The Expanding Surveillance Net: Ten Years after 9/11
Workshop
Queens University, Kingston Toronto
8th-10th September 2011
I was attending a workshop over in Canada last
week. As it’s a workshop, full papers are not generally available (there’s are
a couple of pdf papers available on the conference website, but they’re
protected by a password). I’ll write a few notes here for those not able to
attend. The keynote address and the first panel 'Government Control over Information Flows' in this post, and other panels to follow.
David Lyon (Queens University)
opened the workshop with a keynote address, raising a number of issues about
surveillance post-9/11 and identifying a few problematic trends. Asking if 9/11
was a ‘world historic’ event, causing the elevation of security to a top
priority, or an international cue for a demand for security, he found it the
start of intensification, an opportunity, a pretext, and reinforcement of
tendencies that pre-existed the attack. These included seeking technological
solutions for political problems, the declaration of the attacks as an act of
war, with a military solution, and the engagement of corporate entities into
partnership with government. This leads to a pervasive demand for personal
data, military budgets taking on a surveillance emphasis, and the belief that
exceptional circumstances justify these means. Systems were however, already in
place before 9/11, but there was not the political will to join them all
together. Lyon also highlighted the importance
of fear in this political equation. Surveillance studies must scrutinise
assumptions about surveillance, including those that are ‘shallow mantras and
pernicious lies’ (nothing to hide, nothing to fear, for example), it must be
aware of the ways collective mentalities operate, and have an ethical purpose
in the revelation of the features of surveillance, and what is being done through
surveillance. Pre-emption was important for Lyon,
including early intervention, sorting, bringing risk discourses, actuarial
discourse, and prudentalism into the blurred intersection between domestic and
national security.
He spoke about the oxymoron of ‘total targeting’ which can
only make sense in this type of atmosphere in which all are suspect. Another
trend in the post 9/11 era is the lack of transparency of security and
intelligence services (as revealed in the Washington Post by Dave Priest). This
applies to international cooperation and data-sharing, an area that badly needs
more oversight. In airports we have apparently moved from ‘checking objects’ to
‘profiling persons’. This was associated with the belief that techniques and
practices are politically neutral and can be imported from abroad and
implemented anywhere, and are therefore also suitable for export.
Lyon argued that there was
nothing inevitable about the response to 9/11 and ways of acting. The current
state is a combination of political and economic pressures, media amplified
fear-mongering ordering concerns and persuasion. There is therefore a need to
disrupt fatalistic or protected modes of surveillance. Security and
surveillance are not ends in themselves. We should order priorities for
technology, not the reverse, work to de-abstract data, and consider our
attitudes to fear. Lyon again identified the
importance of a concept of ‘human security’ (something I’ve written about
previously here). We need to question the ‘in technology we trust’ mantra, and
rethink information practices which require contextualising in the frame of
human purposes. Introducing a culture of care for data and built in oversight
would also be productive. Lyon ended by stating
we needed to ask what society do we want, and build/work accordingly.
Workshop co-organiser Art Cockfield (Queens
University) spoke about
surveillance and the law, arguing that the combination of post 9/11 reforms and
new surveillance technologies are turning government surveillance into law. He
mentioned the recent privacy commission report ‘A Matter of Trust’ and drew
upon the history of the state as an entity that watches, systematically and
routinely. However the rise of the information state should also be considered
along the lines of the rise of the safety state and the protective state (cited
David Omand). Broad post 9/11 reforms have done three things: 1) encouraged
pre-emptive info gathering and risk management, 2) relaxed standards for
government searches, 3) provided enhanced resources for surveillance. This is
combined with new generations of security and surveillance technologies, often
produced by military testing grounds in lawless areas of the world. Drawing
insight from liberal social contract theories, we should ask how does
technology change previously protected interests (for example privacy). The
security world, even with algorithmic surveillance, suffers from the problem of
‘drinking out of the fire hose’ (too much information to process, side effect
of it spraying everywhere else?), and there might be a point in helping them to
find the actual information which might actually catch bad guys rather than the
perception that they need all information. Art concluded the point that law
acquires a greater role when technology and legal change undermines social
interests like privacy.
Torin Monahan (Vanderbilt University) spoke about ‘Fusion Centres’
a US DHS programme. These are new configurations of police, national security
and private intelligence. Monahan has conducted interviews with fusion centre
directors and analysts (and commented on the methodological considerations
involved in this). Set up to combat terrorism, the role of the centres has
expanded to a range of crimes and hazards, as part of justifying their
existence to their local settings. The provide assistance to police
investigations. Their location (within state law enforcement) are part of
Monahan’s concerns in that the pick up local prejudices and concerns. Monahan
terms the centres ‘centres of concatenation (playing off Latour’s centres of
calculation) that embody larger networks, sharing imperatives and with ready
access. Data is drawn together as needed, invested with meaning and
communicated to others, then erased – leaving little or no documentation of the
process (especially for ‘quick searches’ communicated via phone or email). As
nodes they are largely passive, stressing detail over abstraction. The system
was driven by the idea that a network (decentralised, information sharing, ‘need
to share’) was necessary to fight a network. This network is physically
embodied in a room of embedded analysts to facilitate information sharing with
mostly free-flowing interaction. A large number of data bases are accessible from
the centres, which also mobilise data from private aggregators that government
might not generally have access to. The prevailing attitudes to this by
analysts was that this was ‘just information’ and that they are ‘a channel’.
The ambition was to be ‘Google, but for the police’. This involves some
relaxation in standards and thresholds for engaging in surveillance. Monahan
concluded buy suggesting security organisations acceding to imperatives of the
surveillance society to collect, share, analyse and act on data. Centres of
concatenation response and leave little trace, producing a zone of opacity as a
shield from accountability.
David Murakami-Wood
(Queens University) spoke about the dynamics of openness
and closure in infowar, including the increasing reliance on open source
intelligence but at the same time the restriction on open public access. He
made the argument that beyond surveillance, there was a vitally important
politics to the whole nature of communication, a conflict that would
re-configuring left-right politics, but that was only partly a result of 9/11.
He asked a number of questions. Firstly, is this just about states? Highlighting
the agenda and role of private sector and networks as part of a broader
political economy. He cited David Philips in relation to specific politics and
choice being reduced to a range of corporate alternatives. Corporate norms such
nymity, connection and transparency. There are similar discourses but very
different ends. Secondly, he talked about changes to the military-industrial
complex, now best thought of as a security-surveillance industrial complex. The
post-cold war environment had long term effects in terms of shock and
alternatives. The alternatives persisted and started to come together. 9/11
added information back into this. He draw attention to Mary Khaldor’s work on
the ‘Baroque Arsenal’ of the cold war – vast, complex, unworkable weapons
systems that even their operators do not fully understand. Thirdly, we can’t
just look at the USA and allies, but also to China and Chinese norms of
information control, analysts, security and corporations that has nothing to do
with 9/11 (unless leveraged rhetorically).Emerging economies engage in security
by with different norms and reasons. Some of these may be major challenges to US imperialism
in the long term perspective. China
is both a resource (a corporate learning experience) and a threat. There is
increasing innovation in online surveillance inconceivable in another
environment – deep packet analysis, and projects out of DARPA, to looking at behaviour
in World of Warcraft to try and detect terrorist activity. There are also
international interconnections, making state arguments self-referential and
self-reinforcing, flowing from the EU to Canada
to the US,
competition between states on law and economy, as well as secret bilateral and
international arrangements.
Murakami-Wood highlighted a number of trends in
this information war. Data warehousing, in which intelligence agencies attempt to
fix uncontainable flows to take a picture of them. We shouldn’t over-exaggerate
this, it almost never works properly, but there are drives by private innovators.
Web Censorship, used to prevent certain types of communication, is reframed for
use in western liberal democratic countries, look to the control of social
media in the Arab spring and London
riots, leaving a thin line between lawful access and censorship. Data flows, ‘national
security’ is misleading in an environment of international flows and
information sharing arrangements between intelligence agencies, as well as
campaigns around intellectual property. He also identified fears of an ‘open
source insurgency’. The Hacker Fight-back: wikileaks places transparency and
accountability in the same field as surveillance and control, with the need to
focus on what benefits us. There is possibility for a massive kickback. This
includes pirate parties where information is the primary reason for their
politics, not an addendum, as well as groups like anonymous and Lulzsec, where
previously anti-political hackers become anti-state and anti-corporate. This
can all be rebadged as ‘cyber terrorism’, but is also the beginning of a
politics of communication – the security environment serves to crystallise
debate. Murakami-Wood believes we are starting to move beyond the era of 9/11
being all that matters.
