...
...Computer records, video and audio tapes and discs, photos, and various "signatures"?like workers or parts used in mass production?\have become increasingly standardized and interchangeable...
...Like drilling technology boring ever deeper into the earth, today's surveillance can prod ever deeper into physical, social, and personal areas...
...A citizen's ability to evade this surveillance is diminishing...
...E See, for example, the thoughtful discussion in J. Rule, D. McAdam, L. Stearns, and D. Uglow, The Politics of Privacy (New York: New American Library, 1980...
...For example, see G. Marx, "Who Really Gets Stung...
...The proliferation of the new techniques may create a lowest-denominator morality, which may even affect those who will actively protect privacy and autonomy, who thus will useindiscriminately?the very tactics of those who seek to lessen them.' The new surveillance increases the power of large organizations (whether governmental or private) over the individual...
...another is the direct triggering of surveillance systems by its subjects when, for instance, a person walks, talks on the telephone, turns on a TV set, checks a book out from the library, enters or leaves a controlled area...
...Surveillance information can be "socially freeze-dried...
...If the wearer goes beyond 150 feet from this telephone or tries to remove or unplug the device, the interruption of the signal is displayed on the computer...
...Where violations cannot be prevented, the surroundings may be so structured that violators are either caught in the act or leave strong evidence of their identity and guilt...
...Problems concerning errors, data tampering and misuse can be lessened by government legislation and policies, good program design and sensitive and intelligent management...
...After over a decade of discussion, telemetric devices are now being tried in the criminaljustice system...
...III The new surveillance has been generally welcomed by those in business, government, and law enforcement...
...For example, the life of an elderly heart-attack victim who lived alone was saved when her failure to open the refrigerator sent an alarm through her telephone to a centralized monitor...
...A small radio receiver in the car picks up low-frequency signals from wire loops set into streets and then transmits back the car's identification number...
...Factory outputs and mistakes can be more easily counted and work pace, to a degree, controlled...
...perform before an unknown audience...
...through closed doors...
...Record surveillance is routinized, broadened and deepened, and, for practical purposes, records become eternal...
...The number of such investigations has steadily increased from 53 in 1977, to 239 in 1979, to 463 in 1981...
...In 1982 it sent out about 2,000 form letters alleging "copying" to takers of its scholastic aptitude test based partly on computer analysis...
...It says nothing about nonvoice and video communications...
...But not to worry...
...Profiling involves an indirect and inductive logic...
...Truth-seeking technologies claim to be capable of going beneath surface reality to deeper, subterranean truths...
...But as Justice Brandeis warned: Experience should teach us to be most on our guard when the government's purposes are beneficent...
...E In New York City, because of computer matching, persons cannot purchase a marriage license or register a deed for a new home if they have outstanding parking tickets...
...To participate in the consumer society and the welfare state, we must provide personal information...
...Integrated "management systems" offer visual, audio, and digital information about the behavior of employees and customers...
...The system's focus on prevention can entail the risk of sparking violations that would otherwise not occur...
...The issues here go far beyond criminal records and faulty computer banks...
...It "sees" into the body?\and attempts to "see" into the soul, claiming to go beneath ostensible meanings and appearances to real meanings...
...7) It either has low visibility or is invisible...
...Ready for use?\or misuse...
...Much has been written about the electronic office, where the dataprocessing machine serves both as a work tool and monitoring device...
...There is a distancing (both socially and geographically) between watchers and watched, and surveillance is increasingly depersonalized...
...Traditionally, privacy depended on certain technically or socially inviolate physical, spatial, or temporal barriers?\varying from distance to darkness to doors, to the right to remain silent...
...As many observers have noted, the historic barriers to the old, Leviathan state lay in the sheer physical impossibility of extending the rulers' ideas and surveillance to the outer regions of vast empires...
...Many companies maintain an internal hot line for anonymous reporting...
...The surveillance component of social control is changing radically...
...Its computer system permits simultaneous monitoring of about 54,000 telephone calls and cables...
...In some offices, workers have to inform the computer when they are going to the bathroom and when they return...
...E The Educational Testing Service uses profiling to help discover cheating...
...The video equivalent of the old reward posters, a program found in hundreds of communities, is called Crime Stoppers USA, Inc...
...And the creation of uncertainty about whether or not surveillance is present is an important strategic element...
...The Hong Kong government is testing an electronic system for monitoring where, when, and how fast a car is driven...
...The new, softer forms of control are helping to create a society in which people are permanently under suspicion and surveillance...
...When it amplifies light 85,000 times it turns night settings into daylight...
...This receiver relays the signal to a central computer...
...What of Privacy & Autonomy...
...Much computer information is also sent via microwaves...
...Rather than simply reacting to what is served up around us, anticipatory strategies seek to reduce risk and uncertainty...
...Telemetric devices attached to a subject use radio waves to transmit information on the location and/or physiological condition of the wearer and permit continuous remote measurement and control...
...The new devices and techniques have enabled police and federal agencies to penetrate criminal, and sometimes noncriminal, milieus in utterly new ways.' In the United States, the federal agency that is most affected is the Federal Bureau of Investigation...
...Requests for parts of one's personal biography (for birth, marriage, and death certificates, driver's licenses, vehicle and voter registration, information for phone, occupational, educational, and special-interest directories) are invitations to comply with more finely tuned manipulative efforts by a new breed of government and marketing researchers, who combine the enormous quantities of available data with the advantages of computerization...
...Before gaining access, or a benefit, a person's eyes are photographed through a set of binoculars, and an enlarged print of the retina pattern is compared to a previous print on file...
...Contrast this with traditional wire-tapping, which changes electrical currents, or hidden voice analysis with the traditional polygraph, which requires the subject's cooperation...
...In other proposed systems subjects are not restricted to their residence...
...Indeed, Americans seem increasingly willing, even eager, to live with intrusive technologies because of the benefits they expect to result...
...or if it is, "there will always be a human requirement in the loop...
...It contains these lines: every breath you take [breath analyzer] every move you make [motion detector] every bond you break [polygraph] every step you take [electronic anklet] every single day [continuous monitoring] every word you say [bugs, wiretaps, mikes] every night you stay . . . [light amplifier] every vow you break .. . [voice stress analysis] every smile you fake [brain wave analysis] every claim you stake . . .[computer matching] I'll be watching you [video surveillance...
...The gigantic data banks made possible by computers raise important surveillance questions...
...Information is easily sent back to a central source...
...One of the largest programs is TIP (Turn-in-a-Pusher...
...FINALLY, UNDERCOVER PRACTICES?\those old, traditional means of surveillance and investigation?have drastically changed in form and expanded in scale during the last decade...
...In the United States, more than 500 26 computer-matching programs are routinely carried out by government at state and federal levels, and the matching done by private interests is far more extensive...
...Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evilminded rulers...
...Information may be recorded from cash-register entries, voices, motion, or when standing on a mat with a sensor...
...This overabundance of violations in turn may lead to the misuse of prosecutorial discretion, the demoralization of control agents and, perhaps, to favoritism and corruption...
...The awesome power of the new surveillance lies in the paradoxical, never before possible combination of decentralized and centralized forms...
...One large company offers a "secret-connection briefcase," which among other things includes a "pocket-sized tape-recorder detector that lets you know if someone is secretly recording your conversation," a "micro-minature hidden bug-detection system, which lets you know if you're being bugged," a "miniature voice stress analyzer, which lets you know when someone is lying," a "built-in scrambler for total telephone privacy," an "incredible 6-hour tape recorder?\so small it fits in a cigarette pack...
...8) It is ever more intensive?\probing beneath surfaces, discovering previously inaccessible information...
...The ethos of social control has expanded from focused and direct coercion used after the fact and against a particular target to anticipatory actions entailing deception, manipulation, planning, and a diffuse panoptic vision...
...As there is the possibility of locking in erroneous or sabotaged data, this may have the unintended consequence of permanent, unjust stigmatization...
...These highly diverse forms of detection have at least one thing in common?\they seek to verify an implicit or explicit claim put forth by an individual regarding identity, attitudes, and behavior...
...It can, of course, also be used to enforce speed limits and for surveillance...
...The highly secretive National Security Agency?\using 2,000 staffed interception posts throughout the world, and satellites, aircraft, and ships?\monitors all electronic communication from and to the United States...
...The easy computerbank combining and mining of vast publicly available data to yield precise lists (whether of suspects or targets for sales pitches and solicitations) generate a sense of vulnerability that is very different from the feeling experienced on receipt of junk mail addressed to "occupant...
...The second task is to guard against the softer forms of secret and manipulative control...
...33 Yet should totalitarianism ever come to the United States it would more likely be by accretion than by cataclysmic events...
...a corrupt judge was caught when he took a bribe from a police agent pretending to be a criminal...
...Surveillance of workers, whether on assembly lines or in offices or stores, has become much more severe with computerized electronic measures...
...The computer match discovered that she had more than the minimum amount welfare recipients are permitted in a savings account...
...As Michel Foucault observed, what is central here is not physical coercion?\but never-ending "judgments, examinations, and observation...
...The permanence and accessibility of computerized records mean that we are all tailed by electronic tale-bearers...
...And powerful new mechanisms may invite overloading the system...
...Individual freedom and liberty prosper when detailed information about a person's life, for the most part, is private...
...A large array of control and countercontrol devices, through mail-order catalogues and ads in major national periodicals, are now available for the mass market...
...Publicity about omnipresent and omnipowerful surveillance is to deter violations...
...means of seeing in the dark, detecting heat or motion...
...And, as our examples suggest, the new surveillance has the potential of fostering repression...
...Those watched become (willingly and knowingly or not) active participants in their own monitoring, which is often self-activated and automatic...
...E Olmstead vs...
...Far more violations may be uncovered and added to the data banks than can be acted upon...
...It uses televised reenactments ("The Crime of the Week") to encourage witnesses to unsolved crimes to come forward...
...3) consider some undesirable consequences of these changes...
...Thus persons may never cease paying for earlier, or never committed, misdeeds...
...E S. Cohen, "The Punitive City: Notes on the Dispersion of Social Control," Contemporary Crisis, 1979, no...
...As we disCussed, information becomes accessible without the need to resort to traditional coercive forms of intrusion...
...The camera is often inside a ceiling globe with complete 360-degree movement and the ability to tape-record...
...Without being opened, mail can be read, purses and briefcases viewed through X-rays or sniffed...
...Now, however, in the words of an agent, "Undercover operations have become the cutting edge of the FBI's efforts to ferret out concealed criminal activity...
...3) It is capital- rather than labor-intensive...
...This suggests that, over time, it seems likely that many of these systems will disproportionately net the marginal, amateur, occasional violator rather than the master criminal...
...How did they find this out...
...The fragmentation and isolation characteristic of totalitarian societies result not only from the state's banning or absorption of private organizations, but because individuals mistrust each other and organizations: trust, the most sacred and important element of the social bond, is damaged...
...Yet in our eagerness to innovate and our infatuation with technical progress and the gimmickry of surveillance, it is easy to miss the time bombs that may be embedded therein...
...To apply for a job may mean having to face lie-detector questioning about intimate details of one's life...
...Supreme Court] 438 (1927...
...The power of national elites, in turn, may also increase as they obtain instant information on those in the farthest reaches of the network...
...One aspect of this process is that 30 persons are motivated to report themselves to government agencies and large organizations and corporations in return for some benefit or to avoid a penalty...
...As records of education, work, health, housing, civil suits, and the like become ever more important in administering the society, persons may decline needed services (as for mental health), avoid conflictual or controversial action (filing a grievance against a boss or a landlord), shun taking risks and experimenting for fear of what it will look like on the record...
...6) It is decentralized?\and triggers selfpolicing...
...Its instruments are often difficult to discover, either because they are something other than they appear to be or, as with snooping into microwave transmissions, there often are few indications of surveillance...
...E J. Bramford, The Puzzle Palace (New York: Penguin Books, 1983...
...The system is, invariably, less effective and certain, and more subject to manipulation and error, than advocates admit...
...The radio signal is fed into a modified missile-tracking device that graphs the wearer's location and can display it on a screen...
...2) indicate how contemporary forms differ from traditional ones...
...One-way video surveillance has expanded rapidly, as anyone who ventures into a shopping mall or uses an electronic bank teller should realize...
...9) It grows ever more extensive?\covering not only deeper, but larger areas...
...Surveillance has become penetrating and intrusive in ways that previously were imagined only in fiction...
...Bits of scattered information that in the past did not threaten the individual's privacy and anonymity are now joined...
...Regulations exempt burial contracts from asset calculations...
...E See, for example, G. Goodwin and L. Humphreys, "Freeze-Dried Stigma: Cybernetics and Social Control," Humanity and Society, November 1982...
...Voluntary participation, beneficent rationales, changes in cultural definition and language hide the onerous aspects of the new surveillance...
...Economy is further enhanced because persons have become voluntary and involuntary consumers of much of this surveillance?\and are participating in their own monitoring...
...The manufacturer assures us that in the U.S...
...Government agents can do this only under strictly defined conditions with a warrant...
...Furthermore, in a free-market economy, some surveillance can be neutralized (by, for instance, the proliferation of antiradar, debugging, and encryption devices...
...In some police departments, an automatic car-locator system has been tried to help supervisors know exactly where patrol cars are at all times...
...Productivity and employee behavior thus are carefully watched, and even executives are not exempt...
...Everyone is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent...
...There also are various hidden beepers that can be attached to vehicles and other objects to trace their movements...
...however, their whereabouts are continuously known...
...Users can choose the robot's weaponry and whether or not human permission (from a remote monitoring station) is needed before it opens fire...
...when microwave phone and computer transmissions can simply be plucked from the air without bothering with direct wire-tapping...
...To invade privacy required crossing an intact barrier...
...This is true of the hit song Every Breath You Take, sung by a celebrated rock group known as The Police...
...The system was presented as an efficient means for applying a road tax to the many cars 28 in Hong Kong's concentrated traffic areas...
...What else do they know...
...It hears whispers, penetrates clouds, walls, and windows...
...Thus it might transform the presumption of innocence into one of guilt?\shifting the burden of proof from the state to the target of surveillance, the accused...
...The rationalization of crime control, which began in the 19th century, has crossed a critical threshold as a result of broad changes in technology and social organization...
...The legal basis of some of the new 32 surveillance's crime-prevention actions is also questionable...
...Should it encounter an intruder, it can say in a stern, synthesized voice, "You have been detected...
...The CIA has apparently used satellite photographs for "domestic coverage" to determine the size and activities of antiwar demonstrations and civil disorders...
...To venture into a shopping mall, bank, subway, sometimes even a bathroom, is to...
...As Sinclair Lewis argued in It Can't Happen Here, it would come in traditional American guise, with the gradual erosion of liberties...
...Observations have a more textured, dimensional quality...
...see also U.S...
...Thus one new employee securitychecking procedure involves retinal eye patterns...
...bait sales" in which undercover agents offer to sell, at a very low price, allegedly stolen goods to merchants or persons they meet in bars...
...the device will not be "armed with lethal weapons...
...There is nowhere to run or to hide...
...A few persons can monitor a great many things (in contrast to traditional forms, such as the gumshoe tailing a suspect at a discreet distance for many days or manually searching records...
...No restrictions are placed on the interception of information transmitted in digital microwave form...
...And "target hardening" (for instance, better locks) is to make committing violations more difficult...
...In contrast to the trend of the last century, information can now in principle flow as freely from the center to society's periphery as the reverse...
...Audiovisual recordings and alarms may be programmed to respond to a large number of "triggering devices...
...Notes This article is drawn from a longer paper available from the author prepared for meetings on George Orwell held by the Council of Europe and the American Sociological Association...
...4) It triggers a shift from targeting a specific suspect?\to categorical suspicion...
...Rather than focusing on the discrete individual at one point in time and on static demographic data such as date of birth, surveillance increasingly involves more complex transactional analysis, interrelating persons and events (for instance, the timing of phone calls, travel, bank deposits).' A thriving new computer-based, data-scavenging industry now sells information gleaned from such sources as drivers' licenses, vehicleand voter-registration lists, birth, marriage, and death certificates, land deeds, telephone and organizational directories, and censustract records...
...IN THE FACE OF THESE CHANGES, we must rethink the nature of privacy and create new supports for it...
...Beyond well-known cases?\such as Abscam, the fake consulting firm run jointly by IBM and the FBI that sold "stolen" data to Japanese companies, the John DeLorean case, police posing as derelicts with exposed wallets or as fences purchasing stolen property?\recent cases have involved policewomen posing as prostitutes and then arresting the men who propositioned them...
...Means of personal identification have gone far beyond the rather easily faked signature or photo ID...
...Consider also the ease of obtaining consumer goods with a credit card...
...Congress, Select Committee to Study Undercover Activities of Components of the Department of Justice, 97th Congress, Second Session, Final Report, December 1982 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1982...
...Offenders in at least four experimental jurisdictions are serving court-supervised sentences that stipulate wearing a monitoring anklet containing an electronic transmitter...
Vol. 32 • January 1985 • No. 1
