Surveillance Systems - Towards an electronic panoptical society?

Interview with the Canadian sociologist David Lyon by Christian Höller

A lot of recent sociological theorizing suggests that a major historical shift has occurred with the advent and increased use of computer technology, viz. one from disciplinary societies (which Foucault has analysed) to societies of control or surveillance. Do you accept this picture and if so, can you briefly sketch the outline of this "new" surveillance society?

DAVID LYON: Associating "major historical shifts" with new technologies is always dangerous, especially while one is still in the midst of the so-called revolution. However, it seems clear that the widespread use of computer technologies in all spheres of social, political, and economic life in the "advanced societies" is contributing to a qualitatively different situation from that previous to the 1960s. The already existing administrative systems, with their extensive surveillance capacities, were effective means of keeping social order and rationally organizing the different facets of the nation-state and the economic enterprise. But computerization encouraged the routinizing of such practices, and their rapid spread across previously sealed units.
The boundaries are blurred as, for instance, one government department is able to share data with another, as commercial organizations keep closer track of personal and household consumption, and as combatting crime - such as drug trafficking - becomes an international operation. The "disciplinary" aspects are still strong, perhaps stronger, but, yes, there is "control" in the sense that the desired outcomes of those who operate surveillance systems become more likely. To call this a "new" surveillance society is merely to draw attention to one of the most striking features of social organization today - not to say that people in Western societies live in totalitarian regimes!

Databases are a main element within this new historical scenario and their prolific use by all sorts of institutions and enterprises suggests the existence of a kind of "superpanopticon" (as Mark Poster has called it). How far are we already way beyond a panoptic kind of picture?

DAVID LYON: The answer really depends on what is understood by the "panopticon" in this context. Jeremy Bentham's original prison architecture, where a central, unseen observer could watch - or could seem to be watching - the activities of all inmates, each in their classified section, was thought by Foucault to be a fine metaphor for the generalized disciplinary practices of modernity. It could be extended to the analysis of schools, management techniques, hospitals, social work and so on. Foucault sometimes stated his case very strongly - the panoptic was the "faceless gaze that transformed the whole social body into a field of perception" for instance - and seemed to underestimate forces of resistance.
The panoptic image appears to lend itself neatly to analysing electronic forms of surveillance, fruitfully achieved in the work of Oscar Gandy on consumer surveillance, Webster and Robins on "Social Taylorism" in the workplace, or Mark Poster on databases. (It should, however, be noted that Poster's approach is somewhat different from the former two.)
The potential danger, in all these accounts, is that the graphic panoptic image can obscure as well as illumine the processes under analysis. Thus, however much the panoptic "sorting mechanism" highlights ways in which consumer surveillance operates (and I think it helpful), or whatever, generalising the panopticon easily misleads. In the case of management techniques, for instance careful analysis of each situation often reveals the limitations of panopticism. So when you ask if we are "way beyond" the panoptic my answer is twofold. In some ways the panoptic image does not show us enough of current surveillance realities; in others, it may deflect our attention form what is really going on.

How exactly are the limits of panopticism revealed?

DAVID LYON: As I say, careful analysis of each situation will reveal how far, in inwhat respects, the panoptic operates. To say that panoptic processes appear in management supervision in a factory,in a social worker's case-files, in the monitoring of a car-park by videocamera, and in the targetting of consumers for customised advertising may well be true. But thequestion is, which aspects of the panoptic are operating? Is it the invisibility of the observer that is crucial, or the sorting mechanisms that classify, include and discard subjects, or is it the amassing of particular kinds of information that is decisive for how power is exerted? The panoptic metaphor can easily give the impression that we all are caught in a massive surveillance-control machine, a kind of totalizing dystopia. Nonsense! I say. Let us rather examine the subtle distinctions between panoptic powers to discover where and how social forces really operate.

You distinguish four milieus of electronic surveillance: government administration, policing and security systems, the workplace and the world of consumption. Can you briefly describe the state-of-the-art in each area? What recent developments, inventions or new gadgets strike you asparticularly terrifying or noteworthy?

DAVID LYON: This classificatory scheme is meant merely to show the pervasiveness of surveillance indifferent spheres. To describe each would take more space than an interviewallows. But what is noteworthy? Record-linkage or data-matching remains one of the most significant aspects ofsurveillance in all these spheres. Personal records collected for one purpose are used for another (apparently worthy) purpose -- for example, monitoring Canadians crossing the border to shop in the USA to discover who might be making fraudulent unemployment insurance claims. The development of so-called smart cards (where data are actually stored on thecard) may well turn out to have implications beyond existing centrally-stored databanks.

Can you explain the example a little more? How exactly are the two scenes connected?

DAVID LYON: In this case, personal databases from the Department of Customs and Immigration are matched with those of Unemployment Benefit claimants in a "dragnet"operation to discover claimants who have undeclared alternative sources of income.

One particular trend you have analyzed concerns the increasing convergence of administrative and commercial surveillance. The spheres of public,governmental tasks (like taxation) and private corporate interests (e.g. data services) seem to more and more blend into each other. Is it not especially frightening when more and more information and data materialis privatized and passed from one private hand to the next without any public control? How do you view these connections?

DAVID LYON: The example of smart cards in the health system is a good case in point. More than one agency is interested in personal medical data -- health insurance companies, your doctor or hospital, pharmaceutical companies, and so on. The risk potential of data getting into inappropriate hands is considerable, unless there is in place a careful regime of ensuring that such data are not promiscuously shared. The forces ranged against such "careful regimes" are constantly growing -- in this case, governments are increasingly absorbed in deficit reduction and cost-cutting, and pharmaceutical companies are equally keen to target their products at precisely the "right" customers. But smart cards could help people determine more readily what data they wish to have disclosed, which would have a decentralizing impulse.Convergence of surveillance practices seems to benefit governments and companies -- but not necessarily the data subject.Smart cards could be a way of taking back some control by consumer-citizens.

Aren't you too optimistic about this point? At least, it would require citizens with technological skills and devices to keep track of their card-data. This would also require that relevant data are disclosed to citizens themselves - which is not always provided.

DAVID LYON: Maybe I am too optimistic. I agree that greater knowledgeability is required of citizens. But, as, for example, Ulrich Beck has suggested, "risk societies" do seem to generate at least a growing demand for the means to such knowledgeability. It seems to me that the task of anyone who is concerned about the threats raised by the growth of new surveillance methods is to try to raise public consciousness and to encourage people actually to use the freedom of information (and data protection) provisions that are increasingly accepted by today's governments.

Turning back for a moment to the old forms of control. It seems that workplace surveillance - the factory panopticon - is more and more extended to the control of consumptive behaviour - the economic control and penetration of leisure. Would you consider surveillance of consumption (e.g. by sharper marketing strategies) on a par with other - more coercive - forms of surveillance?

DAVID LYON: Well, bearing in mind my earlier comments on panopticism, I would again stress that factories are not always, everywhere or inevitably panoptic and by the same token, neither is consumer surveillance. On a broad scale, panoptic methods may be seen as means of"normalizing" populations - to maximise consumption, for instance. Moreover, these methods may often be seen as "successful" in achieving the ends of those who establish the systems. They create situations where as I said, desired outcomes become more likely - people buy Coca Cola, CDs up-to-date cars or computer equipment, and Benetton sweatshirts.
The big paradox here is that "choice" - the mantra of free enterprise - is used as a means of (soft) social control. Pleasure-seeking is coopted to steer the actual choices of consumers! If by the electronic panopticon we mean that consumer are somehow transfixed in a malevolent one-way gaze engineered by power-hungry marketers, this is nonsense! Purchasing desires and decisions are not directly constrained, but they are, to an extent, indirectly guided by the subtle hand of marketers using geo-demographic and dataveillance tools precisely to pinpoint their targets. It must also be remembered that as well as channelling desire, these sorting mechanisms simply exclude certain groups of non-consumers - who in fact show up in other, more coercive surveillance systems of welfare and policing departments.

We are increasingly becoming "data subjects" in the electronic eyes of information-gathering institutions/enterprises. How does that affect conceptions of subjectivity and personhood?

DAVID LYON: Wherever surveillance occurs, two intertwined issues are raised, to do with participation on the one hand, and personhood on the other. They are interwined in the sense that, for example,part of human dignity is the capacity freely and fully to participate in social life. Surveillance may be viewed simultaneously as a threat to democracy, if participation is limited or denied, and a threat to dignity, if the capacity is constricted to make meaningful choices and to find personal fulfillment within socially agreed frameworks. The individuality prized by many in the advanced societies is not necessarily threatened by the individuation required by modern organizations. But the task of social analysts and policy-makers is to find ways of mitigating or reversing the social division and disadvantage that tends to be reinforced by surveillance systems, while at the same time trying to minimise the unfreedom of data-subjects. A further problem is that these developments are outstripping our political and moral vocabulary to deal with them. Surveillance systems are constituting us as as subjects in new ways, so that questions of subjectivty, identity and personhood will indeed be central to these debates in coming years.

What role does the Internet play in the rise of the surveillance society? Does it just enforce the negative, restrictive aspects or do you also see a liberating potential in it?

DAVID LYON: All that I have already said about "convergence" is amplified and reinforced by the Internet.This development allows for even more sharing of personal data, but also in newly proliferating ways. Interpol can use the Internet totrace terrorists or drug traffickers,companies can use the Internet to extend their international markets, employers can trace what usegroups their employees subscribe to or what images they download from the Internet, and ordinary users can watch chosen remote sites courtesy of "web-cam" - video surveillance cameras whose images can be called up on your screen at the touch of a button. As with consumer surveillance, however, there are also modes of evasion and resistance which, given the demographic profile of most users - better educated, higher incomes, etc - are not entirely mysterious or inaccessible.
Whatever liberating potentials may be realised in this technology depend on the knowledgeability of users and the political-economic framework within which the Internet was set up. It is hard to see how the huge information glut being created by current users of the Internet can fail to catalyse efforts to mitigate its worst consequences. We already see this in the amount of media attention devoted to the more spectacular or salacious cases. But it would be nice to think that current moral panics and techno-sensationalism might be replaced with more serious analysis and sober prognoses of surveillance futures with the Internet.

You mention modes of evasion and resistance: what do you mean here?

DAVID LYON: Among other things I have in mind the rapidly developing encryption practices to try to protect data. Of course, this has hit a brick wall with the American government's "Clipper Chip" which allows the state to override these protective measures, for reasons of "national security".But the very fact that there is a struggle brings the issues into the public eye, and makes possible a political debate.

Tools like computer matching, "dragnet investigations" and so on were introduced in central Europe (like Germany) as weapons against left wing terrorism. The effect was devastating: officials gathered myriads of data about innocent people and also used them against them -- while"terrorism" e.g. right wing attacks (now very popular in Austria and Germany) could never really be defeated. Technological progress alone does not seem to be a cure forsocial or political ills. Can you comment?

DAVID LYON: It is a curse of the present that governments, realizing more and more their inability to govern in old ways (because of legitimation crises, globalization and so on) adopt technological fixes in a desperate attempt to hang on to the illusion of control. Older European methods of politically dubious undercover activities, adopted by the USA to combat "communist" groups after the mid-century, have now been re-exported back to Europe as value-added "techno-policing" with the result that some fields of investigation - notably the drug trade - seem to have been Americanized. In this example, as in yours, the results are far-reaching, difficult to investigate and hardly seem politically neutral. But as undesirable activists such as far-right "hate" groups, terrorists and drug traffickers increasingly make use of high-tech networks, one suspects that governments and policing agencies will respond in kind. Again, this shifts the conflict, and the debate, from the political to the technological domain.

The cameras are everywhere, all the wires are probably tapped (at least by someone). What would you recommend against "high-tech paranoia"?

DAVID LYON: High-tech paranoia is generated within a general culture that overestimates the ability of technology to solve human problems and appears as a fear that is the mirror image of technological optimism. It is further fuelled by the alarmist use of phrases like "Orwellian" or "panoptic". There are no easy answers. But tactics such as the followings hould help. One,question whether this new system is really necessary in your organization, community, or country. Video surveillance in public places, for instance, at best merely displaces crime. And the quest for social, political and moral solutions is once again placed on the back-burner. Two, seek ways to protect data-subjects by adopting voluntary codes of practice, and by ensuring that they know what legal recourse they have to data protection or privacy law. Three, engage in the political moral debate over this fast-changing world of technology-and-society. No good cause is served by either complacency or paranoia. The quest of principled and appropriate action is still paramount.