The Surveillance-Industrial Complex

A Political Economy of Surveillance

Kirstie Ball, Laureen Snider

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415634472
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136206979
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

Today's 'surveillance society' emerged from a complex of military and corporate priorities that were nourished through the active and 'cold' wars that marked the twentieth century. Two massive configurations of power – state and corporate – have become the dominant players. Mass targeted surveillance deep within corporate, governmental and social structures is now both normal and legitimate.

The Surveillance-Industrial Complex examines the intersections of capital and the neo-liberal state in promoting the emergence and growth of the surveillance society. The chapters in this volume, written by internationally-known surveillance scholars from a number of disciplines, trace the connections between the massive multinational conglomerates that manufacture, distribute and promote technologies of 'surveillance', and the institutions of social control and civil society. In three parts, this collection investigates:

• how the surveillance-industrial complex spans international boundaries through the workings of global capital and its interaction with agencies of the state
• surveillance as an organizational control process, perpetuating the interests and voices of certain actors and weakening or silencing others
• how local political economies shape the deployment and distribution of the massive interactions of global capital/military that comprise surveillance systems today.

This volume will be useful for students and scholars of sociology, management, business, criminology, geography and international studies.

Part I

International networks and global circuits of surveillance

1 The new military urbanism

Stephen Graham

Introduction

On 14 November 2007 Jacqui Smith, then the UK's home secretary, announced one of the most ambitious attempts by any state in history for the systematic tracking and surveillance of all persons entering or leaving British territory. The highly controversial e-Borders programme aims to deploy sophisticated computer algorithms and data-mining techniques to identify ‘illegal’ or threatening people or behaviour before they threaten the UK's territorial limits.

The now troubled e-Borders project is based on a dream of technological omniscience: to track everyone flowing across the UK's borders, using records of past activity and associations to identify future threats before they materialize. The dream driving the project was to deliver total technological security to the UK state and its border security system in a radically mobile and insecure world. ‘All travellers to Britain will be screened against no-fly lists and intercept target lists,’ she predicts. ‘Together with biometric visas, this will help keep trouble away from our shores…. As well as the tougher double check at the border, ID cards for foreign nationals will soon give us a triple check in country’ (Kobe 2007).

Since 2007 the e-Borders project has faced increasingly insurmountable problems: law suits; widespread allegations that it fundamentally contradicts the European Treaty; a rising chorus of objections from the travel industry; and a growing sense that the project – sold on a simplistic, technophiliac, ‘silver bullet’ – was simply unworkable.

Nonetheless, Smith's language here – ‘target lists’, ‘screening’, ‘biometric visas’ and so on – reveals a great deal. In this chapter, and in a wider book (Graham 2010), I argue that the global proliferation of deeply technophiliac state surveillance projects like the UK e-Borders programme signals the startling militarization of civil society – the attempted extension of essentially military ideas of tracking, identification and targeting into the quotidian spaces and circulations of everyday life. Indeed, projects like this one are more than a state's responses to changing security threats. Rather, in a world marked by globalization and increasing urbanization, they represent dramatic (albeit contradictory, contested and often unsuccessful) attempts to translate longstanding military dreams of high-tech omniscience and rationality into the governance of urban civil society.

With both security and military doctrine within Western states now centred on the task of identifying insurgents, terrorists and an extensive range of ‘ambient threats’ from the seeming chaos of urban life, this trend becomes clearer still. Moreover, whether in the queues of Heathrow, the tube stations of London or the streets of Kabul and Baghdad, the latest doctrine emerging from many state militaries and police forces in the West stresses that means must be found by states and security forces to identify problematic people and threats in advance, before their deadly potential is realized, at a point when they are effectively indistinguishable from – and often are – the wider urban populace. Hence the parallel drive in cities within both the capitalist heartlands of the global north and the world's colonial peripheries and frontiers is to establish high-tech surveillance systems which mine data accumulated about the past to identify future threats.

The new military urbanism

This context helps explain why, as our planet urbanizes more rapidly than ever before, a new and insidious militarism is permeating the fabric of cities and urban life. Fuelled by, and perpetuating, the extreme inequalities that have mushroomed as neo-liberal globalization has extended across the world, this new military urbanism is a constellation of ideas, techniques and norms of security and military doctrine. These are linked intimately into the militarized and neocolonial predation of distant resources necessary to sustain richer Western cities and urban lifestyles. These ideas fuse seamlessly with popular cultural worlds centred on militarized electronic entertainment, automobility, and urban lifestyles organised through new technologies that have military origins (see Bishop 2004). And they work to perpetuate processes of securitization by manipulating urban fears caused by a range of non-state terrorist or insurgent attacks which have successfully appropriated the very architectures and circulations of cities as the means to launch their violence: 11 September in New York; 7 July 2005 in London; 26 November 2008 in Mumbai, etc. (see Graham 2009).

In a world where full state-vs.-state wars are increasingly rare – for now – we are seeing instead a proliferation of violent struggles between state political violence and all manner of non-state insurgents, networks and fighters. Warfare and political violence are now often organized across transnational scales while at the same time telescoping through the streets, spaces, infrastructures and symbols of a rapidly urbanizing world. The practice and imagination of state and non-state political violence, as well as ideas of security, are thus inscribing themselves into the most intimate sites, spaces and symbols of the planet's blossoming urban areas (Graham 2006). Indeed, war and organized political violence increasingly operate through the basic architectures and infrastructures of cities – the very same structures and systems that continually enable globalized urban life to operate. Perhaps unexpectedly, the most basic and banal of urban experiences, infrastructures or artefacts now are becoming fully inscribed into contemporary discussions surrounding geopolitics or international security. In recent military theorizations about supposedly prevailing conditions of ‘low-intensity confict’, ‘assymetric war’, ‘fourth-generation war’, or ‘military operations other than war’, the prosaic and everyday sites, circulations and spaces of the city become the main ‘battlespace’ both at home and abroad (see, for example, Hammes 2006).

As a collective, this new military urbanism operates by attempting to rework the architectures, experiences and cultures of cities in both the global North and global South. Sometimes, such changes are manifest overtly in the repackaging of cities into archipelagoes of fortified enclaves and the reorganization of militaries into urban counterinsurgency forces. More often, they emerge more covertly in the normalization of military techniques and paradigms meant to address civilian and social issues. Centred on the US—Israeli axis of military colonialism and high-tech securitization, this new wave of militarization works by folding all social and political problems – or at least their symptoms – into ‘security’ issues requiring ‘hard’ military solutions (Graham 2003).

The very breadth and power of the new military urbanism is such that, arguably, it is not since medieval times that ideas, techniques and imaginations of political violence and ‘security’ have centred so heavily on trying to (re)organize the basic architectures and experiences of urban life. Rather than castles, city walls and siege warfare, however, the new military urbanism combines walls, fences and barriers with biometric scanning. It adds killer robots and cyborg insects to the revitalizing sciences of urban fortification and ‘control architecture’. And it blurs globe-straddling attempts to track people, information, money, communication and trade to a proliferation of more or less militarized or securitized camps, bases, security zones and enclaves. Many of these, however – far from being split-off from the world – are linked together through the very circulations and infrastructures that make neo-liberal globalization possible.

Laced together with their own systems of connection and circulation, such enclaves and camps range across a wide spectrum. They encompass proliferating gated communities, offshore finance enclaves and cruise ships for the über-wealthy, as well as war prisons, torture and rendition camps and military bases. They include export processing zones, refugee camps, logistics cities and the rapidly securitizing financial cores of global cities. And they range from airport and port complexes, through ‘bubble-like’ tourist enclaves, to fenced-off event spaces for political summits or mega-sporting events or walled ethnic enclaves imposed by colonial powers. Georgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, now even suggests that enclave-like camps are such a dominant architectural manifestation of power in today's world that they are more important than the more open terrain of cities (see Agamben 2005). The new military urbanism has at least four key foundations which are worth exploring in more detail.

Foucault's boomerang: colonies come home

War has […] re-invaded human society in a more complex, more extensive, more concealed, and more subtle manner.

(Liang and Wang Xiangsui 2002: 2)

First, as the circuits of the new military urbanism blur legal separations between the ‘homeland’ cities and those on colonial frontiers, both sets of cities become subject to similar logics of (attempted) reorganization and (attempted) securitization. Colonial logics and geographies thus increasingly proliferate within both domestic cities and those on colonial frontiers. Historian Lorenzo Veracini has diagnosed a dramatic contemporary resurgence in the importation of typically colonial tropes and techniques into the management and development of cities in the metropolitan cores of Europe and North America. Such a process, he argues, is once again working to gradually unravel the ‘classic and long lasting distinction between an outer face and an inner face of the colonial condition’ (Veracini 2005).

It is important to stress, then, that the resurgence of explicitly colonial strategies and techniques amongst nation states such as the US, UK and Israel in the contemporary period (see Gregory 2005) involves not just the deployment of the techniques of the new military urbanism in foreign war-zones but their diffusion and imitation through the securitization of western urban life. As in the nineteenth century, when European colonial nations imported fingerprinting, pan-optic prisons, urban warfare techniques and Haussmannian boulevard building from neighbourhoods of insurrection to domestic cities after first experimenting with them on colonized frontiers, colonial techniques today operate through what Michel Foucault termed colonial ‘boomerang effects.’ ‘It should never be forgotten,’ Foucault wrote:

that while colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself.

(2003: 103)

In the contemporary period, military urbanism is marked by – and indeed, constituted through – a myriad of increasingly startling Foucauldian boomerang effects. For example, Israeli drones designed to vertically subjugate and target Palestinians are now routinely deployed by police forces in North America, Europe and East Asia (Dorrian and Graham 2012) Private operators of US ‘supermax’ prisons are heavily involved in running the global archipelago organizing incarceration and torture that has bourgeoned since the start of the ‘war on terror’ (Brady 2007). Private military corporations heavily colonize ‘reconstruction’ contracts in both Iraq and New Orleans. Israeli expertise in population control is regularly sought by those planning security operations for major summits and sporting events. And ‘shoot to kill’ policies developed to confront risks of suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and Haifa have been adopted by police forces in Western cities (a process which directly led to the state killing of Jean Charles De Menezes by London anti-terrorist police on 22 July 2005) (Vaughan-Williams 2007).

Meanwhile, aggressive and militarized policing against public demonstrations and social mobilizations in London, Toronto, Paris or New York now utilize the same ‘non-lethal weapons’ as Israel's army in Gaza or Jenin. Constructions of ‘security zones’ around the strategic financial cores of London and New York echo the techniques used in Baghdad's Green Zone. And many of the techniques used to fortify enclaves in Baghdad or the West Bank are being sold around the world as leading-edge and ‘combat-proven’ ‘security solutions’ by corporate coalitions linking Israeli, US and other companies and states.

Crucially, boomerang effects linking security and military doctrine in the cities of the West with those on colonial peripheries are backed up by the cultural geographies which...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction The surveillance-industrial complex: towards a political economy of surveillance?
• Part I International networks and global circuits of surveillance
• Part II Surveillance capacity, industrial infrastructures and resource distribution
• Part III Ground-level circulations
• Appendix A About COST
• Appendix B The new transparency: surveillance and social sorting
• Index