Recently, law enforcement has unveiled a chilling tool in its search for perfect law and order: the camera. Many police agencies first began using cameras as a means for catching speeders. Automatically targeted radar guns mounted on overpasses would check the speed of passing vehicles; speeders would have their license plates photographed, and would receive their speeding tickets in the mail. Now, agencies have begun mounting cameras in congested urban areas to surveil activity in the streets. Atlanta, for example, is reportedly planning on using some 20,000 cameras for crime control in preparation for the 1996 Olympics. Unlike store cameras, no one is watching the output to apprehend criminals; rather, when a crime is committed, the event is simply and silently recorded, and the perpetrator is later identified, located, and arrested.
The military has always been the prime innovator in espionage technology. Its constant need for intelligence about the enemy (potential or real) has been the source of this innovation. Though the Pentagon never even admitted its existence until this decade, some of the hugest of its "Deep Black" Budget went to to the National Reconnaisance Office (NRO), in charge of its network of spy satellites. These satellites have an amazing degree of optical resolution; the French claim their V.SPOT system can identify a person smoking on a street from space. The military also coordinates the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites, which can pinpoint the location of a vehicle on Earth to within a few metres. Law enforcement has always borrowed from their technological arsenal of surveillance.
Some people don't mind the presence of the crime-watching cameras; store owners in some downtown areas feel it adds to their security. And, as the old canard goes, if you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide? (Many people do not realize that the State of Florida, for example, does not permit the wearing of masks in public, since masks hide the identity of people committing crime.) Still, civil libertarians feel a chill in the air when the use of these cameras is discussed. In the American legal tradition, assumption of innocence until proven guilty is considered fundamental; yet this was not an acceptable defense against the use of mandatory random workplace drug testing when it was introduced in the 1980s.
And so it's not just been 'Big Brother' that we have had to watch out for. Government, intelligence agencies, and law enforcement have all done their share of monitoring citizens. But since the 1980s, corporations have stepped up their role in ensuring that their workers meet demands of efficiency and propriety. Many employers have introduced keystroke monitoring into their LANs in order to combat idleness, maintained the right to monitor employee e-mail to make sure it remains work-related, and have even begun putting cameras on the factory floor to make sure people are not sloughing off. Many companies routinely utilize private investigators to snoop on people making injury compensation claims, or, more insidiously, to determine if employees' behavior outside the workplace might somehow 'jeopardize' their efficiency.
Of course, "the little guy" has asserted his right to watch the watchmen, a right largely made possible by the affordability of consumer video equipment. With millions of videocameras out there in the consumer market, people have begun using them to monitor police brutality (as in the Rodney King case), employer misconduct (in the case of sexual harassment), and government waste (one dilligent citizen mailed his state DOT some video clips demonstrating that highway construction workers were undoing paving that they had already done the previous day.) Some see this as fighting fire with fire, the moral equivalent of jujitsu. If they are doing it to us, then we are doing it back to them.
It's clear that America is a culture in with a long history of espionage. Our first military spies were deployed during the French and Indian War of the mid 1700s. The climate of Cold War paranoia in the 1950s (McCarthyism) and the deep distrust of government created by Watergate have left deep impressions on the American psyche. The Church hearings in the 1970s revealed that the CIA, FBI, and NSA had been spying on thousands of citizens, who had never been accused of any crime, but merely for their membership in various political organizations. Through programs in the 60s like COINTELPRO, the intelligence agencies tried to cleverly manipulate radical organizations, by doing things like taping the voices of members and then manipulating the playback over the phone so it seemed like they were making veiled threats against other members. Today, the government is still committed to having seamless surveillance capabilities of its citizens, through technologies like the Clipper Chip, Digital Telephony (the 'wiretap bill'), and Packet Sniffing.
Despite all this, we seem to be a culture in love with spying. Some of our most popular films have been about spies (James Bond); one of the most popular shows on TV is the 'real-life' drama COPS, which uses the TV camera as a law enforcement adjunct. One of the biggest growth industries of the 90s has been in "security shops" which sell a wide ranging of technologies ranging from motion detectors to night vision binoculars to personal polygraph devices. If not for our love of voyeurism, pornography, celebrity tabloids, and "real-life" dramas like MTV's Real World would have little appeal. While defiantly demanding their privacy, Americans have always insisted on the right to know everything about their politicians, celebrities, and heroes. "Tell-all" unauthorized biographies appear by the truckload, allowing us to revel in the faults and hidden sins of our idols.
In a society saturated by surveillance technology, a new sort of economy of information has appeared. The NSA has always fulfilled a dual role for "national security": cracking the codes of other countries, while maintaining the integrity of the U.S.' own codes. Strategic advantage is asserted, like in a game of poker, through maximizing what you know about the other guy while minimizing what he can find out about you. In the U.S., this same sort of game filters downward to appear at all levels of society. Business CEOs now maintain files on reporters (based on their record, what sorts of questions do they ask?) in order to pre-empt questions that could jeopardize their image when interviewed. When going for job interviews, many people use "stealth resumes" that conceal desultory blemishes on ones' employment record, while utilizing carefully compiled research on the personnel managers' biases to give them exactly what they want to hear.
As soon as one surveillance technology is introduced, a counter-surveillance response is developed. When Caller ID was first introduced, caller ID blocking was brought onto the market. The introduction of police radar guns saw the development of radar detectors and jammers. Computer intrusion has led to the development of secure cryptography. But inevitably, there follows the counter-response (the unblockable caller ID, the undetectable laser speed gun, the code-breaker program), and so on, and so on, in a never-ending, constantly escalating "arms race" of surveillance and counter-surveillance. The instruments of espionage constantly become more sophisticated, more invisible, more automatic, and more inescapable. California is considering dealing with speeding by putting devices in the car which automatically notify police when the speedometer exceeds a safe speed. (Why not just shut down the engine?)
Francis Fukuyama and other philosophers moan about what has happened to trust in our modern society. They might do well to consider how the march of the espionage society had led to the erosion of that trust. Can we ever know what anyone is doing behind our backs? Our spouses, our children, our President? Trust comes from accepting the idea that people aren't doing bad things when you're not watching them. And trust in most of our American institutions is at an all-time low. But that comes hard to a society where the ethos of the national-security state has pervaded everything. We have to know what THEY are doing, and more importantly, be able to do it to THEM before they do it to US. In an era where so much can happen so quickly without people noticing (money transfers, shadow deals, etc.), paranoia almost becomes a visceral, daily response.
The most insidious aspect of our modern espionage society may be that we have now put most of our trust in machines. After all, it is said, the camera doesn't lie. And apparently, neither does caller ID, the polygraph, the wiretap, the tape recorder, the electric eye, or the FBI's database. People assume that these devices record an unquestionable, undeniable reality not subject to interpretation or bias. This despite the fact that techniques of digital manipulation make fradulent use of almost all of them quite feasible. The U.S. relies on early-warning radar for its defense systems, since incoming ballistic missiles could strike in a matter of minutes; too fast for human judgement calls or hand-wringing. Yet, routinely this radar has interpreted inocuous signals (including a flock of birds) as an enemy attack. When we put the all-seeing eye on automatic, and then allow it to decide the appropriate response, we had better pray it can make better judgement than that.
Steve Mizrach, aka Seeker1