Surveillance: High tech and narcs
In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published Surveiller et Punir, a book popularly translated into English as “Discipline and Punish,” about how societies keep their populations in line with minimal violence. At the centre of his argument lay the panopticon, a prison designed by the 18th-century political reformer Jeremy Bentham, in which every inmate’s cell door faces a guard tower whose windows are opaque.
Prisoners living under these towers never know whether the guards are looking at them, but they have to assume that they are being watched. This setup, Foucault explained, is a powerful metaphor for modern civilisation: Our lives are circumscribed by a fear that invisible authorities have us in their sights.
Two new books about state surveillance in the 21st century, one focused on China and the other on the United States, make it clear that Foucault was right.
In China, as Minxin Pei explains in The Sentinel State, a centralised government uses new tech to extend a centuries-old system of bureaucracy that rewards intelligence gleaned from informants and spies. And in the United States, Byron Tau’s Means of Control documents how a federal democracy formed shady alliances with private companies to collect data on its citizens. The result is a terrifying form of convergent social evolution: Two great nations, locked in an escalating conflict on the world stage, have taken radically different paths to reach eerily similar systems of surveillance at home.
Tau suggests that the issue here isn’t really a technical one. Instead, it’s the questionable financial incentives and inadequate civil protections that have allowed the government to use corporate data to keep Americans under surveillance. Intelligence agencies are not generally permitted to engage in domestic spying, but the law is vague on whether they can buy “publicly available information” from companies like Otonomo, which sells “traffic data” from cities, or Ubermedia and Venntel, which sell “consumer data” from internet advertising exchanges that supply ads to thousands of apps.
When you scroll through the legalese and hit the “I Agree” button, you are often agreeing that your data may be sold to third parties like these companies. According to some interpretations of the law, your consent makes this data public, even if you don’t realise that location-based dating apps know where you are and that they can sell this data to just about anyone. State operatives bank on this lack of consumer awareness.
With some wryness, Tau notes that the US government often accuses its international adversaries of doing precisely what its own spy agencies do. “National security officials remain so concerned about Tiktok because the US engages in the same practice: Collecting data through apps at scale to project national power,” he writes.
Minxin Pei, an expert in Chinese domestic politics who teaches at Claremont Mckenna College, would no doubt agree. In his fascinating, meticulously researched book Pei focuses on how the Chinese government upgraded its surveillance capabilities to prevent another social movement like the one that inspired the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising.
Observers have long suggested that prosperity leads to liberalisation in dictatorships, but Pei argues that China disproves this assumption. Partly that’s because China has a history of “distributed surveillance” going back centuries, which has normalised the idea that spies and informants are everywhere — from remote villages to anonymous crowds in Shanghai — collecting every piece of information, no matter how useless, the same way digital ad exchanges hoover up your personal data without knowing whether someone will buy it.
As the economy expanded, the government used its prosperity to purchase the same tech that the US has to keep watch over its citizens. But what Pei reveals is that souped-up gizmos are not what granted the state its more deeply invasive system of control. Instead, money poured into local and regional police forces, allowing them to beef up their considerable network of informants and spies.
By interviewing exiled dissidents and combing through local websites, vaguely worded state announcements and the occasional leak, Pei manages to piece together the intricate web of human relationships that make up China’s vast surveillance network. He reveals how local and state authorities target “key individuals” including Uyghur Muslims and members of the far-right religious organisation Falun Gong, singling out roughly 1 per cent of the population for special, targeted surveillance.
Both authors argue persuasively that gee-whiz headlines about spy tech are a red herring; surveillance is a function of public-private partnerships, not specific technologies. In China, these partnerships are widely publicised, and the names of targeted key individuals are often known to their communities. In the United States, citizens rarely know when they are being targeted, and the government siphons data from tech companies in secret.
But the result is the same. Mass surveillance has become the norm, and that makes us vulnerable to targeted scapegoating and curtailed freedoms, whether we realize it or not. You know you’re being watched, but the dark glass of your phone’s touch-screen obscures the authorities who lurk just beyond it.
MEANS OF CONTROL: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State Author: Byron Tau Publisher: Crown Pages: 365
Price: $32