Stopping the Spies

Constructing and resisting the surveillance state in South Africa

Jane Duncan

• Publisher: Wits University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781776142170
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Surveillance & Privacy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 2013, former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden leaked secret documents revealing that state agencies like the NSA had spied on the communications of millions of innocent citizens. International outrage resulted, but the Snowden documents revealed only the tip of the surveillance iceberg. Apart from insisting on their rights to tap into communications, more and more states are placing citizens under surveillance, tracking their movements and transactions with public and private institutions. The state is becoming like a one-way mirror where it can see more of what its citizens do and say, while citizens see less and less of what the state does, owing to high levels of secrecy around surveillance.
Jane Duncan assesses the relevance of Snowden's revelations for South Africa. In doing so she questions the extent to which South Africa is becoming a surveillance society governed by a surveillance state. Is surveillance used for the democratic purpose of making people safer, or is it being used for the repressive purpose of social control, especially of those considered to be politically threatening to ruling interests? What kind of collective is needed to ensure that unaccountable surveillance does not take place? What works and what does not work as organised responses? These questions and more are examined in this penetrating analysis of South African and global democracy.
Stopping the Spies is aimed at South African citizens, academics as well for general readers who care about our democracy and the direction it is taking.

CHAPTER

1

Theorising the surveillance state

This chapter examines possibly the most important concept used in this book, namely surveillance. It identifies some of the ways in which surveillance has been conceptualised and theorised, and how these theorisations have changed over time. As Alan Sears has argued, theory is not a mere neutral tool, but a guide to action. The value of theory is that it helps us to ask and answer causal questions that cannot be answered at the level of fact alone.¹ If the problem – to the extent that there is one – is not correctly understood, then it becomes more difficult to craft effective intervention strategies. There can be little doubt that technological developments associated with computerisation have made surveillance easier, but does this automatically mean that these recent developments are negative in nature? Surely, surveillance can also have positive effects? Given the extent to which surveillance has become pervasive, how do the different elements of surveillance relate to one another? Are we really looking at a ‘Big Brother’-type scenario, where different surveillance actors combine their efforts to track and control people from the cradle to the grave? Or are the more benign elements of surveillance really nothing to worry about, with the threats being overstated by more paranoid elements of society? This chapter focuses on theoretical debates about these specific questions, as they impact on what we define as surveillance, and how we mark it out from other forms of information collection and analysis. Such questions matter, as answering them will help us answer the broader question of how worried we should be about these developments.

FOUCAULT AND THE PANOPTICON

It is impossible to discuss the concept of surveillance without invoking Michel Foucault and his appropriation of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon as a metaphor for the kind of surveillance being undertaken by the NSA and its UK counterpart, GCHQ, and other state surveillance actors in the present time. In his book Panopticon, Bentham defined surveillance as ‘a new mode of obtaining power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example’.² Bentham’s definition is significant, as it links surveillance directly to social control. In other words, it is not aimed only at satisfying curiosity or meeting a voyeuristic need to peep into someone’s personal affairs; rather, it is aimed at obtaining information about a person to coerce that person to change his or her behaviour.

Bentham designed a panopticon, or a building that relies on surveillance, to achieve control of particular populations. The building design was meant for a variety of purposes, such as hospitals, schools and prisons, but Bentham was particularly interested in putting the design to use for penal purposes. Consisting of a circular building with an observation post at the centre, and cells radiating out from the centre, this design allowed a single guard to maintain watch over all the inmates in the cells. While it was physically impossible for the watchman to observe everyone at the same time, inmates never knew when they were being watched or not, and as a result they internalised disciplinary behaviour.³

While few panopticons have been built, the concept has found currency as a metaphor for the growth of surveillance in contemporary society. Foucault, who has probably done more than anyone else to popularise the concept, argued that the panopticon was the perfect surveillance tool, as it allowed the enforcers of discipline to observe their charges with a single gaze; while the supervisor is invisible, the inmates are visible to the supervisor at all times. For Foucault, this arrangement allowed for ‘the automatic functioning of power’⁴ by making the actual exercise of power unnecessary: a boon, especially in a society where governments perceived to be tyrannical faced the risk of rebellion by their subjects. This was because inmates were more inclined to alter their behaviour of their own accord because of the awareness that they could be observed. The technical possibility of constant surveillance also turned them into more knowable subjects, which was likely to make them more docile. This internalisation of discipline made the need for more overt forms of control through physical confrontation less necessary, and reduced the number of those exercising power, while potentially increasing the number of those over whom power was exercised. At the same time, power became dissociated from a particular governing individual: rather, it became a deindividualised regime of rules and mechanisms.⁵

The panopticon has become a metaphor for a state that keeps its citizens under constant surveillance to create the feeling of being watched – what Foucault has referred to as a disciplinary society. Such a society can be governed at a distance, allowing for more dispersed forms of social control that do not necessarily require a monolithic and homogenising state with a huge bureaucracy; instead, control is exercised through a variety of administrative systems, institutions and even discourses. Technologies of surveillance allow the activities of the state to become invisible, and its existence enters the realm of abstract ideas.⁶

Foucault elaborated on his conception of surveillance and the power that it produces in later writings, where he identified surveillance as being central to both liberalism and neoliberalism. For him, the panopticon was central to liberal government in that it disciplined individuals by subjecting them to constant visibility, which made overt violence unnecessary because they policed themselves. In other words, power was exercised in a ‘polite’ fashion. Government intervened only when individuals did not function according to established modes of behaviour.⁷ This form of surveillance is biopolitical in the sense that the body is controlled not through physical violence but through observation and classification, to enforce a liberal mode of governance. Biological features of the human body – such as people’s fingerprints and irises – as well as their movements, viewing and internet browsing habits, have become the stuff of surveillance, and are used to manage populations by analysing their present habits, identifying problem populations, and predicting future ones.⁸ This exercise of power is not exclusive to the state, however, but can be used by any institution that gathers and processes personal information. Google, for instance, can be considered an incredibly powerful biopolitical tool, as data generated from users’ internet searches is mined algorithmically and their profiles are sold to advertisers.⁹

The enormous value of Foucault’s conception of power is that it departs from monolithic, state-centric conceptions, which fail to explain adequately how social order is maintained in nominally democratic, non-authoritarian societies. Also, Foucault did not necessarily see power as a negative force in society; it could also be productive. Furthermore, by recognising the dispersal of power, he opened up the possibility that multiple sites of resistance to power might develop. However, the problem with Foucault’s conception of power is that it goes too far in depersonalising and decentralising power, in that it is everywhere and nowhere: this makes power infinitely more difficult to challenge. It also tends to ignore the ideological purposes of surveillance as a means of controlling those rendered surplus by neoliberal capitalism. This is not to say that Foucault did not have a concept of resistance; for him, resistance became possible only if one recognised the interests embedded in a variety of social practices. Simply pointing fingers at a single authority such as a government did not help one to understand how modern social orders actually worked.¹⁰

Another issue that Foucault’s conception of surveillance tends to ignore is that the surveillance capacities of the state have not necessarily replaced more overt forms of repression: on the contrary, at times both have been rolled out together and in fact they complement one another.¹¹ Surveillance may be used to identify populations that need to be contained by the use of more overt methods; for instance, policing decisions about protests may be either facilitative or militarised depending on the extent of the threat that the police identify through surveillance.¹²

THE POSTMODERN TURN IN SURVEILLANCE STUDIES

There are others who have argued that the panopticon is not an appropriate metaphor for contemporary societies. Drawing on the insights of postmodern studies – which problematise theories that advance one-sided narratives of how societies function – some theorists have pointed out that surveillance now takes place on a much more distributed basis than in the past, and that a state-centric approach to surveillance studies is no longer appropriate in societies where there is a huge diversity of surveillance actors. In fact, Kevin Haggerty has argued that the panopticon has been overused in surveillance studies, and has even called for the panopticon to be demolished metaphorically, to remove its grip on the field. He has pointed out that since Foucault’s groundbreaking book, surveillance has come to serve a variety of different functions, not just to police the activities of problem subjects. Surveillance is being used in education and medical treatment, too, so it cannot be said that surveillance serves the single purpose of social control. This means that a less negative, more neutral definition of surveillance is now required.

Surveillance is not necessarily directed at the poor or marginalised to maintain social hierarchies, either; it has become much more widespread. Surveillance is also being directed at non-human subjects, a development that unsettles the control argument, and this form of surveillance has even brought social benefits. Different social actors are also using surveillance, not just the state. The democratisation of surveillance technologies has also meant that ordinary citizens can use inverse surveillance, turning these technologies against the powerful and exposing their abuses of power: practices that have become known as ‘sousveillance’.¹³ Protesters, for instance, can use video cameras to record police violence. These capacities, when put in the hand of citizens, problematise the view that all surveillance is necessarily bad. Other examples of neutral definitions abound in surveillance literature.¹⁴ Haggerty has argued that surveillance scholars tend to avoid studying positive examples of surveillance, as their immersion in critique makes them blind to these phenomena.¹⁵

Different and even alternative metaphors to the panopticon have also been offered, based on the argument that Foucault did not foresee computerisation and the rise of consumerism, which have greatly expanded the scope for surveillance.¹⁶ These developments mean that there is not one single point where surveillance takes place, but multiple points. Thomas Mathiesen’s term ‘the synopticon’ – where the many watch the few by using the mass media – has become popular in surveillance studies, as it recognises these more recent developments. In other words, mass audiences are able to peer into the lives of celebrities and other public figures, placing them under unprecedented levels of scrutiny to which audiences themselves are not subjected.¹⁷ However, Mathiesen did not necessarily propose the synopticon as an alternative to the panopticon; in fact, the two are interlinked in that both are still structures of domination, and he was not necessarily optimistic about the mass media’s effects in society.

Surveillance in contemporary society has even been described as a surveillant assemblage, where surveillance practices do not take place in one part of society only, but where information is gleaned from multiple sources and locations.¹⁸ Drawing on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson have argued that discrete surveillance systems have converged, leading to a rhizomic levelling of surveillance. No longer is it conducted on a top-down basis and primarily by states – as the panoptic metaphor suggests – but diverse media can be connected to pursue surveillance for multiple purposes, and human surveillance efforts can be augmented by computers. Scattered centres of calculation, from police stations to banks, undertake surveillance, and as a result surveillance transcends the boundaries of separate institutions.¹⁹ Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon have termed such surveillance ‘liquid surveillance’, or a form of surveillance that relies on the body being encoded by data and tracked through multiple data flows.²⁰ Deleuze himself recognised the fact that surveillance practices had changed from the early modern period about which Foucault wrote, in that computerisation had made constant surveillance possible at a reduced cost, allowing for continuous control rather than periodic examination. As a result, Deleuze argued, contemporary societies should not be described as disciplinary societies, but as societies of control.²¹ In other words, power over individuals is not necessarily exercised through fixed institutional structures, but through mobile and rapid ICTs, which enable control ‘on the go’: a form of control that is perfectly suited to societies defined by flexibility. At the same time, electronic tagging still allows surveillance to take place, to ensure that individuals are in a permissible place.²²

Other theorists have argued that Foucault’s ideas still remain highly relevant to today’s surveillance society, and that he would not have been surprised by recent attempts to universalise surveillance using the internet and other technologies. Far from being a technology linked to societies of control – which, according to Deleuze, have replaced disciplinary societies – the cellphone can be understood as a portable panopticon, in that it allows users to be tracked and monitored invisibly.²³ In fact, the Snowden revelations have brought Foucault back to the fore, with an emerging group of scholars arguing for his continued relevance. They maintain that there has been an unfair dismissal of his work, even though the panopticon may not describe the functioning of the internet with precision.²⁴ For instance, Gilbert Caluya has argued that what he terms the Deleuzian turn in surveillance studies – with its influential metaphor of the rhizomic surveillant assemblage – does not necessarily represent a significant break from Foucault, who recognised that a myriad forms of surveillance characterised modern society and rejected state-centric conceptions of power.²⁵ Furthermore, while the internet is a distributed medium, it is inherently surveillant in that in its current state it allows for the invisible filtering of information as an exercise of power. Its surveillant potential enables governments to shift their interventions from direct enforcement of the law to more invisible, decentralised, technologically based forms of enforcement. This fits Foucault’s conception of power very well. However, contemporary surveillance operates vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and people also participate in their own surveillance. This added dimension has led David Lyon to insist that researchers should take the cultures of surveillance seriously, as they need to understand the circumstances under which people willingly participate in surveillance activities through their social media and internet usage.²⁶

POLITICAL ECONOMY AND MARXIST THEORIES OF SURVEILLANCE

Political economy theorists have also argued that while contemporary surveillance takes place undeniably on a far more distributed basis than in the period Foucault wrote about, the means of surveillance are much more centralised than is often acknowledged. The internet – and the applications and infrastructure it relies on – is dominated by a few major companies, such as Google, Microsoft and Facebook.²⁷ They have co-operated with NSA surveillance through the surveillance programme known as PRISM, handing over internet data based on selectors that the NSA provided. The programme was apparently directed at foreigners in the main, but US nationals were caught in the dragnet too: a fact that the NSA denied initially, but was subsequently forced to admit.²⁸ Capital has an insatiable desire to control every aspect of human existence, to open up new vistas of profit-making and to minimise resistance to commodification: that is why it ...