Theories of the Information Society, Third Edition - Cryptome

INFORMATION, REFLEXIVITY AND SURVEILLANCE
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The other concerns the more general issue of melding disparate databases.
With the computerisation of most state (and very many other) surveillance files
comes the possibility of linking once separate information. While there are
restrictions placed in the way of making these connections, the potential is
obvious of an ‘electronic identity card’ capable of constructing a ‘total portrait’
of particular individuals. Were agencies able to access, say, medical, educational,
tax, employment, banking and criminal records, it is clear that an individual
profile of considerable complexity and detail could be constructed. Such a development,
inescapably attractive to government officials seeking efficiency and/or
better control, massively escalates the surveillance already undertaken (Ball and
Webster, 2003).
From this one may be drawn to conceiving of modernity by way of the
metaphor of the panopticon (Lyon, 1994). This notion was taken up by Foucault
(1975) from the original ideas of Jeremy Bentham (Himmelfarb, 1968) on the
design of prisons, hospitals and asylums. The panopticon refers to an architectural
design by Bentham whereby custodians, located in a central (and usually
darkened) position, could observe prisoners or patients who each inhabited a
separate, usually illuminated cell positioned on the circumference. This design
is adopted by Foucault as a metaphor for modern life, one which suggests that
surveillance allows the construction of a panopticon without physical walls.
Nowadays, courtesy of modern electronics technologies, people are watched, but
they usually cannot see who it is who is doing the surveillance.
It is easy to over-exaggerate (not least because so little reliable information
in this realm is available), and it would be a mistake to suggest that those who
are surveilled in the ‘disciplinary society’ (Foucault) have no contact with other
subjects of surveillance. It is clear, for instance, that a good deal of the information
gathered about citizens from centralised sources such as the census does
feed back to people and, indeed, enables them to monitor reflexively their own
position, prospects and lifestyles. Thus, for example, information on earnings
levels, crime rates or divorce patterns is useful not only to state officials, but also
to individuals searching to make sense of and to establish perhaps new directions
in their own lives.
And yet it is important not to jettison the notion of the panopticon because
it insistently reminds us of the overweening ambition of the state to see everything
and of the ways in which power and the accumulation of information are
intimately connected. For instance, Manuel De Landa (1991), reflecting on
military surveillance, refers to its ‘machine vision’ manifested in things like
telecommunications interceptions and satellite observation of foreign terrains,
where the surveillance is automatic. Programmes are established which trawl all
communications within a defined category, or satellites monitor anything and
everything that falls under their ‘footprint’. De Landa describes the sophisticated
software that is developed to allow machines to decipher satellite photographs
that pick up virtually everything beneath them as well as the systems created
to facilitate analysis of bugged communications. Looking at all such trends, he
is drawn to describe it as a ‘Panspectron’, something ‘one may call the new
non-optical intelligence-acquisition machine’ (p. 205).
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