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.
With old-style printed files, a definite decision was required to search out information about someone in particular. A bank teller used to need a reason or suspicion before pulling out the file for a customer at the counter. Doing this for everyone would simply take too long. Computerised files allow routine checking. The system can be designed so that every time someone comes into a bank for a deposit or withdrawal, their file is retrieved in a matter of seconds — with, for example, the information that they are overdue on a loan repayment. What this means is that information is automatically checked: everyone is under suspicion.
Just as computers can store and manipulate information in ways impossible previously, so other new technologies make it possible to collect ever more detailed and personal information about individuals. Bugging devices have been around a long time, but they are smaller, harder to detect and provide better quality transmissions than ever before. Video cameras are apparent in many shops, but there are also many that are not so apparent, for example hidden inside lights.
For the serious snooper with enough money, the technological capabilities are awesome. Nightscopes can detect infrared radiation in order to see in the dark. Sensitive sound receivers can listen in to conversations from outside a building, by deciphering the vibrations on a window pane in a room in which people are speaking. Computer-to-computer communications can be intercepted and decoded. The information on a computer screen can be picked up in a nearby room from emitted radiation, without any direct electric connection. (On the other hand, not all fancy new technologies are as effective as promotional material may assert or fearful targets may believe.)
Some of the opportunities for surveillance are open to anyone. For example, it is easy to use a radio receiver to listen in on a neighbour’s conversations on a cordless telephone.
In the future, surveillance is likely to become ever more intrusive and unavoidable. Surveillance cameras are being used in more and more public and private places. One development under way is tiny recorders and transmitters that can be transported on miniature flying craft that could be piloted into a person’s back yard. Eventually they might be reduced to the size of insects that could enter a room and record whatever is said or done. This would be a “bug” in both senses of the word.
It is in the workplace where surveillance has long been most intense and where the new technologies are “employed” to greatest effect. Word processors have their keystrokes monitored, and indeed computers are regularly set up to monitor any routine process. Open or hidden cameras are commonplace. Beyond this, employers are seeking deeper knowledge about their workers. Psychological tests are often used to select workers or, more commonly, to rule them out. Physical features are under scrutiny too, especially in the United States, where blood and urine tests are increasingly demanded as a condition of employment. Whether the aim is to screen out workers with communicable diseases (such as AIDS) or to detect users of illegal drugs, the effect is ever greater exposure of previously private information about individuals.
Gary Marx, author of some of the most insightful studies of surveillance, points out that new technologies overcome most of the natural barriers that protected privacy in the past.[2] Surveillance technologies can operate at a distance, penetrate darkness and go through physical barriers, as in the case of various listening devices. Surveillance is harder to detect than ever before, whether through hidden cameras or remote listening devices. Surveillance requires less labour than before, since technology now can do much of the work. For example, telephone taps used to require tedious listening of all conversations; now computers with voice recognition can be used to signal the presence of “trigger” words such as “bomb.”
Surveillance has long been a central feature of institutions of social control, notably prisons and mental institutions. New technologies allow this control to be extended into the community. In a number of countries, people can serve sentences at home, so-called “home detention.” Typically, they wear electronic bracelets or anklets which communicate with a central computer, which monitors their nearness to the house. One of the arguments for such alternatives to prison is that they would reduce prison populations, but the reality is that an ever-larger number of people may be caught in the net of the criminal justice system.[3]
Surveillance and power
The above examples of surveillance today give an idea of the scope of the problem. How is the problem to be understood? There are various perspectives available. For my purposes, it is useful to analyse surveillance as a
