Navigating the Dataverse: Privacy, Technology ... - The ICHRP

When we talk about state surveillance, then, we are initially talking about lawenforcement,
which is to say the enforcement of expectations already invested in the
state, and supposedly providing a means of protecting the private in public spaces.
Yet surveillance is often described as transgressive: the illegitimate use of state power.
To help us sort through these claims, the next section looks more closely at a central
element determining the legitimacy of state actions: security.
When we talk about state surveillance, we are initially talking about lawenforcement,
which is to say the enforcement of expectations already
invested in the state, and supposedly providing a means of protecting the private
in public spaces.
Security, Economy, Population
French philosopher Michel Foucault appears early in most discussions of surveillance due to
an evocative metaphor he supplied to describe the function and effects of surveillance: the
“panopticon”. This section will not dwell on the panopticon itself (a term coined by Jeremy
Bentham to describe a model prison in which a single guard could view all prisoners at once
without being observed by them) but will show that the term is an unsuitable metaphor for
contemporary surveillance, drawing on Foucault’s subsequent writing.
First, however, five lessons are commonly drawn from the metaphor of the panopticon:
1. The horizon or ideal of surveillance is totalizing – It intends to capture
everything.
2. It sacrifices “privacy” to surveillance – The prisoners may be viewed at any
time. They have no privacy.
3. Surveillance is ideally a one-way non-reciprocal observational relation – The
guard is invisible to the prisoners, the relationship is asymmetric.
4. An efficient surveillance system is economical – Few watchers, many watched.
5. Those observed will tend to assume they are being surveyed even when
they are not and behave accordingly – The system is internalised and to a
degree self-sustaining even in the absence of actual surveillance.
Since Bentham had plans to bring the panopticon into workplaces and hospitals, some
have considered it to be the modern state apparatus par excellence (the ideal metaphor
for a surveillance society) even though it was not implemented in practice.
Foucault, by contrast, distinguished between discipline as a practice of government
(with the panopticon as metaphor) and security, which supersedes discipline. These
terms may sound closely related but Foucault’s close parsing provides them with very
different weightings. Whereas “discipline” works at the level of individuals, aiming to
subjugate, control and direct them, “security” works at the level of populations, aiming
to create conditions in which individuals and groups will of their own accord achieve
certain objectives regarded as beneficial both to them and society as a whole. 74
74 Among the precursors of modern government, Foucault identifies the “pastoral power” of the Catholic
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