The Panopticon comes of age

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 behind“information 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 —. 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.

From GLW issue 452