By Gary T. Marx, Professor Emeritus, MIT

Gary T. Marx bio  |  Back to Main Page  |  References

I hope you do not assume yourselves infallibilitie of judgement when the most learned of the apostles confesseth that he knew but in parts and saw but darkly through a glass.

                —Sir Richard Saltonstall

The articles in this volume in drawing upon history, sociology, political science and law richly describe the variation in surveillance (whether across centuries or only recent decades) for 11 countries and help avoid the creeping myopia and unwarranted ethnocentric generalizations that disproportionate research on anglophone countries brings. These histories show variation as well as commonality. The former cautions us against making unduly sweeping generalizations, even as the latter calls out for ordering that which makes so much ordering in the modern world possible.

But however important it is to get empirical, facts without a conceptual structure are like Jello without a mold. Just as we see much variety in the ordering modern surveillance makes possible, the multiplicity of practices and ideas that encompass the broad notion of surveillance need to be abstractly ordered within conceptual frameworks. To be sure, the editors’ introduction to the volume and the informative general articles by Higgs and Lyon deal with very broad factors that help locate the data, but these are in narrative form. Important sensitizing concepts such as surveillance society, the new surveillance, surveillance assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), social sorting (Lyona 2003) nd sousveillance Mann, Nolan and Wellman 2003) are the same. Yet an additional approach focusing on concept definition and measurement can bring greater precision to the discussion and can offer another way of knowing.

Coming to Terms

The empirical needs to be parsed into elements that can be systematically measured. Going beyond the description of a narrative permits more logically derived and empirically informed answers to big questions such as where society is headed and in what ways this is good and bad. This also permits replication across observers and makes possible the development of guidelines for studying the topic.

In what follows I briefly consider some aspects of conceptualization, illustrate one form with respect to the big questions regarding implications of surveillance developments for the dignity of the individual and a democratic society. I then draw some lessons consistent with the articles in this volume for advancing surveillance research.

In recent work I have suggested an encompassing framework for thinking about how and why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so (Marx, forthcoming 2011a, 2007 and related work at www.garymarx.net). The basic structures and processes of surveillance must be named and their correlates discovered. This involves a conceptual map of new (as well as traditional) ways of collecting, analyzing, communicating and using personal information One part of this identifies attributes (structures) such as the role played e.g., agent or subject; the rules governing information e.g., voluntary or involuntary collection; characteristics of the tool and its application e.g., visible or invisible; qualities of the data; e.g., sensitive, unique identification, private; goals e.g., control, care, curiosity; .and mechanisms of compliance e.g., coercion, deception, engineering, contracts). Another part locates basis processes such as surveillance phases and cycles, the softening of surveillance, and neutralization and counter-neutralization efforts.

Much disagreement in the surveillance debate is about what the varied empirical contours mean in some overall sense for the individual and society –whether involving the state (as the articles in this volume do), hybrid public-private forms or corporate and interpersonal uses. At the extremes are the utopians with their cotton candy promises and the dystopians with their gloomy disaster predictions –whether these apply to the latest widget or practice or to long term trends. Neither perspective describes social change well#&8212;in the past or, I suspect for the near future.

There is a path, however twisting, changing and bramble and illusion filled somewhere between Tennyson’s early 19th century optimism "For I dipt into the future, far as human eyes could see, saw the world, and all the wonders that would be” (Ricks, 1990) and Einstein’s 20th century worry that technological progress can become like an axe in the hand of a pathological criminal (Folsing 1998).

Improved conceptualization and subsequent measurement can result in more logically derived and empirically informed answers to big questions such as what are the legacies of an authoritarian past and where is the surveillance society of control and care headed? Over decades, scores and even centuries, is there a move toward a uniform world-surveillance society driven by a common ethos, problems, and technologies with a decline in the local distinctiveness documented by the articles in this volume?

It is possible to construct answers to the "where is society headed” and comparative cross-national, -contextual and –temporal questions that go beyond speculation. By way of illustration, I will apply one element of the above approach in the hope that it can better document broad societal directions and the concerns for dignity, equality, justice and democracy that underpin much of surveillance studies research.

The Four Questions

To get beyond the rhetoric, four important questions regarding broad historical patterns in the treatment of personal information need to be considered:

1. What is the ratio of what a technology is capable of to how extensively it is applied? (surveillance slack ratio)
2. What is the ratio of what is known (and to how many and what kinds of others) about a person versus the absolute amount of personal information potentially available is? (personal information penetration ratio)
3. What is the ratio of what individuals wish to keep to themselves vs. how able they are to do this given the technology, laws and policies (achieved privacy ratio)
4. What is the ratio of what superordinates know about subordinates to what subordinates know about superordinates? (reciprocity-equity ratio)

Surveillance slack: the size of the gap between what a technology is capable of doing and the extent of its application varies over time. The slack was low in the middle ages when technology was relatively weak but there were few restraints on ruler’s applying what they had. Conversely, consider situations of high surveillance slack, perhaps where technology is very powerful, but there are significant restraints on applying it, for example content wiretapping for domestic criminal prosecutions. Both of these pictures contrast with situations in contemporary authoritarian societies where the technology is strong and the restraints on its applications (as well as on non-hardware forms of informing) are few.

The personal information penetration ratio (what could be known given the means of discovery relative to what is actually known) was probably much smaller in the 19th century and in the medieval period than today. The weakness of the technology then was matched by the fact that there was much less to know about the individual’s behavior (given a less differentiated society and greater homogeneity in ways of living apart from greater power of the technology), even if those in authority were less restrained in using their power to discover it.

However new tools (including formal record keeping) and changes in societal scale, density, mobility, differentiation, specialization, writing, language and communication vastly increase the quantity of information. Having large amounts of information available as a kind of raw material fits well into a society where most things are marketable. It also raises questions about where the outer limits on treating the personal as a commodity are, or ought to be. While people had less personal information to protect in the past, they also perhaps had less reason to protect what was there, at least within the small village. When personal information becomes something to be bought and sold, its value (and a desire to control it) may increase for both subjects and agents. Thus, comparing pre-industrial, industrializing and contemporary societies, in absolute terms, the amount of personal information that is potentially knowable would seem to have increased markedly but with varying degrees of surveillance penetration of that information.

Moving to the achieved privacy ratio (three above), apart from the amount, there is also the content of information individuals seek to and/or are able to protect. This of course ties to tools and rules and to what surveillance agents desire to know, or not to know, about people and organizations. Do people overall today have, or want, to hide or communicate more than in the past, and how is this need or desire conditioned by the nature of the information? How well are the preferences realized in practice? To what extent do agents honor the legitimate preferences of their subjects? What is the fit between the preferences of subjects and agents?

With respect to question four regarding trends in the extent of reciprocal knowledge we can identify three broad possibilities of particular interest using as an example access to, or denial of information for government and citizens relative to each other.

1. The ratio of what government knows about citizens to what citizens know about government increases (government knows more and more about citizens who know less and less about government)
2. The ratio of what is reciprocally known by the parties stays about the same even as it bounces up and down within moderate limits
3. The ratio of what government knows about citizens to what citizens know about government declines (governments knows less and less about citizens who know more and more about government

The first option characterizes totalitarian and authoritarian societies. The third option might seem preferable, but would be organizationally impossible and severely dysfunctional given societal interdependence and legitimate welfare and security goals. From the standpoint of classic democratic theory the ideal state is somewhere in the middle. However this leaves blank the question of the degree and kind of reciprocity. This will vary depending on current events such as major crises and threats, the kind of information and the context and roles played.

Some Meta Method Moral Mandates

A concluding note ought to bring some summation that transcends the individual cases and binds them into something larger than the sum of the individual chapters. Apart from the specifics of each case, this book wonderfully illustrates some broader points about how the understanding of surveillance can be improved. But there are other lessons as well. Jocularly, I state these in the form of moral imperatives for scholars, practitioners and informed and affected citizens. These are illustrative of a longer list (Marx forthcoming).

1. Attend to beginnings (or at least prior circumstances.) The chapters here broaden the tableau of what is to be understood. They relativize the present which often looms so large in our consciousness that we fail to ask where it came from and to realize that other outcomes might be possible.

2. View surveillance as a process not an outcome. Awareness of the social, cultural, and historical roots of whatever is of interest in the present reminds us to go with the flow of events and to see and seek interconnections. The process can be viewed sequentially across a given surveillance application as with a particular drug test application or over longer time periods with the appearance and changes in legislation and policy as with ID policy in the United Kingdom or the draconian measures in authoritarian countries.

3. Study surveillance practices as interaction processes over varying time periods. Subjects and agents of surveillance need to be viewed in interaction, rather than as isolated elements. Surveillance settings involving conflict tend to be dynamic and have a "no final victory" quality. Innovation, atrophy, entropy, neutralization, escalation, evolution, devolution, contraction, displacement and border changes must be understood. Appreciate the creativity and choices actors make, but also the limits of the situations they find themselves in. Be aware of how exogenous influences are affected by and affect those that are endogenous, as well as how technical and social factors may influence each other.

4. Recognize that some things change and others stay the same. Start by locating the broad constants and constraints found in any surveillance context and within these the major areas where variation in form and process can be identified. Be aware of the differences (and challenges) of determining changes in degree and in kind. Some new surveillance developments are in fact qualitative, revolutionary, deep lying and fundamental, while others are quantitative, minor, and superficial.

5. Identify variation and then look for causes/drivers that might explain it within a framework of soft determinism. Don’t automatically associate correlation with causality or aggregates with individuals. Samuel Johnson (1734) warned against mistaking "subsequence for consequence”. Be aware of the many ways that correlations are often faux amis when the game is explanation. Realize that probabilistic statements that may be made with great accuracy at aggregate levels, need not apply to inferences about any given case. Aggregate profiling is contentious when it encounters ideas of justice and individualized treatment.

6. Be attentive to kinds of causation and levels of analysis. Causes exist at many levels. In popular understanding, the reasons people give for their behavior are often seen to be sufficient as explanations. But what individuals say generally does not exist within a context that the individuals have chosen, or are necessarily aware of. A focus on the broader, prior factors in a surveillance setting (its nature, history, culture, law, attributes of the technology) calls attention to different levels and questions within which individual beliefs and motives are found.

7. Appreciate the advantages of a loose systems approach with some open-ended borders. This offers a way to take account of both structure and process. This helps avoid the simplistic determinism and reductionism that can come from over-emphasis on a given causal factor. But do not cop out by concluding that therefore all causes are equal in their importance even if they impact each other. Nor should identifying primal variables lead us to deny feedback, reciprocal and unique historical influences so central to the process view that characterizes most of the book’s articles.

8. Neither a pessimist or an optimist be, in the absence of good data and a well developed argument that defines its terms. Don't let unanalyzed fears and hopes confound the analysis of the empirical record or prevent realistic assessments of what is possible. Keep distinct statements about the world as it now is from predictions or descriptions of what might happen. Beyond attention to demonstrated evidence and causal links, attend to buried assumptions and frames of reference, evidence, and values.

9. Differentiate facts from values. Keep them separate, even while remaining mindful of their interweaving and the importance of values and passion in social inquiry. The findings of social science need to encounter the assumptions of ethics and law. Distinguish judgments based on ideal standards from those comparing known societies and actual behavior. This requires asking not only how one society or institution compares to others but how close or far is it from the ideal. No matter how sound the method or clear the findings, a leap to values, ethics and political choices always remains in what we come to see as facts and in the ends for which a tools is used. But inform value positions by examining their empirical assumptions and the frequent presence of tradeoff bearing ironies. However, in spreading humility and appreciation of the complexities, do not become an academic eunuch, nor a legitimator of the status quo -absent empirical, logical, and moral analysis.

10. Ask about the appropriateness of both means and ends. Desirable ends do not justify doubtful means, and good means can be misused. Good goals and purity of motives are not sufficient justification. Consider the acceptability of means and ends independently, as well as in their relationship to each other. Recognize that a given tool can serve a variety of goals and that a given goal can be met by a variety of tools.

11. Speak and listen to strangers and carry a big tool kit. The strangers might be from other disciplines, organizations or contexts. The advancement of knowledge is not well served by specialized scholars speaking in code only to their tribe about the narrowest of contemporary issues in their country. The knowledge from the many strands of surveillance inquiry need to be better integrated.

REFERENCES

Folsing. A. 1998. Albert Einstein: A Biography. New York: Penguin Books.

Haggerty, K., and Ericson, R. 2000. "The Surveillant Assemblage.” The British Journal of Sociology 51, no. 4 (2000): 605-622.

Lyon, D. ed. 2003. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination. London: Routledge.

Mann, S., Nolan, J. and Barry Wellman, B. 2003. "Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments.” Surveillance & Society 1, no. 3 (2003): 331-355.

Marx, G T. forthcoming. Windows into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology.

• 2011a. "‘Your Papers Please’: Personal and Professional Encounters With Surveillance." In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, edited by Kirstie Ball, Kevin Haggerty and David Lyon, xx-xxxi. New York: Routledge.

• 2011b. "Turtles, Firewalls, Scarlet Letters, and Vacuum Cleaners: Rules about Personal Information." In Privacy in America: Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by William Aspray and Philip Doty, 271-294. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2011a.

• 2007. "Desperately Seeking Surveillance Studies: Players in Search of a Field” Contemporary Sociology, March 2007. 35:2).

Top  |  Back to Main Page  |  References

You are visitor number  to this page since May 9, 2014.