Canadian Journal of Sociology Online September-October 2005
Abstract: Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, the notion that “everything has changed” became a common theme. This paper argues that one of the most important areas of change occurred in the practice of surveillance. Utilizing news articles from the New York Times and Toronto Globe and Mail, we analyze the politics and social dynamics of contemporary surveillance. Our analysis is not a study of terrorism and September 11th per se, but rather uses the political reaction to September 11th to ground an examination of how surveillance policies and practices can paradoxically bring with them both an increased sense of security and a host of new dangers. We detail how September 11th provided a convenient opportunity for the security establishment to lobby for increased surveillance capacity, despite lingering questions about whether such devices can achieve their professed goals.
Résumé: Suite aux attaques terroristes du 11 septembre, la notion de « tout a changé » est apparue comme un thème commun. Cet article prétend que les changements les plus importants se sont produits au niveau de la pratique de la surveillance. Au moyen d’articles tirés du Globe and Mail de Toronto et du New York Times, nous analysons la dynamique politique et sociale de la surveillance contemporaine. Notre analyse n’est pas une étude du terrorisme ni du 11 septembre en soi, mais utilise plutôt une réaction politique aux événements du 11 septembre dans le but de déterminer comment les politiques et pratiques de surveillance peuvent à la fois apporter un meilleur sens de sécurité et une gamme de nouveaux dangers. Nous décrivons comment les événements du 11 septembre ont fourni une occasion pratique au milieu de la sécurité de faire pression pour de meilleures capacités de surveillance et ce, malgré les questions persistantes au sujet de la capacité de ces dispositifs d’atteindre les buts déclarés.
The tragedy of war is that the unthinkable soon becomes the accepted (Hanson, 2002: 112).
The United States has witnessed a heated public debate over what type of structure to erect on the site of the former World Trade Centre to commemorate the September 11th terrorist attacks. Simultaneously, a different type
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of structure — an intensive surveillance infrastructure — is being assembled piece by piece in the United States (U.S.) and other Western nations in response to those events. Although this latter development promises to be one of the more significant and lasting political legacies of the attacks, it is proceeding with comparatively little public debate or protest.
This paper analyses the immediate aftermath of the September 11th terrorist attacks, offering insights into the contemporary dynamics and politics of antiterrorism surveillance. It is not a study of the terrorist attacks per se, but uses the political and institutional response to the attacks as an entrée for an analysis of the dynamics, promises and limitations of anti-terrorism surveillance. We commence by discussing the general intensification and expansion of various forms of surveillance, and relate this to the simultaneous centralization and decentralization of contemporary surveillance. We then analyze some of the factors that can limit the effectiveness of such measures. Notwithstanding these limitations, we argue that surveillance, justified as a means to counter terrorism, will continue to expand and intensify in the coming years. Our final substantive section outlines some of the reasons why we suspect that such an expansion is likely to persist.
Surveillance involves the collection of information about populations for institutional and personal purposes. This definition is broad enough to advance discussion about surveillance beyond the usual fixation on cameras and undercover operatives. While such tools and practices are important, they are only two manifestations of a much broader network of surveillance activities that now assumes a remarkable array of forms, including sensors, bureaucratic documentation, x-rays, satellites, and computerized databases.
These diverse types of surveillance serve an ever expanding variety of functions, including governance, security, control, profit maximization and entertainment. Here we are only concerned with one of these uses — surveillance as a form of security against terrorist threats. We recognize, however, that it is increasingly difficult to differentiate a surveillance practice dedicated to “security” from its many other applications, as surveillance regimes instituted and justified for one purpose now rapidly assume other uses.
The attacks of September 11th spectacularly ended any quiet confidence that North America might be immune from external terrorist threats. Surveillance has a role to play in countering terrorism. Nevertheless, there are reasons to believe that surveillance might not be able to live up to our security expectations, and can, in turn, produce its own unique social dangers. While the risks posed by an expanded and intensified surveillance infrastructure are not as immediate and dramatic as imploding skyscrapers, they are nonetheless real and warrant more serious debate than has been possible in the charged political climate that has characterized the post September 11th environment.
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It quickly became apparent in the aftermath of the attacks that the global response to terrorism would involve augmenting various forms of surveillance. Surveillance helped identify the attackers and capture other terrorist suspects. It was also an invaluable strategic asset in the U.S. war in Afghanistan and has become a key dimension in the efforts of Western nations to secure themselves against future attacks.
Conscious of the prominent place that surveillance was assuming in public policy we began to collect American and Canadian newspaper articles that referred to any form of surveillance in the context of the attacks. We later formalized these efforts by collecting every surveillance-related article published in the New York Times and the Toronto Globe and Mail in the three months after the attacks (September 11, 2001 – December 11, 2001). This provided us with literally hundreds of newspaper articles which we use to ground the following analysis.
Although we are confident that we have collected almost all of the relevant articles from these sources, some comments about our data are in order. We have included Canada’s premier national newspaper in our sample to provide a sense of the international dimension of these developments. By concentrating on articles written during the three months after the attacks we are able to convey an appreciation for the scope of surveillance-related developments at a time when policy was changing remarkably quickly. The three-month cut-off is an arbitrary, but necessary, end-point for our analysis of processes that have proceeded apace and will continue to evolve over the years to come. Consequently, we do not claim to be addressing all of the surveillance proposals and practices that emerged after the attacks, as many of these were still inchoate at the conclusion of our research period. Moreover, our analysis does not address any clandestine surveillance practices which have not been publicly revealed. Nonetheless, we believe that we are able to present an accurate picture of the surveillance-related developments introduced in the immediate aftermath of the attacks (see also Ball and Webster, 2003; Lyon, 2003).
Centralized and Decentralized ObservationHaving watched several televised memorials of the attacks, we are inclined to believe the popular claim that the destruction of the World Trade Center was the most photographed event in history. In fact, the sheer volume of photographs that proliferated after the attacks became the basis for one of the first attack-related hoaxes, when someone posted a picture on the Internet of a man standing on the observation deck of the World Trade Center while a jet bore
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down on him in the background. The (fraudulent) story accompanying the image claimed that the photograph had been developed from a camera retrieved from the rubble of the World Trade Center.
That so many pictures were taken of the attack only reinforces the fact that we now live in a surveillance society (Brin, 1998; Lyon, 2001a; Whitaker, 1999). Photographs are just one component in a staggering array of technologies and tactics now used to record events and monitor populations. That said, it is easy for the uninitiated to not appreciate the sheer scope of this enterprise. Consequently, we drafted Table 1 to document the different surveillance tactics and technologies used to reconstruct the actions of the terrorists prior to the attacks. Notwithstanding its rather large size, Table 1 severely underestimates the number of surveillance sources that were employed in reconstructing the activities of the terrorists prior to the attacks. Thus, Table 1 only lists those sources mentioned in the news media, which focused almost exclusively on sources that had provided useful information. As such, it does not identify the myriad of databases, bureaucracies and miles of video footage that were scrutinized by security authorities [1] but which failed to produce any information about the terrorists.
One of the first things that Table 1 reveals is the range of non-policing institutions now involved in the routine collection of information. Considerable surveillance is undertaken by the bureaucratic structures that most of us encounter in our daily lives as we acquire a driver’s license, withdraw funds from financial institutions, or attend school. Each of these unremarkable acts produces a record which forms part of our “data double;” the electronic, visual or documentary trace of ourselves that we leave behind in our encounters with modern institutions. Alone, or combined with other forms of information through “data matching” techniques, such information can be very revealing (Gandy, 1993; Turow, 1997).
Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson (2000) have introduced the concept of a “surveillant assemblage” as a means to make sense of this proliferating, decentralized and uncoordinated regime of visibility. Their analysis is particularly germane to how surveillance has evolved since September 11th. The notion of an assemblage accentuates the staggering array of agencies and institutions which now operate surveillance systems. As Table 1 shows, this includes corporations, the police, private citizens and a myriad of gov-
1. The phrase “security authorities” or “security establishment” refers to the many policing agencies that deal with the threat of terrorism. In Canada this refers to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, R.C.M.P., Customs and Immigration, and many layers of public police. In the U.S. it includes the F.B.I., Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, National Security Agency, the Department of Defense, the public police, and others. Back to text
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ernmental agencies. No centralized agency coordinates the totality of these surveillance systems and each operates in light of its own logics, agendas and local constraints. How the information produced by these surveillance regimes will be used is not fixed by their initial justification, but can shift over time as it becomes apparent that such information can serve alternative ends. For example, many of the documents, visibility mechanisms and tracking devices listed in Table 1 were originally introduced as a means to provide entertainment, bureaucratic efficiency or profit. It was only recognized at a later point that they could also serve the ends of criminal investigation and national security.
The notion of a “surveillant assemblage” stands opposed to a more traditional concern about surveillance, as exemplified by George Orwell’s (1949) notion of “Big Brother,” which stresses the centralized, state-driven attributes of surveillance. The surveillant assemblage is not a single physical entity or system, but the sum total of the surveillance capacity that can be trained on a location or population. As such, it is less a “thing” than it is a potentiality that can be actualized to varying degrees depending on what and how observational regimes are combined and aligned.
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This image of a widely dispersed, uncoordinated and fractured set of surveillance operations, however, should not be taken as an argument that surveillance is not, or cannot be, centralized. Centralization is not anathema to the surveillant assemblage (Lyon, 2001b), but represents one powerful way in which it can be deployed. In fact, contemporary surveillance is characterized by simultaneous processes of decentralization and centralization. Decentralization is apparent in the continuing proliferation of disconnected surveillance systems. Centralization, in contrast, occurs when powerful agencies work to combine and align these dispersed systems, often to serve purposes that were not part of the original rationale for the development of each particular subsystem. Hence, while the totality of surveillance in society amounts to a fractured and disconnected set of sub-systems, these can occasionally be integrated on a temporary or permanent basis to produce a remarkably detailed picture of particular individuals or locations. Hence, centralization does not mean that one agency (i.e. the state or corporation) deploys and controls the totality of surveillance operations, but that specific organizations work to combine, integrate and deploy the diverse systems that they and other organizations have established.
The efforts by the U.S. security establishment to re-trace the actions of the terrorists prior to the attacks by examining the informational output of a plethora of different institutions is a telling illustration of this integrative and centralizing dimension of surveillance. As Table 1 indicates, assorted physically disparate and organizationally independent surveillance systems were used to retrospectively learn as much as possible about the terrorists. Business records provided the authorities with clues about where the terrorists worked, lived and traveled. Pictures of the terrorists were accumulated from government records, surveillance videos and personal photo albums. Radar transmissions, cellular telephone logs and “black box” airplane cockpit recorders provided insight into the final moments of the attacks. It is this ability to integrate disparate systems which gives the surveillant assemblage its unique power and mutable structure.
It is therefore not possible to adequately understand how surveillance operates if we do not attend to how surveillance capacity is related to, and derives from, efforts to align and integrate a host of different visualizing systems. This involves scrutinizing the types of resources employed to accomplish this integration. In the aftermath of the attacks, for example, the U.S. police and national security establishment relied upon a host of legal, moral, economic and emotional resources to collect and integrate diverse monitoring systems. Such efforts exemplify the malleability of the state’s informational boundaries, as state agencies now often expand their reach beyond exclusively state institutions to capitalize on the surveillance and informational capacities of ostensibly non-state organizations.
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One of the greatest public disappointments related to the terrorist attacks arguably stemmed from revelations that the terrorists had caught U.S. security officials largely unawares. Despite the state’s extensive existing surveillance infrastructure, authorities claimed that the attacks were made possible by a lack of information about potential terrorists and a failure to share existing information. Politicians moved quickly to rectify this situation.
Official state responses to the attacks were multi-faceted. Governments in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom drafted omnibus Bills such as the USA Patriot Act and Canada’s Public Safety Act. These Bills contained a host of proposals designed to address future terrorist threats through changes to policing, the military and public administration. Table 2 summarizes the different surveillance-related proposals that were advanced to deal with terrorism in the immediate aftermath of the attacks as found in the New York Times and Globe and Mail. Detailed examination of this table reveals that surveillance has been positioned as a cornerstone of institutional responses to terrorist threats. Not all of these proposals were ultimately adopted, and at the time of writing some are still being developed and debated. Consequently, Table 2 is not a comprehensive list, but provides evidence of the political embrace of surveillance during a time of political crisis.
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We have broken down Table 2 into four broad categories of surveillance: documentation, visualization, integration (cooperation) and “other.” These categories are not mutually exclusive.
As a form of surveillance, “documentation” has the greatest historical legacy. It was intimately tied to the rise of modern states, and is now an invaluable component of all manner of bureaucratic endeavors (Caplan and Torpey, 2001). The development of birth registries, vital statistics, passports and fingerprinting in the eighteenth century created new ways for the authorities to know the citizenry (Cole, 2001; Hacking, 1990; Nock, 1993; Torpey, 2000). In the process, they also offered the state new power resources and introduced novel opportunities for political intervention (Foucault, 1991). Bureaucratic documentation by state and non-state agencies has expanded apace over the years.
“Visualization” is an offshoot of documentation, involving an attempt to monitor individual behavior through new recording devices. Painted portraits at one time served this function, but visualization came into its own with the rise of photography (Tagg, 1988) and has since expanded considerably to include surveillance cameras, satellite imaging, X-rays, and so on. The digitization of photographic images has been one of the most important developments in the realm of surveillance in the past twenty years.
“Integration” involves efforts to bring together and coordinate already existing visualization tools. This can include combining two formerly discrete systems, such as the Canadian proposal to embed biometrics (a form of visualization) onto identification cards (a form of documentation). Alternatively, it can involve opening up an existing systems to new users, such as the Canadian proposal to allow airline officials to provide U.S. customs and immigration officials with access to the considerable information about travelers contained in airline passenger manifestos (Clark, 2001). As we have noted, this ability to align and integrate diverse surveillance tools is one of the characteristic aspects of contemporary surveillance.
We designate as “other” those surveillance developments that do not neatly fall within one of the other categories. For example, George Bush Jr.’s shortlived proposal to create the remarkable “Operation Tips” program is placed in the “other” category. If implemented, Operation Tips would have transformed thousands of public employees into de facto domestic spies. Postal employees, utility workers, truck drivers and train conductors were all envisioned as potential recruits due to their regular contact with the general public. As such, they were seen to be particularly well situated to use anonymous “tips” lines to inform the authorities of any “suspicious” individuals they might encounter.
Close examination of Table 1 and Table 2 reveals that a large percentage of these different forms of surveillance are not specifically directed at criminal or terrorist suspects. Instead, they involve a generalized observation of every-
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one that uses specified services, spaces or technologies. Consequently, it is not surprising that many of the institutions that are now being encouraged, or legally compelled, to increase their surveillance efforts are not police or military agencies, but public bureaucracies that routinely deal with foreigners, students, travelers, consumers and investors. Authorities are using such efforts to try and unearth hints of deviance by monitoring such mundane and nondeviant things as school records, travel documents and pictures taken in public places.
The proposals contained within the aforementioned Bills employ some or all of the four categories of surveillance. Cumulatively they have the potential to reduce individual privacy rights through an opportunistic expansion of institutional powers and the questionable use of surveillance technologies for a host of unstated purposes. Legislation such as the USA Patriot Act alters the balance of rights between the citizen and state (Pikowsky, 2002). While almost all of this Act’s dozens of provisions merit detailed consideration and debate, the law was passed so quickly that the public was largely unaware of its specifics, and politicians were asked to vote on the Bill without ever having read it.
A climate of fear and anxiety helped ease the passage of such laws (Davis, 2001). However, a great deal of organizational opportunism was also at work. Many of the surveillance proposals adopted in the days after the attack were recycled from earlier legislative efforts. In previous incarnations these proposals had often been legitimated as essential for the international “war on drugs” or to address other crimes, such as money laundering. The September 11th attacks gave the authorities a new and apparently unassailable legitimation for long-standing legislative ambitions. Before the dust had settled on Manhattan, the security establishment had mobilized to expand and intensify their surveillance capabilities, justifying existing proposals as necessary tools to fight the new war against terrorism. Ultimately, the police, military and security establishment reaped an unanticipated windfall of increased funding, new technology and loosened legislative constraints by strategically invoking fears of future attacks.
There are several examples of such opportunism. Since at least 1999, when Congress initially turned down their request, the U.S. Justice Department has lobbied for the development of new “secret search” provisions. Likewise, prior to the attacks, the FBI and the National Telecommunications and Information Systems Security Committee had a lengthy shopping list of desired surveillance-related measures including legal enhancements to their wiretapping capabilities, legal constraints on the public use of cryptography, and provisions for governmental agents to compel Internet service providers to provide information on their customers (Burnham, 1997). All of these proposals were recycled and implemented after the September 11th attacks,
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now justified as integral tools in the “war on terrorism.” New provisions requiring banks to exercise “due diligence” in relation to their large depositors were originally justified by the authorities as a means to counter the “war on drugs.” The opportunism of many of these efforts was inadvertently revealed by an RCMP Sergeant when, during a discussion about new official antiterrorism powers to monitor financial transactions, he noted that: “We’ve been asking for something like this for four years. It’s really our best weapon against biker gangs” [emphasis added] (Corcan, 2001).
In Canada, the Federal Privacy Commissioner was particularly alarmed by the development of what he referred to as a “Big Brother database.” This amounts to a detailed computerized record of information about Canadian travelers. Although justified as a means to counter terrorism, the data will be made available to other government departments for any purpose they deem appropriate. Such provisions raise the specter of informational “fishing expeditions.” Indeed, the Canadian government has already indicated that this ostensible anti-terrorist database will be used to help monitor tax evaders and catch domestic criminals. It will also be used to scrutinize an individual’s travel history and destinations, in an effort to try and determine whether they might be a pedophile or money launderer (Radwanski, 2002). While these are laudable goals, they also reveal how a host of other surveillance agendas have been furthered by capitalizing on the new anti-terrorism discourse.
The Limits of VisibilityThe impetus behind the current embrace of surveillance relies on the assumption that more surveillance will provide greater security where the existing surveillance infrastructure has failed. Anti-terrorist surveillance is therefore justified in three ways. First, surveillance can provide information that can be retrospectively analyzed to provide insights about terrorists and their operations. Second, surveillance can deter future terrorist attacks. Finally, surveillance will allow the authorities to intervene in real-time to thwart terrorist acts before they occur.
While surveillance can help accomplish some of these goals, there are strong reasons to believe that it cannot meet all such expectations. More sober consideration of what we can realistically expect from anti-terrorism surveillance, along with some of the limitations, dangers and paradoxes potentially associated with the hasty embrace of yet more visibility, is required.
As noted, the information presented in Table 1 indicates how the existing surveillance system provides ample opportunities to retrospectively analyze a person’s life. Different observational regimes cumulatively provide a wealth of information that can be combined and scrutinized to learn about the activities, movements and finances of a suspect. It is this retrospective dimension
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that is currently the strength of the surveillant assemblage. Given sufficient time, the authorities can reconstruct a good deal, but by no means all, of the actions of particular individuals by reading the informational tea leaves that they trail behind them as they go about their daily lives.
Advocates also suggest that surveillance might deter future attacks. The assumption is that individuals are not apt to attack people or places where surveillance is integrated into a security apparatus for fear of being caught. Deterrence, however, might not have much bearing on truly committed terrorists — the group invoked to justify recent surveillance enhancements. Deterrence seems to work best when the potential criminal fears capture, detention and prosecution. Such concerns are less relevant to someone willing or eager to die for their cause.
The third justification for anti-terrorist surveillance is that it holds out the possibility for real-time intervention to thwart or capture terrorists. Following this logic, a surveillance system would be able to monitor and/or identify suspicious individuals in real-time, giving security officials the opportunity to intervene prior to an attack. The assumption appears to be that terrorists look and act so transparently suspicious that intensified monitoring will single them out for investigation and capture.
Unfortunately, there are several limitations on the prospect of using surveillance in this fashion. The first concerns the problem of interpretive ambiguity. That is, it is not necessarily self-evident to the person who monitors educational records, or a CCTV camera, that they are seeing suspicious behavior. The difficulty for the watchers is not necessarily that they do not see enough, but that it is difficult to comprehend what they do see. Actions that are “clearly” suspicious often only become so after the fact. For example, a great deal has been made about how suspicious it was that the terrorists trained to fly jets, but showed little concern about learning how to take-off or land. Such behaviors only became suspicious (as opposed to just “curious”) with the benefit of hindsight. Given the massive universe of idiosyncratic human behavior, such “suspicious” actions actually pale in comparison with the host of more routine types of strangeness encountered by many of us on a regular basis.
A second limitation on the potential of using surveillance to initiate realtime intervention is the sheer volume of information produced by existing surveillance systems. It can now be almost impossible to integrate and make timely sense of the reams of images and information being recorded. Given the enormous volumes of information coursing through some surveillance systems, officials tend to rely on practical shortcuts to help them select out particular actions, communications or individuals as “suspicious.” Increasingly, such cognitive shortcuts are being formalized in technological structures. One of the more controversial of these efforts is the U.S. National Security Agency’s
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ECHELON system which aims to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic communications. Rather than attempt to analyze all of these communications, the ECHELON system processes this information through massive computers which search for key words or phrases, thereby drawing out particular individuals and messages for special attention. A less sophisticated example of such information shortcuts involves airline passenger profiling systems, such as the international CAPPS (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System). Such systems flag suspicious travelers by electronically analyzing reams of information pertaining to where they purchased their ticket, how they paid for it, their clothing, nationality, baggage, travel history, and even what they purchased at the airport gift shop (Armstrong and Pereira, 2001).
Such procedures have proven to be controversial for several reasons. First, they can rely on stereotypical assumptions about how a “criminal” or “terrorist” looks or behaves. Specifically, they use risk indicators (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997) that often appear to be little more than racial/ethnic stereotypes. As Norris and Armstrong (1999) have shown in their ethnographic study of CCTV systems, camera operators employ a host of highly stereotypical and questionable markers related to a citizen’s age, race, clothing and demeanor to identify individuals deserving special attention. Such shortcuts tend to introduce a form of self-fulfilling prophecy in that by singling out certain classes of individuals for greater scrutiny based on stereotypical attributes of group behavior, they reproduce and reinforce biases against entire categories of people. Finally, some see these efforts as unpalatable simply because they subject masses of innocent individuals to routine monitoring on the vague justification that such information might prove useful either now or at some unspecified point in the future.
Efforts to identify “suspicious” individuals by analyzing particular markers of behavior or identity are further limited by the fact that the intended targets of such scrutiny are increasingly aware of the security mechanisms used by the authorities. Dedicated terrorist groups such as El-Qaeda seem to be attuned to the informational protocols used to try and monitor their behavior and communications, going so far as to relay messages exclusively by personal courier, rather than use communication formats, such as the telephone or email, that can be easily monitored.
An Expanding StructureThe above section identified just some of the practical limitations on the potential effectiveness of surveillance as a means to reduce the incidence of terrorist attacks. However, the expansion of such measures cannot be attributed to a purely rational evaluation of their likelihood for success. There are several
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reasons to believe that surveillance, justified as an anti-terrorism measure, will likely continue to expand in Western societies irrespective of whether it “works” in some instrumental fashion. In this concluding substantive section we draw attention to four such reasons. The first relates to how surveillance can foster a greater awareness and fear of the unknown or unseen. The second concerns how surveillance can paradoxically be ratcheted up as a result of its past failures. The third involves the way in which domestic security has been commodified. The final factor relates to the public’s apparent lack of concern about the more extreme risks posed by intensified surveillance systems. We suggest that this attitude is related to a difficulty in imagining the more dystopian potentials inherent in such devices.
Surveillance makes some places and people more visible, but in the process, it also accentuates the comparative darkness of other populations and locations. As we become aware of the capabilities of new forms of surveillance, we also become attuned to the fact that other places and populations are not comparably transparent. Such awareness can prompt demands for greater surveillance by both the authorities and by the general public which is increasingly encouraged to express any concerns about unmonitored places and unfamiliar people. This dynamic is most readily apparent in relation to CCTV cameras. As new CCTV systems are introduced, residents of adjacent non-monitored communities frequently complain that by virtue of being less visible than their neighbours they are now at greater risk. This, in turn, tends to prompt demands for cameras in their communities. The result, then, is a dynamic of escalating surveillance, motivated more by a fear of being less visible than other places, than by the demonstrated successes of such systems.
A second factor contributing to the expansion of anti-terrorist surveillance is related to the first. It is not only local citizens who are attuned to differential manifestations of visibility. Terrorists themselves are aware of the different configurations of surveillance and security that surround particular targets and consequently simply choose to attack less secure sites. As such, there is a relational and situational ecology of security, where the intensive security of one location makes another site a more attractive target. Security experts have suggested, for example, that since the security infrastructure of airports has increased, we should now anticipate terrorist attacks on railway systems, power grids or cruise ships, all of which are difficult to secure. An even more concrete example of this was the bombing of the Atlanta Olympics, where the considerable security at the games and the athlete’s village prompted an attack on a comparatively unsecured concert outside of the village.
What we are describing here is essentially a form of “displacement;” the long-standing criminological concern that anti-crime (or anti-terrorist) measures might just move criminals or terrorists from one location to another. We should be particularly concerned about such a prospect in relation to dedicated
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criminals such as terrorists, as they are actively searching for targets, as opposed to the more opportunistic petty criminal who is more apt to be deterred by specific local security measures (Felson, 2002). If, or when, terrorists start to target such less secure targets, the public will likely interpret these as a failure of the existing surveillance/security system. Rather than prompt a re-evaluation of what we can expect from such systems, such attacks will likely lead to calls for increased monitoring of these new classes of target. In the process, a dynamic of escalating surveillance is again reinforced.
The third factor pushing us towards a greater embrace of new surveillance technologies concerns the development of a new publicly supported market for security. Security has become commodified, and governments are being encouraged by business interests to embrace market solutions to complex geopolitical problems. On the business side of this equation, federal contracts provide a lucrative market for often unproven security devices. Following the model of the military industrial complex, powerful corporate interests are increasingly aligned with a push for greater surveillance and security devices, irrespective of questions about their demonstrable need, adequate performance or likely success (Haggerty and Ericson, 2001).
Finally, we recognize that the current expansion of surveillance could not occur without some degree of public support, or at a minimum, a lack of effective political opposition. Consequently, we must account for why the public has expressed only limited concern about these developments. For civil libertarians this comparative silence is particularly disconcerting given that mass public surveillance, exemplified by cameras on street corners, has often been seen as the icon of totalitarianism. Consequently, a broad coalition of citizens and civil libertarians has long resisted intrusive surveillance measures. The current quietude may be explained, on the one hand, by the simple fact that the threat of terrorism now appears more concrete than in the past. Other factors, however, also seem to be at work.
One important reason why public concern about surveillance seems to be muted is a limited political imagination about the risks of such tools. In particular, one of the greatest risks posed by such technologies arguably derives from the fact that they will outlast contemporary political arrangements. Once installed, it is doubtful that such devices will ever be removed except to be replaced by new and more refined devices. Surveillance cameras, electronic databases, integrated bureaucracies and Internet monitoring mechanisms are just a fraction of the technological and informational inheritance awaiting any group that gains power in the foreseeable future. That said, when asked to contemplate the future, Westerners tend to envision a world that looks remarkably like the present. Rarely do citizens acknowledge the prospect of drastic political and social transformation, making it difficult for them to appreciate the dystopian potentials inherent in certain technologies.
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Nonetheless, recent history has shown us how rapidly such changes can occur. Political structures are inherently fragile and subject to dramatic modifications. Should this happen, individuals who now embrace, or are indifferent towards, the ongoing formation of an intensive surveillance infrastructure could one day find themselves scrutinized in remarkable detail by such devices because they look or behave in ways that are now entirely unobjectionable. It is this failure of the public imagination to appreciate such risks which is arguably one of the main reasons for the apparent lack of public concern about increased surveillance.
ConclusionBoth international and domestic terrorists pose real threats to Western societies. Once released from its proverbial bottle, the specter of terrorism is not apt to recede. We must now plan for a future where such attacks are likely to be reproduced and intensified. At the same time, there are also real dangers inherent in trying to counter terrorism by hard-wiring society with a permanent surveillance infrastructure, the future uses of which we cannot begin to anticipate.
In the lingering climate of post 9–11 anxiety, or in the event that there is another major attack on the West, our cautions about the dangers of expanding surveillance are apt to sound naïve; a voice from a rapidly receding past that predates our current fears. However, we would be well advised to contemplate the risks of such surveillance during periods of relative calm, as times of terror, like those that immediately followed September 11th, tempt us to embrace dubious solutions that we might later regret.
Benjamin Franklin’s famous assessment that “Those people who are willing to trade their essential freedom for the sake of temporary security deserve and shall have neither, and will loose both” is a useful caution against the hasty embrace of surveillance. Nonetheless, in the current context his words seem to have lost some of their status as a universal truth, and appear overly strident in a world containing threats the likes of which Colonial Americans could not have imagined. Hence, contra Franklin, we are undeniably in the process of trading some freedoms for the promise of greater security, and as such must remain vigilant to ensure that we might not have already skewed the balance too far in one direction.
References