Theological Perspectives on a Surveillance Society

Watching and Being Watched

Eric Stoddart

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138253025
• eBook ISBN: 9781317011316
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book looks at contemporary surveillance practices and ideologies from a Christian theological perspective. Surveillance studies is an emerging, inter-disciplinary field that brings together scholars from sociology, criminology, political studies, computing and information studies, cultural studies and other disciplines. Although surveillance has been a feature of all societies since humans first co-operated to watch over one another whilst hunting and gathering it is the convergence of information technologies within both commerce and the state that has ushered in a 'surveillance society'. There has been little, if any, theological consideration of this important dimension of social organisation; this book fills the gap and offers a contribution to surveillance studies from a theological perspective, broadening the horizon against which surveillance might be interpreted and evaluated. This book is also an exercise in consciousness-raising with respect to the Christian community in order that they may critically engage with a surveillance society by drawing on biblical and theological resources. Being the first major theological treatment in the field it sets the agenda for more detailed considerations.

Chapter 1
The Thirteenth Chime

1984 was not Nineteen Eighty-Four. Ill-founded expectations that Orwell might be a prophet were doomed to be dashed. ‘Big Brother’ haunts our imagination still; threatening not by waiting in the wings but in the prerogative we defer to him to encapsulate surveillance. Wary as we might well be of Big Brother’s emergence as state monitoring and manipulating of our every thought and move, we are reassured by his absence and are complacent towards the ubiquitous surveillance that otherwise is diffused through our daily lives. The metaphor that alerts us to state intrusion is also the image that constrains what we can recognise as surveillance. Some surveillance is easily identifiable; other activities do not lend themselves so readily to this classification. The diffusion of surveillance and its variegated practices is best captured through a series of snapshots across a range of sites. What these diverse examples have in common will become apparent when we later consider burgeoning theories of surveillance.

Sites of Surveillance

Our selection of sites is based on David Lyon’s focus on situations in which surveillance has developed historically and we share his aim to appreciate the nuances, variations in intensity and subtleties of what we can expect to encounter in diverse domains of contemporary life (Lyon 2007: 25). To Lyon’s list of military intelligence, state administration, work monitoring, policing and crime control, and consumer activity we add domestic contexts and civil society (including religion). We need not read any equality of socio-political importance or moral equivalence into these particular surveillance practices. They serve us merely as features on the landscape in order that we might begin to grasp the extent to which surveillance is deployed throughout society.

Military Intelligence

Persistent surveillance, often of a large area, lasting days or weeks is high in the priorities of the military and we have become familiar with the grainy images released to broadcast news companies to report (and sometimes support) engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. Improving the quality of those images is a matter of urgency because insurgents prove resistant to surveillance by disappearing in the background noise of imaging data gathered by their far more technologically sophisticated opponents. In the Hydravision II trials conducted by the British Ministry of Defence in May 2010, high-resolution imaging equipment was tested that combined a 128 megapixel camera (capable of capturing a 4km by 4km image at 2 frames per second) with in-built software in an attempt to identify insurgents by their unusual patterns of behaviour, such as two vehicles meeting in a concealed area (Gill 2010; Thomas 2010). Other hyperspectral cameras, which are intended to pick out camouflaged vehicles by differentiating between the green produced by chlorophyll in plants and that of dye or paint are in development. The US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has issued an invitation for proposals to develop high-resolution 3-D imaging devices that can be carried by soldiers (DARPA 2010).

The capacity to undertake aerial surveillance without placing personnel in danger has led to significant investment by the US Air Force in unmanned drones. But, lest we allow ourselves to be carried away by the seductive allure of new technologies, we need to be aware that resistance to surveillance can be surprisingly creative and relatively low-tech. The effectiveness of these aircraft took a serious knock when in December 2008 a laptop belonging to a Shiite militant in Iraq was discovered to contain data from live video feeds from US Predator drones operating in the area (Gorman, Dreazen and Cole 2009). Off-the-shelf software, originally developed to intercept music, video and other content that users had downloaded from the internet, had been directed at unsecured feeds from the drones.

First-hand encounters with sophisticated military surveillance technology are not the everyday experience of many, even within the armed forces. However, rolling news network editors revel in having anything to show viewers and such snippets, repeated many times during a day, do become an element of our day-today engagement with surveillance. Back home, the state is no less preoccupied with surveillance, but of a bureaucratic kind.

State Administration

Administrative surveillance, involving the collection, analysis and dissemination of information, is an indispensable activity of government. Merely gathering data is not surveillance. However, public administration is never merely gathering data. Among its many objectives is influencing behaviour in terms of health choices, employment patterns and practices, stimulating investment, consumer activity and industrial production are amongst the many objectives of public administration. Collecting data, much of it concerning specific individuals, is a method of governing – governing (but not controlling) by surveillance.

The UK public sector spends over £16 billion every year on information technologies strewn across the diverse departments of the modern state (Anderson et al. 2009: 4). The Department of Health in England, for example, has a ‘spine’ of national applications at various stages of development that include the Population Demographic Service (the ‘address book’) that will eventually handle patient registration, the Summary Care Record (holding information that might be useful for unplanned care, e.g., allergies and current prescriptions), Secondary Uses Service (archiving summaries of care for payments, cost control, tracking performance targets, resource planning or research), Electronic Prescription Service (not yet paperless), NHS Direct (delivering a nurse-based telephone triage system outside normal surgery hours followed by notification to the patient’s GP), Adastra (supporting out-of-hours GP service contractors), and the Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS – storing and transmitting x-ray and other medical images). Whilst on the one hand there might be legitimate concerns over privacy in relation to some of these databases, on the other, the minutiae of highly specific information about particular patients may be critical to someone’s health, perhaps even their life. Tim Kelsey, an adviser to the NHS, told a fringe meeting at the Labour Party Conference in September 2009 that ‘the surveillance state is in many circumstances a jolly good thing’ and urged for more surveillance of people’s data so that hospital deaths might be cut and, more generally, that public services might be improved (Wheeler 2009). Despite the fact that Kelsey has a commercial interest in data collection, when the prospect is a better healthcare system or more efficient (and perhaps transparent) public sector delivery, his is a call that many find hard to resist.

Other attempts to influence citizens’ (and pre-citizens’) behaviour are more politically charged but, in some cases, no less integral to the state’s involvement in social order. The National Childhood Obesity Database, the National Pupil Database (based on a termly state-maintained school census), the Integrated Children’s System (a locally implemented electronic case-management system for social care records), the ASSET Young Offender Assessment Profile (used to assess offenders and prepare pre-sentence reports for the courts) and ONSET (used to assess all children referred to a Youth Offending Team) all deliver data back to support teams.

So much of what we take for granted in the smooth running of our lives relies on state administrative surveillance. The Department for Transport offers online registration of drivers and vehicles (Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA)), and to maintain and improve motorways and trunk roads the Highways Agency gathers data from the Motorway Incident Detection and Automated Signalling System (MIDAS) of loops in the road that detect vehicle movement and from automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) cameras. Vehicle testing and vehicle identity checks are overseen through data collecting by the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency. TV licensing companies, under contract to the BBC Licensing Authority, use external data feeds from retailers who are legally obliged to inform them of equipment sales and rentals, and some social security information is made available to verify eligibility of the over 75s for a free TV licence.

A public that values, and now comes to expect, benefits that are only fiscally prudent within a data-collection system that keeps them under surveillance is, arguably, scarcely entitled to complain when their various employers deploy their own technologies to secure commercial advantage (or at least not to be at a disadvantage).

Work Monitoring

‘Surveillance in the workplace is simply good business. If you’re not keeping track of what happens in the workplace when you’re not there, then you are probably losing money’ is a stark sales pitch by a company selling workplace surveillance systems (Hidden Pinhole Cameras 2010). Low-tech punch-card clocking-in systems have been replaced by sophisticated swipe-card technologies that can be used to control access to specified parts of a building. Monitoring internet access can reveal patterns of online shopping, betting or social networking during company time. Bar-coding or radio frequency identification RFID tagging can track deliveries and the location of high-value items within large retail premises. CCTV monitors might detect and deter shoplifters but also contribute to supervising checkout operators or the quality of greeting offered to customers as they enter the store.

Rigorous monitoring of airline pilots’ flying hours contribute to our safe travel, as does equipment in truck drivers’ cabs that archive details of speed and hours at the wheel. The familiar automated message warning us that our conversation may be recorded for ‘training purposes’ is what we have come to expect and almost fail to hear when we phone our bank, computer helpline or other service provider. That the person we finally get to speak to has been allocated performance targets for the length and outcome of our call is a fact hidden to us, but weighs heavily on the operative closely monitored by digital communications systems.

In a US survey conducted in 2007, 65 per cent of companies indicated that they use software to block connections to inappropriate websites; 45 per cent of employers track content, keystrokes and time spent at the keyboard, whilst another 43 per cent store and review computer files; 28 per cent of employers have fired workers for misuse of email (American Management Association 2008). In such settings, the role of the corporate keymaster becomes indispensable and powerful as he or she is the security professional who has access to the (scarcely) concealed secrets of employees’ online activities and many of the company’s commercial secrets. Systems, such as EnCase Enterprise’s security software, allow companies to monitor data traffic against intrusion from outside and misuse inside. This and other products such as Deepdive (‘does what no other eDiscovery device can do: it automatically detects and accesses all storage devices on a network – even laptops, PCs and external drives residing outside the conventional corporate data repositories’ (Deepdive 2010)), Paraben (digital forensic solutions) and Kroll Ontrack (focusing on legal, corporate and government entities) employ security professionals who, amongst their other duties of data security and recovery, are the digital equivalent of a manager peering over an employee’s shoulder. These systems attempt to address the internal threat to a company’s profitability, ‘When good employees go bad, attacks tend to be more successful and have a bigger impact on the business’, claims security expert John Pironti of technology systems integrator Gentronics (Derene 2009).

Considering that our workplace might be a site of digital forensics and surveillance goes with the territory in some sectors, but is profoundly disconcerting in others. The police services seem the more traditional home for such practices.

Policing and Crime Control

Surveillance for crime control is arguably the most obvious deployment of those technologies, but official obfuscation as to the primary purposes of particular installations readily garners press and public disquiet. In June 2010, Safer Birmingham Partnerships (SBP) (a partnership of police, city council and other agencies in the UK Midlands) announced the installation of 218 cameras, including 72 hidden, in order to tackle crime. The local MP, Roger Godsiff, voiced the wide concern that the principal function actually was to monitor extremists that the police and security services suspected were living in the city’s Muslim community. No public consultation had taken place and £3 million funding had been provided from a government counter-terrorism fund. Pending public consultation, bags have been placed over the cameras, although not the covert ones. On 5 July 2010, West Midlands Police announced that the covert cameras would be removed and that the Counter Terrorism Unit would no longer be involved in the scheme (West Midlands Police 2010).

The role of surveillance in responding to terrorists’ threats, whether specific or general, is widely accepted, but questions of method and intensity prove highly contentious. Although the UK Labour government ruled out creating a single ‘super-database’ that would track all email, internet and text messaging traffic, it began considering a scheme that would require communications companies to retain personal data for up to 12 months. The aim was to record who was at each end of a communication and how they were communicating – but not the actual content of the message or information posted to or downloaded from a website (Home Office 2009). Questions around the control of these centralised mini-databases and the blurred distinction between communications data and the content of communications raised serious civil liberties concerns, not least because the government’s consultation document was perceived to be, at times, ‘deliberately vague’ (Liberty 2009: 4).

Surveillance cameras intended for routine control of (often low-grade) crime are, despite the Birmingham example, to a considerable extent accepted as part of the street furniture of road signs, bollards and traffic lights. When we walk into a store and spot the prominent screen above our heads we are reminded that we are being watched. This is so common that although we might think of it as surveillance, we readily treat it as innocuous and devoid of otherwise negative overtones. What is not is not so immediately obvious to us is that we are under surveillance by rather different processes when we make our purchases and swipe our plastic cards.

Consumers

Loyalty cards (such as Nectar and Tesco Club Card in the UK) offer us, the consumer, rewards for choosing a retailer and, whilst providing the store (or group) with further brand recognition, can allow tracking of purchases, identification of trends and segmentation of customers who are targeted with special offers. Being able to load a card with money (as with sQuid) delivers even greater convenience for making small payments in, for example, a coffee shop. These are far from being neutral pieces of plastic because consumers and loyalty programmes are mutually shaped (Pridmore 2008).

Protecting customer data, whether in the form of one-off transactions, contracts or loyalty schemes, is, as we might expect, crucially important to the reputation not merely of the reward scheme but of the retailer as a whole. This can pose a considerable challenge as mobile phone company T-Mobile found to its cost when it admitted in November 2009 that some staff had, unknown to executives, passed on millions of records relating to thousands of customers to third-party brokers who then sold on the data to other phone firms (BBC News 2009).

As location data gleaned from our mobile devices becomes increasingly available it takes on considerable added value for retailers who can tailor their advertisements to specific physical points we pass by or frequent in urban areas; a plastic loyalty card is too reliant on our remembering to carry and swipe it when we make purchases. Sharing our geo-location data by ‘checking in’ at physical locations as part of our online social networking activities offers the user the excitement of discovering friends or other users at, for example, a museum. That release of our data means we can be located by friends, but, crucially, also by advertisers linked into the networking website. In that case, being under surveillance as consumers rides on the back of our mutual surveillance of our loved ones (and potential loved ones).

Home, Family and Friends

‘Privacy is dead, and social media hold the smoking gun’ (Cashmore 2009) delivers a further twist to Scott McNealy’s (former CEO of Sun Microsystems) provocative (pre-9/11) claim ‘privacy is dead, get over it’ (Hamblen 2001). We share not only data in the form of personal details, but also narratives (including images), widely and perhaps indiscriminately, across a vast network of ‘friends’ on platforms with whose privacy settings we are not fully aufait. We offer ourselves for surveillance by companies who can monetarise our data and by our peers who might be very loosely connected associates we have met on business or former school friends with whom we have had no contact since those days a considerable number of years ago.

More immediately within our home environment we are presented with PC-monitoring software to protect our children (unless they are knowledgeable enough to circumvent our settings) and to make ourselves accountable to trusted religious mentors. Eye Promise software is purposely marketed at Christian men in the context of small accountability groups ‘to keep my eyes pure for Jesus’ (Promise Keepers 2010). We can elect to deploy domestic CCTV systems to keep the exterior of our home under surveillance or surreptitiously monitor a babysitter in our absence. For about US$200 we can purchase a discrete USB tracking device that records its location at preset intervals using GPS technologies. Secreted into the briefcase of a suspected errant loved one, evidence of his or her travels can be available to match with their version of events upon their return.

One particular real-time system has been designed to address the needs of people with Alzheimer’s and their carers. Comfort Zone offers managed alerts, including a 24/7 call centre for occasions when access to the internet is not available to carers. Monitoring offers the possibility of extending independence for the person with Alzheimer’s whilst providing reassurance for a family who becomes concerned during an episode of wandering. Project Gerhome, run by the French centre for construction research (CSTB), fits out houses with sensors so that within their home elderly people can continue to be independent whilst their electricity consumption, movement, and chair and bed occupation are monitored.

The state, corporations and our friends have us under various forms of surveillance for diverse purposes and with significantly different levels of intensity. One final site completes our orientation to the diffusion of surveillance technologies: those institutions that compose civil society and in which it is not immediately apparent that this practice is prevalent.

Civil Society

Surveillance by professional organisations generally raises few concerns when it is to ensure clinical competency, continuing professional development and other aspects of registration of medical practitioners. Whilst historically a number of trades unions have been subject to surveillance by state authorities, the union keeping track of its own members’ activities is a form of internal surveillance. The closed-shop policy policed vigorously by unions at various times in their history is one form. Identifying blacklegs who defy union instructions (either as current, former or members of other unions) involves surveillance practices that take on a particularly dark tone in local communities, as was the case during the British miners’ strikes (1972 and 1984).

Campaigning groups, indispensable to a vital civil society, do sometimes employ surveillance tactics. The strategies of some militant animal rights activists have included targeting employees of research laboratories, pharmaceutical companies or their suppliers. By monitoring people’s movements and gathering personal data campaigners have targeted specific individuals to be harassed and intimidated. Notorious incidents have included the theft of an urn containing the ashes of the mother of Daniel Vasella, the CEO of Novartis (a Swiss company with links to British animal-testing company, Huntingdon Life Sciences) (Edwards 2009) and the jailing of three animal rights extremists in 2006 for the theft, two years previously, of the body of an elderly woman, Gladys Hammond, who was a close relative of a family running a farm that bred guinea pigs for medical research (Morris, Ward and Butt 2006).

Members of the Mormon Church, for their own genealogical religious requirements, have diligently collected ancestral data from around the world. Countless non-Mormon family historians have, consequently, found their own research made much easier. The intrusive hierarchical monitoring of behaviour possible in rural or tightly bounded communities is now a feature of religious life only for the few rather than the many. A friend once recalled finding himself the target of public extemporary prayer that expressed pastoral concern and made supplication to God for the souls of young people in that Brethren congregation who had been seen visiting the local cinema. More seriously, charismatic (in the theological as well as mundane sense) Christian leaders, influenced in the 1980s by the ‘shepherding movement’, made heavy demands for accountability of group members at the level of their domestic finances, marriage intentions and loyalty to the leader’s teaching and ministry. Lighter-touch approaches drawing on peer surveillance, long before the advent of mobile phones, have been practised by fervent groups of Christian believers, particularly in connection with th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Thirteenth Chime
• 2 Taking Care
• 3 Careful Technology
• 4 An Unsafe Peace
• 5 ‘Unto Whom No Privé Thing is Hid’
• 6 ‘As If’
• References
• Index