The intensification of surveillance: crime terrorism and warfare in the information age, edited by Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster (Pluto 2003) £l4.99, Reviewed by Piers Mostyn On May 2 1924 the Communist Party's weekly paper commented: "Scotland Yard's most important function is the protection of the supreme murderers, robbers and criminals - the Capitalist class itself.
"And for this purpose there exists parallel with the CID the "Special Branch" ... The methods of the Special Branch are many. In addition to its own agents (paid up to £10 a week) members of working class organisations are regularly bribed to betray information. Not only are individuals shadowed and the offices of organisations watched, but their correspondence is also opened in the post and photographed. Telephone lines are tapped by means of "dictaphones", which record conversations. "Microphones" are concealed in meeting places when the "Yard" cannot obtain access or eavesdrop by other means".
Little has changed. But however sinister this activity and however necessary to expose and challenge, 80 years later the targeting of Marxist organisations is but a tiny fragment of the surveillance now going on.
The recent vogue for surveillance as entertainment in TV shows from Big Brother to I'm an Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here may be trashy, dumbed down and ratings-led fodder. Yet it is an accurate, if surreal, representation of everyday life in the 21st Century. Suse a evie an e about new ince 9/11 we have all become
policies, laws and technologies heralding a massive extension of surveillance. From Total Information Awareness in the USA to biometric eyescans at airports, from satellites hoovering up millions of phone calls on the watch for trigger words to laws requiring IT and communications firms to store and hand over data. What this book makes clear, though, is that mass surveillance was a serious trend long before the attack on the Twin Towers. The growth of "data mining" - the analysis of meaningful patterns in personal data - came out of a combination of the internet and IT revolution, rapidly developing techniques in the field of applied statistical analysis with capitalist globalisation.
911 accelerated this process through a massive infusion of investment not only from states, but also from a security industry with a keen eye for exponential profits. The political terrain was laid out by a softening up of the public, whose concerns over privacy and civil liberties were overcome by stoking up insecurity over worldwide
This isn't just about the "war on terror" therefore. The collection and organisation of personal data has become a significant new growth commodity. Major companies are acquiring banks of it as a new capital asset that can provide an aggressive competitive edge in an increasingly cut-throat commercial environment.
A key impact has been in "social sorting" - mechanisms for risk profiling and social categorising. Long prevalent in the insurance business, this expanded into the field of targeted marketing. Security and commercial interests are now in the business of predicting the future behaviour (and therefore "risk") of suspect individuals and communities. Ultimately this may marry up with Blunkett and Rumsfeld's "pre-emptive justice" to enable "enemies" to be identified and neutralised long before they do anything.
long way from A spooks with false moustaches
infiltrating smoke-filled commie meetings, it's closer to the film "Minority Report" and certainly is no conspiracynut speculation.
This burgeoning new industry has its own field of academia called surveillance studies, with an electronic journal ( HYPERLINK, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org www.surveillance-and-society.org) The industry also holds conferences, one of which provided the articles collected in this book.
Some of the more stimulating analysis has revived interest in Michel Foucault's excellent Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison - in which the prison as an all-seeing control mechanism is a paradigm model for modern industrial capitalism, replicating itself through factories, schools and hospitals. However these experts sometimes seem almost in awe of the power and complexity of what they are dealing with. They snipe from the sidelines, but there is little attempt at an over-arching theory of the class-based nexus of globalised capital and armed imperialism that forms the power relations behind these new developments. New Labour can get away with benignly dubbing this "joined up government" - synthesizing the information exchange mechanisms between a post-welfare statism and rapacious private sector profiteering - only because there is little by way of radical critique. Fertile new ground for Marxist analysis. Madrid after March |I