[Reader-list] Surveillance after "Big Brother"

[Menso Heus]

On Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 09:40:20PM -0800, Rana Dasgupta wrote:
> 
> Further to Jeebesh's and Menso's postings.
> 
> I think these are raising the crucial point.
> 
> Jeebesh writes:
> 
> "Our understanding of power is usually underpined by 19th century understanding of a
> visible-centralised apparatus. What we are faced with is a far more insidous and
> imbticated in everyday structure of info-generation, classification and ordering."
> 
> It is *this* 19th century understanding that is labelled "Big Brother".  And it is because
> we are patently not living under this "visible-centralised apparatus" that the spectre of
> "Big Brother" becomes an alibi for the system, a sign of its innocence.

This is basically what I wrote, but...
 
> This is the urgency of a proper language of the system we inhabit.  We need to be able
> to express what the anxiety of this ubiquitous, but distributed system looks and feels
> like in order to displace the "Big Brother" cliche which serves, like the Nazi death camps,
> only as an image of a history that we have happily been able to escape.

I don't believe we should move away from the 'Big Brother cliche' because of this 
reason. Whether the back-end of the system is centralized, distributed, etc, is 
of little relevance to what can be seen as 'the end user experience'. 

Or: people care big brother *is* watching them, not about *how*.

This line is in fact false, people don't care, and that is the main problem in moving
the debate forward. I do not believe that this is due to the fact that there is no 
centralized system, because as pointed out in my initial reply, in effect there is, 
but due to the belief of people in democracy and 'the free west.'

'Security' has always been a very strong motivator for people to surrender their 
freedom. It's very interesting, because somehow the myth of 'the secure society'
has been created and indoctrinated in contemporary culture, the myth that one must 
be able to live life without ever facing any crime. 

Lines are constantly being redrawn and the people accept. They've begun with what 
can be described as 'pre-emptive searching' in Amsterdam and other cities lately
in Holland. This basically means that, at any time, at any location, without any
reason, a police officer can search you. The last numbers I saw were 700 people 
searched in one night with only 7 people actually having anything on them. Now,
mind you that perfectly legite objects are suddenly turned into weapons.
If you're a store room worker that has to cut open boxes all day and have your 
own pocket knife with you, bam! You're a criminal. Because obviously, you're 
carrying an illegal weapon with the purpose of killing someone with it. 

What is happening here is that the situation is changing from the concept of 
'innocent until proven guilty' to 'guilty until proven innocent.' Yet people
are fine with it. People believe that the police searching 700 people will 
prevent them from getting mugged, murdered or raped. Just as people believe 
that you can actually completely secure air travel. 

This unfullfillable promise of absolute security which is being promised by 
governments worldwide must be debunked in order for things to change. The 
very strangeness of it all though, is that what has started the recent chain
reaction of 'hand in your freedom and get more security in return' was exactly
a most literal debunking of the absolute security myth: September 11th.

Interesting side effects of earlier mentioned 'pre-emptive searching' is the
fact that people start to believe there's a lot wrong because there are so 
many police officers out there on the streets, searching people. It's a self-
fullfilling prophecy in a way.

Just as one of the great things about capitalism is the way it succeeds in 
profitting even from the anti movement (whether you're here to buy pro- or
anti-capitalist merchandise, you're still going to pay me) so does the myth
of absolute security have a great catch: people are told not to think and
not to worry, because by doing what the government says, all will be great.
Thus, an informed and actively thinking audience surrounding this debate
is practically non-existant. 

Perhaps more attacks in 'the absolute secured state' will be able to change
this, but it most likely will only push things further in the wrong direction
at an even greater pace.

The complete big brother scenario is thus what we *are* heading for and I
believe that it is therefore also essential to remain part of the vocabulary.

Menso

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