Should international state and corporate surveillance practices be considered more to be servicing needs, or undermining rights, of citizens and consumers?
Surveillance is one of the most complex and controversial aspects of crime control and crime prevention strategies. Early forms of surveillance can be seen as servicing citizens’ and consumer needs through the likes of taxation records, census and civil registration. However, continuous developments in technology and surveillance practices have changed the way human beings interact with each other and the way they behave in society. Moreover, these practices have been known to raise public concern over state and corporate violations of civil liberties perpetuated in the name of ‘protecting citizens’. As well as examining the extent to which these surveillance practices actually protect citizens, consideration will also be given to state/corporate surveillance methods and their impact on consumers. Finally, this essay will assess the risk to civil liberties posed by the globalization of surveillance in regards to totalitarianism, authoritarian government practices and total surveillance states. The recent rise of global surveillance practices is associated with the risk of a development of global totalitarian methods which aim to take freedoms away from citizens and place them in the hands of state control. This essay will argue that in many circumstances, corporate/state surveillance practices only ‘appear’ to be servicing the needs of citizens and consumers but are in fact undermining the rights of the very citizens and consumers they aim to be helping by way of totalitarian methods of governance.
CCTV: Protecting Citizens
The use of mass surveillance has been prevalent throughout history and is often touted by governments as an effective means of preventing and controlling crime. Surveillance expanded rapidly during the 1970s due to computerisation as it spread from workers and citizens to consumers and travellers. CCTV, airport check-ins, supermarket checkouts and employee cards all appeared during the 1980s and further advancements in surveillance practices have become more visible since 9/11 (Lyon, 2004). Government tendency to turn to surveillance as a crime prevention and deterrent strategy brings into question the extent to which surveillance actually protects citizens. CCTV, a form of mass surveillance used in many Western countries, is thought to be an effective deterrent to criminal activity. However, an evaluation of CCTV found that while it can be effective in terms of reducing property crime, findings are more mixed in relation to personal crime, public order offences and the ability to reduce public fear of crime (Phillips, 1999).
Despite the fact CCTV provides no protection to citizens and has a minimal impact on crime rates, the use of CCTV, particularly in Britain continued to expand. In 1994, the British Home Office supported and funded over 585 local CCTV systems as much as £38 million whilst increasing spending to £170 million on CCTV schemes over the next four years (Home Office, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998). As a result of this expansion, Britain now holds the most CCTV cameras in the world and these can now be found all over town centres, schools, colleges, transportation, and business centres as well as supermarkets, hospitals and even certain housing projects. The claim that CCTV provides public reassurance whilst reducing fear of crime is used as justification to increase use of surveillance in public places (Bennett and Gelsthorpe, 1996). However, increased use of CCTV can also generate and increase public fear of total state control, the possible abuse of recorded information and erosion of civil liberties. These concerns have been found to be particularly prevalent in young people and ethnic minorities (Farish, 1995).
Although many of these fears could be alleviated by the regulation of CCTV, a study of 70 local authorities of CCTV systems in England, Scotland and Wales revealed that 70% of the authorities studied did not always follow the codes of practice to govern their systems (Sarno, 1996). Consideration of equal opportunities in relation to use of CCTV was generally lacking with many of the male controllers showing bias and use of stereotypes to target black and Asian youths.
Despite limitations such as these and many more, the expansion of the CCTV industry continues and has brought with it a wealth of information attesting to its effectiveness. However, these claims are made with little scientific support (Groombridge and Murji, 1994a) and as a result, in more cases than not, mass CCTV surveillance only ‘appears’ to be servicing the needs of citizens.
Public Health Surveillance:
Another more modern form of surveillance which tends to give the ‘appearance’ of servicing citizens’ needs is the recently emerging Public Health Surveillance (PHS). This is a form of surveillance which uses ‘ongoing systematic collection, analysis and interpretation of data, closely integrated with the timely dissemination of these data to those responsible for preventing and controlling disease and injury’ (Thacker and Berkelman, 1988). PHS is used to estimate health status and behaviour of populations by donors, ministries of finance and ministries of health. As it can measure to some extent what is going on within the population, it can be thought of as valuable for measuring the need for interventions and to directly measure the effects of said interventions. Its purpose is to enable decision makers to lead and manage more effectively by providing useful evidence (Nsubuga et al., 2006).
The recent unprecedented Covid-19 global pandemic brought about a very unfortunate but equally unique opportunity to assess both the usefulness and effectiveness of PHS on a mass scale as well as control of the spread of the virus, therefore increasing public safety. In the UK, the Test and Trace app was introduced as a means of controlling the public health crisis. However, the privatised design by politicians was deemed to be a ‘lethal mistake’ and considered to be a ‘disaster’ by members of the medical community (Jones, Czauderna and Redgrave, 2020). The main focus of the app is testing, which means it ignores several other crucial aspects of the pandemic which are essential to appropriately control the virus. This includes failure to detect asymptomatic people and ignoring false negatives. Therefore, potentially 80% of those who are infectious will go undetected rendering the application as a failure before it had even begun to be utilised.
Despite government promises that Test and Trace would ‘combat’ the Covid-19 pandemic, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) in 2020 showed that the Test and Trace app has repeatedly failed to meet targets for delivering test results and contacting infected people, notwithstanding costs of the programme escalating near to £22 billion. Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth revealed in a Guardian article in 2020 that the Test and Trace programme now has a larger budget than the police and fire service combined and also voiced concerns over multi-million pound contracts being given to private outsourcing firms rather than relying on experienced public health expertise. Moreover, contracts for staff working on the programme were worth up to £720 million despite staff having very little to do. By June of 2020, utilisation rates of the app were way below 50% and the proportion of time worked during paid hours was as low as 4% for health professionals and only 1% for call handler staff. This means substantial public resources were spent on staff who provided very little in return for the investment and a surveillance app that did nothing to increase public safety or control the pandemic.
Undermining Consumers:
As well as assessing surveillance practices in relation to servicing citizens’ needs, it is equally important to consider whether consumer needs are being serviced or if their rights are being undermined. As with the aforementioned Test and Trace scheme, the outsourcing of government programmes to private companies has potentially large ramifications regarding not only civil liberties, they also pose a substantial threat through possible violations of consumer rights. Evidence of this problem arose recently when private company Serco, who secured the contract to govern the Test and Trace programme, were hit by a ransomware attack by cyber criminals who were part of the Babuk ransomware online hacking group. The Babuk group claimed to have had access to Serco’s systems for at least three weeks (Mageit, 2021). The Department of Health and Social Care declared that Test and Trace was unaffected by the attack. However, many experts claimed the attack exposed the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of Serco’s systems.
Similar issues were raised months later over another private outsourcing company called Sitel, responsible for a large part of the Test and Trace operation, when a former employee claimed that staff working in NHS call centres used their personal email accounts to handle individuals’ health data (Lovell, 2021). The ex-employee stated it was likely that personal information such as names, dates of birth, phone numbers and NHS numbers were sent via personal email accounts, directly breaching the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR).
These breaches of individuals’ personal data have increased during the Covid-19 pandemic and are not exclusive to the UK. Contact tracing as an intervention has raised several privacy concerns particularly in lower-middle income countries such as Bangladesh where citizens’ privacies are not given due consideration and are regularly breached without public knowledge in the name of Covid-19 surveillance (Alam and Sohel Rahman, 2020).
Rise of Corporate Surveillance:
Consumer rights are also being undermined by the rise of corporate surveillance. Until the mid-1990s, the power of surveillance was held by local and federal government agents and private detectives (Peterson, 2001, p.18). However, this is no longer the case as late 20th century surveillance underwent major changes relating to new technologies such as telecommunications, internet and other networks that have made personal databases remotely searchable (Lyon, 2004). A large part of modern corporate surveillance involves consumer data management, which is detailed profiling and data mining on customers and consumers. This type of commercial surveillance is increasingly dependent on software codes and algorithm methods (Graham and Marvin, 2001) that may collect data on individuals without their consent or knowledge.
Risk to consumers’ personal data being violated increases as global communications corporations like Apple, Microsoft and Google attempt to move personal data from individual user machines to their network servers, often known as ‘The Cloud’. More concerning is Facebook’s recent and very deliberate strategy to replace privacy with ‘sharing’ as an online social norm (Murakami Wood, 2012). In this instance, ‘sharing’ would require consumers to sign over all personal data to the corporate giant. Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff refers to this current period of corporate surveillance as ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’. Zuboff’s 2019 book offers unique insight as to how Silicon Valley and other corporations are data mining users to predict and shape personal behaviour in ways which undermine not only consumer rights but personal autonomy and indicate an eroding democracy. Zuboff coined the term ‘surveillance capitalism’ in 2014 and defines it as ‘the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioural data’. She cites Google as the inventors of surveillance capitalism by being the first to capture surplus behavioural data, excess information they did not need, to compute prediction products that they could sell to business customers and advertisers. Knowing that users were unlikely to agree to this violation of privacy, Google proceeded in pursuit of profit using ‘undetectable methods’ (Zuboff, 2019) to collect data on millions of consumers who were unaware that this was even happening. This is not the first time Google have been accused of mishandling consumer data. A 2019 article published in Nature revealed data-privacy and sharing concerns through Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ which sought to access the healthcare information of millions of people without their knowledge (Ledford, 2019). Moreover, Google was recently sued in a five billion dollar lawsuit due to the company’s tracking of internet users even when they were browsing in ‘private mode’ (BBC, 2020). Repeated violations of privacy such as these by Google, a supposedly reputable company, display brief examples of the many ways in which modern corporate surveillance practices are undermining consumer rights.
Globalization of Surveillance:
State and corporate surveillance practices which give the ‘appearance’ of servicing the needs of citizens and consumers also pose some of the biggest risks to civil liberties on a global scale. High tech corporations that sway government with new security and surveillance products are not uncommon in the modern era. Lyon (2004) argues that ‘government’s commitment to these technological innovations as solutions to problems outweigh the capacity of analysis and policy to understand it’. In many cases, these technologies promise one thing and do another. This was evidenced through the technological innovation known as Systema de Vigilancia de Amazonia (SIVAM) in the early 1990s. SIVAM is a combined satellite and aircraft monitoring system designed to curb the trafficking of narcotics and prevent the illegal burning of the Amazon rainforest. Funding for the project came from US security budgets, and included the personal involvement of former US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well the US intelligence and technology corporation Raytheon (Adey, 2010). Today, SIVAM is a fully owned government project which has been enhanced to control more airspace in an effort to meet national security objectives. However, Costa (2001) suggests the project displays a lack of transparency regarding development and implementation. The author also states that the ways in which SIVAM gathers, processes and disseminates information threatens the environmental and human security value of the system. Moreover, SIVAM has also faced speculation that the UN is trying to take control of the Amazon away from sovereign rule as well as concerns that it is being used to monitor Brazilian borders (Murakami Wood, 2012).
This breach of trust is an example of the potential danger that state and corporate surveillance practices pose to civil liberties. Corporations such as Raytheon and others provide states with the means and technology to expand and effectively globalize surveillance methods. The SIVAM project means the technology is now in place that has the potential for a more far-reaching technologically advanced surveillance system, if needed, that can be used to monitor whole nations. This raises questions about whether state surveillance methods such as these are there to service citizens’ and consumers’ needs or because of ‘state concerns with corporate interests’ (Lubbers, 2015).
The merging of state with corporate surveillance practices is one of the most significant factors in the process of the globalization of surveillance. One of the key questions regarding surveillance studies in the 21st century is the spatial extent and scale to which surveillance methods are being applied. Murakami Wood (2012) argues surveillance is one of the phenomena being rescaled and becoming global. This can mainly be attributed to the reconstruction of national governments and the institutions created after World War Two such as the UN, which helped to enforce neo liberal international norms and produced a series of preconditions for economic and political globalization. As governments moved beyond borders of nation states and problems increased, the opportunity for surveillance to appear as the solution on a global scale emerged. Several super national bodies were created to economically regulate goods and finance capital including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Monitoring of global goods and national resources takes on the characteristics of global economic surveillance and has been termed the ‘New World Order’ of information (Mattelart, 2008: 237).
Data surveillance and profiling operations now take place not only on individuals but whole nations and while both public and private companies collect, collate and perform algorithmic operations of data, surveillance has become increasingly dominated by private companies who profile nation states to assess credit worthiness. The IMF for example, an agency not recognized for surveillance practices, has ‘developed forms of economic surveillance as one of its core activities and imposed structural adjustment programs to match expectations of neo liberal governments’ (Murakami Wood, 2012). As a result, nation states are required to be open to scrutiny and ‘provide effective accounting techniques and data about fiscal and other economic policies as a means of ensuring they finance their debts and obligations to foreign investors’ (Gill, 2008). This means that in many cases, bodies such as the IMF and World Bank may view nation states simply as investments which provide opportunity for new state/corporate global surveillance methods.
In addition to this, many security regimes post World War Two have formed international alliances that now boast complex satellite tracking systems through corporations such as ‘Echelon’ that span several continents and ‘Dictionary’, a surveillance system which filters messages from different types of media including emails, telex, fax machines and phones (Lyon, 2004). Project Echelon is the outcome of an agreement between the US and the UK and over the last fifty years has evolved from lifting keywords in intercepted faxes to all-encompassing data harvesting that has the capabilities to track both enemies and allies alike (Matney, 2015).
In 2014, revelations about secret US-NSA programme ‘Prism’ confirmed large-scale mass surveillance of telecommunications and electronic messages of governments, companies and citizens which included close allies of the United States in Europe and Latin America. Bauman et al. (2014) states that the ramifications of this calls for a re-evaluation of contemporary policies and surveillance practices due to the scale of privacy violations it creates.
Corporations such as ‘Echelon’ and security operations like ‘Prism’ are just two examples of the threats posed to civil liberties on a global scale as the globalization of the surveillance process continues with many implications for human rights and democracy.
Totalitarianism:
The most glaring implication to arise out of the globalization of surveillance comes in the form of totalitarianism, a system of centralized governments more akin to a dictatorship. It commands citizens’ obedience and requires complete subservience to the state. Totalitarianism is not a product of modernity. After the Second World War, an international order emerged out of economic depression and forms of totalitarian governments persisted in the form of totalitarian surveillance states. This was evidenced in particular in East Germany, which became a surveillance state enforced through the former East German government’s secret police agency, the Stasi. The Stasi used mass records of surveillance and punishment of citizens as a vital tool in their dictatorship (Beattie, 2009). Methods used by the Stasi included detailed paper record keeping, informers and technical methods like postal interception and wire-tapping (Murakami-Wood, 2012).
The Stasi’s large network of informers infiltrated large parts of the population and a vast majority of work places. An estimated 2.5% of the working population at this time were informants of the Stasi who infiltrated houses of employees and employers’ friends, sometimes re-arranging furniture to play mind games with citizens (Amnesty International, 2015). As well as using psychological harassment as a form of social control, the Stasi also used what is known as ‘the scent strategy’ (Rosenzweig, 2021) to collect samples of odours from unsuspecting citizens which could be compared with other samples and were used to detect suspected dissents. The Stasi evolved into one of the most hated yet feared institutions of the East German communist government as it sought to infiltrate every aspect of daily life including personal and familial relationships (Cameron, 2021).
The Stasi’s reign was one of the most oppressive surveillance regimes in history as it dominated nearly all dimensions of East German life for four decades. Though it is undeniable that the wealth of information collected by the Stasi is overwhelming, a report from Amnesty International in 2015 suggests that more modern forms of government and intelligence agencies can collect far more information with a fraction of the effort due to many of today’s technical advances. The report also highlights the Edward Snowden revelations that the NSA can collect 5 billion records of mobile phone locations per day as well as 42 billion internet records, including email and browsing history per month. Estimates from German organization OpenDataCity suggest Stasi archives would need 48,000 filing cabinets to store their information whereas one US government server would need 42 trillion. Very little is known about what companies like the NSA actually do with the vast amounts of data extracted from citizens and the report serves as an indicator of what the Stasi regime could have accomplished with today’s technology. Moreover, it is a timely reminder of the potential consequences of unchecked surveillance and how quickly these methods evolve into totalitarianism.
China’s Social Credit System:
The totalitarian regime of the Stasi in East Germany draws comparison with the emergence of a modern comprehensive and aggressive form of governance known as the Social Credit System (SCS) in China. This is totalitarianism in effect as the system surveys the activity and actions of Chinese citizens both online and offline in an effort to judge desirable and undesirable behaviour based on individual point scoring systems. Activities such as buying books may be defined as good behaviour and increase an individual’s points tally, whilst criticizing the government would be deemed bad and therefore decrease points. The points system determines individuals’ access to not only facilities but priority medical care, travel, internet speeds and even financial opportunities. The system allows the ‘trustworthy’ to roam free while algorithmic restrictions govern others (Vinayak, 2019).
The main objective of the system is to promote social norms within Chinese society by rewarding ‘trust-keeping’ and punishing that which the state defines as ‘trust-breaking’. However, Chen et al. (2018) defines the ‘rule of trust’ to be nothing more than a mode of governance which imposes arbitrary restrictions based on a questionable definition of ‘trust’ while at the same time shaping the behaviour of governed subjects. The researchers claim the ‘rule of trust’ derogates from principles for governing countries in accordance with the law that Chinese leaders purport to endorse. Vinayak (2019) reiterates that this was exemplified when the Chinese government ratified the International Covenant on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Act (1976) with reservations, yet did not ratify the International Covenant on the Civil and Political Rights Act (1976). This government also strongly opposed The Universal Declaration on Human Rights Act (1948).
The trust the government seeks from citizens is not reciprocated as the scheme is mandatory for all citizens with no opt-in or out option nor consent for data collection and its uses thereafter. Huge threats to privacy become evident if data is to be shared between private companies and governments. Data and algorithms of the SCS along with the use of various technologies to distribute that information is an area of potential concern, particularly as few details have officially been released regarding this matter (Kshetri, 2020). Chen et al. (2018) cautions that the Chinese government is preparing a more advanced version of the SCS which will be reinforced by artificial intelligence tools such as facial recognition and predictive policing. The authors argue that developments such as these will further empower governments to enhance surveillance capabilities while perpetuating authoritarianism.
The SCS programme embodies several implications concerning human rights that range from restrictions in the name of national security to more unique ones such as ‘in the interests of the state’. Risks to personal freedoms are compromised through financial restrictions and travel bans, and the programme even allows for the restriction of free speech in ‘limited circumstances’. Vinayak (2019) states the ‘SCS is the epitome of the disastrous consequences of technological advancement and dampens the essence of human rights laws while providing a frightening foundation for draconian measures’. Political leaders in China have explored the development of novel technological tools to establish social control and supplement traditional means of governing state and society (Creemers, 2018). China’s rapidly increasing technological capabilities in addition to the absence of strong constitutional protections for citizens have led many observers to portray the SCS as an ‘Orwellian nightmare’ (Brehm and Loubere, 2017). Much like the Stasi archives remind us of totalitarianism in the past, China’s SCS and its totalitarian methods of social control are a warning to other nations about the potential emergence of other authoritarian regimes which attempt to establish other surveillance states through measures and practices which add to the development of the globalization of totalitarianism.
Conclusion:
In conclusion, this essay has found through substantial evidence that in many instances state/corporate surveillance practices only give the ‘appearance’ of servicing the needs of citizens and consumers while ultimately undermining the rights of both. Very little in the way of protection has been provided for citizens under the guise of innovations such as CCTV and Public Health Surveillance, with both practices posing several privacy violations. This essay has highlighted the role of corporate surveillance in undermining consumers’ rights and has demonstrated the significance and the risk factors associated with the merging of state and corporate surveillance methods in relation to the globalization of surveillance process which is currently ongoing. This essay has also emphasized the many potential implications for human rights and democracy in the form of totalitarian regimes which aim to create total surveillance states. Comparisons between the Stasi and their totalitarian regime of the past can be made in regards to China’s SCS which indicates a state shift towards the development of and threat posed by global totalitarianism, for which the SCS can be a blueprint for other nations and governments to follow. Threats to civil liberties have now reached a global scale and the ‘appearance’ of being protected does not equate to the vast amounts of liberties and rights placed at risk in the name of surveillance.
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