What is the purpose of surveilling a domestic population? Is it inevitable?
Surveillance and spying are a little different but the benefits of each have long been understood. The purposes of spying are to know when an enemy is going to attack, their capabilities, the potential to attack them first, or what one might gain in making an attack, state to state or tribe to tribe. Learn plans, intentionally mislead, survive.
Domestic surveillance is different or at least thought of as being different. For some types of domestic surveillance the purpose seems to be that the population harbors enemies (overlapping with spying above), whether this means enemies of the state itself or those harmful to the rest of the population.
A version of that is that if there are people who have “wrong thinking,” then their “wrong thinking” can infect their neighbors, and eventually lead to violence or chaos.
More extreme examples of surveillance states include East Germany, where the Stasi kept records on as many as one-third of the country’s population, the SAVAK in pre-revolutionary Iran, and the USSR. In the past, states that built significant surveillance systems needed the information to defend their top-down structure. Is this changing?
Surveillance in the present is done a little differently. Rather than the manpower-heavy individually targeted surveillance of the past, today’s surveillance can be softer and algorithmic. But the situations are also different.
Since today everyone can publish their thoughts online — an option that did not exist in the recent past — a surveillance system must be faster and more scalable.
For online posts, have a set of rules that flag content or behavior as questionable, bring in human monitors to evaluate as needed, remove the content, reprimand the individual, and move on. Users and censors co-evolve as they learn to avoid and catch each others’ modified behavior. A common example of this is the way people would modify the numbers in June 4 (6-4) to be “May 35th” to circumvent a censor in China.
There is also large-scale public movement surveillance that uses video cameras, a topic which gained more awareness in recent years due to the growth of the programs and the progression of facial recognition technology.
Earlier versions of video surveillance were simply a recorded video feed that would be reviewed if a crime had been committed (or sometimes illegitimately if security personnel had a personal interest in someone on camera). Rather than a video feed of a private house or commercial entity, many of these feeds were of public areas. A system like this was used to a great degree in London (notably without effect on the crime rate). Later smart video feeds could help monitors track targeted individuals as they move, for example in the counter-terrorism system built in New York City after 9-11.
Non-state behavioral surveillance includes the kinds that large tech companies can do, for example by aggregating large data sets of user behavior and looking for outliers or finding trends. Even if this is purely for business intelligence, the idea of a business model that supports monitoring user behavior in order to sell advertising space or data is an interesting and increasingly questionable one.
Next-generation surveillance and feedback systems, such as China’s Social Credit System (社会信用体系) take the inevitable next step where individuals may be not only punished but also rewarded for behavior. In different installations and paired with police, such smart surveillance can also help control a population preemptively, for example that of the Uyghurs in China’s northwest province of Xinjiang.
Are these systems needed? Why are we seeing increased surveillance now rather than in the past, even in more “open” countries?
Inevitability
I believe state and corporate surveillance became inevitable outcomes of technological trends and were not necessarily driven by safety concerns or even business intelligence. Certain triggers (terrorist or other violent acts) may have sped up tech investment, but it still would have happened.
As a comparison, let’s look at an industry that is mostly beneficial and also widely used: freemium email services. I also believe this industry’s creation was inevitable. Here’s why.
Predictable declines in the cost of storage space costs, greater network bandwidth, transition to cloud storage over local storage converged to produce a better product which was freemium cloud email service accessed through a browser (rather than legacy paid email clients downloaded on your own computer). Freemium cloud email services typically show ads to the free versions of the service and charge for extra storage, while removing ads.
There was a point at which freemium email services became financially sustainable. Because of predictability, these services were able to launch before sustainability, which is when a funded company would pursue building such a service. That is, develop a good enough product for a smaller audience and then grab market share as the economics become more favorable.
If there weren’t a developed advertising industry, or if storage costs were not declining, or if internet access was not growing, it might not make sense to develop a freemium email service. But those advertising, storage, and access requisites made freemium email, I believe, inevitable. It might not have happened in 1995 (with Hotmail), or 1997 (with Yahoo), or 2004 (with Gmail, which greatly upped the storage limits) but it would have eventually.
Once these services exist they form a positive feedback loop (more users, cheaper per unit storage, more advertising revenue etc) that drives more innovation that improves their businesses further.
This is why I argue that surveillance — and here I’ll just focus on visual surveillance — is inevitable.
Modern surveillance capabilities require devices (cameras, phones), networked feeds (text, audio, video, identity), algorithmic processing of data (better computing power), and follow-up digital enforcement (account lock-downs, credit freezes, travel freezes) or in-person enforcement (visits, removal to a place of punishment).
Is the purpose of this surveillance largely one of safety? I don’t believe so. The surveillance technology investment seems to be opportunistic and not dependent on only being installed when there is a bad actor. I think that the technology innovation itself drives the growth in surveillance usage.
There are certain things we technologically could not do in the past but now can. Business models emerge to make them worth doing.
Are surveillance business models sustainable? Surveillance is also done for compliance. Surveillance is done in order to show that you have taken preventative measures. There is a business model to install surveillance technology to reduce insurance costs.
What about the stated surveillance projects that are supposed to fight increases in crime? If so where are the reductions in crime? Or is crime pushed to other forms and locations?
Will the calls to defund police departments simply lead to increased surveillance?
Surveillance deployments are often in urban areas (high amount of content per minute, high potential value output per minute) rather than in rural areas that wouldn’t support such systems. A way to avoid visual surveillance for now is to move to the middle of nowhere and cover your laptop and phone cameras. Eventually, as equipment prices fall further, visual surveillance tech will be deployed even to remote areas.
What business model innovation could visual surveillance tech develop beyond security itself? Here are some ideas that might fund future deployments.
- Analysis of eating and drinking habits to assess population health and healthcare needs.
- Analysis of how people fall, in order to prevent falls or predict when people are at risk.
- General health assessments: steps taken per day, walking pace, all mapped across demographics.
- Create records of traffic accidents to preemptively adjust traffic patterns.
- Estimate wildlife populations. Estimate pest populations.
Consider
- Surveillance as a practice seems loathsome in some places but it will be practiced more as trigger events lead to equipment installations and business models support it.
- Once installed, who rips these systems out?
- Technology development makes some things inevitable. We only argue about the timescale.
This is another in a growing series of articles on the surveillance theme, including Pandemic Protests, Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Coronavirus Consequences (Part 2), The Owl’s Right Eye, and The Emergence of Omniscience.