Friday, April 27, 2018

A Maelstom of Surveillance

Our world of surveillance began a little over two centuries ago in the secret police that Joseph Fouché created for Napoleon. Secret police were not entirely new, but they only assumed something like their modern form in the years of Napoleon's empire. They were soon copied with varying degrees of success, frequently with dark comedy, by most of the rest of Europe. We could tell much of the history of the last two centuries as the growth of surveillance, the building of files and profiles of citizens by governments and later by businesses, and the attempts to classify and pigeonhole every person and their every action.

We are in a golden age of surveillance now. Himmler, Beria, and Hoover never had the ability to collect, record, profile, and classify that any police department and many businesses have today. It took multiple streams to bring us to this pass today. Only a few of them grew out of the activities of the police or weaved in and out of their realm. The growth and expansion of banking and credit required the creation of fixed, fiduciary identities so that persons could be pinned down and tracked for monetary purposes. The police could more easily deal with someone who's identity changed as revealed by aliases, but the flow of credit, the creation of wealth, the identification of property, could not tolerate aliases. Neither could conscript armies, which again required the correct registration and classification of citizens for military training and service, or skilled work in munitions factories, etc. Armies and banks could be comfortable only when a person's identity was as fixed as a bug pinned in a collection.

Of course the armies also wanted to know something about the health of the citizen, so that had to go in the record too, but the medical profession was also doing more recording and classifying, trying to understand health and disease. Public health was the great medical triumph of the 1800s and early 1900s, and it increasingly relied on record keeping, classifying people, and making observations about their environment. That also merged into the activities of the early social scientists, and of the reformers who set out to help and educate the poor.

There were other streams too, technical ones. The growth of the size of the United States and the desire for more information about the country quickly overburdened the decennial census. That led to the origins of modern information technology in the form of the punchcard, key punches, punchcard readers, and sorters, all of this decades before computers. Parallel to their growth was that of card indexes, often looking like nothing so much as the library card catalogs that many of remember from libraries. Cards with written information on possible subversives, enemy aliens, and their cronies, were maintained by all major governments until they were eventually automated with punchcard and then computers. Fear of Anarchists and Communists made them seem vital to many governments and security firms.

Banks, mortgage companies, and business of all kinds found it convenient to keep records on their customers and employees with the same technological innovations. The time clock was the most visible manifesto on of this to employees, though the card indices were used to track and control them too. Customers were increasingly tracked by department stores and catalog companies so they could be better targeted for advertising.

Computers began to add more and more power to these kinds of systems, but it would take the Internet to make possible the kind of data harvesting and exploitation we see now. Meanwhile cameras, CCTV, audio recording, the bugging of phones, but also just tracing what phone numbers were called and what credit transactions made, and later GPS began to allow governments and businesses build up more detailed profiles and gather ever more data.

Meanwhile the sciences were given us more and more to track and profile. Fingerprints were long the most full-proof means of identification, but blood type, hair, and other means were used as well, until DNA and biometrics began to dominate identification, fixing our identities ever more effectively. Psychology was also hard at work in these years, testing, diagnosing, classifying, and profiling. They were creating psychographic methods that could, when given enough data, describe and anticipate the behavior of individuals or groups.

All of these streams have begun to coalesce in the past two decades. The needs of government, business, finance, and medicine to identify and classify, to detect and predict; the technologies for collecting, sorting, and communicating; the psychological techniques for profiling and controlling have all come together into the nightmare world of modern surveillance. It took us two centuries to reach this point, two decades to Brian the disparate streams together into a mighty ocean, and about two years to begin to comprehend the consequences. Around the world the shape of the future is taking shape, whether in the Social Credit scheme being imposed on China, the commoditization, monetization, and weaponization of psychographic profiles in America, the attempts to put the brakes on in Europe, the targeted use of false information for internal control and external warfare by Russia, or scores of other experiments by government and business that are barely on our radar in every corner of the globe, sweeping us up in a  maelstrom from which their seems no escape and in which direction seems to become meaningless. The ideals of those who created our world of surveillance have created a world that even Orwell would scarcely recognize, in some cases it seems to give those in power more control, but the truth may be that it is spinning out of control at a rapid accelerating rate. When it spins off its axis no one can say where we will be left, or with what.

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