The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality
By Reg Whitaker
Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2000
195 pages.
REVIEW BY ALEXANDER DEL SOL
In The End of Privacy, Reg Whitaker charts the development of surveillance from its use by the semi-police states of the 20th century to the all-seeing electronic gaze that has emerged in the 21st.
But it is to an earlier age and means of surveillance, the 18th century invention of the Panopticon, that Whitaker reverts to develop his thesis. The Panopticon was a circular, multi-storey prison in which inmates were subjected to near constant scrutiny by guards in a central tower. The Panopticon marks one of the first attempts to subject a relatively large mass of people to the scrutiny of a much smaller group through the use of technology. But the idea never quite materialised.
The 20th century became the century of intelligence. Intelligence, or espionage, is a crude and laborious method of surveillance requiring the use of spies, intelligence agencies and secret police forces. Whitaker is not encumbered by ideological purity. All political systems regardless of ideology earn his disapproval. The Bolsheviks are castigated for their invention of the Cheka (which later became the KGB). The Cheka, he insists, was outmatched by the Gestapo and later by the Stasi. And the so-called Western liberal democracies created their own versions, namely the CIA, FBI, MI5 and so on. Whitaker's point is that any state regardless of ideology will embrace the use of surveillance if it has the technical means at its disposal.
As Whitaker so admirably demonstrates, very few human activities have made more immediate use of advances in technology than the art of surveillance. In just under 50 years, beginning with the Cold War, surveillance has evolved from the ponderous to the ultra-sophisticated. With frightening speed and a great deal of premeditation, physical surveillance has largely given way to a planetary Panopticon of satellites, cameras, telephone eavesdropping, directional microphones, laser beams, smart cards and DNA scanners.
The end result of all this technology is the decline of personal freedom and the end of privacy. The ultimate aim is the creation of a system of total surveillance.
Whitaker harks back to the time of the Panopticon again and again but he always manages to miss the device's crucial implication, the possibility of centralised control by an elite. Whitaker indirectly banishes that possibility from his thesis, thus ultimately weakening his argument.
Unfortunately even with that omission aside, the book has other problems. The least of these is Whitaker's occasional use of pretentiously hip cyber-talk, such as: A networked world is a world in which power is networked, diffused into nodes located at key network intersections. The quote is a perfect (and representative) example of Whitaker's propensity to deliver glib lines without bothering to explain them.
The book's other problem is its author's consistent use of mutually exclusive terms. Despite his earlier critique of technocrats and corporations for concentrating media ownership and technological power in fewer and fewer hands and then hiding that behindinformation superhighway and global village nonsense, Whitaker nevertheless falls prey to the same type of fuzzy thinking: New information technologies are two-sided. They enable and empower, but they make their users more vulnerable to surveillance and manipulation.
Like most of those who have succumbed to the computer's mesmerising illusions, Whitaker is convinced that the machine's technical capabilities offer the user personal freedom and power. To borrow Whitaker's own phrase, the information technologies, or so he claims, allow the user to watch the watchers. Whitaker's evidence for this computer-given empowerment are those instances (which he admits are trivial) in which passers-by film the police abusing people.
Strangely, Whitaker is so fascinated by his subject matter that towards the end of his thesis he comes out as a supporter of surveillance in certain instances. Despite his earlier assertion that technology has largely supplanted Big Brother, he later insists that global companies are busily recreating him to combat what Whitaker terms the dark side of globalisation: transnational organised crime and corruption, drug trafficking, illegal arms sales and money laundering.
Whitaker seems to be ignorant of the fact that crime, large and small, has a functional role within the state and that by far the biggest criminals of all, the global corporations, are in control of the surveillance apparatus.
The book's greatest weakness is revealed towards the end and it is the product of the author's own scientific limitations. Whitaker is a professor of political science. He is not a socialist or a sociologist with a thorough understanding of the historical development of the state. He insists that the decline of the nation state and the spread of globalisation has ensured that the state has been de-centered; power is dispersed and diffused; surveillance has become multi-directional.
Whitaker seems not to have noticed that while the idea of the nation state is sliding into obsolescence, the states themselves are being reorganised so that they serve as local administrative arms of the new corporate world order.
Power is far from being dispersed, diffused or de-centered. In fact, the opposite is true. While the number of multinational corporations is dwindling (through mergers and take-overs), their power is increasing exponentially. The few that emerge already have a unified hegemonic ideology, global mega-capitalism, which enables them to look upon nature as expendable, the masses as disposable and the world as just a marketplace.
Moreover, capitalist globalisation will bring them closer to the institutions of international power: the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and Interpol. And of central importance to this possible mega-state will be the unidirectional (top-down) global Panopticon with the means to achieve near total electronic mass surveillance â. the real end of privacy.
While The End Of Privacy is an excellent primer of the means and capability of electronic surveillance, unfortunately its contradictions and weaknesses ensure that it is of limited sociopolitical value.