Keep an eye on democracy

The recent raids on Pete Townshend and others for using their credit cards to view child pornography on the Internet have heightened public interest in surveillance. So, in London, have the, number-plate-reading cameras brought in by Ken Livingstone to support his congestion charge.

You know the story. Take the opening words of Ctrl (Space): rhetorics of surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother, a new 655-page doorstopper from MIT Press. It begins: “Now, more than ever, we are under surveillance.” From supermarket checkouts and the credit agency Experian to intranets and tomorrow’s set-top boxes for digital TV, IT-assisted surveillance is supposed to be a hidden, oppressive and growing part of everyday life.

Of course, just as some believe that ID cards are the least discriminatory way to protect civil liberties and solve crime, others say the same of storing a DNA database of the entire population. Still others add that the rest of the EU has shown how surveillance of terrorist suspects is a better alternative than the detention without trial enshrined by the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001.

Yet everyone fears surveillance. The French post-modernist Michel Foucault was the first to popularise Jeremy Bentham’s 1787 surveillance-centric prison, the Panopticon, for an international audience. Foucault rewrote human history as the growth of power and, in particular, of surveillance. Ever since his Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison appeared in 1975, Western society has felt a growing sense of always being watched.

Wait a minute, though. When Townshend justified his conduct by reference to abuses suffered when he was a child, he only confirmed that fear of surveillance and of invaded privacy has grown in the same measure as the desire to disclose very private matters. So we need to pause a moment before agreeing that we are really under a dangerously high level of surveillance.

It’s OK, if you like, to make fictions about surveillance, from George Orwell’s 1984 to Philip Noyce’s The Truman Show. But contemporary critics of surveillance pander to our fears, our vulnerability and our impotence.

Too many also miss a key point. Although every senior policeman acknowledges the threat to civil liberties posed by surveillance, Ctrl (Space) is right to say that what people fear just as much, nowadays, is “being withdrawn completely from the gaze of others”. Millions want to be on Big Brother.

Millions, too, do not mind being caught on CCTV, feeling – rightly – that they have nothing to hide. Few object to the state capturing data on Internet use.

Now it may be fashionable to disclose things about oneself, but why is the state so keen to take up the offer? And what kind of data mining skills can it really muster, anyway? New Labour says it needs to buy shiny new IT systems to survey criminals, terrorists and – the most reliable target, it now seems – asylum-seekers. But in fact it buys because of its impulse toward suspicion and empire-building.

Now that really is scary. IT-assisted state surveillance is a disturbing trend, not because Big Brother is really tracking you and me everywhere, but because in the long run it will hurt democracy.