So in the case of Freedom Press, the approach should be to negotiate in good faith and to use good judgement in minor or urgent cases. Negotiation and good judgement of this sort will be necessary in any society that moves beyond intellectual property.
4. Antisurveillance
Surveillance, a serious and growing issue, is basically a problem of unequal power. The usual reform solutions, such as codes of professional ethics, laws and regulations, give only an illusion of protection. Another approach is to promote grassroots challenges to surveillance either through disruption or by replacing social institutions that create a demand for surveillance. A long-term programme for institutional change helps in choosing directions for antisurveillance campaigns.
Today, information about citizens is collected by dozens of corporations and government bureaucracies, including police, taxation departments, marketing firms and banks. Cameras and listening devices are commonplace. Technologies to automatically recognise people’s faces or hands are being refined.
So central is surveillance that countries such as Sweden, Germany and the United States have been called “surveillance societies.” Yet few people are enthusiastic about the increased capacity of large organisations to collect information about themselves. Opinion surveys regularly show that most people attach great value to their own privacy — though not always to other people’s privacy. However, concern about invasions of privacy has not led to a mass movement against surveillance. Privacy campaigner Simon Davies notes that activist privacy groups are folding up or losing energy, though citizen action is desperately needed.
So far, the main responses to the threat of surveillance — codes of professional ethics, laws and regulations — have given only an illusion of protection. These responses may be adequate in some circumstances, but they don’t address the driving forces behind surveillance: power, profit and control. Codes of ethics seem to have made little impact, while laws and regulations are regularly flouted or made obsolete by technological change.
There is another approach, which has received relatively little attention: to challenge and replace the social structures that promote surveillance. My aim in this chapter is to outline a radical antisurveillance agenda. It is an exercise in thinking about massive changes in the organisation of society and especially in the distribution of power. Of course, this can be considered “unrealistic” in the sense that such changes will be opposed by powerful groups and thus be difficult to achieve. But envisioning alternatives has the advantage of indicating directions for today’s campaigns that will make some contribution to long-term change. What is actually unrealistic is to imagine that the problem of surveillance can be addressed by band-aid methods.
First, I give an overview of the problem and discuss surveillance as a problem of unequal power. Next, I describe the failure of reform solutions — that is, solutions implemented by powerful groups — and the limitations of technical fixes. Then I describe two grassroots programmes against surveillance, a “disruption programme” and an “institutional change programme.” The disruption programme is one designed to disrupt the process of surveillance, for example by corrupting databases. The institutional change programme is built around challenging and replacing social institutions that create a demand for surveillance. In conclusion, I argue that the institutional change programme provides help in choosing directions for present-day antisurveillance campaigns.
The problem
Surveillance is not a new problem[1]. The lack of privacy in small, intimate communities is notorious. What is new are invasions of privacy by large, remote organisations. There are two main factors here. First is the rise of large-scale bureaucratic organisations, both corporations and government bodies, in the past few hundred years. Second is the development of technologies for communicating at a distance and for collecting and processing large quantities of information. Computers and telecommunications are central here.
The capacities for collecting data about individuals are epitomised by the computerised database. There are thousands of such databases, including police files, military records, welfare files, marketing lists, taxation files, medical records and credit listings. Most of these are compiled when we fill out forms, such as a census form, an application for a loan, a registration for a hospital visit, enrolment at a school, an application for an automobile licence or a subscription to a magazine. Further information is added by banks (every deposit or withdrawal), doctors (each visit to a hospital), teachers (grades for all courses), and many others.
The capacity to manipulate databases on a computer allows invasions of privacy never imagined in earlier days. For example, many telephone directories are now available in computerised form. It is a simple matter to insert a telephone number and obtain the name and address. Marketeers can put in the name of a street and obtain a listing of the names and phone numbers of the people living there. These so-called “reverse telephone directories” allow going from numbers or addresses to names, something not previously anticipated in compiling directories.
Police sitting in their patrol car can access computerised police files remotely. They can key in the licence number of a car that is being driven dangerously, whose occupants “look suspicious” or that is parked near a political meeting. They can receive information about the car owner’s police record, and they can add information to the owner’s file.
Databases are far from secure. Getting access to “confidential” information is often a simple matter of connections and money. Private investigators obtain information about credit ratings, police records, tax payments and the like by ringing up “friends” in the relevant agency and making an appropriate payment. This practice is illegal but commonplace.
Lack of security is only one problem. Another is inaccuracy. In one case, police repeatedly arrested a man for a crime he didn’t commit; the real criminal had stolen his identification documents. In another case, a woman was repeatedly denied rental accommodation; it turned out that she was recorded on a credit-rating database as a bad risk due to defaulting from payments, although it was the owner who was to blame. Surveillance can be a risk even for those who are honest and have nothing to hide.
Individual databases are powerful tools. When they are linked to each other, enormous new potentials are created. For example, taxation records can be linked automatically to records of divorced parents who have failed to maintain court-specified child support payments. It is then a simple matter to extract the payments in the process of assessing income tax. The beauty of this approach, from the administrator’s point of view, is that the defaulter cannot escape by leaving town, as the surveillance operates on a national or even international scale.
The computer records of a driver, stopped for speeding, can be checked and a demand made for payment of parking fines — or library fines. Lists of subscribers to magazines are commonly sold to other organisations; the subscribers then become targets for sales messages.
Some telephone systems allow the telephone number of the caller to be registered by the receiver in a display. It is also possible to automatically record the caller’s number. A company can offer a free gift to anyone ringing a particular number and thus obtain a listing of all numbers that ring up. The numbers then can be used for direct telephone solicitations. Telephone marketing can be partly automated, with a computer dialling the number and conducting at least the first part of the conversation.
1
See, among others, David Burnham,