Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
To be sure, nationalist sentiments may be stirred to move potential combatants,
and it is as well to remember the compulsion of much military recruitment
in the past (press-ganging, economic deprivation, etc.). Notwithstanding these
factors, Giddens, drawing on the ideas of T. H. Marshall (1973), suggests that
something more is also involved and that this may be conceived as a form of ‘contract’
between the nation state and its members. The proposal is that, in return
for fighting for the nation, over the years subjects have achieved a variety of citizenship
rights; for example, the right, as a citizen, to the protection of the state from
attack by outside forces, or the right to carry a passport which allows free entry
into one’s host nation and support at one’s embassies in foreign countries.
Out of the ‘contract’ between the nation state and its members has emerged
a battery of citizenship rights and duties. The main connection with surveillance
concerns how these are to be delivered and collected. The nation state, under
whose umbrella citizenship operates, must develop administrative means to
meet these additional responsibilities. And it is this, broadly speaking the growth
of the modern social democratic state, which is an especially powerful force
for surveillance. It is so because the administration of citizenship rights and
duties requires the meticulous individuation of the state’s members. Electoral
registers require the development of databases recording age and residence of
the entire population; social services need detailed records of people’s circumstances,
from housing conditions, to medical histories, to information about their
dependants; the Inland Revenue creates gigantic files which detail the economic
circumstances of everyone in the UK; throughout one’s school years records are
constructed describing attainments, developments, continuities and changes;
programmes to mitigate the worst consequences of poverty require a great deal
of information on those unfortunate enough to be considered eligible. As Paddy
Hillyard and Janie Percy-Smith (1988) put it: ‘The delivery of welfare benefits
and services is at the heart of the system of mass surveillance, because it is here
that the processes of classification, information gathering and recording are
constantly multiplying’ (p. 172). We might call this surveillance categorical care.
Dangers of surveillance
The nation state’s propensity towards surveillance, propelled either or both by
security needs or the rights and duties of its citizens, has generated a host of
questions. To the fore have been the concerns of civil libertarians who, witnessing
the accumulation of citizens’ records at the hands of anonymous bureaucrats, or
learning of the capabilities of satellites to spy across nations, express considerable
apprehension about the advance of surveillance. There is an extensive
literature highlighting problems such as the creation of police files on people
which may be misused in the vetting of juries or which may even lead to wrongful
arrest (e.g. Rosen, 2000; Whittaker, 1999).
Of particular and pressing concern are two related issues. One is the fear
that agencies may have access to files collected for other purposes, for instance
when police forces may gain access to employment, medical or banking records.
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