Surveillance: Power, Problems, and Politics 9780774816113, 9780774816120, 9780774816137

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Surveillance

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Edited by Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg

Surveillance Power, Problems, and Politics

© UBC Press 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), www.accesscopyright.ca. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09   5 4 3 2 1 Printed in Canada with vegetable-based inks on FSC-certified ancient-forest-free paper (100% post-consumer recycled) that is processed chlorine- and acid-free. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Surveillance : power, problems, and politics / edited by Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7748-1611-3 (bound); ISBN 978-0-7748-1612-0 (pbk.); ISBN 978-0-7748-1613-7 (e-book) 1. Electronic surveillance – Social aspects. 2. Information technology – Social aspects. 3. Social control. 4. Privacy, Right of. I. Hier, Sean P. (Sean Patrick), 1971- II. Greenberg, Joshua, 1973HM846.S867 2009           303.3’3           C2008-907825-X

UBC Press gratefully acknowledges the financial support for our publishing program of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and of the Canada Council for the Arts, and the British Columbia Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. UBC Press The University of British Columbia 2029 West Mall Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2 604-822-5959 / Fax: 604-822-6083 www.ubcpress.ca

We dedicate this book to Leah, Jacob, Jessica, and Toby.

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Contents

1

Foreword: Surveillance and Political Problems / ix Kevin D. Haggerty Acknowledgments / xix Introduction / 3 Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg

The Politics of Surveillance: Power, Paradigms, and the Field of Visibility / 14 Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg Part 1: Stigma, Morality, and Social Control



2 Kid-Visible: Childhood Obesity, Body Surveillance, and the Techniques of Care / 33 Charlene D. Elliott



3 Police Surveillance of Male-with-Male Public Sex in Ontario, 1983-94 / 46 Kevin Walby



4 A Kind of Prohibition: Targets of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s Interdiction List, 1953-75 / 59 Scott Thompson



Part 2: Environmental Design, Consumerism, and Privacy



5 Natural Surveillance, Crime Prevention, and the Effects of Being Seen / 87 Patrick F. Parnaby and C. Victoria Reed



6 Administering the Dead: Mass Death and the Problem of Privacy / 101 Joseph Scanlon

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7 Identity Theft and the Construction of Creditable Subjects / 116 Sheryl N. Hamilton



8 From Bodily Integrity to Genetic Surveillance: The Impacts of DNA Identification in Criminal Justice / 135 Neil Gerlach



Part 3: Genetics, Security, and Biometrics

9 Communication and the Sorrows of Empire: Surveillance and Information Operations “Blowback” in the Global War on Terrorism / 151 Dwayne Winseck 10 Bio-Benefits: Technologies of Criminalization, Biometrics, and the Welfare System / 169 Shoshana Magnet Part 4: Participatory Surveillance and Resistance 11 Public Vigilance Campaigns and Participatory Surveillance after 11 September 2001 / 187 Mike Larsen and Justin Piché 12 Cell Phones and Surveillance: Mobile Technology, States, and Social Movements / 203 Simon J. Kiss 13 Subverting Surveillance Systems: Access to Information Mechanisms as Tools of Counter-Surveillance / 219 Laura Huey

References / 244

Contributors / 264 Index / 267

Foreword: Surveillance and Political Problems Kevin D. Haggerty

Western societies are in the midst of a world-historical transformation in terms of the emergence of new practices, dynamics, and technologies of surveillance. Surveillance involves monitoring people or things typically as the basis for some form of social intervention. In the past half century, surveillance has emerged as the dominant organizing practice of late modernity and is prompting widespread changes across assorted social domains. At the same time, the forms of surveillance are markedly different in different contexts, involving diverse motivations, technologies, dynamics, organizational arrangements, and legal regimes, all of which raise unique social and political concerns. When drawing attention to such developments, we should be cautious not to overemphasize the novelty of surveillance per se. Interpersonal faceto-face scrutiny is an inherent attribute of human coexistence. Institutions also have a long history of using surveillance in organizational practices. That said, we appear to be in the midst of a step-change in terms of the expansion, intensification, and integration of surveillance measures (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 2006; Lyon 2002; Monahan 2006; Solove 2004; Webster and Ball 2003). The reasons for this change are complex and undoubtedly overdetermined but can broadly be attributed to the interplay of things such as new technologies, new government rationalities, novel organizational practices, political opportunism, capitalist market forces, and a heightened public sensitivity to risk (or certain forms of risk). At the cultural level, these changes manifest themselves in a zeitgeist where citizens and officials now assume that greater surveillance is the preferred response to an array of political problems. In my brief prefatory comments to this important volume, I hope to sensitize readers to some attributes of the relationship between surveillance and political problems. There is now a voluminous literature on the production of political problems1 (Best 1990, 2008; Gusfield 1989; Hilgartner and Bosk 1988; Jenness

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1993; Ritzer 2004; Young 2006). The general orientation of these works is social constructionist in that they consciously try to dispel any notion that political problems are naturally given objective conditions that obviously warrant a public response. Instead, political problems are presented as emergent and contingent social phenomena. It is not inevitable that a specific condition will be (or was) dealt with as a political problem, and any specific problem could be framed and responded to in dramatically different ways. When officials come to recognize some set of conditions as troubling, this is itself the culmination of strategic efforts to problematize a state of affairs that was initially perceived as a matter of concern by only a small group of activists. Such individuals mobilize to bring this situation to public attention and do so in ways shaped by their own subjective understandings of the problem and preferred solutions. Activists must convey their messages to a wider audience in order to transform a cause of the few into a concern of the many. The media figure prominently in this process, and the most successful claims makers are those who can exploit preferred media templates to ensure that their messages are taken up and communicated broadly (Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 1989). As a wider constituency of interested publics becomes enrolled, these causes typically start to be adopted, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, by politicians and policy makers who are in a position to commit resources to hopefully rectify the situation. Official and academic studies of the putative problem are conducted, and preliminary programming is initiated. Once introduced, these programs themselves become the subject of ongoing critical and empirical scrutiny. Evaluative studies try to ascertain what, if any, initiatives work and whether programming is being run in an efficient and cost-effective manner. Purported failures and unintended negative consequences of existing programming often become fodder for new rounds of claims making. Surveillance is a crucial, if underacknowledged, component in this entire process. At the earliest stages in the emergence of a political problem, activists must visualize problems in ways that foster public concern about the issue. The techniques used toward this end can vary dramatically, but surveillance figures prominently in many approaches. In an increasingly mediasaturated age, some of the most successful claims makers are those who can produce, distribute, and reproduce dramatic visuals of a problem that appears to demand a social response (Reinhardt, Edwards, and Duganne 2007). Claims making can include the use of heart-rending images of indigent or victimized populations (Tagg 1988) or “shocking statistics” presented in graphs that demonstrate the precipitous increase in the volume or seriousness of a political problem (Orcutt and Turner 1993). Historically, claims makers primarily warranted their claims about the existence of a problem and the need for reform through value-laden appeals

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to sin, evil, or degeneracy (Valverde 1998; Young 2006). Today, as a putative political problem starts to acquire a more pronounced public profile, the activist’s emotional tone starts to be supplemented by the more measured discourse of the technicians who are tasked with trying to empirically demonstrate the exact nature and extent of the problem. Norms and values still operate, as they are the motive force for claims makers and can be transparently on display when activists make presentations to ideologically aligned audiences, but on the wider public stage there is an increased prominence of a secular discourse that aims to empirically detail the nature and extent of a problem. Neoliberal forms of governance are contingent on the production of such official, often quantified, forms of knowledge (Haggerty 2001; Rose 1999). Before programming is initiated, both problematic situations and problem people are ideally to be known in empirical detail. Certainly, this is not to say that programming is contingent on the development of an unassailable body of evidence about the nature of a problem or the likely success of an intervention. It is also not the case that studies necessarily determine the contours of government programming in any straightforward way. Indeed, as Scott (1998) has accentuated, the state has a built-in tendency to embrace a particular form of optics conducive to ways of making problems legible to centralized authorities, culminating in efforts to document, standardize, and register the social – and natural – worlds, in the process downplaying the complexities and nuances of political problems. Hence, the routine deployment of a style of political discourse and practice that privileges appeals to certain forms of empirical facts perceived to be actionable by government officials. Official attempts to learn about a problem involve establishing or drawing on an attendant surveillance regime. If the problem is obese children, then mobs of animated kids are to be corralled in gyms to be pinched by calipers and have their body-fat indexes recorded (see Elliott in this volume). If the problem is adolescents using drugs, then parents can compel their progeny to urinate in a bottle so that they can use home drug-testing kits to scrutinize their behaviour (Moore and Haggerty 2001). In each instance, a particular problematization prompts a political demand for more and better governmentally relevant knowledge, which, in turn, depends on a specific monitoring regime. In many cases, the causal arrow points in the opposite direction, as proponents of new surveillance technologies work to foster an official interest in the type of knowledge that their system can generate. The point, however, is that surveillance is an inevitable attribute of knowledge production – a theme I return to below. While one can generate knowledge without engaging in surveillance – through introspection or dialogue, for instance – surveillance is nearly always a component of a knowledge-generation

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process. This connection is easy to appreciate in relation to sophisticated data-mining practices, but it is also true for more prosaic types of monitoring. Glancing at a stranger entails a form of mundane surveillance that can generate knowledge about his or her culture, lifestyle, and sexual orientation, among other factors. While such knowledge is always provisional and open to revision, it remains a foundational way in which we make sense of our world (Goffman 1971). There is an expansive dynamic to the requirement for governmentally useful knowledge about a political problem. Surveillance regimes must first be established in order to learn about a potential problem. This can be as simple as adding another check-box to an existing study or as complicated as developing sophisticated new technologies to visualize heretofore invisible phenomena. At the same time, such efforts tend to be frustratingly inconclusive. In the social sciences, it is rare (perhaps impossible) to produce a methodologically perfect study of a political problem. When there is competition over the correct way to typify or respond to an issue, considerable critically motivated attention can be focused on deconstructing the methodology used to study that problem (Fuchs and Ward 1994). Hence, the inherent limitations of social scientific studies contribute to the familiar dynamic whereby researchers and state officials demand more studies, with larger samples, that collect more data on more variables over a longer period of time and wider geographic locale. Such efforts augment the production of governmentally useful knowledge about political problems while simultaneously expanding and intensifying surveillance practices. The third way that surveillance is related to this process concerns the fact that surveillance is itself often the official response to political problems. Here surveillance is not just part of an epistemological project designed to learn about a problem but is itself seen as ameliorative. In fact, it can be the case that many situations – police interrogation tactics, political lobbying techniques – are seen as problematic precisely because they are relatively opaque. Visibility allows for the exercise of power, while invisible phenomena are ultimately outside the contours of governmentally relevant knowledge and, as such, are difficult to regulate. Hence, invisibility fosters a disconcerting sense that things are remiss precisely because they are beyond the gaze of authority. Predictably, the preferred solution to such situations is to ratchet-up official scrutiny. This is particularly apparent in relation to anxieties about different kinds of criminal or deviant behaviour. In recent years, some of the most popular anti-crime initiatives position surveillance as a key component in deterrent efforts. Advocates of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), for example, call for increased visibility of people, places, and processes through diverse measures such as cutting down shrubs around your home, building entire communities to maximize natural “lines of sight,” or increasing computerized monitoring of commercial

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transactions (Gill 1995; Levi and Wall 2004). In all such instances – and a plethora of others – surveillance is itself positioned as part of the solution to a political problem. One characteristic of such efforts is that surveillance measures rarely quench the official (or public) thirst for full transparency. Visibility is always bounded, which means that new surveillance regimes can, paradoxically, foster a perception that the groups or areas outside an existing surveillance system are now, by comparison, even more opaque. In an escalating spiral of visibility, such perceptions can fuel new demands for increased scrutiny of these people or places that have now come to be seen as disconcertingly imperceptible. The fifth axis connecting surveillance and political problems concerns the fact that responses to problems themselves have to be monitored. In a neoliberal society, managerial and accountability concerns are paramount. Irrespective of the type of intervention that is used to confront a social problem, there is an increased expectation of ongoing follow-up and evaluative monitoring of the success of those interventions. At the most basic level, neoliberal governance has contributed to the escalation of a managerialist audit society (Power 1997) where a staggering amount of institutional time and resources is dedicated to formally accounting for these processes. Finally, increasingly surveillance itself is posited as a social problem. Claims makers have criticized surveillance measures because, among other things, they reduce privacy rights, are authoritarian, racializing, counter-productive, and inefficient, and involve an opportunistic power-grab by major institutions. These arguments have been advanced by assorted claims makers through formal policy reports (Surveillance Studies Network 2006) and more theatrical efforts, such as those of the “surveillance camera players” who perform their dissent in front of the closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras they oppose. Given that many of the authors in this collection, including me, have an interest in, and occasionally participate in, this form of surveillance politics, the question of how to conceptualize surveillance as a political problem deserves a bit more attention. Reading the most popular commentaries on surveillance, one would be excused for believing that it is an exclusively negative phenomenon, a sentiment fostered by proliferating references to sinister manifestations of “Big Brother” or academic invocations of the panopticon (Haggerty 2006). This orientation is encouraged by our choice of terminology, as the expression “surveillance” is itself coded negatively to imply forms of unwanted or unjust scrutiny. Analysts augment this tendency by typically concentrating their inquiries on the most disturbing manifestations of surveillance. And while there is ample reason to be concerned, even alarmed, about the proliferation of surveillance, it is also the case that surveillance is a generalizable practice that can be used for both laudable and condemnable purposes.

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Returning to the earlier point, approaching surveillance as inevitably tied to the production of knowledge can help us to finesse our normative stance toward surveillance. Consider, for example, how the tenor of our analyses would change if we simply substituted the expression “generating knowledge” for that of “surveillance.” At the broadest level, the evaluation of surveillance tout court would undoubtedly become more normatively agnostic, as few people would identify with the claim that knowledge production is inevitably good or bad. Some might undoubtedly follow Foucault into the realms beyond good and evil to embrace the suggestion that everything, including power-knowledge configurations, is dangerous. But given that Foucault presents everything as dangerous in an unprioritized fashion, such a stance is not very useful in the world of realpolitik, where decisions must be made about whether to support or resist specific initiatives. If we foreground the connection between surveillance and knowledge production, it is apparent that surveillance, while undeniably dangerous, can nonetheless at times serve desirable ends, including progressive forms of governance, building inclusive urban spaces, caring for loved ones, or scientific discovery. Current attempts to increase the transparency and accountability of major organizations are, at heart, efforts to subject those institutions to greater surveillance (Fung, Graham, and Weil 2007). Moreover, as Huey notes in this volume, surveillance can also be used to make the behaviour of official surveillance agents more transparent. This matter becomes more concrete if we briefly consider two famous, but starkly different, uses of the state’s infrastructure of population surveillance. The first example comes from eighteenth-century London, which experienced an intense process of urbanization. The city was unprepared for such a concentrated mass of humanity, and it notably lacked an infrastructure to manage the tonnes of human and animal waste that streamed through the streets and accumulated in fetid basement pools. One consequence was that cholera – a disease that can manifest itself in the rapid onset of symptoms, including the loss of litres of water through horrific bouts of diarrhea – became a recurrent problem. Cholera became even more pronounced when, in an attempt to deal with the choking stench, the city built a series of sewers to direct the waste into the Thames River, transforming London’s primary source of drinking water into a rancid cesspool. At this time, physician John Snow fastened on the idea that cholera might be transmitted through contaminated drinking water. In an attempt to convince a skeptical scientific audience of this connection, he produced a now famous map that traced the connections between the victims of the 1854 outbreak and exposure to soiled drinking water, a document that ultimately helped to prompt politicians to construct a sewer system to direct London’s waste far out of the city centre, in the process saving innumerable

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lives (Johnson 2007). And while Snow is the central protagonist in this story, his efforts relied on an extensive system of bureaucratic surveillance that was used to document the connection between cholera and fouled water. “Snow’s investigations would never have been possible,” Epstein (2007, 42) notes, chiding those who would see gloomy panopticism in all forms of data gathering, “without the reports produced by England’s General Registry Office, the successor institution of a system of parish registers that had been tracking births and deaths throughout England since the mid-seventeenth century.” Fast-forward to the twentieth century, and we encounter a dramatically different use of a comparable bureaucracy. As the Allies marched steadily across Europe in 1945, individual soldiers were stunned by the scenes that confronted them at the Nazis’ hastily abandoned extermination camps. The mounds of corpses and the gaunt stares of skeletal survivors testified to an extensive program designed to eradicate Jews, Gypsies, and other groups seen as degenerate by the National Socialists. Extermination was the culmination of a procession of detailed policies that segregated such individuals from society. Jews and members of other groups were singled out, their legal rights restricted, and their property confiscated. Barred from desirable occupations and relocated in ghettos, millions were ultimately shuttled to death camps where they were murdered. Beyond the twisted logic that motivated this behaviour, a precondition for the genocide was the German infrastructure of bureaucratic population surveillance. The National Socialists’ embrace of eugenics was only the most extreme manifestation of their fascination with issues of population, a fixation that spurned increasingly detailed public scrutiny and categorization (Götz and Roth 2004). This bureaucratic power was revolutionized when the Nazis contracted with IBM, famously known by its motto “the solutions people,” to lend its nascent computing power to the Nazis’ “final solution.” IBM held the monopoly on the early computing technology of Hollerith computing cards and machines. This technology was used at every stage in a cumulative genocidal process: “When Germany wanted to identify Jews by name, IBM showed it how. When the Reich wanted to use that information to launch programs of social expulsion and expropriation, IBM provided the means. When the trains had to run on time between concentration camps, IBM offered the solution” (Black 2001, 74). By combining the state’s existing infrastructure of population surveillance with unparalleled abilities to rapidly access and sort these data, the Nazis added a vital cog in their bureaucratic machinery of death. These dramatically different examples of the uses of the state infrastructure of population surveillance highlight the point that surveillance is neither inevitably good nor inevitably bad; rather, it is a generalized technology that can be used for a host of different government projects. None of this is

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to say that we should forgo engaging in normative critiques of surveillance – far from it. Instead, it is to suggest that criticism must be directed at the precise ways in which the component parts of the surveillant assemblage are materialized in distinct configurations of visibility. This includes being sensitive to how relations of power help to configure surveillance systems in particular ways and to how these systems can, in turn, reproduce or exacerbate existing forms of social inequality. Hence, the most potent critiques of surveillance are those that detail how specific manifestations of scrutiny are directed in the wrong directions, employ inappropriate categories, encourage improper conclusions, and so on. Such critiques concentrate on how surveillance potential is instantiated in relation to particular government projects that are motivated toward specific ends and target distinctive populations. Consequently, I am encouraged that many of the authors in this collection accentuate the particularities of surveillance, along the way raising vital questions about the political implications of distinct surveillance regimes. Nonetheless, in the wider scholarly community there appears to be a sense of dissatisfaction with such an orientation. Some want to engage in a sweeping condemnation of surveillance as inherently inequitable, as apparent in the numerous blunt charges that surveillance is a form of social control or a component in social sorting practices. By way of brusque conclusion, I want to suggest that, while such accusations are true, by themselves they do not constitute a normative critique of surveillance. Take, for example, the recurrent denunciation of surveillance as a form of social control. Such an all-encompassing accusation can only be productive if we are inclined to condemn any and all forms of social control (Lacombe 1996). In fact, governance always entails control in that it aims to steer and direct individuals, encouraging them to embrace particular behaviours. Such efforts help to foreclose alternative courses of action and as such are inevitably controlling – controls that run the gamut from the most delicate to the most repressive. We must loudly denounce unjust forms of social control, but such a critique involves moving down from the lofty heights of condemning social control tout court in order to specify our evaluative criteria, detailing why we should approve or disapprove of particular manifestations of control. The critique lies in the specifics – that this form of control is inappropriate or unjust. The same is true in relation to Lyon’s (2003b) important sociological insight that surveillance is increasingly used for forms of social sorting. As Lyon presents this claim, it is an argument about the functional operation of surveillance that increasingly combines data-processing capabilities and formal bureaucratic categories to direct people into disparate population groups in the ultimate aim of exposing them to various configurations of institutional

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response. However, as the expression has permeated the scholarly literature, it has quickly become a form of blanket condemnation, with surveillance being denounced simply because it involves “social sorting.” Again, the question arises whether we are opposed to social sorting itself or to the precise ways in which this practice is manifested in different government projects. Most of us are happy to see someone sorted out of the population of insured and licensed automobile drivers if he or she has a record of impaired or reckless driving. The same is true for people who have a demonstrated history of trying to bring weapons onto airplanes, as most people would be comfortable with having such individuals singled out for special attention. It is also the case that social sorting can be used for social betterment, to single out people with special needs, for example, so that they can receive additional care and consideration. These processes can vary in terms of how fair, transparent, and coercive they are, but it is difficult to imagine how complex societies could entirely eschew social sorting. Again, we end up in a situation where we must foreground our normative criteria to accentuate why this particular manifestation of social sorting is unjust, unfair, or inequitable. Some of the vital political questions to ask in this regard concern whether the categories and discriminating criteria are appropriate, the sorting process is transparent to all parties, the ultimate aims of governance are just, the people are free to modify or transcend their bureaucratic identity, there is a meaningful opportunity to contest how one is classified, and so on. This is a critique not of social sorting but of the precise dynamics and manifestations of such efforts. And while I am encouraging a normative politics that is attentive to the particularities of how each discrete surveillant assemblage is coordinated, I nonetheless retain my own nagging anxieties about the political purchase of such an orientation. When we step back from the minutiae of each surveillance system, with its unique government logics and configurations of watchers and watched, it is self-evident that surveillance is expanding across a host of different organizational contexts. We are in the midst of an amplifying but uncoordinated social experiment in transparency and are years away from being able to pronounce definitive conclusions about the total social consequences of these efforts. Such an expansion is particularly disconcerting given that a defining characteristic of the new transparency is its assemblage quality – the ability and tendency to integrate and coordinate otherwise discrete surveillance regimes, either in temporary configurations or in more stable structures. This nascent surveillance infrastructure represents an unprecedented risk to citizens because it is an unprecedented temptation for governments. In times of fear and national crisis, state officials will undoubtedly be inclined to coordinate the existing heterogeneous surveillance potentiality, to concentrate and coordinate the totality of this

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monitoring such that it serves distinctively draconian government ambitions. No government – totalitarian or broadly democratic – has ever had at its fingertips the surveillance infrastructure capacity that is unwittingly being created by the countless localized decisions to augment visibility. As the public has become inured to repeated warnings about “Big Brother,” and seduced by the assorted abilities of new surveillance technologies, what prospect is there to champion a political effort to foreground the prospects of unequalled totalitarian repression that lies dormant within emergent surveillance structures?

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the contributing authors for producing an innovative and provocative set of essays. We also extend a special thanks to Kevin Haggerty, who skilfully and eagerly wrote the foreword to the volume; to Dan Lett for his editorial work on the book; and to Randy Schmidt for his editorial guidance and support.

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Surveillance

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Introduction Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg

Privacy International, a British-based watchdog group, has hosted the annual Big Brother Awards since 1988. The ceremonies are held in several countries to recognize national government and private sector organizations that have violated privacy rights in the preceding year. In 2007, the event was held in Montreal, Canada; it marked the first international awards ceremony. The gala drew over 200 delegates from more than eighteen different countries. Several awards were handed out in Montreal. For example, in a tight competition for the Worst Public Official, Stewart Baker, former general counsel of the US National Security Agency (NSA) and undersecretary for policy at the US Department of Homeland Security, narrowly beat out Russian president Vladimir Putin and British prime minister Tony Blair. Putin and Blair were in the running for different reasons: Putin introduced Cold War-era surveillance practices, and Blair’s tenure as prime minister witnessed the installation of millions of public-area video surveillance cameras across the United Kingdom. It was, however, the NSA’s controversial domestic surveillance activities, combined with the political fallout from the US Patriot Act, that earned Baker the dubious honour of Worst Public Official for 2007. An award was also bestowed for Most Appalling Project or Technology. A leading contender for the award was the CCTV industry for its continued success in promoting video camera surveillance systems as a viable crime control policy solution. Another leading contender was India’s Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions (MPPG). The MPPG was in the running for its policy requiring female government employees to disclose details about their menstrual cycles on job appraisal forms. Yet Privacy International decided that neither the CCTV industry nor the MPPG had done as much damage to privacy as the UN International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAS). The ICAS won the award for secretly implementing a variety of invasive policies that included the development of a biometric passport and for its role in arranging passenger data transfer deals.

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The awards for Worst Public Official and Most Appalling Project or Technology attracted considerable interest and attention. But the most watched award category, and arguably the most closely contested category, was Most Heinous Government. Several nations were nominated: China, for continuing its human rights abuses and for expanding its surveillance practices beyond civil society into cyberspace (e.g., Google China); the United States, for its leading role in changing the way surveillance is carried out by governments around the world; and Tunisia, for its excessive surveillance regimes carried out in plain view of international publics. Despite the fierce competition, the United Kingdom edged out the competition for being “the greatest surveillance society amongst democratic nations.”1 The namesake of the Big Brother Awards is significant. In 1949, George Orwell published his futuristic dystopian novel, 1984. It is replete with tales of totalitarian state control. The novel depicts the fictional superstate of Oceania. The ruling party in Oceania attempts to maintain an extreme degree of social control over the middle and upper classes (largely leaving the proles or workers to their own devices) by deploying the thought police and the telescreens. The Ministry of Truth controls mass media and other forms of information, and radical techniques of indoctrination are used to forge love for Big Brother. The point Orwell makes in 1984 – articulated to varying degrees in Franz Kafka’s (1925) The Trial, Aldous Huxley’s (1932) Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s (1953) Fahrenheit 451, and Margaret Atwood’s (1985) The Handmaid’s Tale – is that, under certain circumstances, state authorities exploit the masses and deepen social inequalities through the appropriation and deployment of surveillance technologies and propaganda. Centralized forms of information and data gathering, Orwell warned, threaten democratic socialism and human freedom. In twenty-first-century North America, Orwell’s novel is widely understood as a fictionalized commentary on the threat posed by totalitarian governments. While many people find the basic lessons of 1984 instructive, few people seriously embrace Orwell’s prophecy. Yet the annual Privacy International awards banquets (now nearly ten years running) indicate that concerns about Big Brother watching over citizens’ everyday activities and behaviours are not merely fictional. Big Brother has become part of the everyday discourse about surveillance. Indeed, a search of major news media reveals more than 700 articles featuring the key terms “surveillance” and “Big Brother” in headlines and lead paragraphs between 1990 and 2007. We do not wish to suggest that most people are overly concerned with centralized forms of totalitarian state surveillance resembling Orwell’s depiction. Rather, we understand the continued popularity of Big Brother as a proxy for pervasive uneasiness about certain kinds of surveillance in contemporary society. As the combined influence of the awards banquets, extensive news

Introduction

coverage of the myriad dimensions of surveillance, and continuing cultural popularity of the Big Brother trope suggests, surveillance is understood not only as a response to crime and disorder but also as a potential social or political problem. Surveillance: Power, Problems, and Politics presents several original theoretical and empirical essays written by Canadian scholars. The authors explore the thematic of surveillance as a cause as well as an effect of social and political problems. The overarching methodological objective of the volume is to subject surveillance practices to a form of immanent critique: to problematize present surveillance realities with the intention of envisioning a different kind of future. In doing so, we do not engage in a “politics of dreaming” about a future society that would be free of all forms of surveillance. We are keenly aware that surveillance is a central component of modern statehood (e.g., Dandeker 1990; Torpey 2000). Running through the volume, however, is a normative critique that calls into question the moral and ideological bases, as well as the differential material effects, of various surveillance practices and systems. Although some of the chapters are more explicit in articulating normative critique than others, each chapter confronts the issue of surveillance as a problematic: a domain of acts, practices, and thoughts that poses problems for social and political order (Foucault 1984). Our purpose is to think about how to define and make possible a future where surveillance practices that have inequitable consequences for already marginalized individuals and groups are not simply taken for granted as normal or necessary features of contemporary society. We introduce the volume with an analytical chapter that builds on debate about the politics of surveillance and visibility. The chapter begins with a general overview of the diversity of contemporary surveillance practices – ranging from popular television programs to national security concerns. It then addresses the emerging field of surveillance studies in terms of a community of scholars with shared interests and explanatory goals. We argue that surveillance studies has been largely characterized by a set of contributions informed by the panoptic paradigm, yet new explanatory orthodoxies are on the horizon. Warning against the increasing tendency to conceptualize surveillance as an assemblage of relations that contributes to the levelling of hierarchies of visibility, we formulate an analytical explanation for visibility as a moral category that manifests in inequitable material applications. To stimulate dialogue and debate, we argue that the analytical category of visibility as a political field of cultural action is one way to advance Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000, 2006) otherwise progressive and important contributions to the new politics of surveillance and visibility. We thus warn against the dangers of orthodoxy and paradigm building within surveillance studies.

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The rest of the volume is organized into four parts. Our primary objective in Part 1 (“Stigma, Morality, and Social Control”) is to explain some of the historical dimensions of surveillance as a social and political problem. We present three chapters that detail how certain issues are brought into existence through surveillance practices in ways that typify them as problems requiring political and social intervention. Taking seriously Jackson’s (2004) argument that the theoreticians have dominated the field of surveillance studies, the chapters presented in this opening section contribute to filling an important empirical gap. In Chapter 2, Charlene D. Elliott focuses on the case of childhood obesity in Canada and the surveillance mechanisms used to bring this social and political problem to light. Elliott takes issue with the theoretical argument that the human body disappears (Lyon 2001) as technological innovations in surveillance enable government and non-government agencies to adjudicate dealings and transactions at a distance (e.g., online banking). While some contemporary surveillance practices do not require human embodiment or the presence of an actual person (e.g., formulating insurance premium profiles), the surveillance practices that Elliott is interested in ultimately depend on, or return to, the visible human body. The visibility of the obese child’s body, however, is something that is produced through a set of surveillance practices. It is not something that is objectively observed independent of cultural and moral assumptions of health and fitness. Elliott explains how obesity as a sociopolitical problem was brought into existence through a set of surveillance practices in the early twentieth century. Caught up in the historical emergence of surveillance medicine, children’s bodies were subjected to various practices of charting and mapping. The centralization of surveillance data on children’s bodies led to the normalization of age-appropriate height and weight measures, thus facilitating the creation of preventative interventions to achieve normal heights and weights in cases of deviation. Statistical averages that potentially hide as much as they reveal about children’s health, in other words, were used as evidence to intervene in, and act on, real children. From this historical background, Elliott examines contemporary expressions of the public child and the moral foundations of good parenting. She demonstrates how surveillance works through encouraging responsible eating by practices such as body indexing, adjustments in the built environment, the production of eating report cards, and attempts to monitor and modify children’s media intake. Elliott concludes that, although these measures are in many ways about health and the ethic of caring, they are also fundamentally about the moral politics of visibility. In Chapter 3, Kevin Walby examines the issue of male-with-male public sexual encounters in Ontario between 1983 and 1994. He is particularly interested in the use of video surveillance equipment by police in public

Introduction

washrooms for the purpose of apprehending “sexual offenders” (i.e., men cruising public areas in search of anonymous consensual sex). Walby’s theoretical and conceptual interest is in exploring the role of the “governmental text” in the construction of sociopolitical problems. He is also interested in how law enforcement and media agencies colluded to construct normative standards of heterosexuality that exercised disciplinary effects on gay men. Particularly significant is Walby’s introduction of “visual culture” into surveillance studies by demonstrating the connection between the normalization of heterosexuality and the role of photo and video surveillance. Official institutional actors authorize visual texts, Walby argues, as privileged ways of showing, and they structure the terms of debate about what is and is not a social problem. Walby’s chapter demonstrates that, although it is tempting to argue that the existence of video surveillance as a policing technique determined how male-with-male public sex would be understood and regulated, there was a more complex configuration of discourses among multiple agents and agencies of regulation and resistance. Historicizing the construction of this issue as a problem, Walby shows how it is the broader social context in which surveillance practices and technologies are introduced, not the actual surveillance techniques themselves, that has the greatest influence on the dynamics of regulatory projects. In Chapter 4, Scott Thompson offers an empirically grounded historical analysis of liquor control processes in Ontario between 1927 and 1975. His analysis is situated in relation to the broader social and political dynamics of the temperance era, and his chapter presents a rich account of the contentious debates that accompanied the provincial government’s legalization and regulation of liquor sales. Thompson demonstrates how moralizing judgments about drinking intersected with other moralizing judgments about gender, class, and race. As he explains, women, manual labourers, and “Indians” were more likely than other identifiable social groups to be subjected to government surveillance, investigation, and discipline concerning drinking habits. Inclusion on the Liquor Control Board’s interdiction list not only altered a person’s ability to purchase liquor, says Thompson, but also had significant material effects, with implications for property rights, exposure to other surveillance mechanisms, and community relations. His investigation goes beyond a portrayal of the role of social prejudices in the application of state surveillance and disciplinary action to present an important political critique that stresses the desperate need for oversight of surveillance mechanisms, state disciplinary action, and the ability to question the acquisition and validity of surveillance data. In Part 2 (“Environmental Design, Consumerism, and Privacy”), we present three chapters that engage the themes of visibility and privacy in substantively unique ways. In Chapter 5, Patrick F. Parnaby and C. Victoria Reed

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examine the ideological and material effects that new crime prevention policies, discourses, and “natural surveillance” strategies have on groups of people who are already disenfranchised on the basis of class (homeless people) and race (black men). By natural surveillance, they mean the manipulation of situation-specific social and environmental characteristics as a means of preventing crime and disorder. Parnaby and Reed argue that natural surveillance strategies have gained in prominence with the shift away from theories that explain crime as the manifestation of structural strain (e.g., Messner and Rosenfeld 1994) toward opportunity theories that explain crime as a situational event precipitated by the coalescence of myriad social and environmental characteristics. Parnaby and Reed assert that the effects of natural surveillance are potentially experienced in a differential and not always innocuous manner. Women, homeless people, and visible minorities, they contend, are acutely aware of the potential hostilities of certain spaces in a way that members of dominant social groups are not. Thus, any modification made to social spaces will transform the social and psychic relations of inclusion and exclusion. Parnaby and Reed also assert that rendering environments more amenable to natural surveillance potentially sets the stage for more discriminate forms of monitoring and social control. While they concede that crime prevention through environmental design might contribute to the reduction of crime and disorder in certain circumstances, they also maintain the need for surveillance theorists and practitioners to address the class- and race-based implications that natural surveillance strategies intentionally or unwittingly pose. Several chapters in the book outline that surveillance scholars have drawn much of their theoretical oxygen from the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault. A key Foucaultian concept is bio-power, a term that relates to the concern of governments with fostering the life of the population. For Foucault, modern states exercise power over citizens not by the threat of death but by enabling the production of life vis-à-vis regulation of the body. While surveillance scholars have drawn on Foucault’s notion of bio-power to account for the myriad ways that states are able to coordinate and administer the activities of the population, they have focused almost exclusively on living bodies. In Chapter 6, Joseph Scanlon explores the relationship between surveillance and privacy by focusing on the administration of the dead in the context of mass-death situations. Scanlon begins by reminding us that, when ordinary people die under typical circumstances, their deaths garner little public recognition or attention. In the context of a mass-death incident, those who lived otherwise ordinary lives become part of a mass-mediated spectacle that surpasses the extraordinary. On the one hand, Scanlon argues that surveillance and social sorting are key dimensions of managing mass death. This is especially the case in Canada, the United States, Britain, and

Introduction

other Western cultures, where there is a much stronger motivation to accurately identify the deceased, and in many cases recovery of the body parts becomes a state priority. On the other hand, Scanlon shows that surveillance and the administration of the dead pose a range of privacy concerns for those who are left behind. In a typical situation of death, the handling of the deceased’s affairs is normally left to the family or an individual appointed by the deceased in a last will and testament. In a mass-death situation, administration of these affairs is handed over to the state, thrust into the public spotlight, and discussed in the public sphere through the media. In both instances, those who are normally discharged with this honour and responsibility are regularly excluded. For Scanlon, the link between surveillance and mass death is complex and contradictory. Surveillance practices are necessary in order to identify victims and bring some measure of closure to their families. At the same time, these practices are also problematic because the information-gathering and data-sharing processes open a variety of concerns pertaining to upholding personal privacy and respect for victims and their families. In the final chapter of Part 2, Sheryl N. Hamilton engages privacy from a different angle: the focus of her chapter is on identity theft and the “construction of creditable subjects.” Her chapter begins by presenting some startling statistical evidence about the increased prevalence of identity theft. She explains how more than 7,750 cases of identity theft were reported in Canada, with a net loss of more than $16 million, in 2006. In the United States, the numbers are more dramatic: a 2003 Federal Trade Commission survey revealed that nearly 10 million Americans became victims of some type of identity theft, resulting in business losses of US$48 million and individual losses of US$5 billion. Hamilton critiques the lack of theorizing about the changing nature of subjectivity in surveillance scholarship and introduces the concept of the “creditable subject.” Whereas the so-called data double is a digital self that is still authored by the embodied subject, she contends, the creditable subject is produced through techniques of data surveillance (dataveillance): that is, the cross-referencing and data matching of giant consumer databases and the deployment of credit software designed to predict the credit performance of individuals. Identity thus no longer functions as a representation of the conscious, breathing, offline self. We are no longer the referent, Hamilton argues. Rather, identity is constituted in the credibility of the self, and the creditable subject, always contingent, can be made visible only in and through its theft. Our interest in Part 3 (“Genetics, Security, and Biometrics”) is to examine the complex, troubled, and contradictory relationship between surveillance and security. The chapters in this section deal with the issues of surveillance and security in different arenas (criminal justice, state anti-terrorism, and

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welfare administration), but each shares the concern that the purported applications of surveillance to enhance security have deleterious consequences that must be critically interrogated. As casual observers of popular culture will attest, the use of DNA evidence for crime control purposes is a stable feature of the modern mediascape. Rarely does an episode of popular dramatic television programs such as Law and Order, CSI, or Without a Trace go by without purporting the utility and efficacy of genetic identification for crime detection purposes. Public opinion about the value of genetic identification for crime detection largely reflects this simplified and benign portrayal. In the context of poor public understandings about the link between genetic surveillance and crime, in Chapter 8 Neil Gerlach explores how the introduction of DNA data banks is transforming the criminal justice system in Canada. Gerlach laments the lack of informed public discussion about DNA identification practices and proposes that we examine the effects of genetic identification at three levels: crime detection, institutional operation, and political process. At the level of crime detection, for example, DNA identification has arguably been a huge success. Genetic identification has been used not only to hunt down the so-called bad guys but also as the basis for emancipating the wrongly convicted (e.g., the Canadian citizen David Milgaard, who spent eighteen years in prison for a crime he did not commit). DNA identification is compelling, Gerlach argues, because it is based on the perception of objectivity at a time when public confidence in the criminal courts is low. In popular culture as well as institutional life, the criminal justice system is transforming itself to accommodate developments in genetic identification, yet lost in this process is a critical questioning about the implications for extending state power over the bodies of citizens. Gerlach challenges us to take this question seriously as well as the degree to which genetic surveillance is being “normalized” within and beyond the criminal justice arena and the extent to which individuals may be participating in their own genetic surveillance. In Chapter 9, Dwayne Winseck examines surveillance and security in the context of the global war on terrorism (GWOT), and he focuses on the adoption of information operations (IO) as the fundamental doctrine of US military and foreign policy. According to Winseck, IO operates as a form of “soft power” that succeeds to the extent that citizens and nations can be persuaded through consent rather than coercion. His theoretical concern, therefore, is to explore the relationship between surveillance and propaganda. Operating from a political economy of communication perspective, he argues that, while the development of new communication networks has granted citizens access to previously unavailable information, the retooling of the Internet and other public communication infrastructures have also provided state and corporate actors with greater surveillance capacities than ever before.

Introduction

One particularly interesting example involves the US military identifying foreign intermediaries with established credibility in their own cultural environments to be used as conduits of strategic communications. This practice involves electronic media engagement teams utilizing the full surveillance capacity of new media technologies by scouring the Internet to initiate contact with editors of websites and with journalists who cover operations in the Middle East. Once these foreign intermediaries have been identified, news releases and stories written by military officials are made available to journalists affiliated with the traditional media outlets. Where inaccuracies are found, corrections to the “record” are produced and new information provided. In another interesting example, Winseck describes the collusion that has occurred among the telecommunications industry, Hollywood, and the US military establishment and the myriad ways in which public understandings of the GWOT are being managed at various levels, from policy development to film and video-game production. For Winseck, however, neither the GWOT nor the Bush administration’s propaganda and IO operations can be considered a fait accompli. Resistance from within the United States, particularly from the judiciary, is generating considerable “blowback” and threatens to undermine the administration’s imperialist agenda and the country’s position in the global system. In Chapter 10, Shoshana Magnet examines surveillance and security in the context of the American welfare system. She focuses on the material and ideological consequences of introducing biometric technologies into the administration of social assistance. Drawing on earlier seminal studies that examined state surveillance of the poor (Gilliom 2001), she challenges the accepted wisdom of publics, policy makers, and law enforcement officials that biometrics is a normatively neutral technology. Rather, she contends that the use of biometrics for welfare administration produces narrow benefits for a small group of people by situating the poor in a broader network of crime and criminalization. Magnet’s chapter includes a valuable primer on biometric technologies, followed by a detailed history of the changing nature of the US political economy and how the emergence of neoconservative economic thinking and policy making produced a context in which biometrics could be introduced into the US welfare system. Pace Gilliom, Magnet demonstrates how biometrics has intensified more conventional forms of welfare surveillance, thereby automating a process of sorting out the “deserving poor” and the “undeserving poor.” Ultimately, she argues that biometrics depends on a theory of flawed economics. Its purported objective of saving the state much needed money actually does not occur, as the process of criminalizing otherwise innocent people increases monitoring and administrative costs to government while generating windfall profits for the private biometrics industry.

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In Part 4 (“Participatory Surveillance and Resistance”), we present three chapters that explore how groups of people in different social locations participate in, and resist, surveillance regimes. Mike Larsen and Justin Piché introduce the section by exploring the participatory role of citizens in government-led public vigilance campaigns. Looking across national contexts, they explain that a variety of public participatory surveillance campaigns were implemented after the 11 September 2001 attacks. These campaigns ranged from centrally coordinated national undertakings to local efforts geared toward metropolitan environments. Larsen and Piché identify a common theme in all public participatory campaigns: the call for responsible individuals to constantly watch for suspicious activity and to immediately convey relevant information to authorities. For Larsen and Piché, not only are public vigilance campaigns heavily shaded by moral discourse, but they also reflect an attempt by governing authorities to reformulate their relationship with the public in a stated effort to obtain actionable information in order to prevent terrorism. Their chapter presents supporting empirical evidence from three ongoing public security advertising campaigns in New York City, Ottawa, and London, England. In Chapter 12, Simon J. Kiss explores the relationship between participation and resistance in surveillance practices by examining how states and social movements make use of mobile technologies and how these technologies are transforming the relations between these actors. Kiss draws on earlier contributions to the study of new media technologies to describe the emancipatory potential that mobile, wireless communication provides to citizens and advocacy groups. Although Kiss acknowledges that advances in new media technologies have created new avenues for accessing information and holding powerful actors to account, he also presents a critical appraisal by reminding us that these technologies are never normatively neutral. In other words, states and other powerful actors can utilize the innovative, creative, and potentially radical applications of new media technologies by social movements as well. Kiss documents these dynamics by reviewing key case studies in the Philippines, South Korea, and the United States. He argues along the same lines as Elliott in her study of childhood obesity, noting that surveillance begets surveillance, but he also contends that it is not only surveillance practices that constantly change in response to other practices; the social relations between actors change as well. In the final chapter, Laura Huey builds on some of the themes of social and political resistance presented in Kiss’s analysis to explore the extent to which access to information legislation qualifies as a form of counter-surveillance. Huey begins with a brief discussion of the methods she used to acquire empirical data that inform the chapter. She then examines some of the research literature on surveillance to explore definitions of counter-surveillance. Both of these are important steps and speak to the book’s broader argument

Introduction

about the importance of conceptual clarity and analytical precision. Her chapter also helps us to understand the hitherto taken-for-granted concept of counter-surveillance. Drawing on a number of interviews conducted with privacy workers, Huey discovers an interesting difference between academic uses of the term “counter-surveillance” and (possibly) the politically charged meanings that anti-surveillance stakeholders associate with the concept. Her chapter concludes the volume by contemplating issues of academic accountability in terms of conceptual clarity and by problematizing the need for further work in the area of counter-surveillance and the politics of resistance. Collectively, the chapters comprising Surveillance: Power, Problems, and Politics flesh out many important nuances of past and present surveillance practices. They also explicate the relationship between surveillance practices and the production and exacerbation of political and social problems in myriad locations. The original theoretical, conceptual, methodological, and empirical data presented in the volume refine our analytical resources and advance the literature on surveillance by identifying a number of ways in which surveillance itself can become a social and political problem.

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1 The Politics of Surveillance: Power, Paradigms, and the Field of Visibility Sean P. Hier and Josh Greenberg

In the past decade, surveillance has emerged as a sustained interdisciplinary topic of investigation and theorization. Scholars in a variety of fields (e.g., sociology, political science, criminology, communication and media studies, commerce, engineering) have started to examine the importance of information-gathering and data-sharing techniques. With a special interest in the growth of computer databases and the accelerated integration of onceremote information storage systems, the field of surveillance studies has begun to document the changing character, and some of the consequences, of surveillance practices around the globe (Hier and Greenberg 2007). In this chapter, we focus on how proliferating surveillance practices are related to a diverse set of political and social problems. Although surveillance practices are commonly rationalized as a way of addressing what are perceived to be extant problems (e.g., fraud, crime, terrorism), we argue that the implementation of surveillance systems also often leads to or exacerbates a range of other political and social problems (e.g., poverty, over-policing, suspicion, exclusion) under the guise of managing risk and reducing harm. For this reason, we conceptualize surveillance as contributing to as well as deriving from political and social problems. The chapters in this book explore the relationship between surveillance practices and political and social problems in a number of cultural locations and institutional arenas: welfare administration, disaster management, consumerism, popular culture, policing, moral regulation and anti-terrorism campaigns, news media, and social movements. Our objective in this chapter is to critically assess the relationship between surveillance and political and social problems in the context of influential explanatory frameworks in surveillance studies. We do so to articulate a progressive political and theoretical agenda for understanding and interrogating the proliferation of surveillance practices, technologies, and institutions in the twenty-first century. We begin by providing a brief overview of the diversity of contemporary information-gathering and data storage and sharing practices. We then

The Politics of Surveillance

examine the relationship between surveillance and political and social problems in terms of theoretical and conceptual developments in surveillance studies. The latter entails examining theoretical developments ranging from panopticon to contemporary models that draw on poststructuralist ways of thinking. We argue that although the walls of the panopticon have been effectively scaled down – if not torn down altogether (Haggerty 2006) – the surveillance literature has not yet fully broken from the logic of visualization that is found in the panoptic model. Specifically, we argue that Haggerty and Ericson’s (2000, 2006) work on the politics of surveillance represents one of the most promising developments in surveillance theory over the past decade. We make this argument because their work offers a viable explanation for how surveillance systems work, and it attempts to theorize the nuances of diverse surveillance applications. The important insights of their work notwithstanding, we argue that they do not go far enough in theorizing the differential applications and sociopolitical effects of surveillance systems. This is due in part, we argue, to explanatory limitations that derive from predecessor selection, paradigm building, and the dynamics of intellectual communities. In the final section, we advance Haggerty and Ericson’s insights into how surveillance systems manifest in different cultural and political spaces by arguing that the category of visibility, as a political field of cultural action, represents one progressive avenue to advance beyond the logic of the panoptic paradigm. Contemporary Surveillance Practices Surveillance is commonly understood as an activity that law enforcement agencies engage in to gather information about criminals and other wrongdoers. When many people think of surveillance, images of espionage and secret policing activities come to mind. Following the 11 September 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, and the 7 July 2005 bus and train bombings in London, surveillance has also increasingly been understood in terms of border security provisions and anti-terrorism measures. Border security and formal law enforcement operations – overt and covert – are important forms of contemporary surveillance. But when surveillance is represented primarily if not exclusively as a security issue, the term fosters images of a relatively small and powerful group of people who have the means and the desire to monitor the masses (see also Haggerty’s foreword to this volume). Given that surveillance fundamentally involves a form of watching, it is surprising that the term continues to be understood in popular discussions principally as a form of one-way observation carried out for purposes of law enforcement and state security. It is surprising not least because every evening millions of people around the world turn on their television sets to watch small groups of people fight over who will cook dinner on a remote tropical

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island; to scrutinize celebrity dance performances and render immediate judgments on the merits of contestants’ preparedness; and to indulge in the spectacle of “cougars” (i.e., women over forty years of age) squaring off against “kittens” (i.e., women in their twenties) to win the affections of former athletes turned celebrity bachelors. Surveillance clearly entails more than small groups of powerful people watching over the unsuspecting masses for the purposes of security and social control. The example of television as a medium of surveillance highlights the role of technology in contemporary surveillance practices. To speak about surveillance in its contemporary forms is necessarily to consider the role of technological innovations such as remote searchable databases, networked computing, high-speed communication, and an array of technical gadgets. It is also to speak about how social relations and interactions are conducted across vast distances, in the absence of co-present individuals (e.g., searching online medical records, banking transactions). But this does not mean that surveillance always or even regularly emerges from a centralized location (e.g., policing agencies), where one group of people (large or small) engages in the monitoring of unsuspecting others who play no role in their own surveillance. A common feature of the uses of contemporary surveillance data is that those who are chased, harassed, inconvenienced, arrested, restricted, excluded, denied, and victimized actually release the information that is used against them, albeit often for different reasons and in different social locations. The uses of surveillance can be mundane: online retailers use information about customers’ past purchases to advertise unsolicited products and deals. It can also be serious: law enforcement agencies sometimes wrongly include people’s names on no-fly lists based on personal information submitted during the purchase of an airline ticket. In addition to enabling hierarchical forms of surveillance, the release of personal information enables lateral or peer-to-peer surveillance (Andrejevic 2005). A relatively recent example of people’s willingness to release large amounts of personal information that enables lateral surveillance is the proliferation of social-networking media such as Facebook and MySpace. Users of these media voluntarily release personal information by updating web pages with information such as photographs, recently read books, their latest travels, and the names and pictures of their newest “friends,” primarily to keep the viewers of their pages apprised of their activities, thoughts, feelings, and whereabouts. Strangers and confidants are entrusted, and grant trust, to make use of personal information for any number of reasons, benign as well as deceitful. Conventional understandings of surveillance that emphasize techniques of control and disempowerment need to be rethought in the context of

The Politics of Surveillance

online social networking where surveillance becomes more than a mode of domination. New forms of lateral surveillance continue to proliferate with developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs). The collection and storage of personal data, however, are not always explicitly authorized, and data do not always stay put. At least since the 1970s, ICT expansion has enabled a greater number of surveillance operations, and it has facilitated efficient, often automated data sharing and analysis of digital information. As an example of data sharing and analysis, IMS Canada – a company that provides market intelligence to pharmaceutical and healthcare stakeholders – collects prescription data from retail pharmacy outlets and assembles aggregated physician prescribing profiles from public health records to be circulated as a commodity in the private sector (Zoutman, Ford, and Bassili 1999). The profiles compiled by IMS Canada are sold to pharmaceutical companies and other interested parties that manipulate public health data for, among other reasons, the manufacture of specific drug products to be marketed to individual physicians. The latter influences the Canadian public’s pharmaceutical drug consumption and treatment options. There is no contention among surveillance scholars that the number of systems used to gather, store, and share personal information in its individual and aggregate forms is growing. But not all observers agree that every information-gathering and data storage practice is tantamount to surveillance. Bennett (2005), for example, contends that much of the literature on information gathering and data storage lends itself to hyperbole when it comes to new technologies and associated privacy implications. He observes a growing tendency among surveillance scholars to make exaggerated claims about the dangers of contemporary information-gathering and data storage and sharing practices based on highly abnormal or exceptional cases (and see Haggerty’s foreword to this volume). An example of exaggeration is the common tendency for surveillance scholars to lay claim to the inevitable abuses of CCTV cameras in the absence of comprehensive and comparative empirical data (e.g., Norris and Armstrong 1999). In their efforts to explain how data circulate in interconnected or networked societies, scholars have defined surveillance in broad terms as the routine collection and storage of personal information for myriad reasons. Among the reasons for routine information gathering are law enforcement and border security as well as consumption, health care, education, and entertainment. For Bennett (2005, 132), however, “there is a fundamental difference between the routine capture, collection, and storage of this kind of personal information [primarily for the purposes of consumer convenience and bureaucratic expediency], and any subsequent analysis of that information from which decisions (benign or otherwise) might be made.”

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Although Bennett (2005) does not offer an alternative conceptual perspective to stipulate what actually counts as surveillance, his point about the differential applications of surveillance systems is important. In an attempt to characterize the dynamics of contemporary information- and data-gathering techniques, surveillance scholars have conceptualized surveillance in such a way that they are unable to discriminate analytically among unequal applications or differential effects of information-gathering and data-sharing techniques without falling back on broad judgments about the “caring” and “controlling” aspects of contemporary surveillance systems (see, e.g., Lyon 2001). There is merit in conceptualizing surveillance in broad terms: it helps us to move beyond the view that surveillance only involves asymmetrical monitoring, where the few watch the many. It also helps us to appreciate the extent to which surveillance data, regardless of their applications, are gleaned from the routine activities of everyday life – as potential resources in a wide range of programs, policies, campaigns, and projects. Yet conceptualizing surveillance broadly runs the risk of underestimating and, as Bennett (2005) would suggest, trivializing the asymmetrical material applications of surveillance systems – particularly the ways in which new surveillance technologies are integrated into existing institutional relations of power. As we argue below, however, analytically inflating the concept of surveillance to encompass a wide range of undifferentiated practices and applications, with only secondary interest in intention or legitimating ideology, has as much to do with how the community of surveillance scholars is organized and how knowledge about surveillance is produced as it does with the fundamental characteristics of contemporary surveillance practices. Situating Surveillance Studies As Haggerty (2006) explains, over the past quarter century, a set of standard research practices emerged in surveillance studies. Guided by the general theoretical principles of panoptic surveillance (sketched out by Bentham and popularized by Foucault), the parameters for “normal surveillance research” were established. Researchers thus came to endorse a set of reified theories, concepts, assumptions, metaphors, standards, and expectations in surveillance research, and something approximating a panoptic paradigm took hold in surveillance studies. Like most research traditions that cohere around a standard set of paradigmatic assumptions, surveillance scholars were eventually confronted with a set of anomalies (Kuhn 1970) that could not be adequately explained using the panoptic framework. Rather than seeking out new theories and metaphors that better explain anomalies in the empirical world, Haggerty (2006) contends that surveillance scholars overextended the panoptic model to domains where it did not apply. Not only did the overextension of the panoptic paradigm lead to the proliferation of a large number of hybrid concepts (e.g.,

The Politics of Surveillance

electronic panopticon, super panopticon, urban panopticon), says Haggerty, but we have also come to the point where retention of the panoptic paradigm actually oppresses innovation and scholarly advancement. In the past few years, a number of explanatory approaches have been formulated to move beyond the determinism that characterizes applications of the panoptic framework in surveillance studies. Two contributions stand out. The first contribution, David Lyon’s work on the surveillance society, has exercised considerable influence over the metaphors, concepts, and explanatory frameworks used by surveillance scholars. In a series of contributions, Lyon (e.g., 2001, 2003a, 2003b, 2006, 2007) sketches the broad architecture of contemporary surveillance as well as some of its implications. It is common to find references to Lyon’s arguments in major surveillance contributions, especially his arguments pertaining to the Janus-faced nature of contemporary surveillance, leaky containers, data doubles, information ethics, social sorting, mobilities, and the globalization of personal data. In fact, no scholar of contemporary surveillance is cited with greater frequency in the literature on surveillance than Lyon (and this might include Foucault!). Yet it is unlikely that Lyon’s work will replace the panoptic paradigm as the leading comprehensive framework in surveillance studies because it does not offer an attempt to develop an actual theory of surveillance. His work, rather, comprises a diverse set of theoretical currents in international social theory that is used to broadly explain the features and dimensions of contemporary surveillance systems. The second contribution, Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson’s (2000) work on the “surveillant assemblage,” does have the potential to become a leading theoretical framework in surveillance studies (for a strong endorsement of the assemblage model as the guiding analytical metaphor in surveillance studies, see Lyon 2003a). Haggerty and Ericson argue that, for too long, surveillance scholars have relied on Orwell’s metaphor of Big Brother and Foucault’s metaphor of the panoptic prison to formulate explanations of contemporary surveillance. The problem with the Orwellian and Foucaultian imagery is that contemporary information- and data-gathering systems exist beyond the state, and they increasingly eschew asymmetrical forms of monitoring and social control. That is, scholars of surveillance have been confronted with a set of empirical anomalies that cannot be explained using centralized models of social control, and it is necessary to find more appropriate metaphors to conceptualize contemporary forms of surveillance in their collective expression. To this end, Haggerty and Ericson (2000) use Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of “assemblages” to denote the increasing convergence of once discrete systems of surveillance. They argue that we are witnessing the rhizomatic expansion of information- and data-gathering systems. A rhizome is a plant that grows horizontally, throwing up shoots in different locations.

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Rhizomes grow and expand in such a way that they cannot be stopped by breaks in a single location. In a manner very different from a centralized arborescent trunk, the rhizome’s growth is continual. The metaphor of the rhizome better captures the character of contemporary surveillance, Haggerty and Ericson assert, because surveillance systems are appearing in so many institutional spaces. And these systems do not simply mark important changes in the form and intention of surveillance. Through the rhizomatic expansion of surveillance, Haggerty and Ericson argue, a partial democratization of surveillance hierarchies is taking place. This democratization involves more sectors of the population becoming susceptible to surveillance, based increasingly on the voluntary release of personal information in myriad locations. The assemblage model is unlikely to reproduce the determinism found in many applications of the panoptic paradigm given its all-encompassing, omnipresent scope (the latter, incidentally, is an attribute shared by Foucault’s conception of the panoptic function). Indeed, as Haggerty and Ericson (2000, 618) write, “no population group irrefutably stands above or outside the surveillant assemblage.” But it is possible that the surveillant assemblage will reproduce (or is reproducing) the kind of uncritical scholarly acceptance that Haggerty argues characterized the panoptic paradigm. This is important because, as we explain below, the potential for uncritical acceptance and application of the surveillant assemblage is related to surveillance studies scholars’ hitherto under-theorization of the material dimensions of power, surveillance, and social control (but see Dandeker 1990). There is one key analytical difference between the institutionalization of the panoptic paradigm and the growing popularity of the surveillant assemblage, however. Whereas the panoptic paradigm became overextended and overdetermining (see Althusser 1970) to the point of stifling innovation and progress in surveillance studies, the surveillant assemblage is potentially restrictive in a different way: it threatens to underextend and underdetermine (see Poster 2001) scholarly inquiry by liberalizing surveillance theory and relativizing asymmetrical surveillant applications. This is the essence of Hier’s (2003) attempt to supplement the surveillant assemblage with an explicit research agenda conceptualizing the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control; of Bennett’s (2005) argument that surveillance scholarship has become so broad and indiscriminate that the precise meaning and, consequently, analytical/discriminatory value of the surveillance concept are unclear; and, tellingly, of Haggerty’s (2006) and Haggerty and Ericson’s (2006) promotion of government rationalities and stakeholder politics, respectively, as viable perspectives for analyzing the politics of surveillance and visibility (see also Hier et al. 2007). To summarize, contemporary surveillance practices proliferated in a variety of social and institutional locations over the past thirty years. Many of these

The Politics of Surveillance

practices were enabled by the willing participation of the subjects of surveillance. The proliferation of diverse surveillance practices presented an empirical problem (i.e., an anomaly) for the dominant explanatory metaphor in surveillance studies: the panopticon. In an effort to better explain the architecture of contemporary surveillance, Haggerty and Ericson (2000) formulated the surveillant assemblage. It is a useful sensitizing concept to characterize the general constitution of contemporary surveillance practices, but the uncritical scholarly acceptance that led to the overextension of the panoptic paradigm in surveillance studies is now a potential threat that could morph into a form of underextension of the assemblage model. Probing the Politics of Surveillance and Visibility Regardless of whether the metaphors used to characterize surveillance practices are overextended (i.e., the panoptic paradigm) or underextended (i.e., the surveillant assemblage), the result is the same: a compromising of the political potential of surveillance theory and research. In a manner reminiscent of the panoptic paradigm, the surveillant assemblage metaphor threatens to compromise the political potential of surveillance theory, despite the intentions of its creators, because its primary purpose is to explain the contemporary architecture of surveillance with only a secondary (descriptive) concern for the mechanisms that produce differential applications or appropriations of surveillance systems. Put otherwise, the point of formulating the surveillant assemblage was to encourage surveillance scholars to think outside the panoptic principle about contemporary surveillance. It was not formulated to offer a definitive statement on surveillance. Haggerty and Ericson (2006) are clear on this point, which suggests to us that the potential for underextension of the surveillant assemblage owes much to how the surveillance studies community is organized and how knowledge about surveillance is produced – in contemporary as well as historical surveillance scholarship. Two primary factors are contributing to the potential underextension of the surveillant assemblage. The first is related to the way that Haggerty and Ericson (2000, 618) differentiate the form or structure of surveillance from its material applications in a wider effort to reject the argument that the mainstream of society is untouched by surveillance: While poor individuals may be in regular contact with the surveillance systems associated with social assistance or criminal justice, the middle and upper classes are increasingly subject to their own forms of routine observation, documentation and analysis ... In the case of the powerful, this can include the regular monitoring of consumption habits, health profile, occupational performance, financial transactions, communication patterns,

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Internet use, credit history, transportation patterns, and physical access controls.

Although Haggerty and Ericson rightfully acknowledge that the targeting of surveillance is never equivocal, and that observation of the powerful “is often a mile wide but only an inch deep” (618), they do not go far enough in explicating the significance of “centres of appropriation” (608), where flows of discrete information are “assembled” at nodal points along rhizomes in the assemblage and in the context of existing institutional relations of power and social control. The lack of analytical care to centres of appropriation leads them, however unintentionally, to relativize, or at least to undertheorize, asymmetrical surveillant applications. The second factor pertains to the ways in which they understand power and visibility and how their understanding is linked to the problems inherent in historical appropriations and contemporary applications of the panoptic paradigm. One of the most problematic features of the overextension of the panoptic framework in surveillance studies is that it came at the expense of fully appreciating that the panopticon – a cultural trope born of a class-stratified Victorian society – was always materially located. The mis­ appropriation of the panopticon that shapes the vast majority of surveillance theory can be explained in terms of the differences between Foucault’s genealogical and Bentham’s utilitarian perspectives (Goodlad 2003). Whereas Foucault (1977) conceptualized the panopticon primarily in terms of the technological function of the machine, and was secondarily concerned with who operated it and how it was applied, the panopticon’s control or ownership was central to Bentham. He conceived of the panopticon’s benefits not only as disciplinary but also as remunerative: the panopticon would turn a profit. Not merely conceived of as an architectural model to control the masses, then, the panopticon was also to be equipped with internal mechanisms of surveillance to monitor observers in the inspection tower – the great open committee of the tribunal of the world. One of the consequences of the profound Foucaultian influence on surveillance studies scholars is that it has fostered a disproportional focus on the disciplined individual who lives under the panoptic glance to the neglect of the observer in the metaphorical inspection tower. In his genealogy of modern surveillance and control, Foucault conflates the subject positions of the observer and the observed (Goodlad 2003), and the panopticon is conceived of as a technology of power for society as a whole, regardless of any specific application. For Bentham, however, the separation of the watcher from the watched is key because the panopticon is not a general technology of power distributed throughout the whole of society. It is, rather, a materially located mechanism of social control intended to fix the place of certain sectors of the population. The important theoretical point is that power does

The Politics of Surveillance

not circulate equally, and blurring the distinction between the relations of domination and subordination by focusing on the workings of the machine (i.e., inspection tower, assemblage) and its “visualizing capabilities” has the effect of relativizing historically recurrent asymmetries of power and surveillance at the expense of understanding visualization and perception as relations of power. Given that Haggerty and Ericson take the panoptic paradigm as a point of departure, it is unsurprising that they seek to develop new (and important) insights into how the surveillant assemblage operates as a “visualizing device” (2000, 611). But in doing so, they inadvertently reproduce some of the problems found in Foucault’s appropriation of the panopticon by stretching surveillance to an excessively high level of conceptual abstraction. Although their recent work on the politics of surveillance and visibility offers important conceptual advances beyond the original formulation of the assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2006), they nevertheless reproduce some of the conceptual problems of the assemblage model. Specifically, they argue that contemporary surveillance as a general tool to accomplish any number of institutional goals has led to a proliferation of social visibility and a levelling of hierarchies of visibility such that people from all walks of life are now under surveillance (i.e., they are visible). This argument resembles their earlier contention that one of the ironies of developments in networked surveillance capabilities is that the same technologies that allow for “the disappearance of the body” also facilitate “the disappearance of disappearance,” as greater volumes of information are accumulated, coded, and manipulated for a protracted range of functions (Haggerty and Ericson 2000, 619). As we elaborate below, hierarchies of visibility are not necessarily being levelled, and it is somewhat misleading to suggest that we are experiencing a partial democratization of surveillance hierarchies (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). It is true that more people find themselves implicated in surveillance systems with diverse interests and intentions (often without their knowledge or consent). It is also true that powerful sectors of the population are now subjected to surveillance systems, sometimes based on virtual data doubling. In Haggerty and Ericson’s treatment, however, both arguments entail a descriptive notion of visibility that inadvertently feeds into an undifferentiated theory of power. Arguing that hierarchies of visibility are levelling assumes an implicitly normative conception of visibility as entailing those who are “touched” by surveillance systems. But visibility is as much a political field as it is an aesthetic perception. To build on Haggerty and Ericson’s otherwise important insights, we seek to formulate an analytical category of visibility that is better able to differentiate among the nuances of surveillance applications. This formulation entails differentiating two empirically related but analytically distinct research foci: one on surveillance and one on political and social

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problems. While Haggerty and Ericson (2000) recognize that the projection of the virtual self is never a complete or total representation of embodied personhood, there is nevertheless a clear analytical slippage in their work whereby visibility is treated as synonymous with aesthetic vision or perception. The analytical implication is that new assemblages enable a variety of stakeholders to conduct surveillance over a greater number of people in their virtually partial or wholly embodied forms. In this regard, they understand the surveillant assemblage as a visualizing mechanism/machine to bring more people under the gaze of the machine, independent of, or secondarily influenced by, culture, politics, ideology, and vested material interests. The Politics of Visibility Conceptualizing the category of visibility in terms of politics as well as aesthetics helps us to avoid the relativizing tendencies of the assemblage. It also helps us to better understand how perception mutually imbricates with cognition and cultural conditioning. As Brighenti (2007) insightfully explains, it is important to distinguish vision (undifferentiated physical observation) from the field of visibility. Visibility, as a field of cultural action, is conditioned by aesthetics (relations of perception) and politics (relations of power). The field of visibility does not simply comprise phenomena that enter into the range of physical perception; rather, it entails a more comprehensive task of constructing meaning. That is, what we perceive is influenced by how we interpret the world through cultural knowledge formats, and this always leaves human visual observation susceptible to variation across time, space, and place. Although visibility is a form of constructed or culturally conditioned perception, this is not all that it is. Because perception and being are linked – that is, how we perceive objects in our visual fields is linked to our social and cultural contexts – visibility is a relational social process. As a relational social process that is conditioned by vested material interests and desires, reciprocal democratic vision among individuals and groups is more often the exception than the rule. While the surveillant assemblage purportedly extracts bodies from places and reconfigures them as virtual data doubles, thereby distorting or influencing human perception, it also contributes to the strengthening of asymmetries in the field of vision by reconstituting the body by using assemblages of discrete data flows (Ball 2005). For Brighenti (2007), asymmetries in the field of vision transform visibility into a “site of strategy.” As an asymmetrical site of strategy for visualizing the population, the field of perception interestingly shifts: normalcy – understood by Haggerty and Ericson (2000) as that which is visible – becomes invisible. In the surveillant assemblage, that is, where innumerable data flows bring about the “disappearance of disappearance” in the context of ubiquitous

The Politics of Surveillance

social monitoring, it is in fact appearance (virtual or embodied) that becomes normal, unmarked, unnoticed, and banal. The assemblage brings the entire population into the range of potential vision, implying that “invisible” phenomena are not beyond the pale of comprehension or perception but simply unmarked, common, and mundane. In the context of the surveillant assemblage as a total visualizing machine, therefore, visibility and invisibility are metonymical: they blur into one another, overlap, and become interchangeable. The invisible refers to the articulated, visible, ordinary features of everyday life that, paradoxically, render it unremarkable, commonplace, and forgettable. Given that visibility and invisibility are metonymical, and therefore analytically indistinguishable, in the surveillant assemblage it might be more appropriate to conceptualize the surveillant assemblage as an “invisibility machine” that is produced through visualizing tendencies and comes fully equipped with visibility traps. Haggerty and Ericson (2006) are justified in arguing that the assemblage brings into perception that which is not otherwise comprehensible, but this argument is not an end in itself. Rather, as they have started to recognize, it is the place to begin asking deeper analytical questions. Why are certain groups of people more visible than others at certain moments in time? In what contexts does visibility work against democratic participation in social institutions? What is worth being seen under different government regimes? How is visibility (the ordinary/normal) intrinsic to invisibility and super-visibility (the extraordinary/abnormal)? What does the visible minority tell us about the invisible and super-visible majority at specific historical moments? Although we are not yet in a position to provide a complete set of answers to these important questions, we offer a set of ideas to encourage critical inquiry into surveillance as a political and social problem. To gain greater conceptual understanding of the complicated relationship between visibility and recognition, it is useful to conceptualize thresholds of visibility that define the field of perception. In one sense, as Brighenti (2007) explains, there are “fair visibility thresholds”: normative standards for equitable and proportional surveillance. The surveillant assemblage is a metaphor designed primarily to address groups of people existing within the parameters of fair visibility. Groups of people falling below the threshold of fair visibility comprise the socially excluded who largely escape the field of vision and surveillance. They are the marginalized underclasses (e.g., undocumented migrants working off the grid), not worthy of the status of “invisible visibility.” While the marginalized underclasses usually remain out of the field of vision – noticed but unacknowledged – they sometimes join other groups of people above the threshold of fair visibility: the super-visible who are singled out for excessive surveillance and who are stripped of the status of

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“normalized invisibility.” That is, their visibility derives from the field of the invisible masses – a field of invisibility, moreover, that is produced by the visualizing tendencies of the surveillant assemblage. It is well established that asymmetrical forms of surveillance above the threshold of fair visibility are significantly influenced by race-, gender-, sex-, age-, and class-based distinctions. Manifestations of disproportional surveillance above the threshold of fair visibility manifest in the political economy of society and the experiential economy of everyday life. Gilliom (2001), for example, demonstrates how the interaction among race, gender, and class in the context of welfare administration reinforces cleavages in the material distribution of valued societal resources (see also Magnet in this volume). More than posing material implications, however, excessive visibility also becomes a trap when people’s awareness of their excessive normative visibility status influences self-esteem and self-image (Brighenti 2007). An example of the psychological implications of excessive visibility is Franz Fanon’s (1986) vivid exploration of the ways in which visibility can operate as a trap through the penetrating gaze of the colonial other (see also Parnaby and Reed in this volume). Surveillance is a social and political problem at both extremes of the fair visibility threshold. Disproportional levels of surveillance above the fair visibility threshold constitute an obvious problem that is empirically well documented across a range of scholarly fields. But ignoring the marginalized underclasses that fall below the threshold of fair visibility (but remain in the assemblage) is also a problem – one of under-surveillance fostered through misrecognition, isolation, and social marginality. Importantly, the conditions that produce problems above and below the threshold of fair visibility are not typically problems of surveillance per se. Surveillance practices can exacerbate or reinforce existing problems with excessive or minimal levels of scrutiny, respectively, and they sometimes play an important role in bringing about the conditions of exclusion, denial, inequality, or deprivation. But when the analytical category of surveillance is foregrounded in studies that are primarily about social and political problems, the result is to relativize surveillant applications by confusing the material sources of political and social problems with the mechanisms of their reproduction or articulation. It is necessary, therefore, to differentiate two analytically distinct but empirically overlapping interests in surveillance studies. The first analytical interest is in the general concept of surveillance. An analytical category of surveillance must possess defining features or characteristics. We are fully cognizant of the dangers of inflating the concept of surveillance by indiscriminately defining a wide range of phenomena as instances of surveillance. We are also aware of the dangers of deflating the concept by too narrowly restricting the range of instances that qualify as surveillance. In the absence

The Politics of Surveillance

of a clear set of criteria to define surveillance qua surveillance, however, conceptual confusion will continue to detract from the analytical value and political significance of surveillance studies. By encouraging an independent analytical focus on surveillance qua surveillance without recourse to its applications, we are better able to address Haggerty and Ericson’s (2006) frustrations with the problematic nature of a broad, undifferentiated theory of surveillance. We are also able to resist their contention that we can no longer speak of inherent attributes to identify surveillance qua surveillance. The second analytical interest lies in political and social problems. It is necessary to critically assess the ways in which information gleaned from assemblages of data affect population groups in fields of visibility differentially, inequitably, and temporally. The differential applications of surveillance systems pertain to populations long disadvantaged by such systems above and below fair visibility thresholds (e.g., visible minorities, welfare recipients, children and youth, homeless people, and so on) but also to populations whose members are otherwise in privileged social positions. For example, Sheryl N. Hamilton argues in this volume that the crime of identity theft – a growing political problem – differentially affects “creditable” sectors of the population largely based on personal information stored in databases. Creditable sectors comprise people who have assets that are desirable to identity thieves. Not only does the growing prevalence of identity theft suggest to us that the traditional focus on claims making and definitional activity in the constructionist tradition needs to be supplemented with an appreciation of the significance of new technologies, assemblages, conditions, and emerging subjectivities; it also reminds us that accumulated capital, which is typically conceptualized as a marker of privilege and prestige, can create new problems by placing wealthy sectors of the population more squarely within the surveillant assemblage. Still, we must resist the seductive dimensions of new information and communication technologies that potentially lead us to relativize surveillant applications in explanations of surveillance and political problems. As we have argued, the problems with surveillance theory and its secondary – sometimes rhetorical – engagement with political and social problems can be significantly attributed to the history of surveillance theory and how knowledge about surveillance is produced. There is a provocative literature in the sociology of knowledge that explores the ways in which intellectual predecessors are selected and excluded (Camic 1992; Hier 2001; Laub and Sampson 1991) and how sociological explanations are produced in the context of intellectual traditions, schools of thought, and scholarly paradigms. Caught up in the rise of postmodernism and poststructuralism throughout the 1980s and 1990s, surveillance studies – exemplified by Lyon’s (1994, 2001) work – was essentially set on a path inspired by, but critical of,

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Foucault’s panoptic writings. In the process of embracing postmodern and poststructural contributions (sometimes influenced by other streams of the Foucaultian imaginary), mainstream surveillance studies lost sight of the structural foundations of surveillance. Rather than building a set of theories on the work of Dandeker (1990), Gandy (1993), Giddens (1985), and Rule (1973), , for example, exemplars of “good surveillance scholarship” were found elsewhere. One of the consequences of predecessor selection in surveillance studies has been that surveillance scholars have disproportionally focused on the workings of the machine to the relative neglect of political economy, social inequality, and social control. Conclusion: A Place to Begin We have argued that it is important to understand the contemporary architecture of surveillance and how surveillance systems “work.” Understanding how contemporary surveillance works, even if primarily descriptively, is significant. Analyses of the differential applications of surveillance systems are crucial, but we cannot underestimate the relationship between a broad conceptualization of surveillance and context-specific analyses. Put simply, if it were not for the provocative, descriptive richness of the assemblage model, our understanding of the differential applications of surveillance systems would be diminished. A major benefit of the assemblage model, therefore, is that it better prepares us to analyze context-specific applications of surveillance and stakeholder politics. The broad sensitizing framework provided by the surveillant assemblage comprises a distinct research agenda that is empirically related to but analytically separate from the context-specific applications of surveillance. We must understand the architecture of surveillance, but it is equally important to understand how surveillance practices are related to political and social problems in the context of material relations of power and institutionalization. The relations among surveillance and political problems are not foremost relations of surveillance. Surveillance mechanisms regularly contribute to the deepening or reinforcement of political problems, but they are not fundamental causes. When surveillance practices are treated as fundamental causes of political problems, we are often left with a relativization of surveillance applications and, consequently, a reduction in the political potential of surveillance theory. Finally, our arguments about fields of visibility and the visualizing tendencies of the assemblage model should not be taken as ends in themselves. These arguments are, rather, places to begin to think otherwise about surveillance and political problems and to refine our knowledge of how surveillance can be understood as a political and social problem. We do not wish to foster or exacerbate prolonged academic debate about how to conceptualize surveillance; academic debate is important to gain full understanding of

The Politics of Surveillance

surveillance and political problems, but it can also work against the practical imperatives of surveillance research and social change. We therefore encourage surveillance and political problems researchers to probe deeper into the politics of surveillance and visibility. Acknowledgments We owe a special debt of gratitude to Kevin Walby and Adam Molnar for their candid critiques and instructive direction on earlier drafts of this chapter. And we thank Mary Leighton for a humbling editorial overhaul.

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Part 1: Stigma, Morality, and Social Control

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2 Kid-Visible: Childhood Obesity, Body Surveillance, and the Techniques of Care Charlene D. Elliott

In March 2007, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Health released the results of an eight-month study on the epidemic of childhood obesity in Canada. The report, titled Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids, begins by announcing that Canada “has one of the highest rates of childhood obesity in the developed world, ranking fifth out of 34 OECD countries” (Standing Committee on Health 2007, 1). It goes on to relay the “distressing” fact that 26 percent of young Canadians are now overweight or obese. For the first time in recorded history, the Standing Committee warns, our younger generations are expected to live shorter lives than their parents due to obesity. This is no false threat: excess body weight is linked to a range of comorbidities, including Type 2 diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and some forms of cancer. As the Standing Committee on Health makes clear, the problem is not merely “serious” but “shocking,” since overweight and obesity rates in children have steadily risen since the mid-1970s – from 15 percent in 1978 (3 percent obese; 12 percent overweight) to 26 percent in 2004 (8 percent obese; 18 percent overweight) (2007, 2). Equally clear in Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids is that the causes of this public health problem are multiple and complex. Implicated is the social environment, the physical environment, and “culture” in general – everything from food advertising, package labelling, and community infrastructure1 to physical education in schools, health policy, and the allocation of tax credits. To fully understand childhood obesity, we learn from the report, the entire social landscape must be carefully monitored. Combating the problem requires equal measures of scrutiny. Under the heading (framed as a directive) “What Must Be Done,” the report concludes that surveillance mechanisms are key to solving childhood obesity in Canada. “What Must Be Done” among other things, is to combine all campaigns to combat obesity “with surveillance” (2007, 11), which includes requiring Canada’s federal government to

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• • • • •

collect data on a regular and continuous basis on healthy weights for children; make data available on both physical activity levels and food choices; provide data from a variety of biometric measurements, including body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and abdominal circumference; include data on diverse ethnocultural and socioeconomic groups, specifically including Inuit; and collaborate with provincial and territorial partners, national Aboriginal organizations, and other stakeholders. (Standing Committee on Health 2007, 25)

”What Must Be Done” to tackle childhood obesity, in short, is to collect and assess personal data in order to both influence and manage Canadian children carrying excess weight (or those deemed to be at risk). The project – in terms of both surveying the problem and prescribing the solution – is indisputably one of surveillance. As David Lyon (2001) argues, surveillance is carried out through monitoring, checking, and scrutinizing aspects of everyday life. Surveillance entails collecting, storing, transmitting, and using personal details to influence and manage people and populations (Lyon 2001, 2002). It is a process underscored by visibility, social ordering, control, and a focus on the body “as a means of identification and of predicting behavior or conditions” (Lyon 2001, 70). This chapter seeks to map the character of contemporary surveillance of children’s bodies – particularly overweight/obese bodies – in Canada, and to illustrate how the subject of the child prompts a shift in the framing of, rationalization for, and general response to the surveillance of obesity. While obese bodies are highly visible and subject to scrutiny (Elliott 2007; Herndon 2005; Murray 2005), this chapter explores how the monitoring of overweight children, particularly school-aged children, is characterized as a technique of care, which has necessarily emerged due to the failure of the system, the social environment, and what Wadden, Foster, and Brownell (2002) identify as a “toxic environment” – one characterized by the endless promotion of, and easy accessibility to, high-caloric and low-nutrient foods. True, adults must also navigate through this toxic (food) environment. Yet the obese/ overweight adult is considered largely responsible for the body he or she inhabits. The adult body reflects, and literally embodies, personal consumption choices. As such, the surveillance/reporting of such large(ly) visible bodies is often framed as a critique or indictment of the individual. Children’s bodies, by contrast, are considered vulnerable. Children are not deemed responsible for their consumption choices, particularly when it comes to food. Consequently, obese children (as will be shown) presumably reflect the irresponsibility of others (be it parents, marketers, educators, governments, or the social environment more generally). This reality – the responsibilization

Kid-Visible

of the adult self for his/her own body – and, more importantly, the responsibility of society for children’s bodies provide some interesting contributions to the question of bodily surveillance in Canada. As Lyon argues, surveillance is a question of classification and social sorting, but it also involves both care and control, which may have unintended or unforeseen consequences (Lyon 2001, 2002, 2003b). In the case of obese children, I suggest, all moves to control are justified as a sign of “care,” which raises some fascinating contradictions and troubling consequences – all while simultaneously diffusing any critique of the politics of monitoring, tracking, classifying, and endlessly scrutinizing the body. Mapping the surveillance of overweight children as a sign of care draws attention to the multifaceted ways in which surveillance operates in contemporary society. Surveillance is not merely about the disappearing body that is captured through data footprints or transactional data. It is not only about the ethics of CCTV or the problems of identity theft. Surveillance is equally about visible bodies and physical bodies and the ways that such bodies are represented (through indexes) and managed by social policies operating on various levels. The representation of a child’s body as a “too visible” (i.e., obese) body then serves to construct the body as one that requires care as well as control. What emerges in the case of overweight children? Not the idea of disappearing bodies supplanting visible ones (as some surveillance literature suggests). What emerges, rather, is a dualism in the function of surveillance, whereby bodies are simultaneously disappearing and becoming more visible. The visible body leads to the need for mapping, monitoring, care, and control. It is the visible body, in this instance, which starts the process rolling. The Body and the Surveilled Body: From the Personal Body to the Public Child Interest in the “body” has been a prominent feature of a range of academic literature for some time now. Research has explored, among other things, representations of gendered bodies, consumption and bodies (Carolan 2005), the legal body (Hyde 1997), citizen bodies (Bacchi and Beasley 2002), children’s bodies (Prout 2000), and the governed body (Foucault 1977; Turner 1992). Attention has been drawn to the way in which the body has been schooled and its connection with what Crawford (1980) refers to as healthism, whereby healthy behaviour becomes a moral duty and illness becomes an individual moral failing. Given the turn toward the body in a range of disciplines and fields of analysis, it is notable that studies in surveillance either downplay or sidestep the primacy of the body. Lyon (2002) rightfully observes that surveillance first emerged as a consequence of the “disappearing body” in social settings, and because “embodied persons” have slid from view in the web of social relations. Today,

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he argues, the visibility of bodily behaviours manifests primarily via CCTV surveillance. Indeed, much of the surveillance literature supports the notion of focusing on the mediated or disappearing body. Yet Lyon (2001, 68) observes that body surveillance – the taking of fingerprints, retinal scans, biometric measures, and other such data – equally forms “a key component of surveillance societies.” All of this information is collected from the personal body, a body that has become “simply a source of data even though it is thought to reveal much about the individual” (70). Simply put, in much of the surveillance literature, the personal body or embodied self receives minimal attention (Ball 2006; Vaz and Bruno 2003), and the visible, obese body is notably absent. Studies on the monitoring of children’s bodies in the surveillance literature prove equally spartan.2 The child’s body, however, has long been an object of scrutiny, particularly in the realm of health. Children were the first targets of “surveillance medicine” – a distinct medical perspective that emerged early in the twentieth century. Surveillance medicine is characterized by “the dissolution of the distinct clinical categories of healthy and ill ... [and] attempts to bring everyone within its network of visibility” (Armstrong 2005, 395). Children were particularly subject to bodily charting and mapping for the simple reason that they underwent growth and development. Medical observation was therefore justified under the rubric of ensuring that development was following the “proper stages” of health (396). Height and weight charts emerged, allowing medical doctors to plot where individual children fell in relation to the “growth trajectory” of a population of children (396). Growth monitoring was used not only to confirm health but also to “detect deviation related to different conditions or illnesses in the child” (Lauritzen and Sachs 2001, 501). From this initial focus on height and weight, surveillance medicine expanded outward, receiving expression in health profile questionnaires, socio-medical surveys, and health promotion initiatives. Armstrong (2005) suggests that, in bringing all people under the medical gaze, surveillance medicine reconfigured approaches to illness and health. Treatment of an illness per se became less important than the question of prevention and the identification of risk – a strategy that finds particular resonance in the contemporary discourse surrounding children’s weight. Armstrong further outlines a key implication of surveillance medicine for children, one specifically emerging out of the use of height/weight charts: it is the “problematisation of the normal” (395), because the height/weight charts simply provided a composite of all children. “Yet how,” queries Armstrong, “from knowledge of other children’s growth, could the boundaries of normality be identified?” (396). Abnormality thus becomes a relative phenomenon: “[a] child was abnormal with reference to other children, and even then only by degrees” (396-97). This problematic, I suggest, is equally central to the contemporary

Kid-Visible

framing of childhood overweight/obesity. Yet when one of every four Canadian children is overweight or obese, it appears that large is, in fact, part of the new normal. Surveillance medicine, then, is characterized by a focus on visibility, ongoing medical observation, measurement, risk prevention, and the problematization of the normal. Vaz and Bruno (2003, 287) argue that this medical perspective – particularly the emphasis on risk prevention – creates the notion of “patients before their time.” The idea here is that even healthy bodies become discussed in medical terms, according to their predispositions toward illness, hypertension, obesity, et cetera. This emphasis on risk prevention demands a constant sense of vigilance from the individual, since risk can be self-created (e.g., through smoking, failing to exercise or properly care for the body, etc.). Surveillance medicine thus “turns increasingly to extracor­poral space – often represented by the notion of ‘lifestyle’ – to identify the precursors of future illness” (Armstrong 2005, 401). As Armstrong explains, lack of exercise and a high fat diet therefore can be joined with angina, high blood cholesterol and diabetes as risk factors for heart disease. Symptoms, signs, illnesses, and health behaviours simply become indicators for yet other symptoms, signs, illnesses and health behaviours ... In Surveillance Medicine each illness is simply a nodal point in a network of health status monitoring. (401)

As with the problematization of the normal, both creating patients before their time and emphasizing self-surveillance to mitigate risk (Vaz and Bruno 2003) are issues that have particular significance when it comes to children. They have significance because the idea of the child patient is at odds with carefree innocence that our culture ascribes to the child (Saunders 2006). Moreover, children are viewed as in need of protection, requiring monitoring (Fotel and Thomsen 2004) for their protection. When it comes to health, this tension underscores the difference between adult self-surveillance/ responsibility in managing risk and the techniques of care required to protect children from risk. The child’s body, then, represents a form of public responsibility. Surveillance medicine, which first focused its attention on the child, also helped to firmly establish the idea of a public child. While children’s health and safety were previously considered a private trust, by the early twentieth century they became viewed as a matter of public importance. Medical discourses of “protection, prevention, and statistical attention” (Gleason 2005, 231), which formed the basis of public health, also gave health professionals (along with health education) a new status in the lives of individual families. Strategies to safeguard youngsters from contagious diseases (such as diphtheria,

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tuberculosis, and whooping cough) were targeted at a community level – with school medical inspections, immunizations, and medical experts becoming public figures. As Gleason notes, vital statistics on individual children simply became part of a larger network of surveillance (233), just like the health and weight charts. Overall, this heightened public health attention “helped foster a more recognizable sense of community responsibility for the wellbeing of particular children at the same time as it increased and deepened the surveillance of individual families and parents” (231). Attention to this public child also invited questions about what constituted proper parenting and the place of the community in protecting children (232). Of course, ideas about proper parenting and community protection often fell short of the reality of children’s personal experiences, yet health campaigns were vigilant in their attempts to “make domestic habits accountable to a public standard” (234). As Gleason’s work on the “public child” in Canada in the first half of the twentieth century attests, the notion of “containing the incompetence of parents” (particularly mothers) was firmly in place by the late 1940s (235). Although Gleason focuses specifically on children’s health in relation to accidents, the idea of mitigating parental incompetence can equally apply to children’s nutrition and the problem of obesity. Certainly, the same strategies – namely, public education for both adults and children – are used to prevent and respond to both “threats” (i.e., accidents or obesity) to children’s health. Stalking Fat from All Angles: Strategies to Combat Childhood Obesity On 5 September 2005, The Nation ran a feature article entitled “Junk Food Nation: Who’s to Blame for Childhood Obesity?” Under this heading, and framed by a sea of Cheezies, squints the pudgy (and accusing) face of a young boy. The article is unremarkable in that it frames the alleged crisis of childhood obesity in the typical fashion – under the question of blame. And it is precisely this notion of “who is to blame” that is the precursor to “what must be done” (the very directive found in the Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids report). The query “who is to blame?” prompts a range of surveillance activities. When it comes to childhood obesity, there are five aspects of surveillance which I would like to address, each of which has different implications for the “caring” – and control – of the obese child. These include surveillance of the physical body, activity, nutrition, the built environment, and media/ promotion.3 Each aspect illuminates a number of concerns regarding surveillance medicine and the public child. Body surveillance is best illustrated by the (contentious) use of body mass index (BMI) measurements and the even more contentious application of

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obesity report cards being piloted in some districts in the United States. In this context, body surveillance expresses itself in the limited notion of assessing bodies and determining a sense of crisis solely in terms of objective numbers – 26 percent of Canadian children being overweight/obese – which then sets in motion a range of other surveillance strategies. The Standing Committee’s Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids report observes that the 2004 Canadian Community Health Survey conducted by Statistics Canada is the first to actually measure children’s height and weight (as opposed to self- or parental reporting). From this observation, its recommendations are to “collect data on a regular and continuous basis on healthy weights for children” and to “provide data from a variety of biometric measurements, including body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and abdominal circumference.” This monitoring, the Standing Committee on Health (2007, 24) asserts, is “essential” in establishing health targets, which will help to both combat the obesity problem and track “progress achieved.” In short, a cornerstone of reducing weight is observing it numerically, even though the criteria for classifying overweight/obese are contested.4 Government representatives in the United States are equally concerned with data collection on children’s weight, calling for state-level surveillance systems to monitor the problem “by use of objectively measured height and weight data” (Hoelscher et al. 2004, 1002). Indeed, the idea of evaluating “data” collected from body measurements receives the most literal expression in the form of obesity report cards – the practice of reporting students’ body mass scores to parents in attempts to draw attention to the problem. Students in New York, Delaware, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania (among others) receive notes in their report cards indicating where they “score” in terms of weight. Children ranked with a BMI above the eighty-fifth percentile are considered overweight and potentially at risk of becoming obese (Kantor 2007). Here is a perfect instance of numerical data prompting the problematization of the normal on both ends (lean and heavy) of the weight spectrum. First, there is the previously noted concept of overweight becoming the new normal. With over one in four Canadian children (and 55 percent of First Nations children on reserves) overweight/ obese, certain significant questions arise with regard to what is “normal” in terms of size. Second, this form of numerical surveillance presumes that children in the “right” BMI bracket are healthy – even though the BMI number itself may mask a variety of unhealthy behaviours (i.e., lack of exercise, poor nutrition, questionable practices to suppress weight, etc.). There is no guarantee that leaner-looking children are, in fact, healthier than non-lean-looking children. Obesity report cards underscore the ways in which surveillance is about visibility. Large BMI numbers, indicating more visible bodies, are used to infer levels of health.

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Calculating 26 percent of children as overweight/obese, as mentioned, sets in motion a range of other surveillance strategies. While the starting point is the body, the techniques of care radiate outward – to the family, the school, and the social environment. Given the problem of the “objectively measured” obese body, the second aspect of surveillance pertains to children’s activity, in which numbers (in terms of minutes active) are given equal primacy. Canada’s physical activity guides for children and youth recommend ninety minutes of moderate to vigorous activity per day. In fact, the Healthy Weights report refers to “objective measures of physical activity for children” in which they wear pedometers to count the steps taken every day (Standing Committee on Health 2007, 3). Other numerical indicators also emerge, such as the mandatory twenty-minute-a-day activity program for elementary schools established by many provincial school boards in 2006 (even though activity and implementation have proven to be unevenly distributed). Activity levels, such as body mass, prove equally subject to “grading.” Active Healthy Kids Canada, a non-profit organization, issued the first annual Canada’s Report Card on Physical Activity for Children and Youth in 2005 to provide “a national snapshot of the physical activity behaviours and opportunities for children and youth” (2006, 3). Canada received an overall grade of D – an assessment determined, in part, by “self-report studies of leisure time physical activity” presented as averages over time (weeks, month, year) (4). In 2006, the national overall grade was also a D – but a more comprehensive D – since “new data” have allowed “new indicators” to be added for further analysis (3). Such data provide the “opportunity to be more descriptive” (3), again underscoring the degree to which numerical data (the percentage of children enrolled in organized sport, etc.) drive strategies to control children’s activities. As Active Healthy Kids Canada notes, “taking a closer look at how active or inactive children and youth are through the course of daily living in their home, school, work and community environments may indicate how physical activity levels can be increased through more active approaches to day-to-day living, rather than by trying to pay for and ‘schedule in’ time to be active” (2006, 5). While the D grade is meant to signify a national failure, the score is comprised of the individual activity rates (or lack thereof) of children. In terms of physical activity/inactivity specifically, Active Healthy Kids Canada (2006) defines a D as when “less than half of Canada’s children meet the minimum daily physical activity requirements to support basic healthy growth and development.” Here the measurement of activity is framed explicitly under the prevention of risk. However, it is worth noting that the data cited for sport participation in the report card (between 40 and 50 percent of children participate in organized sports two to three times per week) cannot reveal the quality of the “organized sports” or how physically active the children are when participating in them. This inscrutability also applies the mandatory twenty minutes of daily

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school activity, which, as some critics have observed, often entails little more than stretching between the desks within the classroom (Davy 2007). The third mode of surveillance entails targeting nutrition – ranging from advocating for education on reading nutrition labels (mandatory for children in schools and in terms of public awareness campaigns for adults) to education on Canada’s new food guide released in 2007. Again, there are numerical targets for nutrition, such as the United Kingdom’s goal to increase children’s consumption of fruits and vegetables to five servings a day (which prompted a policy in 2005 to provide schoolchildren daily with one fresh fruit or vegetable serving). Canada’s food guide similarly recommends a minimum of four to six servings of fruits and vegetables for children three years of age and older. Suggestions, however, are frequently targeted at parents/adults, who are primarily responsible for children’s food intake. Inserts such as “Influences on the Development of Children’s Eating Behaviours” found in the Canadian Journal of Dietetic Practice and Research (Waisman 2007, 1) underscore the degree to which children’s observations of the eating behaviours of others influence their own habits. This report focuses on “ways in which caregivers influence children’s eating environments and eating behaviours” (1). From studies such as the Feeding Infants and Toddlers Study (FITS), readers learn that “4 to 24 month old children typically consumed significant amounts of developmentally inappropriate, energy-dense, nutrient poor foods” (1). Also noted is the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS), which reveals that “seven out of ten children aged 4 to 8 years fail to meet the minimum number of servings” for vegetables and fruits (2). Beyond this, the report emphasizes that parenting styles can work to negatively influence children with “authoritarian”5 styles of feeding, promoting “overeating, overweight, food rejection and picky eating” (3). Such observations suggest how adults’ failure/incompetence compromises the health of children. Suggestions for “healthy eating interventions” highlight how parents and caregivers should be targeted by education and prevention efforts. “Parental modeling,” affirmed as a means of teaching children “to prefer and select healthy foods” (Waisman 2007, 4), echoes the idea of proper parenting that emerged in the early twentieth century alongside the public child. Studies such as FITS and CCHS, which statistically document the failures of parents on the nutritional front, further provide evidence of the need for the ongoing monitoring of the public child and for “containing the incompetence of parents” (Gleason 2005, 235). It is, in short, the failure of care that requires education and interventions as techniques of care. This “failure” can even manifest itself in the inability of parents to even perceive that their children have a problem. The Standing Committee on Health, for instance, noted their surprise to find that only 9 percent of parents classified their children as overweight or obese, when in fact the actual combined rate was 26 percent. This discrepancy was interpreted as either lack of awareness

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or outright denial – although, in both cases, parents’ perceptual failings were deemed as putting their children’s health at “an even greater risk” (2007, 3). Finally, as per BMIs and physical exercise, nutritional intake is also identified as another source of data. Returning to the Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids report, the committee affirms the need for “longitudinal information on various measures of food intake” (2007, 24). Surveillance is necessary for strategy, we learn, since without a comprehensive snapshot of the current situation “it is difficult to set precise, numerical targets and to determine the level of resources required to improve the situation” (24; emphasis added). The built environment provides another frame through which the community is viewed as accountable to the child. Built environment includes access to playgrounds and parks as well as supermarkets “with a variety of modestly priced foods” (Standing Committee on Health 2007, 7). Walkable neighbourhoods, sport and recreational facilities, and well-maintained bike paths are identified as positive influences on children’s health. Also included in the category of built environment are commercial food outlets, both “good” and “bad.” Whereas high numbers of fast-food outlets in a community are framed as a negative feature when it comes to weight excess, community gardens, community kitchens, and “community infrastructure that supports diverse commercial food outlets” become touted as opportunities to create a built environment that facilitates a “proper” weight in children (37). Here the monitoring of space cuts across all levels and implicates multiple players: community (planting gardens, creating community kitchens, establishing sport leagues, etc.), commercial (the types of food outlets offered), municipal governments (maintaining parks and recreational facilities), and provincial and federal governments (creating initiatives to support investments in municipal infrastructure). In short, within the frame of the built environment, absolutely nothing escapes scrutiny. What starts with a mere number – 26 percent overweight/obese children – unfolds into a careful evaluation of the entire environment. Wadden, Foster, and Brownell’s (2002) concept of the toxic environment puts a clear value judgment on where “environment” factors in the problem of excess weight. In terms of grading public space, Active Healthy Kids Canada sought to evaluate the built environment in terms of “links between community design and physical activity.”6 However, Canada’s built environment received a grade of INC – flagging a need for greater monitoring – because assessors found “insufficient national data to provide a grade assessment in relation to kids” (2006, n.p.). Finally, perhaps the most intriguing strategy for combatting excess weight pertains to the monitoring of children’s media habits. Excess weight is frequently linked to hours in front of the television/computer/video game. Active Healthy Kids Canada (2006), for example, assigns a grade of D­- to Canada generally for physical activity and screen time. The report notes that

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fewer than 20 percent of children have less than two hours of screen time daily. Over 50 percent of children watch two to four hours of television daily, and 33 percent spend over two hours on the computer each day. Correlations are further made, not merely between television viewing and sedentary activity, but also with unhealthy food preferences. Many studies focus on the marketing of “junk” foods in general and the question of television advertising in particular. The US-based Kaiser Family Foundation recently released an analysis of advertisements aimed at children, reporting that more than a third of television commercials promote candy and sugary snacks (Gantz, Schwartz, Angelini and Rideout 2007, 9). This study merely complements a vast compendium of existing ones. As the US-based Institute of Medicine Committee on Food Marketing and the Diets of Children and Youth reported, “television advertising remains the dominant form of marketing reaching children ... that is formally tracked” (IOM 2006, 15). It is in this context that the answer to The Nation’s headline “Who Is to Blame for Childhood Obesity?” (see Ruskin and Schor 2005) is most pointed. Consider, as an example, the Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) editorial “What Are They Feeding Our Children?” Michael F. Jacobson lambastes “the deplorable way in which manufacturers seduce youngsters into eating foods that are good for profits but bad for health ... Companies and their ad agencies use every trick in the book: TV commercials, vending machines in schools, premiums, contests, tie-ins with – or products strategically placed in – TV shows or movies, fast-food outlets in public schools” (2004, 2). It is because of such advertising “seduction” that advocacy groups such as CSPI Canada are lobbying hard to institute a national ban on all television advertising targeted at children under the age of thirteen.7 Surveillance of content essentially leads to calls for control as a technique of protecting young children from the persuasive techniques of advertising, which they may not have the cognitive ability to recognize. Monitoring extends beyond the number of hours watched and advertisements viewed to even embrace programming content. Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster, for instance, now sings “A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food,” while companies such as Nabisco have been chastised for the content of its online advergaming, in which children play videogames where foods of poor nutritious quality (such as Oreo cookies and Doritos) are either the “characters” or form the backdrop for the game. In attempts to correlate content with food consumption, some researchers have even measured children’s “ad libitum” (free-feeding food intake) of a range of snacks after showing them (in a laboratory setting) ten food and ten toy advertisements, followed by a Scooby-Doo cartoon. Again, measurement was key – with the researchers announcing that food intake was up to 134 percent higher in obese children after watching food advertisements (Kirkey 2007, A8).

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Bodies and Lives These five aspects of surveillance – physical body, activity, nutrition, built environment, and media/promotion – encompass all things pertaining to the life of the child. What do the five aspects of surveillance reveal about questions of surveillance and the overweight child more generally? The most obvious observation is that surveillance operates as a technique for governing obesity. The objective BMI number, and the data revealing the “crisis” of childhood obesity, set in motion a series of other data-collecting endeavours in attempts to protect the child. Such data collection is warmly embraced, since it is framed as a protective measure and informed by the notion of the public child – a child who is being failed by a toxic environment that he or she did not create.8 Within this protection reigns the primacy of numerical indicators that presume to reveal the “truth” of the problem. The number of overweight children signals a crisis, which prompts an exhaustive collection of other data: numbers of fruits consumed, steps taken, minutes exercised, hours of television viewed, number of advertisements watched, and so forth. In this context, Lyon’s notion of “everyday surveillance” (2002) is thrown into high relief. Unlike other forms of monitoring, however, this form of surveillance is never critiqued as a privacy violation or as a form of control. Surveillance is embraced solely as a technique of care and, as such, is beyond reproach. Second, surveillance of children’s body mass, along with the subsequent classification of normal, overweight, or obese children, illustrates the ongoing primacy of surveillance medicine when it comes to children. Although surveillance medicine demands that adults perform self-surveillance and monitor their own lifestyles in order to mitigate risk, it places children squarely as recipients of care. This contradicts the vast literature in cultural studies and sociology that underscores the agency of the child and frames young people as savvy consumers (Buckingham 2000; Kapur 2005). Academic literature in the field of childhood studies insists that young people skilfully navigate through the marketplace, yet through the medical gaze (and the policies that ensue) children seem to be largely incapable of monitoring their own bodies. Thus, when it comes to children, it is adults who must also be monitored to ensure that they are modelling proper eating behaviours and providing an environment in which children’s health can thrive. The surveillance of children prompts the disciplining of adults through a series of interventions, including “programs that teach parents and caregivers the necessary skills to prepare and plan nutritious foods” and programs that strengthen “literacy and numeracy skills” that will assist in the interpretation of food labels, Canada’s food guide, and guides to physical activity (Standing Committee on Health 2007, 6).

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Yet, even this has complexity. Surveillance medicine for adults, as noted previously, focuses increasingly on “extracorporal space – often represented by the notion of ‘lifestyle’ – to identify the precursors of future illness” (Armstrong 2005, 401). Surveillance (and self-surveillance) of adult lifestyles in relation to health might include the careful monitoring of smoking and drinking habits, quantity and quality of food intake, and exercise. With children, lifestyle surveillance not only includes more diverse nodal points – food, exercise, and nutrition – but also the content of advertisements, programming and videogames, the existence of vending machines in schools, and the promotion of foods in general. As such, while the idea of lifestyle monitoring ties into the concept of “creating patients before their time” by looking at predispositions toward illness (Vaz and Bruno 2003, 287), the healthy body of the child can be framed as “at risk” due not merely to predisposition to elevated blood pressure, for example, but also to exposure to particular media content, vending machines, and the like. The final observation regarding the surveillance of children’s bodies pertains to the contradictions involved in such monitoring. Such extensive bodily surveillance could, and perhaps should, be considered a violation of privacy – but it is not. The upshot is that this “technique of care” may work to normalize for children the intense scrutiny of every aspect of their lives. Intervention, not self-surveillance, characterizes the care of obese children’s bodies, and the question arises as to when the intervention (and general surveillance) has gone too far. There are, for instance, problems associated with inferring that size equates to health; the large child’s body does not necessarily signify an unhealthy body even as it sets in motion an intense, expansive, and virtually inescapable scrutiny. While surveillance is, at base, about visibility, the case of obese children begins with an aesthetic and then numerical judgment on what fat supposedly reveals about the body. The visible body is presumed to be a failing body. It is the visible (size), not the truly physical (health), that forms the justification for this, and all other, surveillance.

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3 Police Surveillance of Male-with-Male Public Sex in Ontario, 1983-94 Kevin Walby

The most renowned writings on public male-with-male impersonal sexual activity have emerged from the sociology of deviance (Delph 1978; Desroches 1990, 1991; Humphreys 1975). The general assumption of deviance scholars is that deviance is not a characteristic that naturally inheres in actions and behaviour. Rather, they argue that the attribution of deviance is produced through processes of labelling and claims making. Based on studies of the “deviant” behaviour of tearoom participants, scholars have argued that the lived experiences of participants who are labelled as deviant offer deeper understandings of deviance construction, compared with studies in the tradition of conservative criminology. Conservative criminologists assume that the causes of crime are to be found outside human processes of labelling, claims making, and knowledge production. While deviance scholars are not concerned with conservative criminology’s emphases on causality and social control, they nevertheless essentialize deviant identities and fail to historically locate the production of deviant identities. Recent developments in the sociology of governance offer a potential way out of the traps of social control and essentialism. Governance scholars question how the conduct of certain groups of individuals is problematized and regulated through discursive and material processes in ways that constitute recognizable types. That is, governance scholars are concerned to explain how certain recognizable types of people (e.g., the insane, homosexuals, terrorists) are brought into being or produced through historical processes of claims making, normalization, and image construction. This means group identities (homosexual, female, racial, or national) are sociohistorical, not natural, in constitution. In this chapter, I draw from governance studies to conceptualize the regulation of urban spaces of impersonal sex and tearoom trade participants. Despite the fact that bathhouses and tearooms are often treated synonymously as public places for male-with-male impersonal sexual activity, and as

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important features of the gay community, there are subtle differences. Bathhouses are more communal, professionally organized, and even business oriented; they charge men money for lockers and rooms to conduct sexual acts (Smith 1988). By contrast, tearooms1 are public settings for “private encounters” (Humphreys 1975), where participants are less often known to each other and meetings are impromptu. Although critical histories of bathhouses have been conducted (Alexander 1996; Bérubé 1996), the same cannot be said for tearooms. I examine how the Ontario Police Commission (OPC) condoned the use of video surveillance equipment in public washrooms for the purpose of apprehending what they called “sexual offenders” (gay men cruising in tearooms) between 1983 and 1994. In this time period, more than 500 men from southern Ontario were charged on allegations of “gross indecency.” Cameras were placed above urinals or in the ceilings of public washrooms; collected video footage was sometimes played in courtrooms as evidence. The accused men were publicly exposed when local media collaborated with police by printing their names. Instead of focusing on tearoom participants as deviant individuals, in this chapter I historicize the production of identity achieved through economies of text generated by police surveillance procedures. I am interested in how texts transport the observations and discriminations of surveillance agents from one setting to another. That is, I demonstrate how the category “homosexual” is produced through the use of documents in economies of text, linking police surveillance agents, courts, media, and the Criminal Code of Canada. The chapter is organized in three parts. First, I draw upon Humphreys’ (1975) well-known and controversial book Tearoom Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places to argue that the sociology of deviance has not adequately addressed the circulation of power and the production of knowledge about people, places, events, et cetera that become targets of regulation. Second, I explain in greater detail what I mean by governance studies, and I argue that scholars working in the area of governance studies should pay more attention to the relationships among materiality and video and pictures as texts that are active constituents of regulatory projects. Governance studies scholars are only beginning to understand the importance of visual culture in social regulation projects, and I explain the connection between the normalization of sexuality toward heterosexuality and the important role played by photo/video surveillance in Ontario. Third, I draw from media and archival data to document the regulation of tearooms in southern Ontario between 1983 and 1994. Although I explicate how the dynamics of social regulation operated during these projects, it is vital to realize that regulation is always incomplete. I am therefore equally interested in instances of resistance to, and counterdiscourses opposing, dominant representations.

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Tearoom Trade and the Problems with Deviance Studies Laud Humphreys’ book Tearoom Trade, originally published in 1970, is a landmark study in the sociology of deviance. It is remarkable for its meticulous account of male-with-male impersonal sexual activity in public spaces. In his study of impersonal sex in park and roadside public toilets, Humphreys posed as “the watchqueen.” What this means is that he kept an eye out for police, antagonistic teenagers, and regular passersby attempting to enter facilities. He did so to notify those engaged in fellatio or other activities of interloper presence. According to Humphreys (1975), watchqueens can assume three different roles: “the waiter” (those waiting for a sexual encounter), “the masturbator” (those engaged in autoerotic activity), and “the voyeur” (those deriving pleasure from watching the engagements of others). Assuming the role of the voyeur allowed Humphreys to make detailed mental notes on the comportment and activity of the men involved in sexual acts. His major claim is that men involved in impersonal sex don a “breastplate of righteousness” to avoid being suspected and to affirm their own sense of home and community status. This breastplate is a tactic of neutralization, a “protective shield of superpropriety,” where to others in his everyday world he appears not only as regular but also as “an exemplar of good behavior and right thinking” (135). As a testament to the groundbreaking importance of Tearoom Trade, Tewksbury (2004) argues that Humphreys’ intellectual inheritors have only substantiated his major claims in more diverse empirical locations. Tewksbury also claims that Humphreys’ observations remain unchallenged. I critique Humphreys’ major explanation for why city spaces used for sex become policed. In doing so, I call into question the deviance studies framework that continues to dominate studies of male-with-male sexual activity. The sociology of deviance started in the early 1960s as a critique of the hegemony of positivist criminology and the latter’s concern with causality, criminality, and social control (Cohen 1988). Criminology, and the social control agencies that fed off the knowledge produced by criminology, were regarded with skepticism for their participation in the stigmatization and criminalization of people labelled as deviant. A constructivist-interactionist approach to analyzing deviance was initiated. For instance, in his classic work Outsiders, Howard Becker (1963, 14) argues that “deviance is not a quality that lies in behavior itself, but in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it.” Groups in society create deviance by making and reproducing the agreed-upon rules whose infraction constitutes deviance. Those caught breaking the rules are labelled as outsiders and face greater regulation than those conforming to desired normative behaviour. Socially ostracized groups often find themselves surrounded by alien rules that designate them as a social problem. The purpose of deviance studies, according to Becker, is to take the standpoint of those

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labelled as deviant and become aware of the manifold character of deviant behaviour. Taking up the standpoint of deviant individuals gave voice to silenced social groups, and it subverted the narrow focus on psychological and biological predispositions toward criminality that were popular in conservative criminology. However, since Becker, sociology of deviance scholars tend to focus on the people constructed as deviant rather than on the context in which deviance is constructed. The sociology of deviance, broadly construed, offers too narrow a focus on individuals and risks ignoring important questions regarding power/knowledge and social regulation. Sociologists of deviance turn the deviant “into a sociological version of a screen hero” (Denzin and Lincoln 1998, 15), suggesting there is a real or essential identity of deviants that is different from the attributed label. Deviance scholars posit this static identity instead of analyzing how identity is configured and reproduced through discourse. Similar problems with the essentialization of identities are evident in research regarding tearoom trade in Canada (see Desroches 1990, 1991). Desroches’ research concerns the policing of tearoom trade in Ontario in the early 1980s, but it fails to extend analyses beyond a description of tearoom participants’ biographies (many of which read like police reports). Desroches uncritically accepts Humphreys’ argument about the breastplate of righteousness, reproducing the narrow focus on deviants’ self-validation. Put otherwise, focusing on the “rules of encounter” brackets out questions of social regulation. By accepting categories such as “homosexual,” Desroches (1990, 57) contributes to the entrenchment of myths about sexual practice instead of deconstructing discourses that construct heterosexual behaviour as the norm. Indeed, Desroches (1991) calls tearoom trade “a law enforcement problem” instead of historicizing how male-with-male desire has been constructed as a problem requiring regulatory intervention such as surveillance. His approach contributes to an understanding of deviance, but it does not conceptualize tearoom trade in terms of the breakdown and reconstitution of the heterosexual matrix and contestation over spaces of consumption and leisure. Governance Studies and Visual Culture The sociology of governance offers a set of analytical assumptions capable of avoiding essentialism by examining the historical production of identity. Rather than investigating the lives of members of an identity group, governance studies can be used to study the social organization of knowledge that problematized identities to emerge over time and in particular places. Governance scholars understand government as a decentred process. Practices of governance include “the relation between self and other, private interpersonal relations involving some form of control or guidance, relations

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within institutions and communities and, finally, relations concerned with the exercise of political sovereignty” (Gordon 1991, 3). Governance studies must be differentiated from studies of social control in terms of a refusal to equate government activity with state sovereignty. Governance processes involve attempts to manage or modify certain behaviours (Hunt and Wickham 1994). There are four key dimensions of governance: partiality, power/ resistance, knowledge, and self/other dialectic. First, attempts at governance are always incomplete. What this means is that total regulation of one group of people by another can never be achieved because, no matter where power is exercised, it can always be resisted. Therefore, second, power – understood as the ability to produce an effect or the ability to be acted upon – is always involved in governance processes through contestation over spaces and struggle over discourses. Because power always implies resistance, resistance is an integral part of governance that contributes to the incompleteness of regulation. Third, knowledge is used in governance processes to locate and make intelligible and actionable populations targeted for regulation. This is important: before one group of people acts on the conduct of another group, they must first know the population targeted for regulation. And fourth, there is a mutually reinforcing link between the identities of the regulator and the regulated (Hier 2002). The identities of regulators are always constituted and reinforced in the context of opposing other identities. The way that governance is materially attempted is through texts. Although a considerable amount of research has been done on how written forms of text constitute attempts at governance, the same cannot be said for the texts of visual culture and the meanings that increasingly refined visual images contribute to understandings of ourselves and others around us (Jay 2005). Interpretation of the texts of visual culture requires a more or less developed sense of visual literacy (Messaris 1994). Each “reader” of visual texts brings a different set of skills to do the work of interpretation. Visual literacy refers to the conceptualizing of a visual text: what a visual text means and how meaning is communicated or organized. Surveillance, involving the interpretation of video or photo texts, requires skills in how to construct an image taken as a surveillance object. Surveillance videos/photos can be conceptualized as texts, active as constituents in the regulation of different everyday commercial and urban settings when activated by surveillance agents (Walby 2005b, 2005c, 2006). Involvement in the production and interpretation of visual texts is what Corrigan (1988) calls “picturing.” Picturing is a socially organized way in which people select and objectify aspects of images, affecting how they think about and act toward themselves and others. In this sense, governance is always textually organized, and it involves relationships between local objects and extra-local agents and agencies. Surveillance images can be used in media

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reporting and the legal administration of tearoom participants (e.g., bookings, prosecution), feeding into discourse in a way that legitimates intervention into male-with-male public sexual activity as well as the by-laws guiding everyday police procedures. These textual aspects of governance make possible decentralized forms of regulation. For instance, Smith (1988) has shown how the policing of downtown gay steambaths in Toronto in the early 1980s went beyond personal bigotry, involving routine police data-gathering practices and the production of texts about an event (e.g., bathhouse raids). The event is analyzed using a set of institutionally informed interpretation skills, and the alleged facts of the event are assembled in such a way that depicts the targets in the event (i.e., gay men) as culpable and deserving of regulation. Through procedures of official documentation, police produce the event by inscribing it as a fact. Goodwin (1994) has shown how the textual production of an event is similar in the use of video and how these texts become courtroom evidence. Visual texts, therefore, are authorized ways of showing, and they structure the terms of debate about what is and is not a social problem. Police Surveillance of Male-with-Male Public Sex in Ontario, 1983-94 In this section, I review several cases in which texts produced through video surveillance were used to intimidate and stigmatize gay men in Ontario. Between 1983 and 1994, the Ontario Police Commission condoned the use of video surveillance equipment in public washrooms to survey gay men cruising in tearooms. Police agencies and local media humiliated many of the men involved in attempts to enforce the laws against public male-withmale sexual activity and the historically received norm of heterosexuality. These actions were very powerful, but there were also instances of resistance and contestation. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Ontario was a place of tremendous struggle involving groups such as the Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario and the Right to Privacy Committee. These groups struggled against moral entrepreneurial groups who directed hatred toward gays as well as against the Ontario Human Rights Commission (which had not yet added sexual orientation to its human rights act). In 1969, the Criminal Code of Canada was amended to decriminalize private homosexuality, but public displays of sexual activity became more vehemently and, according to the law, legitimately regulated. Gay rights groups were forming and converging across Canada during the 1970s, and the gay rights movement was gaining momentum. Yet there was also concern about the growing public visibility of gays and lesbians in downtown areas, particularly on Toronto’s Yonge Street. When twelve-year-old Emanuel Jacques2 was murdered on Yonge Street in 1977, homophobic marches staged by religious groups were accompanied

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by calls for the reintroduction of the death penalty. Gays were referred to as “child molesters,” and chants such as “kill the queers” were common (Kinsman 1996, 336). A larger concern over gays in city spaces developed. These homophobic events cannot explain the regulation of gay men’s bodies and experiences that followed, but they provide an important historical context, showing the conditions of possibility that influenced the development of various regulatory projects, starting with bathhouse raids in Toronto and extending out to tearooms across southern Ontario. On 11 December 1978, thirty Toronto police officers raided The Barracks bathhouse in Toronto. The Barracks catered to sadomasochism between men. No underage people were allowed in the club at any time. Twenty-three men were charged with being inmates of a common bawdy house. Three owners were also charged for operating a bawdy house, including George Hislop (president of the Community Homophile Association of Toronto). During the raid, police unnecessarily kicked in doors, punched holes in walls, tore ashtrays from the walls, called those arrested “dear” and “sweetheart” in a demeaning tone, and seized the membership list (Blatchford 1978). At least one of the men on the list was a Toronto policeman. On 12 December 1978, about 400 people met at the Church Street Community Centre to show support for the men. They established a Gay Defence Fund and raised an initial $5,000 to defray court costs. The raid was criticized as a blatant attempt to intimidate the gay community and as a threat to all persons who engaged in consensual sexual acts. Four more raids were conducted on Toronto steambaths on the night of 5 February 1981 (Smith 1988). About 200 police officers were armed with crowbars and hammers to pry open doors, and more than 300 men were arrested as found-ins or keepers of bawdy houses. The raids led to complaints about excessive force and offensive police conduct. However, the raids – and the media coverage of them – legitimized the police search for public homosexuals. Across southern Ontario, a series of tearoom raids occurred in the succeeding years. In September 1983, the Orillia Opera House was raided by the Orillia city police. A complaint about juvenile involvement at the Orillia Opera House led to the raid. Orillia police chief Ken Boyd immediately defended the actions of his force and the long project of washroom surveillance (Day 1983). There were some reports of police dragging men out of schools while they were teaching. Suspects were followed and harassed by the media on their way to court, and approximately thirty onlookers across the street from the court yelled at and cursed the accused as they entered the court. This sort of taunting is a significant mechanism of humiliation and shame. Some of the men, accompanied by their wives, endured taunts of “fag,” “homo,” and “son-of-a-bitch” (Day 1983). Photos of this carnival-like atmosphere were published in The Packet. As Barry (1995) has shown, the capacity to

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see has historically been an important technique for the legitimization of making objects both near and far actionable. Before the trial, the names of these men had been printed in The Packet following a Supreme Court of Ontario ruling against a ban on the publication of the names of those accused. According to law at the time, names became part of the court record, and the newspaper could publish them as soon as the charges were filed.3 Despite common knowledge that name publication could lead to loss of jobs, marital strain, and suicide, the justice argued that “publicity is the very soul of justice” (Day 1983). Several men were already undergoing psychiatric care as a result of the charges. “If they are treated in a special way,” the justice proclaimed, “that is an affront to the principles of equality in the Charter.” The Simcoe County Board of Education fired three teachers who were charged (Ontario Brief 1984b).4 Dennis Findlay of the Right to Privacy Committee in Toronto accused Orillia police of using trial by media before actual court appearances and thought that it was inappropriate to release names. Ed Jackson, editor of the Toronto-based Body Politic, as well as Findlay and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), had been involved in challenging this naming and shaming practice since the charges were announced on 9 September, expressing concern to the Orillia Municipal Council. The Orillia case is interesting for how the justice mobilized a discourse of equality to legitimate humiliation and intimidation of the gay community in Orillia and across southern Ontario. Although a complaint about juvenile involvement generated the intervention, the gross indecency charges did not reflect this. Use of cameras to gather evidence about the men was challenged by Findlay and the CCLA as invasive and excessive. The men involved in tearoom trade at different locales travelled to other sites to participate. They were followed by regulatory projects aimed at removing them from public spaces. Indeed, in an Oakville case, Halton regional police were gearing up to “fight [the] invasion of public washrooms in [a] suburban community by homosexuals from metro Toronto” (Ontario Brief 1984a). The acts were depicted as the epitome of “dirty sex,” and the men were characterized as addicts (Scotton 1985). In one sense, this was a war against homosexuals that operated at the level of discourse as a battle for the safety of suburban communities from the dangers lurking in the big city. In another sense, the regulation of tearoom trade is only comprehensible in relation to the routine police data-gathering practices and the production of texts about events. One former reporter, who had repeated conversations with police officers, argued that video equipment is expensive and timeconsuming to use. He argued that police do not set “up all this [surveillance camera] stuff to catch two people ... [They] let it run for a few days ... get a whole bagful. Mass arrests mean more newspaper coverage, which is socially

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disruptive for those caught, in that with a newspaper – the words come into people’s homes. They can be clipped out, pasted on refrigerator doors, put into wallets, sent to school in lunchboxes” (D’Amato 1985). The former reporter argued that it was only with the use of video surveillance that tearoom trade in Ontario had become a problem. The finances and time invested in monitoring projects compelled police to make mass roundups more a part of their routine practices. On 5 January 1985, thirty-two men were brought up on charges of gross indecency following police video surveillance of their sexual activities in a washroom at Fairview Mall in St. Catharines. The same washroom had been targeted in 1978 for the same reason: a restaurant owner had complained to the police that the pedestrian flow through his washroom was excessive. Members of the Niagara police force had gained previous experience in these mass roundups: a year earlier they had conducted an identical raid, capturing the same number of men in the nearby city of Welland. Surveillance cameras were the size of pencils and did not require a court order to be operated. At the time, privacy laws and fair information principles were weak, and the cameras were considered to be legitimate crime-detecting tools if they did not collect sounds. Seven officers had been in the mall for a week; a few had sat behind monitors in adjacent rooms, and some had sat behind potted plants to track men as they emerged from the washroom. Instead of arresting men immediately, however, the police had let the list grow before calling them all in to the police station on a Saturday. When they arrived, the police offered to let each of the accused see his videotape (McMahon 1985). Because of such intimidation policies, men caught in tearooms rarely pleaded innocent when charged. The Niagara police chief argued that it was necessary to employ all means available to arrest men using public spaces for sex. Just a few hours after the charges of gross indecency were announced, one of the men from St. Catharines drove out to the country, doused his clothes in gasoline, and set himself ablaze (Taylor 1985). This incident led to greater mobilization of gay rights groups in future instances of surveillance. It also reinforced public perception that gay men were naturally mentally unfit. “It is sad that this type of situation ended so tragically,” said Niagara regional police deputy chief Martin Walsh. “It would appear these people are sick” (Canadian Press 1985). Feeling distraught and guilty, an officer asked to be transferred because of his involvement in the surveillance project (Ontario Brief 1985a). Members of the public felt “sickened and appalled to think that a fine husband and father killed himself so dreadfully after being accused of gross indecency” (Josephy 1985, A5). The CCLA lobbied the Ontario solicitor general, Kenneth Keyes, to ask the federal government to introduce fair information principles concerning video surveillance practices by law enforcement agencies. In the wake of the controversy over the handling of

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the case, members of the Niagara Regional Board of Police Commissioners reviewed the police investigation. Chairman Al Barnes said the commission would review news clippings, letters to the editor, letters to the police commission, and television tapes to determine public sentiment. He said letters to the commission overwhelmingly supported the police surveillance practices (Ontario Brief 1985b). A month later it was announced that mass arrests of so-called sex offenders in public washrooms by the Niagara regional police force would cease. In the future, arrests would be made after alleged offences occurred rather than after the conclusion of the surveillance project. The police chief continued to authorize officers to use whatever methods and equipment were needed to investigate “illegal acts” (Ontario Brief 1985c). Significant about the case of St. Catharines are the techniques involving camera surveillance used by police to make mass arrests, the way that gay men were characterized as sick and mentally unfit, and how pressure and resistance caused police to alter their practices. Even though Niagara regional police stopped conducting mass arrests, the use of camera surveillance to accomplish mass roundups continued elsewhere. A lengthy surveillance project that culminated in a raid was aimed at a washroom in Silvercreek Park in Guelph. Police were investigating a washroom at Stone Road Mall, and from there they followed an individual to the park washroom. Cameras were then installed in the ceiling above two of the three stalls and in a wall vent above the urinals. Two police officers were locked inside a nearby women’s washroom, where they could watch on three monitors. Other police officers monitored from unmarked cars. Radio contact with those inside was maintained. When the charges were announced, gay rights groups in the Guelph and Kitchener-Waterloo areas tried to block the publication of the names of sixteen men. Guelph Gay Equality urged in a press release that the Daily Mercury and other local media “refrain from publishing the names of men arrested for alleged indecent acts in Silvercreek Park” and argued that there were “more responsible and cost effective measures available to prevent these activities than the video surveillance of public cubicles and the mass arrests of those so entrapped” (Ontario Brief 1985d). Crucial to the Guelph case was the admittance by a judge of videotapes as evidence to secure a guilty verdict against a twenty-six-year-old university student. Black-and-white videotape, lasting less than three minutes, depicted the man and another unidentified man having sex (Aprile 1986). While admitting the tape as evidence, the judge nevertheless ruled that police videotaping in washrooms violated the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and he blamed the lack of a legislated scheme of fair information principles (Harris 1986). The resistance by Guelph Gay Equality is important, as is the use of videotape in the courtroom as a way of producing alleged facts about the event by inscribing it as an object in documentary form (Latour and Woolgar 1979). The sexual act becomes a fact of immorality

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and gross indecency because of the way the video was interpreted in the court. On 6 March 1986, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association made a submission to Ken Keyes, the solicitor general of Ontario (see CCLA 1986). The submission detailed the impacts of being outed in the media on the men’s friends, jobs, and families. The submission asked how “the role of voyeur square[s] with the self-image of the officers involved,” chastised police for excessive and “gratuitous voyeurism,” and advocated discreet prevention as an alternative policy (Spears 1986). Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the CCLA, spoke out against police surveillance of washrooms. In response to the CCLA submission, the Ontario Police Commission took a survey of the municipal forces that had been using camera surveillance to monitor what the memorandum released afterward referred to as “sexual offenders” in public washrooms (Macgrath 1986). Some camera use guidelines were suggested for dealing with what the OPC memorandum identified as the difficult problem of homosexual crimes in public washrooms. Some of the guidelines included “that whenever this equipment is used ... the chief or his designee issues instructions that there will be no indiscriminate viewing of washroom users ... whenever possible, any camera focused on the interior of a washroom cubicle should not be activated until the operator of the equipment has developed reasonable and probable grounds by viewing the common area of the washroom that a criminal act is taking place in the cubicle in question” (2). After the release of the guidelines, the public accountability of the police was challenged by a spokesman for the Right-to-Privacy Committee, David Raeside, and Marion Bryden, the law enforcement critic in the Ontario New Democratic Party (Kaskmeri 1987). To construct guidelines without “consulting with the gay community is not going to help police-gay relations, which are bad as it is,” said Raeside. As McRobbie and Thornton (1995) show, the democratization of forms of media communication empowers problematized people and their allies to articulate their own counter-discourses. A crucial part of doing a history of the present is recovering critical stories of resistance (Kinsman 2000). These counter-discourses deconstruct symbolically violent categories that circumscribe plural lived experience. One of the accused men from the Guelph case appealed his charge to the Supreme Court of Ontario in 1988. He argued that the trial judge erred in admitting the evidence of the video surveillance because the data-gathering techniques amounted to an unreasonable search, contrary to the Charter (Haliechuk 1988). Lawyers for the accused maintained that he had a reasonable expectation of privacy since the sexual activity with another man occurred behind the closed doors of adjacent washroom cubicles. The court ruled against the appeal, however, noting that the men going to the washroom for sex undoubtedly understood that it was being used for that purpose and that lookouts were in place to watch for police.

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At the end of July 1993, forty-six men who had been participating in tearoom activity in an Oakville park washroom were charged with indecent acts. Police began their nine-day video surveillance project in the lakefront park after receiving complaints (Ontario Brief 1993). After the charges were laid, one of the accused committed suicide. Outside court, one man who was convicted said he was “living in absolute fear” (Sumi 1993). A lawyer representing five of the accused called the surveillance project a witch hunt for homosexuals. However, in July 1994, Judge Latimer of the Ontario Court of Justice ruled at a trial of four of the men that the indecency charges laid violated the guarantee Canadians have of a “reasonable expectation of privacy” under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Tyler 1994, A10). The judge acknowledged concern about sexual acts taking place in washrooms, but he also noted that if police had waited fifteen days Criminal Code amendments giving officers the power to lawfully conduct video surveillance with the authority of a search warrant would have come into effect. Conclusion: On the “Truths” of Immorality Based on the case illustrations developed in the previous section, it is tempting to argue that the existence of video surveillance as a policing technique determined the dynamics of tearoom regulation in the period under analysis. Persuasive as this argument may be, it undermines what governance studies scholars argue with respect to examining the interactions among discourse, resistance, and multiple agencies of regulation. Historicizing tearoom regulation, we can see that picturing techniques have been used in diverse settings. But it is the social context, not the actual surveillance technique, which has the greatest influence on the dynamics of a regulatory project. In the case of tearoom surveillance by police in Ontario, videos and photos were used to produce perceptions of the truth about particular events and the identities of those involved. After being arrested, the men and their “crimes” were entered into what I refer to as economies of text: “a complex system of documentation produced by the police, the courts, the jails, and the newspaper” (Maynard 1994, 229). Just as more contemporary regulation of tearooms is based on contestations over meanings of public/private in relation to the categorization and legal constitution of homosexuality, regulation projects in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century were linked with the growth of the city and concerns over public health, immorality, and the perversion of youth. Governance scholars should not reproduce the tendency to focus narrowly on written texts (e.g., legal statutes) to the neglect of visual texts. Both past and present, the surveillance camera has not only provided police with the ability “to be where they could not be” but also produced regulatory knowledge about the activities of gay men. This knowledge was rearticulated as public knowledge in economies of text, which generated new objects of

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governance offered up for problematization and possible intervention, thus creating the conditions of possibility for more regulation. By historicizing the production of identity as achieved through the economies of text generated in police surveillance procedures, I am not suggesting that tearoom regulation involving the dynamics of social regulation hitherto discussed has operated only in Ontario or ceases to operate in the contemporary moment. Similar techniques were used in policing Calgary’s North Glenmore Park5 and the so-called Village Mall scandal in St. John’s (Newfoundland)6. Duncan (1996, 129) argues that space “is subject to various territorializing and deterritorializing processes whereby local control is fixed, claimed, challenged, fortified and privatized.” Contestation over public space and what behaviours should occur there is central to the regulation of malewith-male impersonal sexual activity. Camera/photo surveillance as a technique in regulating public male-withmale impersonal sexual activity produces televisual representations that enter into economies of text linking police, courts, media, and the Criminal Code of Canada. Camera/photo surveillance can play a part in producing the category “homosexual,” so that male-with-male sexual activity is coded as risky and an affront to public space. This is what Maynard (1994) calls the “dialectics of discovery”: where in public places men discover each other to be engaged sexually, where these men are discovered by police through surveillance, and where the event becomes an object and the gross indecency is entered into public knowledge as a truth. Numerous agents and agencies are involved, including judges, media professionals, police, and citizens who make complaints. The process produces homosexuality, thereby providing information that makes the “homosexual” intelligible and actionable as an object of governance. Yet, as I have demonstrated above, each attempt at inscribing the events and central characters as “homosexual” was met with resistance. Acknowledgments I thank Josh Greenberg, Sean Hier, Alan Hunt, and Chris Hurl for their helpful comments.

4 A Kind of Prohibition: Targets of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s Interdiction List, 1953-75 Scott Thompson

Those who can “take liquor” decently shall have it, and others shall not have it – so as far as it goes, this is a kind of prohibition too.1 – from the Ferguson Government’s Papers Concerning the Temperance Question in Ontario

Between 1927 and 1975, the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) listed over 79,000 individuals on its “interdiction” or “drunk” list. Inclusion on the list not only altered their ability to purchase liquor but also posed implications for their property rights, exposure to surveillance mechanisms, and personal and social relations within their communities. The list was not evenly applied, however. Bureaucratically held assumptions about the intrinsic behaviour of particular populations focused LCBO surveillance practices on self-constituting categories of risk. Although practices of moral regulation, racism, and discrimination are well established in the social sciences, the necessary connection of these social phenomena to classification practices – the material, moral, discursive, and technological means through which individuals and agencies distinguish groups of people to be regulated, controlled, and segregated – is less well understood. When the LCBO was first constituted in 1927, temperance remained a strong political and social force in Ontario. Prohibition discourses of the day latched onto the “folk devil” of the saloon and tied drinking to the social dangers of ill health, poverty, the neglect of children, the degradation of morals, sexual promiscuity, and the abuse of women (see Campbell 1991, 16-17; Heron 2003, 281-83; Malleck 2005, 62; and Valverde 1998, 153-60). Those who were given the task of creating a politically stable government monopoly over liquor sales saw to the specific development of techniques and policies designed to mediate these risks and gain control over the public perception of alcohol consumption.

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For the LCBO, restricting particular types of individuals from accessing liquor was a necessary exercise in light of the need to maintain good social conditions within the province. Restriction was also understood as a necessary action to ensure that only those who had earned the privilege to drink would be served. This translated into the construction of a detailed means of identification, assessment, and classification in order to distinguish those who could “take liquor decently” from those who could not (Ferguson 1926, 1; Willison 1924). To make these discriminations, the LCBO employed the interdiction list that circulated to all liquor vendors in the province. The list came with the stipulation to restrict the alcohol use of designated individuals. Although the goal of the program was to identify and control the drinking behaviour of known drunks, the LCBO employed surveillance and control mechanisms unevenly across populations, leading to the over-representation of particular populations on the interdiction list. Previous investigations into the interdiction process have been beneficial for developing a general understanding of relevant social relations involved in listing practices (see, e.g., Heron 2003; Malleck 2005; and Valverde 1998, 2003, 2004). In this chapter, data are presented from quantitative analyses to more fully express the contents of LCBO interdiction files and to investigate these relationships for statistically significant relationships within the classification process. What this chapter seeks to explicate is a statistical reconstruction of the factors that predicted LCBO listing practices. From the results of the data analysis, we can gain insight into the morality of the temperance movement through board action pertaining to the severity of LCBO disciplinary procedures and uneven applications of the list across populations. The latter denotes categorical convergence in action across targeted “high-risk” populations. The data analysis demonstrates that the interdiction list was used to enforce a type of prohibition based on the morality of the temperance movement and, specifically, the gender and racial prejudices operating in Ontario in the early 1900s. The LCBO and Its Moral Mandate In 1927, the LCBO opened liquor stores across the province. Previously, the province was characterized by quasi-prohibition; the Canada Temperance Act allowed for municipal decisions on liquor sales, while after 1916 the Ontario Temperance Act enforced prohibition over all liquor sales – other than to those made to licensed ministers of the gospel, manufacturers, or druggists. In addition to this, doctors were permitted to prescribe liquor to people wealthy enough to afford it. Although there had been several national and provincial referendums and plebiscites on the liquor issue, there was a general level of support for the regulations of the Ontario and Canada Temperance Acts, resulting in continued regulation of liquor sales across the province.

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In early-twentieth-century Canada, liquor was widely considered unhealthy, and the sale of liquor was seen as exploiting the poor and morally weak individuals who could not resist the call of the local saloon (Smart and Osborn 1996, 28). Political cartoons of the time often presented liquor sellers as predators or scavenger birds looming ominously over young men or children, while drinkers were presented as sick, often violent, moral degenerates who squandered the resources of their families on the bottle (see Figure 4.1). Nevertheless, in the face of public opposition, the provincial government, under the leadership of Howard Ferguson,2 saw liquor as the sole means of achieving a balanced budget; they sought to pass previously drafted legislation for state-controlled sales (Ferguson 1926). Criticism of the bill came from all parts of the political spectrum; teetotallers argued that referendums in 1902, 1919, and 1920 had displayed a consistent public will against the sale of liquor, and others argued that the tremendous powers allocated to the board, which placed its authority above “review either by a court of th[e] land or the government of th[e] province” (Liquor Control Act S.O. 1927, c.70, s.25.2), were unwarranted and politically questionable.3 While the Ontario government first argued that it would be open to sensible arguments from all sides, criticism of the new liquor control bill increased in severity with each reading. In fact, criticism was so intense after the second reading that dissenting voices appeared from within the government’s own party (Ferguson 1927, 3). Still, the third and final reading of the Liquor Control Act took place without warning on 30 March 1927 in the presence of only a handful of members of the provincial Parliament. In light of the strength of the temperance vote, as well as general opposition to the Liquor Control Act in Ontario, it was understood by government officials that the sale of liquor needed to be conceptualized in two key ways. First, “if the Government was expected to be returned at the next and succeeding elections they had to make their law effective,” specifically in controlling sales and intemperate behaviour. Second, the government could not permit “it to be shown that revenue [was being generated] from the ruination of families or creating drunkards” (Willison 1924). As the new Liquor Control Board was formed, the government took these points as a virtual blueprint of action to develop the LCBO around the firm concepts of strict control of sales and, more importantly, control over the morality and visibility of liquor consumption (Ferguson 1926, 1927). To this end, the board presented itself as a force bent on controlling liquor consumption. It pledged to ensure that only “those who could take liquor decently should have it” and that the board would always know “exactly who is buying and how much, and what disposition is being made of it” (Ferguson 1927, 2, 3). Furthermore, new LCBO outlets were to “be confined

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Figure 4.1  Early temperance political cartoons. The Toronto-based Pioneer newspaper published many temperance-focused political cartoons in support of Ontario’s proposed and enacted prohibition legislation in the early 1900s. “Watching for Prey,” 26 December 1920; “Liquor Taxation,” 9 July 1909; “Which Will You Vote To Give It To?” 19 September 1919; “Citizens Awake and Act,” 24 October 1902. Thanks to Craig Heron (2003) for bringing these cartoons to my attention.

A Kind of Prohibition

to points where they may be found necessary to check petty bootlegging and better social conditions” (3). Employees were continually informed that it was “essential to remember that sales and profits are secondary considerations, that the primary one is control; that volume of sales and profits may actually in some stores indicate laxity toward abuses of the permit privilege, and that satisfactory service in a store is best proved by prevalence of good social conditions in the surrounding community, absence of drunkenness and disorderliness, and freedom of complaints of neglected wives and families” (LCBO 1928-29, 14; see also LCBO Circular 497, 1928). The board was focused on protecting its public image from charges of exploitation, and it sought to do so by attempting to strictly control any liquorrelated information. On several occasions, the board informed employees not to release any information on the internal practices of the LCBO to the press or public and strictly warned employees not to supply liquor to anyone who may be of “a questionable character.” Either action, board members explained, could “be featured in the press and be seized as [an] opportunity for criticism of the Liquor Control Act, vendors and issuers” (LCBO Circular 526, 1928). In this way, the Ontario government placed upon the LCBO and its staff the task of implementing a moral mandate upon the people of the province to ensure the public maintenance of temperate values and the protection of the revenue generated from state-controlled liquor sales. The Interdiction List Key to maintaining the LCBO’s moral mandate was a multilayered surveillance system. It was based on a strict review of all personal purchases, detailed population sorts, the LCBO’s own policing and investigative branch, and its punitive and controlling tool, the interdiction list. Initially, interdiction – a statute in England prior to the 1800s designed to restrict liquor access to known drunkards – was intended to be limited to people found in open court to have a problem with liquor. However, the classification was soon co-opted by the LCBO, and it was liberally employed to restrict liquor access for a wide variety of individuals. People placed on the LCBO’s interdiction list had their names, addresses, and likenesses distributed to all vendors and licensed establishments in the province. Inclusion on the list came with the stipulation that it was now illegal to sell liquor to the listed individuals. Interdiction orders were also sent to people who were listed by means of registered mail, explaining that it was illegal to buy or possess liquor or to be present in an establishment that sells liquor for the prescribed time period. As one government proponent of interdiction explained to the public, if drunkards refuse to be good, the Government officials just grip them in the most convenient place and sit them down very hard. And so any person can go to the justice of the peace and file an affidavit that a certain person

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is injuring his health, misspending his means or interfering with the peace and happiness of his family. Upon enquiry, the Justice of the Peace Interdicts the man or woman, notice of which is duly posted in beer parlors and all places vending liquor. If the Interdicted person enters one of these premises he is immediately apprehended and brought before the Justice of the Peace to be dealt with according to law. If anyone gives liquor to an interdicted person, the penalty for the first offence [is] from one to three months imprisonment without option for fine, and for second or subsequent offence from four to twelve months imprisonment without the option for fine. (Willison 1924)

Interdiction followed a fairly standard process in Ontario. It was initiated by an internal or external applicant who submitted a request to have the LCBO investigate another person’s drinking activities (and sometimes his or her own drinking activities). Regardless of whether or not the process proceeded further than a request, an investigation file was opened on the person in question. If the LCBO deemed the particular case worthy of investigation, an investigator, an LCBO employee, or in rural areas a member of the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) would investigate the fitness of the specified individual to retain the privilege to drink. Reports were then sent to the LCBO head office for a final decision to be made. Regardless of this decision, the investigation files were kept in case of further LCBO action. Interdiction orders required detailed investigations that delved deep into individuals’ social and private lives, collecting information that the board described as the “intimate details which outside of the family itself, can only be known to the clergyman and the social worker” (LCBO 1927-28, 10). Within these files were at the least a letter from the individual applying to the board to initiate an investigation, the investigation report, and a resulting notation from the board regarding its conclusion. Most files were supplemented with letters from policing organizations; police letters concerned individuals’ criminal history. Letters from a wide variety of sources, including non-governmental aid organizations, Alcoholics Anonymous, church officials, doctors, and lawyers, almost exclusively denoted their support for the interdiction process.4 Data Collection Data presented in this chapter were gathered from all LCBO interdiction files in the RG-36-13 series at the Archives of Ontario for 1929 to 1990.5 These files contain original applicant letters requesting the LCBO to conduct investigations and the resulting orders, police reports, and other miscellaneous records pertaining to individual cases. The series consists of thirteen boxes, approximately four metres of documents, and includes lists of all individuals interdicted through judges’ orders, as well as a representative

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sample of the LCBO files on those who had been the subjects of interdiction investigations. The series contains the complete files on over 500 individual cases investigated between 1929 and 1975. For the purpose of this analysis, only data from an individual’s first LCBO interdiction investigation are included. The reason is to remove the impact that previous records and rulings would have played on the severity of the board’s action in subsequent investigations. Also, since “all inactive files were destroyed in the mid-fifties”6 when the LCBO relocated its offices, only post-1952 files were used in the analysis to avoid the impact that this removal had on the randomness of the sample. Files were reviewed, ordered by date, and allocated a representative number pertaining to the privacy of those who were the subjects of LCBO investigations. No information is included that would enable anyone listed to be identified, and no subjects were contacted in accordance with the Archives of Ontario’s research agreement (Access Request No. 2004-071). Data were collected from files on age, sex, race, geographical location, and involvement of external agencies as reported by the investigator. Data were also collected regarding the applicants initiating the LCBO investigations, their relationships to the persons under investigation, the reasons provided by the applicants to justify the investigations, as well as the job training or occupation reported by the individual under investigation. In four cases, multiple reasons were provided by applicants. Multiple reasons ruled out the selection of a single predominant reason. In the latter cases, the individuals in question were removed from the analysis to maintain the independence of the measured variables. Methods Data were analyzed to discover which factors played a statistically significant role in determining the severity of board action. Severity was measured on an eight-point scale: (1) lack of investigation upon an application; (2) investigation with no disciplinary action taken; (3) issuance of a warning letter based on details of the investigation; (4) issuance of a partial order – limiting consumption to either public or private places; (5) issuance of a six-month interdiction order; (6) issuance of a twelve-month interdiction order; (7) issuance of a twenty-four-month interdiction order; and (8) issuance of an indeterminate interdiction order. In all cases, each possibility denotes a uniform increase in the severity of board action, thus allowing for an analysis by means of linear regression. Linear regression presupposes that many factors play partial roles in determining an ultimate outcome. In the case of interdiction, the ultimate outcome is the severity of board action. The model is often simplified into the following equation:

Yi = B0 + B1 X1i + B2 X2 i + ... Bp Xpi + Ei

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In this equation, Y represents the outcome variable (the severity of board action), and it is explicable through the predictor variables. For this analysis, the dependent variables were collected from the interdiction files. They include gender, job training, or identified occupation of the individual under investigation (Occupation), who applied to initiate the investigation (Applicant), the reason provided by the applicant, individuals and institutions interviewed or supplying evidence to the investigation (Interviews), region of the province the individual lived in, and race. These collected factors were then recoded into the predictor variables (appearing as X1, X2,...Xp), and through the analysis they were given fitted values or parameter estimates (appearing as B0, B1, B2,...Bp) that denote the impact of the given variable; E is the error or model deviation; and i = 1, 2, ... n for n observations. The results of the analysis yielded a parameter estimate, or B score, for each tested predictor variable. This score, in significant cases, denoted in Table 4.1 as p values with *s, shows the extent to which the particular factor impacts the severity of board action on the eight-point scale of possible board action. For example, a variable showing at least one * and having a B score of –1 denotes that, in cases possessing that variable, the severity of board action would predictably be one point lower than in similar cases that did not share the specified variable. The analysis also yields an R2 score, found at the bottom of Table 4.1 beneath each level of the analysis. This score represents, as a percentage, the degree to which the severity of board action can be explained by the measured predictors within the model. For example, an R2 score of 0.60 would denote that 60 percent of the outcome could be explained by the measured variables, while 40 percent could be attributed to non-measured variables. In this case, the analysis provided a substantial R2 score of 0.715, meaning that the final model of measured variables can explain almost 72 percent of the severity of the board’s response. Significant relationships were found in almost all of the measured factors. The complete results are presented in Table 4.1. Findings The findings are broken down by the variables of gender, occupation, applicants, reasons provided for investigation, interviews, region, and race. This sequence accords to analytical organization in the regression model. Within each of the sections, the statistically significant results from the regression are explained and further highlighted through supporting evidence drawn from the LCBO interdiction files as well as other secondary sources. (1) Gender Although other variables drew significance away from the role that gender played at later levels of the regression, gender played a significant role at the first level of the regression model (see Table 4.2). Gender was determined

Table 4.1 Multiple regression modelling denoting the severity of board action, 1953-75 (N = 413)

Predictors

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Intercept

B SE

5.48

5.826

4.913

5.022

4.293

4.332

4.361

0.096

0.142

0.201

0.203

0.207

0.207

0.206

General Race (“Indians”) Gender (female)

B SE p B SE p

0.363

0.331

0.075

0.044

0.360

0.532

0.558

0.277

0.275

0.232

0.230

0.214

0.225

0.224

0.19

0.229

0.746

0.849

0.093

0.018**

0.013**

0.448

0.112

0.066

-0.002

0.054

0.165

0.169

0.226

0.244

0.204

0.204

0.187

0.191

0.191

0.048*

0.619

0.746

0.992

0.774

0.389

0.375

Occupation White collar Blue collar

B SE p B

-0.792

0.058

-0.038

0.000

-0.200

-0.006

0.343

0.295

0.294

0.272

0.270

0.269

0.021*

0.843

0.897

0.999

0.941

0.982

0.004

-0.052

-0.180

-0.149

-0.157

-0.558



SE

0.188

0.158

0.158

0.145

0.145

0.144



p

0.003**

0.981

0.744

0.215

0.305

0.277

Applicants Police

B

0.805

0.784

0.367

0.391

0.188



SE

0.220

0.219

0.205

0.205

0.226



p

0.000***

0.000***

0.075

0.506

0.405 

  Table 4.1



(N = 413)

Predictors

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Judge

B

2.777

2.736

3.389

3.408

3.427



SE

0.248

0.246

0.240

0.239

0.238



p

0.000***

0.000***

0.000***

0.000***

0.000***

Self

B

0.904

0.846

1.274

1.248

1.253



SE

0.296

0.294

0.278

0.227

0.276



p

0.002**

0.004**

0.000***

0.000***

0.000***

Family (male)

B

0.635

0.580

0.807

0.808

0.828



SE

0.403

0.400

0.367

0.365

0.364



p

0.166

0.148

0.029**

0.028**

0.023**

Father

B

1.099

1.026

0.904

0.808

0.783



SE

0.358

0.356

0.326

0.326

0.325



p

0.002**

0.004**

0.006**

0.014**

0.017**

LCBO

B

0.549

0.487

1.003

1.110

1.191



SE

0.292

0.290

0.276

0.278

0.279



p

0.061

0.094

Wife

B

-0.621

-0.661

0.000*** -0.665

0.000*** -0.663

0.000*** -0.668



SE

0.226

0.224

0.209

0.208

0.207



p

0.006**

0.003**

0.002**

0.002**

0.001**

Reason Provided

Breach of Liquor   Control Act

B

-1.262

-1.145

-1.167

SE

0.439

0.402

0.399

0.398



p

0.004**

0.005**

0.004**

0.005**

-1.123

Interviews Police

B

1.262

1.270

1.281



SE

0.153

0.152

0.151



p

0.000***

0.000***

0.000***

Finances

B

0.912

9.180

0.913



SE

0.346

0.344

0.343



p

0.009**

0.008**

0.008**

Postal Region Region P

B

-0.371



SE

0.156

0.179



p

0.018**

0.002**

Interaction Applicants/Police*/   Region P





-0.557

B

0.659

SE

0.318

p

0.039*

% variance explained R2

% increase R2

11.8

–

20

8.2**

62.1

42.1***

63.1

1***

*p < .05, **p < .01, *** p < .001 Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1953-75, RG 36-13.

70.6

7.5***

71.1

0.5***

71.5

0.5***

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Table 4.2 Result of all investigations, sorted by gender of person investigated, 1929-75

Female (predominance 16.50%) Predominance (%)

Male (predominance 83.50%) Predominance (%)

Applicant Applicant Police 32.40 Wife Judge 16.20 Police Self 14.70 Judge LCBO head office 13.20 Mother Husband 8.80 Self Daughter 4.40 LCBO head office Father 2.90 Father LCBO inspector 2.90 Brother Son 1.50 Sister Brother 1.50 Daughter Mother-in-law 1.50 Son Aid organization First Nations band Doctor Court administrator Probation officer LCBO inspector Neighbour LCBO response LCBO response No action 1.40 No action Disciplinary action 98.60 Disciplinary action Warning letter 7.40 Warning letter Limited consumption 1.50 Limited consumption Interdicted 89.70 Interdicted

26.80 21.30 15.80 13.00 6.80 5.50 2.30 1.80 1.50 1.30 1.00 0.60 0.60 0.30 0.30 0.30 0.30 0.30

10.21 89.79 9.40 2.30 78.09

Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1929-75, RG 36-13.

by either the relationship explained in the investigation application or the description of the individual in the interdiction file. In no case was gender reported as ambiguous, unrecorded, or unknown within the LCBO’s files. The first level of the regression showed that the female gender existed in a positive relationship with the severity of board action, displaying a B score of 0.448. This means that women were subject to more severe board action than their male counterparts. Far more men became the targets of board investigations and interdiction than women, accounting for over 80 percent of all interdiction files. The targeting of men by the interdiction list can be understood not only because they constituted a larger percentage of the drinking population, especially

A Kind of Prohibition

in the early days of the LCBO, but also because of the gendered dimension of the temperance movement and its morality concerning the financial and violent impacts of male drinking on the home (Heron 2003, 173, 232-33; Smart and Osborn 1996, 28-29). Although LCBO investigations into the actions of men often resulted in milder penalties than those awarded to women, men were nonetheless the subject of the vast majority of interdiction investigations and attention by the LCBO. While the bulk of investigations into both genders ended in the subjects being added to the interdiction list, the successful listing of women was still significantly higher than that of men, accounting for a 10.81 percent difference in interdiction (full interdiction and limited consumption) listing. Popular culture in the early 1900s presented women’s relationship with alcohol in one of three ways: passive and virtuous women of temperance were seen as “angelic” since they never took a drink; some women were seen as the victims of poverty and violence at the hands of intemperate husbands; and others were seen as overindulgent themselves, prone to violence, sexuality, and uncontrollable behaviour (Heron 2003, 289). In actuality, women’s relationship with alcohol was much more complex than these typifications suggest. Although many Ontario women in the 1900s and 1910s were either active members or supporters of the temperance political movement, if not members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) itself, some women were actively seeking the right to drink (Heron 2003, 289). When prohibition ended in Ontario in 1927, the LCBO was well aware of prohibitionist arguments and gendered constructions; it presented the interdiction list as the key tool that would protect wives and families from the poverty, violence, and uncontrollable behaviour associated with alcohol use (Ferguson 1926; Willison 1924). In internal circulars, the board informed its workers that they were to uphold the stipulations in the Liquor Control Act to ensure that, if an individual “by excessive drinking of liquor, misspends, wastes, or lessens his estate, or injures his health, or interrupts the peace and happiness of his family,” he would be identified and classified, and his consumption would be controlled through interdiction.7 Once the interdiction list was in place, many women sought to activate the surveillance and disciplinary powers of the board to identify and control drinking and other undesirable behaviour, such as physical abuse. Research by Valverde (2004, 573) suggests that this element of interdiction became even more predominant over time: instances of abuse in interdiction cases reached rates as high as 51.95 percent when 1975-90 Liquor Licensing Board of Ontario (LLBO) interdiction data are included. The LCBO’s attitude toward female drinkers was the same as the temperate public opinion of the time: “good” women were against drink of any kind, and “a female in a public drinking establishment was probably a prostitute”

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and definitely of inferior moral character (Heron 2003, 289). To protect the morality of men and women, LCBO policy limited public female drinking within designated “ladies and escorts” areas of licensed drinking establishments. These areas were regulated differently from men’s sections, and, as Heron points out, they were required to be structurally separate and have their own entrances and washrooms (294). Women were allowed to drink in these specifically defined legal and cultural spaces, but they could do so only under the protection of their male “escorts” (289). These regulations were strictly enforced and constantly policed by the LCBO and in later years by LLBO investigation officers. Women drinking in licensed establishments had to step lightly around the liquor inspectors and be sure not to stray far from their escorts if they were to avoid unwanted classification. The ultimate faux pas, however, was leaving the ladies and escorts room and entering the male side of drinking establishments – as doing so led to the possibility of a woman interacting with an unmarried man while under the influence. Women’s physical features and the conditions of their homes were also commented on in official investigation documents of the LCBO. Statements such as “she had not bothered to do the laundry or clean up” or “the home was neat and tidy and nicely furnished” were common in women’s inter­ diction files.8 The presence of men, other than husbands, in women’s lives was also of great importance to investigators; sexual deviance was understood as a necessary ground for interdiction. In one police report to the LCBO, an officer thought it pertinent to question whether a woman should have the right to drink because she conducted visits to a married man’s hotel room, even though the man “seems very friendly with her husband” and was reportedly a family friend.9 In other cases, sexual promiscuity was deemed a sufficient ground for more than simply listing, as one investigator reported in the case of an interdicted woman: “Mrs. _____ is guilty of associating with another man and the younger members of the family are aware of their mother’s conduct”; the children, the investigator concluded, “are better off with a father who drinks in moderation than a mother whose conduct is questionable.”10 (2) Occupation The occupation held by the individual under investigation was also reviewed, yet no particular occupation offered significant results. However, when occupations were recoded as manual labour (blue collar) and non-manual labour (white collar), the regression yielded significant results (see Blackburn, Brooks, and Jarman 2001; Dale 1987). Although blue-collar and white-collar occupations yielded negative B scores, indicating that those whose occupations were denoted were less likely to be the recipients of severe board action compared with those whose occupations were not specified, there remained a significant distinction between these two occupational types. Specifically,

A Kind of Prohibition

Table 4.3 Occupations of individuals under investigation by the LCBO, 1953-75 Occupation

Predominance (%)

None reported Construction worker* Professionals Factory worker* Farm worker*

40.0 28.8 7.0 6.8 6.5

Occupation

Predominance (%)

Housework/Unpaid* Driver* Trapper/Bush worker* Other Rail worker*

3.4 2.9 2.4 1.9 0.5

* Represents occupations recoded into the “blue collar” classification for the linear regression. From this data one can see very strongly defined class lines with a vast overrepresentation of the working class and unemployed. Professionals made up the “white collar” classification and consisted primarily of clerks and salespeople. Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1953-75, RG 36-13.

those employed in white-collar occupations saw a B score of – 0.792, while blue-collar individuals’ B score was – 0.558. The latter resulted in a statistically significant difference between occupations based on manual labour and those that were not, in addition to the significant difference found between those who reportedly held occupations and those who did not.11 Not only were members of the working class recipients of greater disciplinary action by the board, but also the predominance of occupations within the interdiction files leans drastically toward them. Occupations from the capitalist class were simply not found (see Table 4.3). Consistent with the popular sentiment of the temperance movement of the time, the LCBO was specifically aimed at preventing sales to “poor people, whose families could ill afford the loss” (LCBO 1927-28, 13). Within temperance ideology, the financial factor of the immorality of liquor sales was of central importance, as many political cartoons and much temperance literature depicted the impoverishment of working-class families by unscrupulous saloon owners and class-based male drinking (Gray 1972, 38-51; Heron 2003, 121-28; Smart and Osborn 1996, 28-29; Spence 1926). In the 1920s, it was understood and accepted within temperance circles that the “poor” or “working” man had little to no disposable income, and thus his purchases of liquor must come at the expense of his family. In its own reports, the LCBO stressed this point, explaining that “the purchase of liquor ought to come and must come after, and a long way after, the necessities of life, and adequate duty to dependents, if proper living conditions are to be maintained,” and the board would see to it that liquor would go only to those who could afford it (LCBO 1927-28, 10). To battle the perceived misspending of income, the LCBO incorporated several regulatory and procedural actions in order to maintain the temperance of the working class. First, LCBO stores were specifically directed not to remain open after 5 p.m. to remove the temptation for the working man.12

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Second, the board required that liquor permits record the occupation of the bearer as well as devote a column within the permit where “the actual amount of each purchase is inserted; the cash values totalled and carried forward” (LCBO 1929-30, 9). This action was taken in order to “directly bring home to those purchasing liquor the amount of money they are spending on luxuries, possibly to the expense of real necessities” (9). Third, of course, was the interdiction of individuals found by vendors or through investigations to be spending “an unreasonable amount of money” on liquor (LCBO Circular 403, 1928). While the LCBO appeared to seek out interdictions based on the amount of money being misspent, its methodology was questionable. Excessive purchases were determined not only by volume but also by one’s wealth – that is, extrapolated from one’s reported occupation. In a circular to its vendors, the LCBO laid out this distinction, reporting that “certain law-abiding citizens are very unnecessarily humiliated in front of the public when questioned about the amount of purchases on their permit,” explaining that “at no time was it the intention that the general public should be limited in their purchasing from our stores ... If people are law-abiding and financially able, [there is] no reason why they should not be granted the privilege of buying what they wish” (LCBO Circular 3833, 1947). With this in mind, the LCBO perceived intemperate drinking nearly exclusively as a problem of the poor and working class, while efforts to control this type of drinking were based on occupational classification. (3) Applicants Outcomes of LCBO interdiction investigations were highly predictable based on the sources of applications for investigations. Initially, the ability to apply to the LCBO for an interdiction investigation was to be limited to close family members and the judiciary. However, the records of the interdiction files depict a situation where anyone could contact the board and request an investigation. Applications came from two main sources: from institutions such as branches of the criminal justice system, including the police, judges, hospitals, and mental institutions, and from individuals. Lang and McNeely (1963), who gained access to the complete list before the 1927-53 records were mostly destroyed, found that 18 percent of the applications came from institutions, while 31 percent came from individual sources. These numbers are virtually identical to those tabulated from the remaining records. Significant relationships within the regression existed for institutional applications submitted by police, judges, and the LCBO’s own employees, while significant relationships for individual applications were discovered for wives, fathers, male family members (excluding fathers), and individuals themselves when compared with applications submitted by female family members (excluding wives).

A Kind of Prohibition

Table 4.4 Institutional applications for interdiction, 1953-75 Applicant Police Judge LCBO employees Aid organizations Municipal workers First Nations bands Other institutions

Predominance (%) 46.80 31.91 17.44 1.31 1.27 0.85 0.42

Source: Percentages are tabulated from interdiction files with institutional applications. Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1953-75, RG 36-13.

Institutional applications enjoyed a significantly higher percentage of success at having people listed than requests by individuals – by a margin of 26.74 percent.13 The regression provided B scores at the seventh level of the regression of 3.427 and 1.191 for judges and the LCBO’s internal analysis respectively. Applications by police were significant and remained so for the third and fourth models, recording B scores of 0.805 and 0.784. Although these were the sources of all significant relationships, applications came from a wide variety of sources: police, judges, aid organizations, municipalities, and bands. Table 4.4 shows all institutional sources and the percentage that each represented in the remaining interdiction files of the LCBO. Within the institutional group, judicial action stands out as the most influential on board action. An application made by a judge increased the severity of the board response score greater than any other measured variable, impacting the final score by 3.427. Although the Liquor Control Act empowered judges to issue only indefinite interdiction orders that required judicial action to be removed, the LCBO’s status of being literally above the law led it to reclassify or overturn such orders as it saw fit.14 Between 1927 and 1952, the final year that the LCBO published its interdiction data, it had altered or overturned the interdiction orders of nearly 7,000 individuals. Applications originating from the LCBO organization itself were also found to be significant, yielding a B score of 1.191 at the seventh level of the regression. Most of these applications originated from local vendors and investigators who identified individuals through their purchasing or drinking behaviour, though the LCBO head office also ran detailed analyses and sorts of interdiction list data to further identify individuals (see Thompson and Genosko 2006; Thompson and Genosko forthcoming). Similar to the case of judges, the role of local LCBO personnel was substantial in the interdiction process, though again they remained secondary to the powers of head office, which ultimately dictated interdiction orders and policy.15

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Table 4.5 Breakdown of individual applications for investigations, 1953-75 Applicant Wife Mother Self (Male) Father Self (Female)

Predominance (%)

Applicant

Predominance (%)

41.36 20.48 14.05 8.03 4.01

Daughter Son Husband Sister Other

3.16 3.21 2.40 2.40 0.90

Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1953-75, RG 36-13.

The role of police applicants was deemed significant by the regression analysis. A stronger relation was discovered denoting the statistical interaction of police applications with geographical region, requiring them to be analyzed as a conjoined predictor (see section on regions below). Applications by individuals were made primarily by women. Over 80 percent of requests came from women, most of who (41.36 percent) sought to have their husbands added to the LCBO’s “drunk list.” Mothers were the second largest classification, making up just over 20 percent of the total requests by individuals, followed by the highest male category of fathers at 8.03 percent. Table 4.5 shows the breakdown of individual requests by relationship to the individual investigated. The linear regression analysis yielded significant results for applications made by wives, fathers, and male family members. Of the individual applicants, applications from male family members other than fathers (e.g., husbands, sons, in-laws, etc.) had the largest impact on the severity of board action, with a B score of 0.828. The second largest action came from fathers, with a B score of 0.783, followed by wives, with a B score of -0.668. In these cases, a strong gendered element to the application process is present, as both male categories depicted positive relationships when compared with female ones. It can be seen throughout the interdiction files that in some investigations conducted by the police or LCBO investigators women’s requests for having an individual listed either were not taken seriously or were devalued. The main explanations given for disregarding requests were that women involved were too emotional or presented overly temperate values. One LCBO investigator explained, “his mother is quite temperamental and it has been ascertained that she wrote a letter to the Liquor Control Board of Ontario requesting renewal of the Prohibitory Order mentioned above while in a fit of temper,” so she was not taken seriously.16 In another case, an investigator cited a husband’s intemperate actions as caused by his wife, whose actions

A Kind of Prohibition

Table 4.6 Gender of the applicant and severity of LCBO action, 1929-75

% Requested by men

% Requested by women

Both Both Board response Women Men* genders* Women* Men genders* No action Disciplinary action Warning letter Limited public Limited private Listed Predominance

10 90 10 10 0 70

0 100 12 0 0 88

5.00 95.00 11.00 5.00 0 79.00

4.69 15.49

20.19

0 100.00 66.67 0 0 33.33

23.68 76.32 17.76 0.66 1.32 56.58

12.30 87.70 42.22 0.33 0.66 44.49

1.87 77.94

79.80

* Not including “self” applications. Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1929-75, RG 36-13.

were “putting undo stress on him and his business,” and she had “deprived [him] of sexual intercourse” for six weeks.17 In another case, when a woman applied for her husband to be listed because he became physically abusive when he drank, the police investigator reported that “as stated in Mrs. _____’s letter he does get abusive when drinking and I have been to the residence on 2 occasions during the past year [to investigate abuse cases], but Mrs. _____ does not help much as she is a teetotaler [a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union] and is strictly against drink of any kind.”18 In all of these reported cases, the investigators opted not to recommend listing. From the severity of board action, one can see how the gender of the applicant played a definite role in interdiction classification (see Table 4.6). Individuals who applied for interdiction on their own behalf were dealt with differently by the board. In such cases, the regression analysis demonstrated a significant relationship, with a positive B score of 1.253. When individuals applied on their own behalf, they were commonly issued a one-year interdiction order – that is, as long as the investigator was satisfied that the letter had in fact been sent by the person listed in the application. Selfapplications accounted for almost 8 percent of all interdiction applications (1929-75), though some (just over 20 percent) of these letters were typed on police letterhead and signed as witnessed by constables. Due to the close relationship between the LCBO and the OPP, it is likely that police officers used their knowledge of LCBO procedures, especially in the case of selfapplications, to quickly list individuals whom they thought were in need of “extra attention” while not being required to undergo a complete formal investigation (LCBO Circular 557, 1928).

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(4) Reasons for Application Under the Liquor Control Act, interdiction was to be used in very specific cases, where an individual, “by excessive drinking of liquor, misspends, wastes, or lessens his estate, or injures his health, or interrupts the peace and happiness of his family.” But the board also reserved the right to have an individual listed “for any cause which it deems sufficient with or without any hearing.”19 Many reasons were provided by applicants to explain requests for investigation, but few justifications resulted in significant relationships when statistically analyzed. This was perhaps due to the role that police and financial interviews (discussed below) had on the final score, drawing significance away from the reasons provided in the applications. Interestingly, the specific wording of the reasons why the board should investigate an individual were fairly constant within the applications, making recoding virtually unnecessary. The reasons provided, and their predominance within the remaining interdiction files, are presented in Table 4.7. The linear regression revealed one reason for interdiction to be significant: breaches of the Liquor Control Act. Since the law pertained to drinking behaviour in the province, the board sought to control it through the strength of the interdiction list. Although interdiction orders were automatically handed out for specific sections of the LCA, such as drinking and driving, the board was more focused on controlling crimes that violated its moral mandate. Specifically, the board was interested in, and tracked, persons who were convicted under the LCA, placing them within one of three subcategories: those who sold liquor – section 87(1); those who permitted drunkenness – section 105(a); and a general catch-all category. These categories were then used to tabulate and perform risk assessment and analysis (see Thompson and Genosko, forthcoming). Interestingly, breaches of the Liquor Control Act yielded a B score of –1.123 compared with cases where no reason was provided, denoting it as having a negative impact on the severity of board Table 4.7 Reasons cited within interdiction applications, 1929-75 Reason provided No reason provided Overindulgence Abuse/Violence Control* Health

Predominance (%) 28.80 20.30 14.00 9.20 9.00

Reason provided

Predominance (%)

Misspending Because husband on list Neglecting children Breach of Criminal Code Breach of Liquor Control Act

8.50 2.90 2.90 2.90 1.50

* The “control” category was tabulated from those applications citing reasons related to the individual “not following orders,” “not being good,” “not doing what he is told,” etc. Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1929-75, RG 36-13.

A Kind of Prohibition

action when taking all other measured factors into consideration. This relationship could be due to the minor nature of several crimes classified under the board’s BLCA “general” heading or to the fact that these individuals were identified through the criminal justice system and did not necessarily fall into the category of those in need of losing the privilege to drink. (5) Interviews Interviews were necessarily conducted as part of LCBO investigations to determine an individual’s fitness to retain the privilege to drink. According to early board instructions, investigations consisted of collecting “such particulars as it is possible to obtain as to the character and standing of the permittee” (LCBO 1927-28, 13). However, the process became more formalized over time – specifically requiring police reports and the interviews of several key informants. Interdiction records reveal that the LCBO’s directions were interpreted quite liberally in this regard and that data were collected on a wide variety of subjects from multiple sources, often resulting in very detailed personal files. In most cases, the LCBO relied on the police for its main source of data collection, but the complete list of interview sources and their predominance reveal the extent and scope of the LCBO’s investigative arm (see Table 4.8). In nearly all of the interviews contained within the investigator’s reports, personal information was passed on to the LCBO as well as the interviewee’s recommendation for board action. This information allowed for an analysis that accounted for the impact of unfavourable reports from the interviewees. The linear regression shows that significant relationships exist for the police and finances – a composite of both employer interviews and banking information – when compared with court records. Table 4.8 LCBO interview subjects, 1929-75* Interview subject Applicant Police Court records Finances (employer) Medical Social Services LCBO investigator

Predominance (%) 100 56.25 37.28 23.06 12.28 7.11 6.89

Interview subject LCBO vendor Finances (banker) Neighbour Alcoholics Anonymous Licence holder Educator Church official

Predominance (%) 6.03 5.38 1.29 1.07 0.43 0.21 0.21

* This covers only those who recommended listing the individual under investigation. Some of those interviewed voiced no opinion, while an extreme minority voiced opinions against interdiction. Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1929-75, RG 36-13.

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Interviews related to finances included records from both employers and bankers. These groups were coded together as they related nearly identical information – in most cases employment and spending information. Primarily, LCBO inspectors gathered their data from financial information and extrapolated how much income could be directed to liquor purchases without negatively affecting the family or “lessening his estate” (LCBO Circular 1717, 1928). Interviews on finances often included job performance, employment regularity, house ownership, and spending on essentials such as groceries and children’s clothing. A representative report involving an employer interview stated that “Mr. _____ is employed at Chrysler Canada Ltd. On [date] he arrived at work in an intoxicated condition. For this, he received a three day suspension from work and was advised by the company to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. On [date] he took a five-week leave of absence from work due to illness. During that time he became intoxicated almost every day. He spent $30.00 a day on liquor for himself and friends, and the family is beginning to suffer financially.”20 Over 28 percent of the interdiction files contained financial interviews that were more extensive than simply job descriptions, and negative financial interviews positively impacted the board action score by 0.913. Police interviews appeared in over 56 percent of the interdiction investigation files (1929-75) and consisted mainly of police knowledge of the subject under investigation. As interdiction investigations became more formalized over time, police interviews came to include references to all incidents, arrests, and convictions in which the subject was involved. Furthermore, most files that included police interviews contained copies of the original police reports and any supporting evidence. Police interviews that denoted the need for an individual to be interdicted resulted in a positive B score of 1.281, thus increasing the severity of predicted board action. (6) Region In an analysis of the characteristics of individuals listed by the board, those who were classified as living within the northern region of the province suffered a statistically significant increase in the likelihood of being listed as well as an increase in the severity of board action when compared with the central region of the province (see Table 4.9). Not only was the northern region of the province found to be a significant predictor of the severity of board action, but the regression also determined an important interaction effect between the northern region and applications by police to have individuals interdicted. Interaction terms can be explained as “to exist when the association of one variable (‘X’) to another (‘Y’) depends on the value (or ‘state,’ or ‘condition’) of a third variable (‘Z’)” (Alford 1998, 39) – in this case, the severity of board action in regard to police applications was dependent on provincial region. This interaction term

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Table 4.9 Regional distribution of interdicted individuals, 1929-75

P

K L

Postal region P – Northern region K – Eastern region L – Central region N – Southwestern region M – Toronto

N

M Toronto

Representation as percentage of Ontario population

Representation within the interdiction list

8 15 35 20 22

31 28 19 12 10

Source: Archives of Ontario, Interdiction List of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, 1929-75, RG 36-13.

resulted in a B score of 0.659, denoting a positive relationship to the severity of board action. The north was seen by the LCBO head office as containing clientele “of the lowest type – Indians and Bushmen” – in need of strict control (LLBO minutes, 9 January 1958, quoted in Valverde 2003, 195). Historically, the north had voted in favour of legalizing liquor sales and, upon the first day of the LCBO stores being open, made national news in regard to the volume of liquor purchased in one day. The Globe (2 June 1927, 3) reported that, on the board’s opening day, stores in the northern towns of Fort William and Port Arthur sold liquor to more than 2,500 people – resulting in enough sales to “quench a $15,000 thirst.” In order to curtail northern drinking, LCBO expansion into the northern region of the province was slow, and until the 1940s and 1950s few localities contained a liquor store (LCBO 1940-60). The reduced number of northern outlets, in combination with the remoteness of northern communities, created a situation where those individuals who wanted to drink had to travel large distances to obtain liquor. This influx of drinkers into small northern communities was unwelcome, and intruding populations were often defined as “Indians” by locals – though this racial classification was not firmly connected to lineage or birthright (see Jacobson’s notorious text Bended Elbow, 1975). In the northern region especially, these populations were a tarnish

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on the record of both policing organizations and the LCBO as individuals publicly displayed the negative aspects of the liquor trade and led to public criticism of both organizations. To solve this problem, the interdiction list was touted by both city officials and the LCBO as a means to control these populations, allowing officers to “at least remov[e] these people from the main city streets.”21 In this way, interdiction served as a blunt instrument of social control employed by policing institutions to clear streets of target populations, reducing both visibility and public scrutiny. As one officer explained, “it is highly improbable that putting this man on the prohibited list will do him any good but it will give Mrs._____ some protection by being able to call police when this man appears.”22 (7) Race Within the interdiction files, few cases specifically denoted race. Investigators commented on race in approximately 6 percent of the interdiction files, singling out both “Indians”23 and “Negroes.” The racial classification of “Indian” proved significant at the final level of the regression, increasing the severity of board action by a score of 0.558. The LCBO perceived “Indian” drinking as a serious threat, and significant resources were committed to keep individuals with this social/legal classification from purchasing alcohol. “Indians” could not purchase alcohol legally until 1954 due to stipulations under the Indian Act, while Ontario law specifically excluded all individuals within the “Indian,” “Non-Treaty Indian,” and “Interdicted” legal classifications.24 The board’s fear of serving “Indians” was twofold. First, the board feared any political or public backlash from being seen as exploiting “Indians’” “natural weakness”25 toward liquor consumption. Second, the board feared criminal prosecution under the Indian Act or Ontario’s Liquor Control Act, both of which specifically criminalized liquor sale to, purchase by, or possession for “Indians” and other interdicted persons in Canada. Before 1954, the LCBO’s policy was based on prototypical understandings of race, as the LCBO explained: “In view of the technical difficulty of deciding whether an Indian may come under the prohibitions of the Indian Act, whether he is a non-treaty Indian, or whether he may have become enfranchised and occupying the status of a white man, vendors, permit issuers and all others concerned are instructed to refuse all applications for permits by persons of Indian Blood.”26 After 1954, First Nations-LCBO drinking relations became more complex; like “drunkards” who regained their drinking rights after serving their stipulated periods on the interdiction list, “Indians” had to show the LCBO “that [they] were capable of taking a few drinks and be law-abiding” before they were given full drinking privileges and the right “to have beer and liquor on the reserves.”27 As the LCBO head office explained to employees, “section 95 (1) of the act provides that intoxi-

A Kind of Prohibition

cants may be sold to an Indian for consumption in a public place in accordance with a law of the Province where the sale takes place authorizing the sale of intoxicants to a person for consumption in a public place. This means within the Province of Ontario, Indians may be served in establishments which are holders of licenses issued by the Liquor Licensing Board. It does NOT mean that Indians may purchase spirits, wine and beer from Ontario Liquor Control Board Stores” (LCBO Circular 4753, 1954). However, as First Nations leaders from across the province had predicted, their new rights did not solve the problems of LCBO racial classification, and many of their people quickly found themselves formally listed on the interdiction list. As Chief Adams of the Sarnia reserve explained, “if we took the privileges that you suggest, I could go to the beverage room and have a few drinks. Then if I came home to the reserve drunk, the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] would throw me in jail. It just looks like a trap to me. If we wanted a glass of beer, and could take it home, that would be better. With the present setup, liquor is an awful detriment to the Indian. It is not a fair thing.”28 After 1959, First Nations bands could apply to the government to be granted the right to become wet – that is, making liquor possession on reserve lands legal. After the formal declaration was made by the band and reviewed by the federal Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa, the request was forwarded to the LCBO, which could either grant or deny this privilege. Bands in Ontario acted on this newfound “freedom” to differing degrees; some petitioned as soon as 1959, while others waited until the early 1960s, and some bands decided to maintain the prohibitions placed on their reserves (LCBO Circular S-363, 1959; Canadian Corrections Association 1967, 32). Also in 1962, the year that a large portion of First Nations bands in Ontario had contacted the LCBO over allowing alcohol on their reserves, the LCBO decided to discontinue its liquor permit and liquor consumption surveillance programs. Regardless of the legality of First Nations drinking between 1954 and 1975, one’s racial classification of “Indian” remained a strong predictor of the severity of board action. Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated both the targeting of populations by the LCBO interdiction process and how these populations were co-constructed or seen as a social problem through the process of LCBO surveillance, interdiction investigation, and classification. The results of this chapter shed light on the specific nature of LCBO disciplinary action in the pre-electronic period and several important aspects regarding the general nature of social categorization. The linear regression model depicted an uneven application of disciplinary action, yielding significantly higher results for individuals classified as “Indians,” women, manual labourers, and those living in the northern region

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of the province. These classifications were further supported by the textual records of LCBO institutional policy and as such were reproducible through an analysis of these texts. The regression model also yielded important results pertaining to the role that classifications, particularly in regard to applicants, played in board action. These relations were not found within the written texts of the LCBO, though they are nonetheless of importance in understanding the role that classification played in the interdiction process. Furthermore, the nearly identical findings of this chapter’s textual and statistical analyses reaffirms the effectiveness of regression statistics in developing predictor models to identify both textual and non-textual institutional policy. This case study also allowed for a review of the process of categorical convergence between “risk” populations and the types of behaviour attributed to them. Although law laid out the types of behaviour in need of regulation, it was LCBO policy that distinguished certain portions of the Ontario population as in need of “extra attention.” Once classified in this way, an individual was more heavily scrutinized, and his or her actions were viewed through the classification. This system led not only to the reification of original categories but also to a cyclical process of identification, classification, and reification that worked to increase the convergence of LCBO categories for both individuals and populations. Since the regression analysis yielded significant results for a wide variety of non-alcohol-related social factors, it is clear, in this case, that the application of the specifically targeted interdiction legislation of the Liquor Control Act to particular risk populations was not anomalous but systematic. In particular, this analysis shows the importance of race and gender in interdiction but also the use of the interdiction classification by police and city officials to control behaviours not specified within the legislation. Not only does this investigation portray the role of non-legislated criteria and social prejudices in the application of state disciplinary action, but it also stresses the desperate need for oversight of surveillance mechanisms, state disciplinary actions, and the ability to question the acquisition and validity of surveillance data. Although this project is historical and specific to Ontario, the conclusions presented here should not be considered limited in their application. Implications of this research pose serious concerns for the types of surveillance, social sorts, classification technologies, and “terror-mediated” political policies that have proliferated in recent years. Questions about the possible impacts of sorting and classification performed every day by credit card companies, the federal government of Canada, or the US Department of Homeland Security need not be answered with mere speculation, as historical projects like this one investigate, document, and explicate the social consequences of the categorical construction of “risk” populations.

Part 2: Environmental Design, Consumerism, and Privacy

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5 Natural Surveillance, Crime Prevention, and the Effects of Being Seen Patrick F. Parnaby and C. Victoria Reed

When it comes to crime prevention, the term “surveillance” often conjures up visions of asymmetrical, overt, and unverifiable social monitoring (e.g., closed-circuit television [CCTV] cameras). What receives less attention in crime control discussions is the importance of natural surveillance in the prevention of certain types of crime and/or forms of social disorder. According to Desyllas, Connoly, and Hebbert (2003, 643), natural surveillance is “the overlooking of public space by members of the public in the course of their day-to-day lives.” Unlike other forms of overt surveillance, natural surveillance is a by-product of the routine ebbs and flows of social life across time and space: people glancing in all directions as they pass from one place to another. As a crime prevention strategy, natural surveillance is meant to increase the perceived risk of engaging in misconduct, thereby deterring potential offenders. In environments where opportunities for natural surveillance are limited, crime prevention practitioners often modify the physical landscape and, if possible, strategically manage the temporal and spatial flow of people, thereby increasing the likelihood that observant individuals will prevent crime by being in the right place at the right time (see Crowe 2000). Our intention in this chapter is neither to determine whether natural surveillance, as part of a larger crime prevention strategy, actually deters crime and/or disorder nor to contribute new empirical data. Rather, we seek to problematize the introduction of natural surveillance into social and geographical landscapes by offering a normatively informed theoretical analysis of identity, culture, politics, and social space. Our argument is twofold. First, we maintain that the effects of natural surveillance are potentially experienced in a differential and not always benign manner. Second, we argue that rendering environments more amenable to natural surveillance potentially sets the stage for discriminate gazing where (a) the schism between dominant and marginal identities is exacerbated and (b) concomitant

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levels of suspicion might, paradoxically, lead to the further marginalization of already marginalized groups. We begin with a select overview of criminological theories to establish a framework for a more specific discussion about the role of natural surveillance in situational crime prevention. Next we explore the relationship between identity and social and geographical space, and we examine how natural surveillance intersects with the social, political, and cultural dimensions of identity construction with respect to two marginalized populations: young black males and homeless people. We then consider how natural surveillance opportunities might open possibilities for intensifying the stigmatization and marginalization of these groups before revisiting the theoretical principles of situational crime prevention in order to make suggestions for possible improvements. On the one hand, therefore, we explore the politics of visibility. On the other hand, we link the politics of visibility to issues of privacy and social justice. Opportunity Theories and Situational Crime Prevention In order to appreciate the relevance of natural surveillance as a crime prevention tool, we must first understand how opportunity theories of crime differ from more traditional criminological approaches. For the most part, opportunity-based theories explain crime as a situational-specific event that is precipitated when particular social and environmental characteristics coalesce in time and space (Cohen and Felson 1979; Sacco and Kennedy 1998). Unlike theories that flesh out the structural determinants of criminality, opportunity theories are more focused on the immediate causes of crime. Most importantly, opportunity theories assume that, because opportunities for crime and disorder are not evenly distributed in time and space, some environments provide ample opportunities for offending, while others do not (Birkbeck and LaFree 1993). Although there is some debate about how extensively offenders rationally assess or plan their crimes (Birkbeck and LaFree 1993; Desroches 2002), it is generally assumed that most offenders conduct some sort of cost-benefit analysis before engaging in disorderly conduct. In short, potential offenders evaluate the social and physical environments with respect to the presence and/or absence of opportunities, the amount of effort required to complete the task, the level of risk involved, and the potential for reward (see Cornish and Clarke 1986). The task of identifying the specific environmental and social characteristics that lend themselves to crime has posed a unique challenge to urban planners, sociologists, and criminologists. Although a complete review of the research literature is beyond the scope of this chapter, several contributions are worth mentioning. In Defensible Space, for example, Newman (1972) argues that the crime and disorder plaguing American inner-city communities

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were a function of poor urban planning and/or architectural design. Specifically, ill-conceived public housing lacked a sense of territoriality, opportunities for natural surveillance, and adequate access control. It also presented an undesirable image. Taken together, these socioenvironmental characteristics undermined the ability of residents to form the kinds of social relations that make possible the delineation and defence of normative and spatial boundaries. Despite criticism (e.g., Stevenson 1996), Newman’s ideas, like those of theorists before him (e.g., Jacobs 1992; Wood 1961), have been extremely influential. At about the same time that Newman was writing, Jeffery (1971) published his seminal work Crime Prevention through Environmental Design. If social scientists were guilty of anything, Jeffery argued, it was that they had grossly overstated the social causes of crime and ignored the role of the physical environment. For Jeffery, the physical environment was the potential catalyst for and medium of criminal behaviour. His answer to the failure of American crime control policy was, therefore, the adoption of preventative strategies grounded in the biological and psychological principles of social behaviourism that, at their core, acknowledge the vital role played by the physical environment in human decision-making processes. From a more macro perspective, Cohen and Felson (1979) argued that one must also take broader ecological forces into consideration when evaluating the etiological importance of criminal opportunity. In their routine activities approach, Cohen and Felson argued that crime was a function of three converging factors: a motivated offender, a suitable target, and the absence of capable guardianship (see also Felson 1987). The likelihood of this convergence, they argued, has a lot to do with the routine activities that comprise our daily lives, including our aggregate behavioural patterns with respect to work, travel, and consumption. While largely eschewing the importance of an offender’s biography in the etiology of crime, routine activities theory was (and remains) concerned with the temporal and spatial distribution of particular criminal opportunities. Since the publication of these studies, research into what constitutes a good crime location has become more refined. Generally, the research literature suggests that, when evaluating a situation, offenders consider the expected reward (Hough 1987; Shaw and Gifford 1994), the risk of being observed or caught (Desroches 2002; Ham-Rowbottom, Gifford, and Shaw 1999), signs of occupancy (Rappetto 1974), and the ease with which a target can be accessed (Brantingham and Brantingham 1975). Going beyond what often amounts to crude environmental determinism, Brantingham and Brantingham (1990, 1993) argue that criminal acts usually transpire when the complex backdrop of social and environmental cues corresponds to a learned template of features believed by the offender to be synonymous with

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a good crime location. Criminologists must, therefore, examine how an offender’s motivation, knowledge, and perception of a situation intersect with, and subsequently alter, the temporal and spatial distribution of crime (see Brantingham and Brantingham 1993). The Case for Natural Surveillance Situational crime prevention – while presupposing a rational offender and a non-random distribution of criminal opportunities – builds upon these ideas and involves the strategic manipulation of situationally specific social and environmental characteristics as a means of preventing crime and disorder. If offenders engage in a process of rational decision making before committing crimes, it follows that ensuring adequate opportunities for natural surveillance in a given location is one way of tipping potential offenders’ cost-benefit analysis in favour of less aberrant conduct. Of course, to advocate natural surveillance opportunities is to assume that offenders are likely to re-evaluate the risks associated with their behaviour, given that they might be seen or interrupted while committing the offence (Crowe 2000). The empirical evidence suggests that natural surveillance does indeed have a deterrent effect (Brantingham and Brantingham 1993; Desyllas, Connoly, and Hebbert 2003). For example, at the level of social psychology, McDonald and Gifford (1989) asked forty-four convicted burglars to evaluate a set of photographs depicting potential targets for break and enter. Based on the participants’ evaluations, McDonald and Gifford determined that, when natural surveillance opportunities were poor, offenders deemed the location a suitable target (see also O’Shea 2000). Similar results were obtained in a follow-up study involving police officers and offenders (Ham-Rowbottom, Gifford, and Shaw 1999). Moreover, Garofalo and Clark (1992), in their study of guardianship and residential burglary, found that proxy guardianship, which included informal arrangements among neighbours to watch one another’s homes, diminished the initial risk of victimization. With respect to non-residential properties, Bellamy (1996) discovered that clear lines of sight into and out of convenience stores, in addition to restricted access to areas outside a clerk’s field of vision, helped to reduce the risk of robbery. Finally, when coupled with exit-entry screening strategies, such as theft detection screens or electronic merchandise tags, natural surveillance has been effective in preventing the pilfering of audiovisual materials and books from university libraries (Clarke 1992; Scherdin 1986). With respect to crime and disorder in public places, research indicates that fewer criminal occurrences happen on well-lit streets than on darker streets (Farrington and Welsh 2002; Painter and Farrington 1997, 1999, 2001; Poyner 1991; Poyner and Webb 1997; Shaftoe 1994). Moreover, Poyner (1991) demonstrates that cars parked in surface parking lots are less susceptible to theft or vandalism, as the open nature of the structure permits casual surveillance

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by passersby and other motorists parking their cars (Webb, Brown, and Bennett 1992). And in their study of bus stops in California, Loukaitou-Sideris et al. (2001) found that locations with poor natural surveillance were more likely to be plagued by crime and disorder. The authors conclude that “the presence of physical features that increase the visibility of a site (such as open storefronts, unobstructed windows, and well-lit areas) and the absence of features that can block views (for example, blank walls, thick vegetation) can help ameliorate crime” (259). Natural surveillance thus appears to play an important role in deterring certain kinds of crime and disorder. As such, it seems only logical that we design and manage our social and physical environments in ways that effectively capitalize on the deterrent effects of natural surveillance. Proponents of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED), a proactive crime prevention technique used by urban planners, landscape architects, law enforcement agencies, and security personnel across North America and the United Kingdom, have done just that. CPTED practitioners argue that proper environmental design, when combined with the strategic management of behavioural routines, can help to reduce opportunities for crime and disorder. Such design can partly be achieved by maximizing opportunities for natural surveillance, whether through changes in environmental design (e.g., removing foliage or improving lighting), social management (e.g., rescheduling where or when employees take their lunch breaks or encouraging residents to socialize in different locations or at different times), or a combination of both (see Cozens, Hillier, and Prescott 2001; Crowe 2000; and Newman 1972). The popularity of CPTED has grown; cities across Canada are incorporating it into planning guidelines. In cities in Ontario, for example, city-planning staff members are expected to review planning documents in order to determine their level of CPTED compliance. Part of this process involves ensuring that specific landscapes and/or structures offer adequate opportunities for natural surveillance (Parnaby 2006). The city of Mississauga, which in 2002 was declared the safest large city in Canada,1 has incorporated CPTED into its official city plan. Section 2.11.2.7 of the official city plan, which pertains to the city’s urban design goals and objectives, includes the following reference: “To develop an awareness, understanding and appreciation of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) concepts and principles to reduce the potential for incidence and fear of crime through the application of proper design of the physical environment. The policies to achieve this objective are integrated in various sections of the Plan” (City of Mississauga 1999, 11). Mississauga has been using CPTED since the mid-1990s, when city staff, in partnership with the Peel Regional Police, started to conduct a series of CPTED audits on twenty city-owned buildings following what appeared to be an increase in disorder (City of Mississauga 2000a).

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After a lengthy evaluation process (and after the recommended CPTED modifications were made to each location, including retrofitting to maximize opportunities for natural surveillance), the Mississauga Planning and Development Committee (MPDC) reported a substantial decrease in the number of reported incidents. Shortly thereafter, the city recognized the importance of CPTED in its strategic plan for the year 2000, suggesting that it become a part of the city’s overall approach in building distinct and recognizable communities (City of Mississauga 2000b). As part of Mississauga’s new way of doing business, it was not long before development companies hoping to sign contracts with the city were required to demonstrate familiarity with CPTED principles. However, we must look beyond the immediate, preventative capacity of natural surveillance in order to come to terms with the broader social implications of altering social geography. Part of the process involves coming to terms with how natural surveillance – or being seen – factors into the process of identity formation. In the next section, we consider two populations that are potentially affected by natural surveillance in different ways. Space, Visibility, and Contested Identities Our daily lives are characterized by ongoing transitions from one location to the next, each location offering a different social experience. More often than not, we are aware of the extent to which others are aware of us. Walking down a crowded street, for example, means heightened exposure to the kinds of natural surveillance that a crowded, fast-moving environment affords. Conversely, walking down a residential side street in the middle of the afternoon offers a different experience insofar as one’s presence is less likely to draw attention. Our lives are thus punctuated by particular moments when we are subject to varying degrees of unobtrusive surveillance depending on our spatial and temporal location. Not everyone experiences the opportunities and constraints of social space and visibility in the same way, however. As social geographers argue, all spaces are “bound into various and diverse social and psychic dynamics of subjectivity and power” (Rose, as cited in Ruddick 1996, 135). As such, they are not merely passive mediums within and through which people live and interact. Rather, space influences the complex processes that lead to the ongoing construction of our individual and collective identities: who we are depends partly on where we are, how or whether we can express ourselves, and how others view us and behave toward us when we do so. Being black or female, for example, often entails having to be acutely aware of potential hostilities in certain spaces. Thus, racial identities (Day 2006; Feagin 1991), gendered identities (Gardner 1991), and (depending on the circumstances) even sexual identities (Bell 1995; Corteen 2002; Hubbard 2000) have important spatial dimensions that are defined in relation to

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shifting normative structures that delineate and enforce boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. It follows that the natural surveillance opportunities being incorporated into social geography must be seen as acts of spatial and social transformation. They must be seen not only in terms of their capacity to prevent crime but also in terms of their potential impacts on the identities and experiences of particular individuals or groups – especially the marginalized among us. As Gardner (1991, 260) notes, being a member of a marginalized group “can make the arc of experience in public places radically different, with different highs and lows and different rites and rituals, rather than the seamless experience we often assume it is” (see also Hubbard 2001). We must acknowledge that for some people being the subject of another’s gaze is not always a neutral experience. Natural Surveillance and the Young Black Male In Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community, Anderson (1990) reminds us that in Village-Northton young black males often have a difficult time convincing others of their commitment to civility and law-abiding behaviour because of “the stigma attached to their skin color, age, gender, appearance, and general style of self presentation” (163). He then contends that “most residents ascribe criminality, incivility, toughness, and street smartness to the anonymous Black male, who must work hard to make others trust his common decency” (163). These observations would be equally valid if, instead of Village-Northton, Anderson was referring to current-day Toronto, Vancouver, Miami, or New York City. Young black males are routinely associated with crime and fear of crime across North America, and this association is now entrenched in popular culture (Skogan 1995; Wortley and Tanner 2003). Fear of the young black male has been well documented in the criminological literature (e.g., Skogan 1995). St. John and Heald-Moore (1995), for example, found that among white people the mere presence of a black male stranger evoked more fear than the presence of a white stranger. Similarly, in studies of neighbourhood composition and fear, research has consistently demonstrated that, when the perceived or actual percentage of black residents in a neighbourhood increases, fear of crime among non-black residents often follows suit. That fear usually stems from preconceived notions about the threat of black males in particular. As Chiricos, Hogan, and Gertz (1997) maintain, as the perceived percentage of black residents in a given community increases, fear of crime among white residents increases too, providing that the white residents believe themselves to be at risk of victimization in general. Similar conclusions were reached by Quillian and Pager (2001) in their study of racial stereotypes and perceptions of neighbourhood crime: “The [actual] percentage of a neighbourhood’s Black population, particularly

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the percentage of young Black men, is significantly associated with perceptions of the severity of the neighbourhood’s crime problem” (718). The criminological evidence is relatively clear: white people tend to fear young black males. Why does the literature on young black males matter in the context of the present chapter? Given that people rarely witness a crime in progress, natural surveillance often involves being on the lookout for undesirable people who may be on the verge of doing undesirable things. Thus, people often find themselves employing a kind of incongruity procedure, to borrow Sacks’ (1972) term, whereby the desirability of others, their belonging or potentially malicious intent, is measured by subtle behavioural and/or appearance-based cues, as opposed to obvious signs of criminal conduct (see also Anderson 1990). Opportunities for natural surveillance do not render the difference between desirable and undesirable populations objectively clear. What renders these differences clear, rather, are the decisions and prejudices of human beings. Not surprisingly, this incongruity procedure – what Parnaby (2006) refers to as a differentiation process – tends to be highly sensitive to the social, political, and cultural tensions that characterize everyday life in a given context. Indeed, some people are deemed more suspicious than others, not because they are engaging in a criminal act per se, but because their behaviour and/or appearance resonates with preconceived typologies of what a potential criminal looks like. These typologies have important age, gender, and racial dimensions that, for some people, stem from personal experience. For the vast majority of people, however, these typologies have their roots in the socially constructed nature of crime and offenders in popular discourse (see Best 1999; Sacco 2005). While it is true that the culture of fear pertaining to the presence of young black males manifests in the fearful avoidance practices of others (e.g., crossing the street or avoiding eye contact) (Day 2006; Feagin 1991), it also underlies, or gives rise to, suspicious or fearful gazes as people evaluate, deconstruct, and eventually reconstruct the suspicious person before them in the image of a potential offender. As we continue to incorporate natural surveillance opportunities into the built environment as a means of preventing crime and disorder, we also set (or enhance) the stage for a sensitive social dynamic where fear, surveillance, and moments of identity construction collide. Consider, for example, Davis’ (1992) observations on the tactics used by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As part of Operation Hammer – a massive police campaign to rid the streets of south-central Los Angeles of gang-related crime – more than 1,000 extra-duty police officers and members of the elite tactical squad took to the streets under the direction of Chief Darryl Gates. Their instructions were to pick up and interrogate anyone looking suspicious, instructions

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that ultimately led to the detainment of a disproportional number of young black (and Latino) males. Many of the detainees were released without charge. As Davis points out, the tactics were eerily similar to combat search and destroy missions, where surveillance precedes aggressive intervention. Indeed, one can easily imagine LAPD officers scanning the urban landscape – looking into stores and bus shelters, down alleyways and into backyards, across parking lots and into vehicles – in a desperate bid to identify those who do not belong. In his analysis of surveillance, race, and spatial politics in the contemporary American city, Fiske (1998) offers a slightly different example. The message, however, is the same. Using personal experience to draw attention to the exclusionary effects of natural surveillance, Fiske writes that “a group of African-American students in my university have described how the campus is racially zoned for them by non-technological [natural] surveillance. In Computer Science, in Engineering, and in the School of Business white students routinely subject them to a ‘What are you doing here?’ look that abnormalizes their presence. The look was so intense, so immediately power-laden, that one woman had to put her fingers on either side of her eyes and point them at me in an attempt to make me experience how it felt to be on the receiving end of it” (81) In each instance, opportunities for natural surveillance become the medium through which being black is problematized. Young black males (and likely females) become the subject of a suspicious, penetrating gaze, and the effects of the gaze are far from innocuous. As bell hooks (1992), citing Franz Fanon, argues in Black Looks: Race and Representation, “the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. This ‘look,’ from – so to speak – the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire” (116). Therefore, it is useful to understand space as an active medium in which marginalized identities are either confirmed or challenged (Ruddick 1996, 135). A suspicious gaze across a parking lot is just one of many moments when a person’s existence is either validated or called subtly, but effectively, into question. As such, it should not surprise us that “men’s own racial identities are shaped by their attempts to deny, rationalize, accommodate, and resist being feared by strangers in public space” (Day 2006, 575). Moreover, it is an experience that non-black citizens often fail to understand. As Day suggests, “many white people find it hard to see that the construction of whiteness allows white people to not be feared in public spaces – to move freely, to interact easily with strangers, to escape habitual surveillance” (577). Of course, the dynamic outlined above is not exclusive to young black males. Given the anxiety about terrorism in North America and the United

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Kingdom, a similar dynamic is likely to unfold when an individual’s behavioural and/or appearance-based cues resonate with contemporary constructions of a terrorist (Manning 2006). Indeed, in July 2005, British authorities shot and killed twenty-seven-year-old Jean Charles de Menezes on a subway train. Thought to be a suicide bomber, Menezes, a Brazilian-born electrician, allegedly ignored police instructions and ran into a subway train, where he was shot eight times.2 The death of Menezes, an innocent victim of Britain’s shoot-to-kill policy, raises important questions not only about the role of racial profiling in the post-9/11 era but also about the facilitative role of design-based natural surveillance. Public and private spaces are being designed to maximize opportunities for natural surveillance (Smith and Cornish 2006). Although perhaps logical from a crime prevention point of view, such measures must be understood in terms of their broader social, political, and cultural implications. Certain people are more likely to be watched than others, and for some being the object of a suspicious gaze is not a meaningless experience. As we have suggested, being the object of such scrutiny can be an intensely discriminating moment during which existing stereotypes render the schism between dominant and marginal identities painfully clear (White and Sutton 1995). Moreover, we would argue that enhanced opportunities for natural surveillance might actually perpetuate the marginalization of young black males vis-à-vis the criminal justice system. Natural Surveillance and the Homeless In cities across North America, the homeless are constantly on the move, seeking the bare necessities of life while simultaneously fending off public scorn (Lankenau 1999; Rokach 2005). In some ways, homeless people have been represented as antithetical to contemporary citizenship: their dishevelled appearance, chronic unemployment, and use of public space challenge prevailing norms of self-presentation, self-sufficiency, thrift, and spatial order. They are constructed as social deviants, and as such their presence constantly undermines the highly manicured sense of “safe diversity” (Ruddick 2002, 61): a civic vision that emerges hand-in-hand with a desire to create clean, safe, and unfettered areas for consumerism (Fitzpatrick and LaGory 2000). The desire for cleanliness and safety pushes the homeless farther into the deep recesses of urban space, where they are unseen and no longer challenge the sanctity of private property – even if that property is a deserted alleyway, an empty parking lot, or an abandoned building. From semi-circular or partitioned park benches to automated sprinklers in city parks, urban geography is being carved up, designed, and managed in ways that are increasingly hostile to the needs of this already marginalized population (Davis 1992; Parnaby 2003). Citizens without a permanent home must, therefore,

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engage in tactical appropriations of urban space, judiciously using marginal areas (those outside the public’s purview, such as alleyways) and prime areas (those used by and visible to the public, such as sidewalks and public parks) to meet their basic needs (Ruddick 2002). The routing of the homeless from marginal spaces also results from the use of situational crime prevention strategies to counter other forms of crime and disorder. Because homeless people frequently occupy marginal spaces that are also used for drug dealing, drug use, and vandalism, the tactics adopted to prevent such crimes inevitably impact on this population. Why? One reason is that homeless people and would-be offenders (the housed and the unhoused) seek to capitalize on the absence of natural surveillance: homeless people do so as a means of escaping the public’s gaze, while securing a precarious sense of safety, and would-be offenders do so as a means of avoiding detection. The absence of capable guardianship (Cohen and Felson 1979) in some secluded alleyways, recessed doorways, bus stops, or parking garages thus provides the exact opportunity structure sought by both populations, though generally for different reasons. From a criminological standpoint, reducing crime and disorder in marginal areas might alter environmental and/or social characteristics. Restricting access to out-of-sight areas altogether, or making those areas slightly more visible, is a possible option that depends on the location, the nature of the crime and/or disorder, and the broader social, political, and economic context. For example, a report written by the London Metropolitan Police, The Recessed Pest: Reducing Crime Opportunity in Recessed Doorways (Beckford 2002), identifies the kinds of disorder that typically unfold in urban, recessed doorways: For most of us living and working in inner cities our experience of them [recessed doorways] will also conjure up images of rough sleepers, street drinkers, drug users and prostitutes and a myriad of often quite disgusting deposits such as used hypodermic syringes and bodily wastes ... In the main though they can generate fear simply because they are places that cannot be looked into. Most would agree that the pedestrian walking along a street at night should be able to clearly see the way ahead and recessed doorways and other such obstructions to vision, such as bus shelter advertising panels, can all add up to a street that scares (3; emphasis added).

Natural surveillance renders recessed doorways particularly attractive to those selling and/or using drugs as well as to rough sleepers and street drinkers who are looking to avoid public scrutiny. The report offers several designbased solutions, including completely removing certain recessed doorways, reducing the depth of the recess to a minimum, and installing shutters or

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gates to restrict access after hours (Beckford 2002). These solutions aim to eliminate or minimize the appeal of an out-of-sight location for rough sleepers, street drinkers, drug users, and prostitutes. Similarly, homeless people spend time in subway stations, bus terminals, and other transit facilities. These locations are especially appealing because they offer certain amenities (e.g., toilets and sinks), opportunities to make money (e.g., panhandling), and shelter from the elements (Smith and Cornish 2006). At the same time, however, transit facilities offer homeless people an opportunity to avoid surveillance while they sleep, eat, and organize their belongings. These activities are common at night when traffic volume is low and when bathrooms, marginal hallways, empty train cars, and other nooks and crannies offer fleeting moments of privacy. Like recessed doorways and other above-ground locations lacking in natural surveillance, however, transit facilities also attract offenders. Unsurprisingly, proponents of situational crime prevention advocate changing the ways in which certain facilities are operated and/or designed as a means of routing undesirable people. According to Smith and Cornish (2006), such changes include improved guardianship (encouraging passengers and staff to monitor one another’s security), improved natural surveillance (better lighting and good lines of sight), and controlled access (reducing people’s ability to access out–of-sight areas). Whatever strategy is ultimately adopted, the transit environment and its temporary, semi-private reprieve are denied to the homeless. The measures cited by Smith and Cornish (2006) might render the physical environment more tolerable and occasionally safer for those who are not homeless, but the implications are severe for homeless people. Secluded, marginal spaces provide venues where stigma management and other forms of self-presentation vis-à-vis the public are less salient (Goffman 1959, 1963; Snow and Anderson 1987): without an audience, homeless people no longer have to perform in ways that are congruent with public expectations regarding appropriate conduct and self-presentation. Indeed, research has shown that homeless people value privacy as much as anybody else (Dordick 1996; Wakin 2005). Just as normals, to use Goffman’s (1963) term, retreat to the privacy of their own homes in order to “be themselves,” homeless people use spaces lacking in natural surveillance for similar reasons, whether it be a recessed doorway, a back alley, or a concealed area in a public transit facility. This is not to suggest that such spaces are safe or even desirable. They are not. Rather, we argue that such spaces offer temporary reprieve – a modicum of privacy – from the public’s gaze (Fitzpatrick and LaGory 2000; Hagan and McCarthy 1998). Eliminating access to marginal spaces because of a lack of natural surveillance and subsequent amenability to crime, disorder, and appropriation inevitably pushes homeless people back into the public fray. According to

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Fitzpatrick and LaGory (2000), such people become “more visible and thus more subject to surveillance and control. In these circumstances, visibility also makes their stigmatized identity more difficult to manage and control. They are constantly reminded by pedestrians’ glances of pity or disapproval, or by the words and gestures of business owners and police, that they are out of place” (139). Like Fanon, we see the connection between membership in a marginalized or stigmatized group, on the one hand, and the consequences of public scrutiny, on the other – a connection that leads to such groups’ need to justify their very presence in public spaces. For the homeless, the gaze of authorities and other citizens constantly reminds them that they do not belong; this chronic state of never belonging becomes physically and psychologically debilitating. Yet options for the homeless are limited: staying in shelters places them in often inflexible, dehumanizing institutions (Dordick 1996); finding out-of-sight spaces that are even more marginal to domiciled populations increases the risks to personal safety (Fitzpatrick and LaGory 2000); and resisting eviction makes probable confrontation with police or property owners. Homeless people’s constant exposure to natural surveillance – their inability to avoid public scrutiny – thwarts their access to privacy: that is, the privacy to wash, to relieve themselves, or to sort through their belongings without becoming a spectacle in the process. Homeless people are thus exposed to the public’s gaze, making stigma management extremely difficult and ongoing marginalization extremely likely. Discussion and Conclusion If, as Garland (2000) suggests, crime now constitutes a normal social fact and a taken-for-granted aspect of North American consciousness, then authorities and governments must seriously consider preventative measures. Moreover, environmental criminology and situational crime prevention must continue to play key roles in the struggle to reduce disorder. We strongly believe that the strategic introduction of natural surveillance opportunities, or the intensification of existing ones, is a viable and potentially effective course of action. But problems arise when crime prevention strategies are conceptually disconnected from their larger structural context. That this disconnection tends to occur is not surprising, given the extent to which scholars of environmental criminology and situational crime prevention have avoided the structural relevance of race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender in favour of a more pragmatic and, at times, fictitiously neutral science of the situation (O’Malley 1992; White and Sutton 1995). As White and Sutton argue, “there nevertheless exists a tendency for some environmental criminologists [including situational crime prevention] to ignore or downplay the contribution of wider sociological perspectives on the relationship between space and power” (1995, 85). As a result, and as we have demonstrated here, situational crime prevention strategies impact on some groups more

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than on others, and they do so in different ways. For the homeless and young black males, the introduction or maximization of natural surveillance opportunities can actually intensify their marginalization over the long term, as widely held stereotypes are confirmed almost systematically. On a strictly theoretical level, environmental criminology and situational crime prevention must reconnect with the traditional sociological concerns of race, gender, ethnicity, and power, especially as each one intersects with the spatial and temporal dimensions of social life. In a more applied sense, and as White and Sutton (1995) have argued, it is crucial that the most alienated and marginalized among us be integrated into the decision-making process when communities begin seeking more immediate, situationally specific crime prevention strategies. Only then will we make comprehensible the peripheral, yet immensely important, effects of our crime prevention strategies. Our quest for safety and security is now rendering our geography increasingly transparent. Coffee shops, bus shelters, pedestrian overpasses, stairways, bank machines, and convenience stores are becoming more amenable to our gaze. Yet it matters whom we look at and how we look at them. We are all familiar with the common perception that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear, but for many individuals and groups the experience of being watched is not innocuous; some of us have good reason to worry about the gaze of others. These moments of surveillance often occur precisely when one’s existence is either validated or indignantly called into question. Thus, while a fleeting glance through a window, across a parking lot, or into the lobby of a building may help to reduce crime and disorder and to encourage perceptions of safety and security, it may also reaffirm and further entrench existing social, political, and economic inequalities. Although rarely experienced by the privileged, the public gaze has become routine among the less fortunate. We must be sensitive to this experience of surveillance as we continue to seek new and effective ways of preventing crime and disorder.

6 Administering the Dead: Mass Death and the Problem of Privacy Joseph Scanlon

When ordinary people die under normal or unremarkable circumstances, their passing attracts little public attention. Small-town newspapers usually publish an obituary based on information supplied by family members, and in larger cities the level of publicity rarely exceeds a classified ad placed by a funeral home and paid for by next-of-kin. In cases of mass death, however, ordinary people become the focal point of extraordinary international attention. It does not matter if mass death results from accident (e.g., the crash of Swissair Flight 111 into the Atlantic Ocean near Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, 1998) or natural disaster (e.g., the Indian Ocean tsunami, 2004). Cases of mass death attract substantial levels of attention from media and disaster management personnel, and they thrust otherwise ordinary people into the public spotlight. The publicity of mass death has several dimensions, not all of which directly affect the deceased. While the identities of the deceased can usually be discerned from physical evidence in situations of normal death, this is not always the case in situations of mass death. The first challenge for agents responsible for administering the dead is to determine potential victims. The determination of potential victims often depends on friends, family members, and associates to report missing persons – particularly in natural disaster events. Once a probable list of victims is established, police and other officials begin searching for information to confirm that listed persons are actually missing and to gather information that will facilitate positive identification. In the process of reporting missing persons, those who have come forward find that their efforts often make them the unexpected targets of intrusive questions. How did you know the person? What kind of life did he or she lead? Who were his or her known associates? In this process of identity reconstruction, or of bringing the deceased back into existence, the police develop detailed files on persons (the dead and their survivors) who may never before have attracted the attention of officials.

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The challenges of administering the dead, and the concomitant implications for publicity, do not stop here. Once a victim has been identified, the remains are released to next-of-kin for burial or cremation. This, too, usually comes with a degree of publicity because media remain interested in those who have died in a mass-death incident. After burial or cremation, public inquests are common,1 and the publicity associated with mass death does not cease with the closure of public inquests. A terrorist attack, for example, encourages journalists to revisit the events of previous attacks, and Hurricane Katrina will inevitably be recalled the next time the coastal United States suffers a similar fate. Journalists and public officials will ask many questions. How did citizens and officials respond? What was the relative amount of destruction? Were lessons learned? And media coverage of current tragedies and disasters usually involves questioning the relatives of those who died. How has this most recent tragedy made you feel? What do you have to say to the families of the victims watching today? In the process of administering the dead, family members and friends of deceased people who lived ordinary lives often become the centre of ongoing official, public, and media attention. In response to the social problem of managing mass death, various surveillance mechanisms come into play that potentially exacerbate a new set of social problems pertaining to privacy of the dead and their relatives. As explained in the introduction to this volume, however, social problems beget social problems in the context of the expanding regime of surveillance. For instance, in Canada, the terms of the Privacy Act prohibited the Department of Foreign Affairs from releasing the names of Canadian victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004) and of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (2001). The provisions of the Privacy Act potentially reduced the amount of public attention granted to the families of the victims, but they also potentially inhibited the process of identifying the dead. The dilemma between respecting privacy and enabling the efficient administration of dead bodies has made some countries (e.g., Australia) reconsider whether restrictions on privacy make sense in the context of mass-death situations. The focus of this chapter is not the techniques for identifying the dead per se but the impacts of mass-death situations on the privacy of family and friends who are most closely associated with the victims. On the one hand, surveillance and social sorting are key dimensions of managing mass death. Particularly in Western cultures, identification of the deceased and, in many cases, their body parts is a priority in mass-death situations. Identification, moreover, is not limited to official channels of sorting the dead: journalists regularly participate in mass-death identification, though in a different way. On the other hand, surveillance and the administration of the dead pose a range of privacy concerns for victims and their friends and families. In the

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process of identifying the dead in mass-death situations, elaborate mechanisms of identification are put in place. This process removes handling the affairs of the dead from the private domain of the family, as is common in normal death, and makes it a public affair – regularly excluding family and friends. In other cases, identification of the dead requires gathering personal information from families and friends. And in all cases, media are involved, for better and for worse. In what follows, I present data primarily from an extensive study of the administration of the dead after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. I also present data acquired as a result of research focusing on Canadian mass-death incidents, particularly the 1998 crash of Swissair Flight 111. I outline a number of issues that arise in the process of administering mass-death situations, and I demonstrate how privacy concerns are intimately related to the many challenges of administering the dead. The relationship between privacy concerns and administering the dead raises many important, multifaceted issues for the study of surveillance practices and social problems. Administering the Dead There is a growing literature on the handling of large numbers of dead. Much of the research is technical, discussing forensic issues involved in identifying the deceased. To some extent, the literature addresses problems of collecting antemortem data. On the whole, however, it does not address issues related to privacy or the ways in which mass-death situations turn the gaze of authorities in the direction of the survivors (Brannon and Morlang 2001; Pretty, Webb, and Sweet 2001a, 2001b). There is also a social science literature on mass death dating back to studies conducted more than twenty-five years ago by faculty and students at the Disaster Research Center, now located at the University of Delaware (Blanshan and Quarantelli 1981; Hershiser 1974; Hershiser and Quarantelli 1979; Quarantelli 1979). This research demonstrates that most plans for dealing with mass-death situations bear little relationship to the reality of mass death. Among other things, these studies show that disaster plans assume mass death will occur at a single site and that it can be controlled. They also assume that no bodies or body parts will be removed until after they are marked and photographed in place. What actually occurs after a mass-death incident is that the bodies of the dead will be collected by survivors and taken to various public buildings (e.g., police stations, schools, temples), where a more official process of accounting takes place. This occurred, for example, in the case of the 1917 Halifax explosion (Scanlon 1988); my ongoing research into the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami supports these findings as well. In most disasters, emergency personnel (e.g., firefighters, police officers, EMS technicians) are not responsible for the recovery of bodies. Recovery

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operations are commonly carried out by survivors and bystanders. Following the 1917 Halifax explosion, it was survivors who brought the bodies of the dead to Chebucto School (Scanlon 1988). Following the 1995 earthquakes in Kobe, Japan, citizens brought the dead to the police stations, temples, schools, gymnasiums, and health and community centres (Nishimura 1997). Local fishermen began the process of picking up human remains after Swiss­ air Flight 111 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. And survivors picked up the bodies of the dead and brought them to Buddhist temples in Thailand and mosques in Sri Lanka after the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. Because initial recovery and movement of the dead are unofficial and informal, there are rarely any records of where a body has come from and nothing with the body to assist in its identification. Even if bodily remains are collected by emergency personnel during a mass-death situation, remains are often too numerous to easily identify. After a mass-death incident has occurred, identifying the dead is a long and difficult process, since those who are responsible for dealing with the bodies will have very little information to go on. Nevertheless, elaborate efforts to identify the dead, even if only parts of bodies can be recovered, persist in mass-death situations. Despite the availability of only one relatively intact body following Swissair Flight 111, police and forensic scientists managed to identify a body part for everyone believed to have been on board. They even found matching bodies for twins because of the presence of identical DNA. The goal of identification makes body handling after disasters unique. Identification is not a major obstacle in normal death situations (Blanshan 1977). Researchers from Carleton University, Ottawa, have described the identification process in detail. After the crash of an Arrow aircraft in Gander, Newfoundland, which carried US soldiers from the 101st Airborne Regiment, bodies were moved to a morgue at an unused hangar at Gander airport, where identification teams from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) examined each body for identifying characteristics (e.g., military-issued dog tags). Bodies and body parts were subsequently moved in individual carrying cases, each covered with an American flag, to the US military morgue at Dover, Delaware, where each body was photographed and filmed, x-rays were taken, dental work was examined, attempts were made to get fingerprints, and body tissue was collected for forensic analysis. The forensic work at Dover involved US federal law enforcement, the RCMP (who monitored what happened), pathologists, x-ray technicians, photographers, and others who were responsible for documenting the dead. During this process, the bereaved and those who normally deal with death, such as funeral professionals, are shut out (Pine 1974). This means that no one pays attention to the concerns of the bereaved, who are forced to wait without adequate explanation about what is happening and why it

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is taking so long (Eyre 1998). People who process bodies are often reluctant to release them until they are absolutely sure about identification: they do not want to risk an error. Families, however, want information released as soon as possible, especially if they belong to religions that call for quick burial.2 Media Coverage in Mass-Death Situations International media agencies devote considerable attention to celebrities when they die (tragically or otherwise). From John F. Kennedy to the Princess of Wales, ongoing news coverage, analysis, and speculation are common. Similar trends of exhaustive, ongoing media attention follow mass-death situations. For instance, more than 200 journalists from Canada, Denmark, England, France, Ireland, Japan, Norway, Scotland, and Sweden showed up in Jonesboro, Arkansas, after a teacher and four girls were shot at an elementary school in 1998. There were 325 media personnel in the isolated community of Gander, Newfoundland, in 1985 after the crash of the Arrow aircraft carrying military personnel killed all those on board. ABC Television even flew in a satellite unit from England. Roughly 1,000 media showed up overnight at the small Scottish community of Lockerbie after the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988. And consider the extensive live television coverage of the shootings at Columbine High School and Montreal’s Dawson College. One of the first things media personnel search for is a list of the dead. They do so to locate and interview next-of-kin and others who knew the victims. They often go to great lengths to obtain lists of the dead. When the Herald of Free Enterprise sank at Zeebrugge, for instance, the media descended upon Kent Constabulary and tried to get the names of the dead: “Resentment was frequently expressed by journalists, many of whom represented local papers and wished to find a local angle and interview someone from their area” (Kent County Constabulary 1987). The search for a “local angle” reflects the fact that the media wish to find a way to link mass-death incidents to their own communities. When the ferry Estonia sank en route from Tallinn, Estonia, to Stockholm, Sweden, on 28 September 1994, 913 of the 1,049 passengers died. While most of the victims were Estonian or Swedish nationals, the Ostlandets Blad, the daily newspaper in Ski (south of Oslo) tracked down the ex-wife of one victim who came from Ski; journalists interviewed her and ran a front-page story based on the interview. The next day a second frontpage story based on an interview with a friend of the victim appeared. Because the victim, Matti Sormul, had been a local businessman, the paper had his photo on file. An incident after the crash of Pan Am Flight 103 reveals how quickly a person’s (and his or her family’s) privacy concerns can be subverted by public media attention. The day of the crash, a couple from Syracuse were

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heading to New York City to pick up their daughter, who was returning from a university-sponsored trip to Europe. At the airport, they noticed dozens of reporters, photographers, and television crews. The woman asked someone what was going on. He told her a Pan American flight had crashed. She asked what the flight number was. He informed her that it was 103. Realizing that her daughter was dead, she collapsed onto the floor, screaming, “Not my baby, not my baby” (cited in Deppa et al. 1994, 29). When the couple left the airport, the woman noticed a copy of the Daily News in a taxi. On the front page was a photograph showing her lying on the floor of the airport. “I just couldn’t believe it. I was the news of the day” (33). Media coverage of mass- and single-death situations can pose serious implications not only for the privacy of victims’ family members but also for human dignity and decency. But when the Broadcast Standards Council in the United Kingdom interviewed 210 victims of violence or disaster (including fifty-four who had been interviewed by reporters), it found that threequarters of the interviewees were not offended by news coverage; this opinion was especially pronounced among those involved in a disaster (Shearer 1991). Survivors explained how they were prepared to be interviewed if the stories had a purpose: that is, if the stories “exposed the human frailties and negligences [sic] that had contributed to major disasters and so help to minimize the danger of such disasters happening again” (Shearer 1991, 5). Indeed, acceptance of media coverage is indicated by the fact that the woman who learned of her daughter’s death at the airport later agreed to speak to reporters: I think it was the way the media approached me on the phone ... They were not pushy. They asked permission ... They knew it was a difficult time and they would accept the fact if I chose not to ... And soon after that there was some information that people had had a warning about this, that Pan Am had received notification. At that point, if these things were true, I had a sense of anger that I felt that needed to be acknowledged. So I think that was another factor that influenced my decision. I think you want other people wakened to the truth. (Cited in Deppa et al. 1994, 33-34)

Learning Who Has Died Media outlets can play an important and a demeaning role in the process of administering mass death. Another important, and often conflict-ridden dimension, is learning or authenticating who has died. When Swissair Flight 111 crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia, obtaining a list of the dead was not difficult: the airline had an accurate record of the passengers and crew. Obtaining a list of the dead was also relatively straightforward in the case of the Arrow crash involving members of the 101st Airborne. The task of identifying the dead was more complicated, however, when the Herald of

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Free Enterprise overturned in Zeebrugge harbour in 1987. At the time of the accident, ferries did not maintain passenger lists, so authorities had to wait for people to call and report missing persons. Since most passengers were British, most calls came to Kent Constabulary. The numbers were overwhelming. Kent handled 1.5 million calls from people concerned that someone they knew might be among the victims. While most calls were not about persons actually on the ferry, many were about persons who could have been on board. When they finished sorting out the calls, Kent police found that 3,679 callers had supplied sufficient information to identify the 194 bodies (Kent County Constabulary 1987). In 1992, after an El Al cargo plane crashed into an apartment in Amsterdam, there were even greater difficulties sorting out the dead. The difficulties stemmed from the fact that the number of persons who said they had lost their homes was far greater than authorities had calculated. That is, establishing a clear understanding of the dead came into conflict with people trying to profit from the accident – personally and financially. There are various explanations for the extreme size of the list of missing persons ... One creditor even saw it as a way of obtaining the address of someone who owed her money ... Added to this, those reported missing came from dozens of different nationalities ... There were multiple spellings of the same name ... so one particular person might be listed twice or more. Many names were spelled phonetically, and many foreigners were known by a nickname or alias. Particularly in the case of Africans, it transpired that different generations used different names for the same person. (Rosenthal et al. 1994, 54).

The problems expanded when the government offered amnesty to illegal immigrants who reported that they had been in the building and survived. In the wake of a destructive mass-death incident (e.g., a terrorist attack or natural disaster), the only way to determine who is missing and possibly dead is to ask the public to report missing persons. This approach means opening a call centre and recording the information provided by people who phone in. In domestic incidents, responsibility for administering call centres usually falls to the police. In an international incident, such as the 2004 tsunami, foreign ministries normally run satellite call centres. The problem is that thousands of persons are reported missing, but very few turn out to be victims. Yet creating a list of missing persons is crucial if the dead are to be identified. There is no point in examining bodies and noting postmortem information unless there is antemortem information about those who are missing and presumed dead. Identification is possible only when the two lists are compared. And antemortem data can be gathered effectively only when it is known who can reasonably be assumed to be dead.

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While reports to call centres are initiated by callers who are concerned about friends and family members, people who call are often questioned about the person whom they have reported missing. The questions that callers are asked can become quite intrusive. At first, the call takers focus on the name of the caller and the name of the person reported missing. But they also ask where the person reported missing was staying, whom he or she was with, and when the caller last had contact with the person. The caller will be asked what credit cards the missing person carried and whether he or she has dual citizenship. The caller will also be asked about travel plans. And that is just the start: if it appears that the person is a genuine victim, then the questions become more and more intrusive. Before detailed personal information about victims can be acquired, it is necessary to review names on potential victims’ lists to determine which individuals are likely to be victims and which are not. Some screening is fairly easy. In the immediate aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, one woman told the Israeli foreign ministry that her daughter was in Goa, which was not on the side of India directly affected by the tsunami. But many calls are much less clear and require follow-up. One problem is that people who contact call centres and hotlines rarely phone back when they discover that the person whom they reported missing is safe. A second problem is that, in some cases, contact information about callers is not recorded accurately. This was a major problem in New York City after the 11 September 2001 attacks. Many police precincts did not take down contact information for callers reporting missing persons, making it extremely difficult to gather further information. A third problem is that many countries, including Canada, have statutes prohibiting the release of information about individuals. Such countries cannot release the names of those reported missing; rather, they must go through the tedious process of following up on every call. By contrast, in Denmark, where there are no such statutory restrictions, the list of missing persons can be made public. Following 9/11, it took less than twenty-four hours for two-thirds of the names on the Danish list to be eliminated. In most cases, listed persons were unaware that they had even been reported missing and called in themselves. Whether or not lists are made public, the media quickly learn about the victims and start to chase after them. This is especially true if next-of-kin go to the place where mass death has occurred. After Swissair Flight 111, nextof-kin were flown by Swissair to Halifax and billeted in the Lord Nelson Hotel. Knowledge about Swissair’s crisis response was released to the media, which were staked out across the street from the hotel and at Peggy’s Cove, the nearest spot to the crash site (Brunhuber 1998). In the case of the tsunami, some next-of-kin, who had been sharing a holiday with friends and family and were thus also survivors, were already in Thailand and Sri Lanka.

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In the aftermath of experiencing tragedy and destruction firsthand, they were forced to pore through photographs of victims that had been posted on bulletin boards and websites and in some cases were permitted to wander up and down the rows of bodies. And while all this was going on, the media were present: even the initial medical examinations were conducted in plain view of journalists and other passersby. Antemortem Information When it becomes clear that a person qualifies as a victim of mass death, the police begin to gather antemortem information. This is literally a process of reconstructing identification – bringing into existence a person’s identity on the basis of personal characteristics that can be verified by an assemblage of experts. Today most police forces use the Interpol Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) yellow form. It is used to record information that might assist in the process of identification, such as the presence of birthmarks or surgical scars. The form is used to record what the missing person was wearing, including specific details such as an inscription on a watch; to record information about who might have information about the victim’s DNA, such as his or her physician or dentist; and to record other personal information, such as whether the missing person has ever been fingerprinted, tattooed, completed military service, or had surgery (all related to locating other records). Police visit the homes of the victims to try to find something that only the missing person had touched in the hope of obtaining fingerprints. In this process, the police will open a locked diary or try to find a toy used by a missing child. They also look for personal items such as a toothbrush or comb – any instrument or tool that might assist them in obtaining DNA. They check police records, visit hospitals, and advertise in dental journals in case the person saw a dentist whom the family did not know about. After the Indian Ocean tsunami, a police officer in Sweden learned that a child had attended pre-kindergarten; he retrieved the child’s prints from a fingerpainting the children had done. Before long, the police have compiled an extensive file on someone who never previously came to their attention. Collecting antemortem data is easier in some countries than in others. In Israel, every person who is not Orthodox serves in the military, making fingerprints, medical records, x-rays, dental records, and DNA available for every missing person after a suicide bombing, an airline crash, or an incident such as the tsunami. Sweden has taken a blood sample from the heel of every child born during the past three decades. Because so many Swedes were believed to be victims of the tsunami, the government ordered samples to be made available to police to facilitate retrieval of victim DNA. In some countries, however, the collection of antemortem data is more difficult. In the case of the tsunami, police assigned to gather this information were

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officers who normally deal with relatives of crime victims whose job it is to try to explain police and court procedures and to assure survivors that everything is being done in the name of justice. The job of disaster victim identification is very different. It is an investigative role, and it is intrusive. Some officers following the crash of Swissair Flight 111 were reluctant to probe victims’ families and had to be sent back for more information. Unlike the police in other countries, the Canadians were experienced: antemortem collection was coordinated by RCMP officers in Vancouver who have been working to identify the remains of prostitutes, victims of what has become known as the pig farm murders. Pine (1974) argues that collection processes based on the determination that the dead will be identified lead to a massive, though mutually agreed on, invasion of privacy. He says that a funeral director may learn a great deal about the deceased after a normal death: “An important part of his responsibility is maintaining the guardianship of such secrets. For instance, there may be secret information about illegitimate children ... or there may be hidden or embarrassing traits such as women with tattoos or bald men who wear wigs” (284). In times of disaster or catastrophe, he argues, guardianship of these secrets assumes pronounced importance: “The disaster experts continually learned of secrets about the dead ... Such guilty knowledge was acquired from many sources and about many people. The chance to gain such knowledge increased considerably because each surviving family offered every imaginable bit of useful (or what they considered useful) information to assist in identification. They seemed to feel obligated to tell, but it was apparent they hated to be in this situation which forced them to reveal such secrets” (284). It is certainly true that police who collect the data, officials who translate it, clerks who enter it into a computer, and people who try to find matches between pre- and postdeath data all become very familiar with the victims and that what they learn would never be shared with strangers after a normal death. It is also true that police may make frequent visits to the home of someone whose remains have not been identified in an effort to find something that might be of value. The gathering of antemortem data involves a massive invasion of privacy that would normally not be tolerated in the case of a living person. There is also no doubt that the data acquired may be widely shared: in the case of the tsunami, all the foreign countries involved worked together. Postmortem Data As police were collecting antemortem data about those missing and believed dead in Thailand and Sri Lanka following the tsunami, foreign police and forensic scientists were collecting postmortem data from the bodies. They

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recorded all information (e.g., clothing, jewellery, tattoos, etc.), but they focused on dental records, fingerprints, and other sources of DNA. Initially, they worked in rudimentary conditions, but eventually a Norwegian firm, Normeca, assembled a state-of-the-art morgue in Phuket, Thailand, and autopsies were done in a hospital morgue in Colombo, Sri Lanka. In both countries, detailed files were compiled, containing information that normally would not be recorded anywhere or would only be held by someone’s personal physician. At all locations, identification procedures followed roughly the same basic steps. A body was brought from the containers and x-rayed. Police officers examined clothing and jewellery. Clothing was removed, and visible marks were noted (e.g., tattoos and birthmarks). Next, bodies were sent to pathologists and odontologists (forensic dentists). Teeth were extracted for DNA. Finally, bodies were cleaned and returned to body bags. Scribes followed bodies and recorded everything on the Interpol DVI form. Scribes would then take bodies to the Thai Tsunami Victim Identification – Information Management Centre (TTVI-IMC) to enter information on them into two computer databases: the French version of the Automated Fingerprint Information System (AFIS) for fingerprints and DVI System International, a system developed by the Danish firm Plass Data, for all other information. DNA samples were shipped to a laboratory in China, which had offered to process them without charge. As antemortem data arrived in Thailand, they were entered into the same two databases, and the searches for potential matches began. After the tsunami, the searches were done on computers. When possible matches were found (i.e., the systems would generate a number of possibilities), they were then given to fingerprint specialists and odontologists. If they confirmed a match, then the file was sent to a review committee. Only after the identification procedures were reviewed and confirmed and approved by the host countries were embassies notified that a body was ready for release to nextof-kin. Popular television shows such as CSI and Law and Order suggest that the process of matching fingerprints is relatively quick and easy. This is not necessarily true in the case of single deaths, and it is a particularly problematic presumption in the context of mass-death situations. Researchers who chronicled the process of identifying the dead following the 2004 tsunami learned that saltwater exposure had practically erased the epidermis or outer skin. Some prints were then taken from the second layer or dermis, but they proved to be smaller and less reliable. Some prints were less than satisfactory because ink was used instead of powder and sticky paper. There were also problems obtaining antemortem fingerprints. Sometimes police would visit a home several times before obtaining a workable print of the missing person.

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In the case of dental records, the main problems were with antemortem data. While dental records from Scandinavia (where early dental care is free) were usually excellent, other dental records were less satisfactory. Since many dentists chart only their own work and do not maintain records of work done by previous dentists, it was extremely difficult to match antemortem and postmortem dental charts. The major problems in this mass-death case were related to DNA. There are three types of DNA – reference, surrogate, and familial. Reference DNA is from the person’s own blood, from a sample taken before death. Surrogate DNA is from a sample acquired from something the person used before death, such as a toothbrush. Familial DNA is acquired from blood retrieved from a member of the dead person’s family. Reference DNA is ideal. In the case of Swissair Flight 111, however, it was rarely available. Surrogate DNA proved harder to get because often several persons from the same family were killed, a parent and child or parents and a child or two siblings. It was hard to determine who had used what in a home. Familial DNA also proved a problem because tests sometimes showed that the “father” was not actually the biological parent of the dead child. Police, presumably out of respect to the dead, did not mention this to the families. It is likely that the mother was aware of the problem, but the father’s knowledge of the situation would never be known. It was an issue that would never have arisen except for the tsunami; after normal death, no one would have reason to question paternity. Once again, mass death led to the discovery of information that otherwise would have remained private. Problems after Release of the Body Even after antemortem and postmortem data were matched after the 2004 tsunami, bodies had to be released to the embassy concerned, and arrangements had to be made for cremation or burial in Thailand or Sri Lanka (or shipment home). If bodies remained in Asia, nothing further was done. If they were shipped to Europe, they were usually subjected to further checks. In Israel, for example, all returning bodies were examined by a forensic laboratory. In England, autopsies were performed by the staff of the West London coroner, who has jurisdiction over any bodies arriving at Heathrow Airport. The various checks often led to complications. For example, the Swedish government decided it would hold a formal ceremony each time a tsunami victim was returned. Ordinary citizens who had died in the tsunami were greeted as if they had been distinguished citizens. The first welcome ceremony proved embarrassing when, after it finished, it was determined that the body was the wrong sex. In England, a similar dilemma arose when checks showed that the first two bodies to arrive had been wrongly identified.

Administering the Dead

In Thailand, because all the bodies had been thrown together, it was not possible to predict when someone might be identified. That depended on when both antemortem and postmortem data were entered into AFIS and DVI System International. The speed at which antemortem data were available was a function of the efficiency of the police collecting them. But the speed at which postmortem data were available was the luck of the draw. If a body happened to get into the system earlier, it was identified earlier. Things were somewhat different in Sri Lanka because many bodies had been buried and then exhumed: police had a pretty good idea of whose body they were examining. Overall, the situation was, to say the least, tortuous for the relatives of the victims: they had no idea when or if their relative(s) would be identified. It was possible that someone else had incorrectly identified the body, received permission to take it away, and had it cremated. Even after someone has been identified, the problems for next-of-kin are not over. After the crash of Swissair Flight 111, searchers recovered only human debris, which, bit by bit, was used to extract tissue so that DNA could be established and compared with DNA data obtained from the relatives of the dead. Since it was not possible to determine in advance whether a bone fragment, for example, belonged to someone who had already been identified, victims were identified several times from different body parts. To allow next-of-kin some say in this process, the Canadian authorities offered several options: relatives could have each body part sent to them when identified, could wait until the process was over and receive all the identified parts, or could accept the first part identified and ask that they be told nothing more. They were also told that, once every victim had been identified, the remaining body parts would be buried in a mass grave. Later, when the ocean bottom was scoured and most human debris recovered, it was buried as well, although the relatives were not notified of that discovery. In Thailand and Sri Lanka, most bodies were relatively intact because the victims had died from drowning, thus making collection of postmortem data comparatively easy. In Thailand, however, some of the people working on the bodies did things that others considered inappropriate. This is not uncommon. For example, after a pleasure boat, the Marchioness, sank in the Thames with significant loss of life, those handling the bodies cut off the hands of the dead. They took the hands to the lab and did work on them. The families were not told about this and were told not to open the coffins. It came out later that all the corpses had their hands cut off, and there was a really strong reaction. Cutting off hands and lower jaws is not uncommon in some autopsies, especially in murder cases. The practice might have been useful in some cases after the sinking of the Marchioness but certainly not in all. It was not,

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in the opinion of most forensic scientists, relevant or necessary in Thailand, where the bodies were intact. It was considered entirely unprofessional by some forensic scientists from some countries, and when it was noticed it led to a major protest. Eventually, conflict led to some of the participants being instructed to cease and desist. But the impact of what they had done showed up later. When one body showed up in Eire, the coroner refused to release it to the family. It had been identified through dental records, but the lower jaw was missing, making it nearly impossible to confirm the identification. Normally, when someone dies outside his or her own country, diplomatic personnel will assist with the paperwork involved in getting the body released either for local burial or cremation or for shipment home. While diplomatic personnel may, in rare cases, arrange a loan to cover shipment costs, they will not cover the costs outright. Shipping bodies is expensive since they must be placed in specially designed carrying cases so that no leakage will occur. In the wake of the tsunami, most foreign governments quickly agreed that they would cover the costs of shipment to the place where the person had lived. Conclusion While normal death is a fairly private affair, mass death is very different. Instead of being informed by the authorities that someone has died, those who knew the dead initiate the process by reporting a missing person. If it appears that the report is legitimate, they are asked to provide detailed personal information to aid identification. This process often means a number of phone calls and visits from police. At minimum, this is a lengthy, intrusive process. Whether the names are publicized or not, extensive files are compiled on someone who may never before have been of interest to the police. Once it has been determined that someone is a victim of mass death, the slow process of trying to match antemortem and postmortem data begins. This process is not too difficult when there are a few dozen dead, or even a few hundred dead, and when there is a list of those who were killed. It is extremely difficult when there are thousands of bodies involved and no one is certain about their identities. For next-of-kin, this period is especially stressful for two reasons. First, no one can say when someone’s body might be identified. Second, it is not unusual for police to return for further information. The relatives of the victims are not only exposed to official informationand data-gathering techniques, but they also become media targets. Unlike normal individual death, mass death is news. Persons who never before have been of interest to the media are now front-page news, and they may remain so for weeks, months, or years. Thus, the awareness that a loved one may be among those killed in a mass-death incident is only a first step on what can often be a long and tortuous public journey.

Administering the Dead

A mass-death incident can turn ordinary people into celebrities, generating a massive hunt for information about people that is compiled in police files, shared with other police forces and forensic scientists, and increasingly stored in and transmitted through electronic databases. Ordinary persons who are involved in a mass-death situation become the subjects of a massive amount of attention, and the same level of attention is focused on those who were close to them. Mass-death incidents result in an enormous invasion of privacy, an invasion that can perhaps not be avoided if the victims are to be identified. As I have explained, a tension exists between privacy concerns and the administration of the dead in instances of mass death. Administering the dead through a myriad of surveillance practices is a fluid, multifaceted, and unpredictable process. In the process of administering the mass dead, victims and their families are often adversely affected by bureaucratic rigidity, differences in international customs, intrusive questioning by authorities and journalists, disaster protocols, practical constraints, and relentless uncertainties. Surveillance is at once a necessary and a problematic component of administering mass death. It is necessary in order to ultimately identify victims of mass death and bring some degree of closure to their families. It is problematic because the information-gathering and data-sharing process opens a variety of concerns pertaining to upholding personal privacy and respect for victims of mass death and their families.

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7 Identity Theft and the Construction of Creditable Subjects Sheryl N. Hamilton

We don’t have to stray into science fiction to find a control mechanism that can fix the position of any element at any given moment – an animal in a game reserve, a man in business (electronic tagging). Felix Guattari has imagined a town where anyone can leave their flat, their street, their neighborhood, using their (dividual) electronic card that opens this or that barrier, but the card may also be rejected on a particular day, or between certain times of day; it doesn’t depend on the barrier but on the computer that is making sure everyone is in a permissible place, and effecting a universal modulation.

– Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations (1995, 181-82)

A few years ago two individuals rented a post office box in the city of Ottawa. They took out advertisements asking anyone who wanted to make $70,000 per year to submit a résumé to companies such as Logitistic Telecom, IDCOR, Pastel Media, and Metromedia. People who submitted their résumés were mailed a letter informing them that they were suitable candidates. Applicants were asked to complete an application form, providing their date of birth, driver’s licence number, social insurance number, and home address. The two con artists even demanded a twenty-dollar processing fee. The information collected was used fraudulently to obtain credit cards from banks and department stores, social insurance cards, and driver’s licences. In March 2006, acting on a tip from Canada Post security, the police arrested the two individuals, who await prosecution for conspiracy to commit fraud. The scam operated for four years and netted its perpetrators over $500,000. To date, no money has been recovered, and more than 100 people have already been contacted by the police – all victims of the crime of identity theft.

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Identity theft is essentially an umbrella term that refers to attempts by criminals to impersonate their victims. The solicitor general of Canada defines identity theft as crimes in which someone wrongfully obtains and uses another person’s personal data in some way that involves fraud or deception, typically for economic gain (Bi-National Working Group 2004). Victims are most often selected on the basis of good credit ratings, and their profiles are typically used in order to obtain access to credit and money, as well as to purchase goods and services, under the assumed identity. The impersonation of identity is achieved as a result of the theft, materially or digitally, of personal identification information. Victims are usually unaware of the fact that someone has been acquiring mortgages, cell phones, and credit cards in their names – that is, until they apply for a job or credit extension themselves or until bill collectors come calling. While the direct financial losses from fraudulently obtained funds, goods, and services are borne by companies, victims spend considerable time and energy trying to clear their credit records and restore their good names. The crime is obviously made possible by ubiquitous personal information holdings due to consumer credit and new information technology. In other words, identity theft is a crime possible only in a well-established culture of surveillance. I begin this chapter by outlining the types and prevalence of identity theft in North America. I then briefly examine government responses to identity theft to show how governments have been generally ineffective and how they invoke the neoliberal strategy of making the individual responsible for managing risk. While other scholars have been concerned to map out the top-down power dynamics produced in the rush by states and the private sector to collect personal information, they have been less attentive to the possibilities that information- and data-gathering practices – when badly managed – create opportunities for individuals to rewrite the conditions of the so-called surveillance society. In a twisted form of resistance to ubiquitous surveillance practices that span society, with their attendant datagathering regimes, identity thieves act as the ghosts in the machine. Their use of data­veillance for personal gain results in both intended and unintended consequences. I therefore examine how we might conceptualize identity theft and some of its unintended, but nonetheless important, consequences. First, I address some of the theoretical aspects of identity theft, arguing that few scholars have recognized the new form of subjectivity produced in the same conjuncture of social conditions that enables identity theft. Most scholars argue that, in surveillance-oriented societies, personal identities remain intact, and data doubles or virtual footprints are surveilled, produced, and controlled. By contrast, I argue that a more profound change is transpiring, whereby identity theft forces us to confront the fact that we

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are now creditable subjects. Our embodied offline, non-digital identities are becoming secondary to our recognition as social subjects. Identity Theft in Canada For several years, media, analysts, and law enforcement officials alike have dubbed identity theft as the fastest growing crime in North America. In 2002, the PhoneBusters National Call Centre, an identity-theft clearing-house in Canada, received 7,629 identity theft complaints totalling losses of more than $8.5 million. These numbers increased almost 100 percent in 2003 and totalled $21.85 million in losses. Numbers have been decreasing slightly since 2003 but are still significant.1 Most complaints result from credit card theft or false applications for credit cards.2 Equifax and Trans Union, the two major Canadian credit bureaus, receive approximately 1,400-1,800 complaints of identity theft per month, and the Canadian Council of Better Business Bureaus estimates that consumers, banks, credit card firms, stores, and other businesses lost $2.5 billion in 2002 as a result of identity theft (Bi-National Working Group 2004).3 The figures are even more startling in the United States. In 2001, 86,212 complaints of identity theft were reported to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and the numbers have skyrocketed ever since, with 3.6 million Americans victimized by identity theft during a six-month period in 2004 (Stern 2006).4 The FTC’s 2003 survey found that, within a one-year period, nearly 10 million Americans became victims of some type of identity theft, resulting in business losses of US$48 million and individual losses of US$5 billion (FTC 2004).5 The real loss to individuals, however, is first in time and energy and second in the sense of violation, loss, and vulnerability that results from one’s public self being sullied without one’s knowledge and beyond one’s control. Individuals typically spend over two years and close to 200 hours to “fix” their identities (Solove 2004, 110).6 Because arrest rates for the crime of identity theft are low, it is often unclear who its perpetrators are (Allison, Schuck, and Lersch 2005; Bi-National Working Group 2004; Siebrasse 2005). The small amount of available data in Canada and the United States suggests that victims tend to be of all ages and from all levels of education.7 What is clear across the research is that, not surprisingly, people who are targeted for identity theft either have good credit ratings or have the potential for good credit ratings (Bi-National Working Group 2004). Types of Identity Theft While we can clearly see a pattern of increased activity in the domain of identity theft, the available private and public sector data obscure the range of fraudulent activity actually included under that umbrella notion.8 To

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better understand its complexity, it is helpful to consider five categories of identity theft: scoffing, diving, skimming, phishing, and database theft. Each type involves different techniques for obtaining personal data and implicates its victims in different ways. The first two types are scoffing and diving. Scoffing begins with a physical theft, typically of mail, from which personal and credit data are gleaned (e.g., bank account statements or credit card and utility bills). A thief might steal a preapproved credit card and fill out the required information, informing the company that the address has changed. The new card is mailed to the address provided by the thief, but the card is issued in the original recipient’s name. The intended recipient never knows.9 Diving also begins with a material means: thieves literally dive into dumpsters to retrieve documents that careless businesses and individuals discard. This practice enables thieves to reconstruct financial profiles. Again, bank statements, utility bills, credit card statements, and so on are the most sought after “trash.” The third type of identity theft is skimming. It is both technologically more sophisticated and better funded than scoffing and diving. Skimmers use card readers, no larger than pagers or personal data assistants, to record the magnetic information stored on a credit or debit card. Using this information, they create counterfeit cards, often in offshore locations. These counterfeits are then used to access victims’ accounts or purchase goods and services in victims’ names. All the while, however, victims retain their original cards. Cards are never stolen, but the personal data on them are. Skimmers have been placed at automated teller machines, disguised to look like part of the bank’s machinery. When combined with the illicit video­ taping of people entering their personal identification numbers (PINs), or merely “shoulder surfing” (i.e., surreptitiously watching someone enter her or his PIN), the scheme is complete.10 The fourth type of identity theft is phishing (also known as spoofing or as pretexting if done through the telephone). Phishing is the most virtual type of identity theft. Its most common form involves sending out a spoof e-mail message designed to appear as though it is an authentic notification from a commercial company or organization. The purpose is to fool recipients into divulging authentication data, which are then used to perpetrate fraud.11 The most common sites for phishing/spoofing are financial institutions and online auctions.12 For instance, in June 2004, the Royal Bank of Canada notified customers that fraudulent e-mails were circulating that requested clients to verify their account and PIN numbers. In a 2005 report, Internet security firm McAfee reported that there are 150 million phishing e-mails sent daily on the Internet (Palmer 2005). Always morphing technologically, the most recent incarnation of phishing has been called “evil twins”; it involves hackers generating a fraudulent WiFi hot spot,

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established near a legitimate public wireless access point, in order to trick users into logging onto the rogue site. The latter is related to “pharming”: hackers exploit vulnerabilities in an organization’s domain name server software and illicitly redirect Internet traffic to targeted websites. Most troubling of all, with the use of spyware, even intended victims wise enough not to enter their personal data on the fake site may pick up a “data mine” from the website that sends information back to the thieves from the subsequent legitimate activity by that user on her or his computer. The fifth and most significant type of identity theft involves databases. Both governments and businesses maintain large databases of personal information on citizens, clients, and employees. Thieves can obtain access to these data by stealing computer hard drives, hacking into computer systems, bribing or compromising employees for access, and waylaying the data when they are mobile, either through transport between data centres or on employee laptops. Given the ways in which we are today involved in complex webs of data systems throughout the private and public sectors, it is database theft that poses the most widespread risk and the most profitable return for thieves (particularly criminal organizations). According to the Ontario information and privacy commissioner, “it is one thing to have someone pilfer through your mail, or your unshredded trash, looking for credit card records, receipts and statements to steal, but quite another when electronic databases are involved. The identity theft problem becomes considerably magnified by the widespread sharing, selling, trading, matching, accessing, copying, misuse and outright theft of large databases containing hundreds of thousands of detailed customer files. Why steal one identity when you can steal thousands of them, remotely, and without detection?” (Cavoukian 2005, 6). Examples abound. In June 2005, Card Systems Solutions, a credit card transaction processor for MasterCard, Visa, and American Express, reported that hackers had stolen 40 million credit card numbers. In May 2006, 27 million American veterans had their names, birth dates, and social security numbers stolen from the home of an employee of the American Department of Veterans Affairs. And in June 2005, Citigroup reported that the personal information on 3.9 million consumer-lending customers was lost by UPS en route to a credit bureau. Similar examples can be found in Canada. TJX Companies, the parent company of the Winners and HomeSense chains, announced in January 2007 that they had been the victims of an ongoing hacking effort dating back three years. This resulted in the exposure of up to 40 million credit cards. Visa alone confirmed that 20 million cards could be affected. Estimates place 1 to 2 million Canadians in jeopardy of identity theft as a result of the breach. In 2006, the privacy commissioner of Canada launched an investigation into CIBC when one of its mutual fund subsidiaries lost a backup

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computer file containing the personal data of 470,000 investors. Although there is no evidence that the data were compromised or illegally used, social insurance numbers, addresses, signatures, birth dates, and bank account numbers were lost in transit between two locations.13 In 2005, Equifax Canada suffered a digital break-in, and criminals obtained access to hundreds of consumer files with information on bank loans, credit cards, and social insurance numbers. Then again, in 2006, criminals posing as legitimate credit grantors obtained access to approximately 1,400 more files.14 Not surprisingly, the bungles are not only within the Canadian private sector. In early 2005, the health information of more than 672,000 Albertans was lost when a tape being shipped from the province’s data manager, IBM, to a subcontractor for conversion to microfiche went missing. One year later the BC government accidentally sold backup computer tapes containing sensitive medical information, including individuals’ HIV status, at a government auction. Also in 2006, the Canadian Savings Bonds account was breached, and $100,000 was withdrawn from sixteen accounts. Information was stolen and subsequently used to apply for credit cards and cell phone accounts. In almost all of these private and public sector incidents that exposed clients to, or directly resulted in, identity theft, the data stolen were not encrypted, disaggregated, or password protected, and adequate security measures were not in place for their transportation and transfer. Therefore, identity theft is a crime unlike most others, as Michelle Doyle (2005) correctly points out. It is often non-personal: thieves rarely know or have any contact with their victims. It is not an impulse crime but a very sophisticated crime committed by highly organized surveillance-savvy criminals. At the time of the offence, victims are rarely aware of their victimization; it often takes months, even years, to realize what has happened. The crime can also be ongoing if the personal data have been sold to other criminal organizations or individuals. Investigation and prosecution by legal authorities are hindered by the crime’s diverse and digital nature, its potentially border-crossing nature, and the specific expertise necessary to track down the digital “fingerprints” of the thieves. Responses to Identity Theft However vague and complex identity theft may be, Canadians are clearly concerned about it. A late-2005 Ipsos Reid survey found that more than three-quarters of Canadians were concerned about becoming victims of identity theft; however, at the same time, a significant number would provide personal account information and passwords to a familiar business over the Internet or the telephone.15 The combination of public worry and trust mirrors the mixture of concern and apathy of the Canadian government. The legislative response to identity theft has been muted in Canada compared

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with that in the United States, while at the same time the Canadian government has attempted to download responsibility for the crime’s avoidance onto citizens.16 In 1998, the American federal government passed the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act (ITADA), which prohibits “the knowing use, transfer, or possession, without authorization, of a ‘means of identification’ of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, or in connection with any unlawful activity that constitutes any offense under U.S. [law].”17 The legislation provides for significant criminal sanctions, including large fines and prison sentences. One year later this legislation was given additional teeth.18 Other legislation in the United States permits individuals to contest and repair their credit status, and legislation in more than thirty states requires corporations to make public any security breach resulting in the loss of personal information. Despite the legal action of the state, the combined effect of the lack of resources, the focus by police on violent crimes and drug offences, the specialized expertise required, the numerous jurisdictions in which one crime can take place, and the length of time it takes to investigate makes identity theft a low priority for law enforcement.19 In Canada, there is neither specific legislation nor dedicated provisions within the Criminal Code targeting identity theft. To prosecute identity theft in Canada requires the use of a variety of Criminal Code provisions, including “possession or use of credit card data” (s. 342(3)),20 “uttering forged documents” (s. 368), “personation for advantage” (s. 403), or possession of stolen property (s. 355(b), as cited in Doyle 2005, 11).21 The legislation that seems to be most appropriate in tackling identity theft is the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, more commonly known as PIPEDA.22 The problem, however, is that PIPEDA is aimed at the prohibition of mistreatment of individuals’ personal information by data-collecting corporations and at providing individuals with access to their own data profiles. Identity theft is a crime outside its purview, although there have been calls for it to include public notice of breaches of corporate data security.23 In the ongoing absence of stronger legislative action or adequate law enforcement, the state’s response in Canada has been to responsibilize potential victims – to encourage individual citizens to protect themselves from identity theft. Almost all treatments of identity theft in the print and broadcast media conclude with tips instructing consumers how to protect themselves. Insurance companies offering protection against identity theft all have material on their web pages advising clients how to secure themselves. Technology and software firms are rushing to offer consumers ever more sophisticated technological means to theft-proof their personal information. This neo­ liberal strategy of making the individual accountable for his or her own data safety was very evident in a recent “public advisory” issued from the solicitor general of Canada to Canadian consumers.

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In 2004, the Department of the Solicitor General of Canada and the US Department of Justice jointly issued a special report to advise the public on current trends and developments in identity theft. After providing the usual litany of facts demonstrating that identity theft is one of the fastest-growing crimes in Canada and the United States, the report implicates the consumer in her or his own risk through her or his quotidian existence: “One reason for the increase in identity theft may be that consumers often become victims of identity theft without having any direct contact with the identity thieves who acquire their personal data. Simply by doing things that are part of everyday routine – charging dinner at a restaurant, using payment cards to purchase gasoline or rent a car, or submitting personal information to employers and various levels of government – consumers may be leaving or exposing their personal data where identity thieves can access and use it without the consumers’ knowledge or permission” (Solicitor General of Canada 2004, 1-2). The report details the most common means by which identity theft occurs and it concludes with the section “What You Can Do Today to Minimize Your Risk of Identity Theft” (3). The tips include never lending credit cards, cancelling and destroying those credit cards not in use, never carrying a social insurance card, following up with credit and utility companies if statements and bills do not arrive on time, shredding financial documents and receipts, not carrying PINs in purses or wallets, and ordering credit reports annually to verify the information contained in them (3). Notably, at no time does the advisory raise any concern about the rampant collection of personal information by businesses and governments. It does not advise consumers to resist participation in marketing schemes or surveys that require them to provide personal information. It neither suggests nor even implies that business or the state has any responsibility to manage data better. Only citizens are responsible in addressing “the fastest-growing crime” in Canada and the United States. The government’s public advisory thus resonates with the recent identity crimes in Ottawa with which I began this chapter. While that story coheres with the understanding of many as to what identity theft is, it is both typical and atypical. It is typical in that it involves theft of data to obtain credit under false pretences; that the thieves did not know the victims personally; and that the victims were unaware of the crime until well after it occurred. It is highly atypical, however, in that the thieves were caught and are being prosecuted. More significantly, despite the good press it makes, it is a highly misleading instance of identity theft; it implies that the biggest risk to individuals with respect to identity theft stems from the dishonest individual obtaining personal information directly from the material traces left by the intended victim. This uncharacteristic case obscures two key realities. First, identity theft, in addition to being the crime of the century, is the crime of surveillance society. In other words, it is our implication in the interconnecting webs of

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digital databases managed by capital and states that makes us most vulnerable. Second, identity theft has both intended and unintended consequences. Because we accept it as the theft of identity, it is necessarily productive of a new way of thinking about subjectivity in surveillance society. Identity in Surveillance Society “Identity theft,” claims Ontario’s information and privacy commissioner (Cavoukian 2005, 2), “is the Crime of the Information Age, the Crime of the 21st Century – an unfortunate by-product of the growth and velocity of personal data coursing through vast, interconnected e-commerce databases and networks.” Most scholars of surveillance society would agree with Cavoukian’s diagnosis. There is a significant and growing body of research theorizing and articulating the power effects of data collection and management – particularly through databases. These authors correctly diagnose several characteristics of our current experience – the ubiquity of our personal data in the digital environment; the dominance of the database as a sensemaking, sorting, and organizing rationality in the current social order; the need to shift our power metaphors away from George Orwell’s Big Brother; and the disappearance of the located physical body as a relevant marker of identification. However, I argue that, for the most part, these accounts underemphasize the implications for subjectivity in the surveillance era, and when they address subjectivity they do not go far enough. An example of the limited scope of subjectivity in surveillance societies is Oscar Gandy’s (1993) account of the panoptic sort. Gandy argues that the panoptic sort is “a difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine measurements” (15). It relies on the collection, processing, and sharing of information about individuals and groups that is generated out of daily lives. Gandy is concerned, however, with the ways in which the panoptic sort works to control and disadvantage certain individuals and groups on the basis of its capacity to predict rather than with their constitution as particular types of subjects. Individuals are largely passive victims in Gandy’s analysis, with the primary threat posed by targeted marketing as a result of the construction of consumption profiles. More usefully, David Lyon (2001) correctly identifies one of the central preconditions of a shift in subjectivity in surveillance society: “the disappearing body” (15; see also Staples 2000).24 He recognizes that “nomadic bodies and digital personae are the subject of contemporary computer-based surveillance, and are categories altogether more slippery and malleable than those utilized in previous surveillance regimes” (35). Yet, ultimately, Lyon denies the power of the new subject of surveillance because he continues to centre the “real” person and to read the digital persona as a mere (and inaccurate) representation of him or her. This claim echoes Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson’s (2006, 4) description of our “data doubles” and our

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“virtual/informational profiles” as always necessarily a translation of our real selves that lie outside the machine. By contrast, I argue that identity theft inverts the distinction: what lies inside the machine becomes much more relevant, and much more determinative, than what is found outside it. Mark Poster’s analysis of the superpanopticon is instructive. Poster explains databases as discursive in a Foucaultian sense, linking databases as discourses to the production of different forms of subjectivity: “Now, through the database alone, the subject has been multiplied and decentered, capable of being acted upon by computers at many social locations without the least awareness of the individual concerned yet just as surely as if the individual were present somehow inside the computer” (1996, 185). In the superpanopticon, the focus shifts from domination: “The cultural function of databases is not so much the institution of dominant power structures against the individual as it is the restructuring of the nature of the individual” (190). For Poster, as for most of the other scholars working in this area, however, it is the consumer categories into which we are located for the purposes of marketing that are most significant. William Bogard (2006) has recently suggested that the nature of control is changing and that we need to trouble our attachment to the distinction between the possible and the real. While a number of other scholars in surveillance studies make reference to Deleuze’s societies of control (a concept that I discuss below), Bogard, I suggest, makes the most of it. He correctly asserts that the new controls of surveillance society work on “the plane of desire” rather than on the level of pleasure or pain (61).25 He suggests that we are witnessing a “fundamental disarticulation of subjectivity”; subjects are fractal, divisible, and able to be controlled at any point for any purpose (71-72). Bogard argues that “the simulation of surveillance is the effort to convert the revolutionary force of desire into the carefully regulated production of pleasures – mass media, computers, marketing, gaming – and the bounds of essentialist identity and experience into a bestiary of grotesque hybrid forms – cyborgs, mutants, emoticons – receptive to the commands of global production” (76-77). I would add one other “grotesque hybrid form” to Bogard’s list: the mutable subject produced in and through identity theft. In the context of the provocative theory on surveillance and hybrid data forms, it is surprising that only a few scholars have addressed identity theft expressly. As Daniel Solove (2004, 115) argues, “the underlying cause of identity theft is an architecture that makes us vulnerable to such crimes and unable to adequately repair the damage. This architecture is not created by identity thieves; rather, it is exploited by them. It is an architecture of vulnerability, one where personal information is not protected with adequate security, where identity thieves have easy access to data and the ability to use it in detrimental ways.” Although Solove does not make this claim, I

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argue that we can actually read identity theft as the most effective contemporary form of resistance to the surveillant assemblage. Most scholars continue to pose surveillance practices as top-down, monolithic, and totalizing systems; they focus on the activities of the surveillors. The surveilled are understood in largely passive terms, limited in their activities of resistance to providing false information on questionnaires or refusing to provide SINs when requested. However, identity theft, while criminal, is clearly the most powerful instance of individuals using the behemoth of surveillant databanking practices to their substantial advantage. Identity thieves are using the incredible computational power and peculiar blind spots of the practices of dataveillance to subvert the goals of the larger system and achieve their own objectives. They are exploiting the attributes and weaknesses of the system much more effectively than any other group of individuals to date. And they are making visible that our identities have changed. Recently, Poster (2006) offered a valuable theoretical inquiry into identity theft. He identifies the seeming paradox at the heart of the rise of identity theft. In past decades, what might have merely been considered various forms of increasingly sophisticated credit fraud are grouped, prosecuted, and promoted as identity theft. “American culture,” Poster writes, “generally regards identity as the basis of subjectivity, as the center of the self, its spiritual core ... If that were true ... identity theft would not be possible” (87). He argues, as a result, that our conceptualization of identity must have changed: “Identity theft implies that identity consists of a series of numerical indicators (social security numbers, credit card numbers, driver’s license numbers, bank account numbers, birth dates) and a series of personal information (name, address, mother’s maiden name). These may be known to the consciousness of an individual, but they exist regardless of that knowledge in computer databases, Internet sites, plastic cards, and other documents. The constituents of identity in the sense of identity theft exist, therefore, in information media, and these media are dispersed across the globe” (113). Poster is recognizing only part of the issue, however. While I agree that our notions of identity have changed, the numerical indicators that Poster identifies, rather than constituent elements of identity, are more accurately understood as the means of identification of a form of identity, an emergent mode of subjectivity that is even more abstract. The distinction is aptly illustrated, I argue, by an examination of two related yet contrasting representations of identity theft in popular culture. Identity and The Net In the sleeper hit The Net, freelance software analyst Angela Bennett, played by Sandra Bullock, is a withdrawn individual who spends most of her time on the Internet. She avoids her neighbours; her friends, interactions, and transactions are mostly online; and she has not had many successful romantic

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relationships. When a friend and fellow computer geek whom she has never met in person sends her a disk with a strange software prototype on it, the intrigue begins. While on holiday in Mexico, her purse is stolen, and Bennett loses her credit cards, passport, driver’s licence, and other identification. The fellow whom she meets at the resort turns out to be a hacker hired to retrieve the diskette and kill her. She escapes, but he and his team are able to erase her identity and replace it with that of Ruth Marx, a woman wanted on prostitution, drug, and theft charges. When she returns from Mexico, her car is gone from the airport, her house is empty and for sale, and there is a fake “Angela Bennett” working in the computer firm that had been head-hunting her. She realizes that, in order to pull off the identity theft, they had to know everything about her – and they obtained that information from her online activities and credit card records. With no social contacts to verify her embodied identity, only a former boyfriend can vouch for her. After he and her online friend, CyberBob, are killed, Angela is alone, moving through Los Angeles, trying to regain her identity. Somehow it is all tied to the rogue program that her friend sent to her, which is eventually revealed to be the Gatekeeper software that has been adopted by the New York Stock Exchange, the Department of Water and Power, the Los Angeles International Airport, and other key social institutions to protect themselves against hackers. However, the software actually provides access by the Praetorians – a radical hacker group – to those very powerful mainframes. Angela Bennett is eventually arrested as Ruth Marx, and her public defender suggests that her story that her identity was stolen is “far-fetched.” Angela responds in frustration: “Just think about it. Just think about it. Our whole world is sitting there on a computer. Everything. Your DMV records. Your social security. Your credit cards. Your medical history. All right there. Everyone is stored in there. It’s like this little electronic shadow. It’s just, just begging for someone to screw with, and you know what? They’ve done it to me, and you know what? They’re gonna do it to you!” Thus, we are painted a world that is completely interconnected and where we have naively placed our data, and hence our selves, into databases and, soon, onto the Internet. As a result, we have made ourselves incredibly vulnerable to being “screwed with.” On the one hand, Angela Bennett is a woman alienated from “real life,” more inclined toward her “virtual life” and hence more vulnerable. On the other hand, she is incredibly computer savvy, not our typical victim. Yet the filmic Los Angeles quickly transforms into a hostile and foreign environment for Angela, an environment envisioned as one linked by wires – telephone and Internet. There is nowhere she can move and no device she can use that does not alert her pursuers to her location. In other words, the film implies,

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the technology that is supposed to protect us does not; we are all at risk because we are “in the computer,” and even those of us with the most computer knowledge are vulnerable. If it can happen to Angela, it can happen to us. At the end of the film, Angela is able to deploy her considerable computer skills in order to expose the criminals. She hacks into the system of the Gatekeeper company, reactivates her identity, and then places an incredibly destructive virus into their system to bring them down. Ultimately, it is one individual using the technology for good that returns the normal social order. While The Net was released in the relatively early days of the Internet and World Wide Web, its direct-to-video sequel, The Net 2.0, was released at the height of the panic about identity theft in 2006. In the film, Nikki De Loach plays Hope Cassidy, another freelance computer analyst, who is lured to Istanbul to be the patsy for a huge corporate fraud. After her identity is erased, authorities believe that Hope is a person named Kelly Roos, who has killed two people and stolen $14 million. Again, there is a digitized chase through the streets of Istanbul, where both the thieves and the Russian mob are after her. It turns out that Interpol agents are in the hunt as well, using her to flush out the thieves. The two films share key elements, including the heroine’s technological skills, the chase format, the slowly unfolding sense of doom that surrounds a person when his or her identity is gone, and the various ways in which we can prove who we are when we “disappear.” However, the sense of isolation in The Net 2.0 is produced not from Hope’s alienation from the “real world” and the people around her, as was the case with Angela, but from her location in Istanbul. The Net 2.0 is told through flashbacks, as Hope speaks not to a public defender but to a psychiatrist in a prison evaluating her before her trial as Roos. The psychiatrist turns out to be one of the thieves using the information that Hope is providing in order to erase the “loose ends” of the case and learn where she has hidden the money. In a bid to gain a bargaining chip with which to negotiate the return of her identity, Hope had broken into the system and “relocated” the $14 million away from the thieves. Speaking to the doctor in prison, she screams, “this could happen to you. To anyone. Do you have credit cards? Driver’s licence?” “Of course,” replies the doctor. “Okay. Well, I guarantee you that someone has used your identity and you don’t even know it.” In The Net 2.0, Hope’s experience takes place within a much more detailed aesthetic of surveillance. Whereas in 1995 paranoia was produced through the matrix of telephone lines, in 2006 viewers were perpetually placed in the position of voyeur and surveillor, as flashback images are viewed through the grainy image of closed-circuit television. We see surveillance cameras all around Hope – at the hotel, at the bank, at the computer company for which she works, at the client’s estate, at the “prison,” at the American consulate.

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More so than its prequel, the 2006 film tries to capture the emotional shock of identity theft, the sense of violation. In prison, Hope shouts at the doctor, “do you know what it feels like to go an entire life and realize that none of it matters? That basically the person you thought you were doesn’t exist? ... My passports. My credit cards. My bank accounts. Everything. Someone has taken me.” She is her data. However, what is most telling in the two films is their resolutions. In the dénouement of The Net, Angela Bennett returns to her old life, regaining her house, moving her ailing mother in with her, and returning to her employment. Equilibrium is re-established as she returns to her “real” identity. By coming to terms with her mother’s illness and becoming a neighbour, Angela is even more “real” than before the film’s events, now valuing intersubjective contact. In contrast, in The Net 2.0, Hope Cassidy’s imbrication in the international plot, and her exposure to the Russian mafia, require that she be issued a new identity by Interpol. The film’s first sign that trouble is brewing is watching Hope’s bank account balance on a hightech screen on the airplane rapidly tick down to zero, without her noticing. This scene is echoed in the ending, when we again see Hope on a plane. This time, however, she is flying to an unidentified location, with her new name, Diana Moon, and with her digitally displayed bank account balance of $5 million (due to her “retention” of some of the $14 million that was originally stolen). She looks great and is laughing, apparently unfazed by her identity reassignment, her financial security well established.26 The ending of The Net 2.0 simultaneously confirms the ubiquity of surveillance and the malleability of identity in the twenty-first century. However, any potential angst resulting from the instability of identity is defused through the securing of financial resources. We are then forced to ask is the problem ever that Hope’s identity was stolen, or is it that her access to financial security – her credit – was taken? The narrative does not allow Hope to return to her “real” identity – it is gone forever. However, it does reestablish her as fiscally secure, and that, apparently, is what really matters. The link that the film forces us to make is succinctly captured in the promotional poster caption “No money. No identity. No way out.” It is the notion of credit as not merely a marker of identity but also a form of identity that I suggest must be added to discussions of identity theft. To this end, I argue that identity theft is simultaneously productive of, and produced by, the creditable subject. The Creditable Subject The creditable subject is already a digital subject, yet it is not reducible to the trace, ghost, or alter ego of the embodied, coherent subject that exists elsewhere. The embodied coherent subject does not author this identity; it is produced relatively autonomously in the cross-referencing and data-matching

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of giant consumer databases and the deployment of credit software designed to predict the credit performance of individuals.27 The creditable subject is contingent and mobile, manifesting only in the moment of identification when credibility is ascertained through the password or code. For this reason, the creditable subject is susceptible to appropriation and is evoked by the hand of whoever types in the password. Deliberately doubled, the creditable subject is both one who is credible, in the sense of reliable and continuing, and one who is constituted in the immediacy and variability of relations of consumer credit. As a result, the creditable subject’s reliability and continuity do not depend on modernist notions of coherent consciousness or even bodily markers that can be connected to the traces left in computerized transactions. The creditable subject is not disembodied – its body has never been particularly relevant and may even be an obscuring element. This is how Hope’s physical presence can be so effectively denied, as she stands there, by the simple words “but the computer says ...” As Simson Garfinkel (2001, 31) notes, “identity theft is made possible because credit card companies, always on the lookout for new customers, don’t have a good way to verify the identity of a person who mails in an application or orders a credit card over the telephone. So the credit card companies make a dangerous assumption: they take it for granted that if you know a person’s name, address, telephone number, Social Security number, and mother’s maiden name, you must be that person.” To illustrate the distinction I am making, it is helpful to consider current forms of target marketing where the goal is to shape future consumption of individuals through the sophisticated calculation of their preferences and propensities as a result of data on their past consumptive activities (see Elmer 2004). The fundamental project of target marketing, its measure of effectivity, is the accuracy of the link that marketers can construct between the digital persona constructed from past action to the person who is likely to purchase. The creditable subject is one step further along this continuum. Identity theft, for example, only becomes a problem because the creditable subject ceases to be a good credit customer. If the identity thief appropriated the identity but continued to pay the bills, neither the financial institutions nor the individual would be aware of the theft because the machine no longer cares about the verisimilitude of the persona to the person. It is in part for this reason that identity theft is so difficult to “clean up.” The work of trying to reconnect person to persona, to reunite two forms of subjectivity that have been placed in tension by the identity thieves, to reassert the necessary relationship between them, is a project denied by the very notion of the crime in the first place. The creditable subject is one manifestation of Gilles Deleuze’s (1995) “dividual,” the primary subject form of societies of control. Deleuze argues that societies are shifting away from relations of discipline and entering into the

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process of becoming societies of control. While disciplinary societies operated through institutions and tactics of enclosure, control societies, corresponding to the rise of the cybernetic machines, operate through control and instantaneous communication (174). Institutions of enclosure or confinement function in an independent, analogical fashion; control mechanisms, conversely, are not separable and independent but numerical and continuous: digital (178). “Confinements are molds, different moldings, while controls are a modulation, like a self-transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies from one point to another” (178-79). What is most relevant for my purposes is his articulation of what happens to individuals in control societies. Unlike disciplinary society, which Deleuze asserts has two poles of the individual and the mass, in societies of control “the key thing is no longer a signature or a number, but a code: codes are passwords” (1995, 180). “The digital language of control is made of codes indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied. We’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become ‘dividual,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (180). In control society, we permit, even encourage, disembodied identification, and easy, fast credit is the lifeblood of our moment of capitalism. “Tokens of trust, such as personal identification numbers and barcoded cards, are demanded to demonstrate eligibility or reputation” (Lyon 2001, 27). Online banking 24-7, preapproved credit, and instant access to cash are increasingly and inevitably demanded by consumers seeking the immediate gratification of desires. “A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt” (Deleuze 1995, 181). These two forms of credit increasingly define identity. The creditable subject is a good risk and therefore the target of identity theft. But we are not the creditable subjects. One’s financial reputation embodied in his or her credit rating and accessed/produced in activating the code is the creditable subject. Identity no longer functions as the possession of the bounded, complete individual, resident offline. We are no longer the referent. Rather, identity is constituted in the credibility of the dividual. The creditable subject, always contingent, is made visible in and through its theft. It has its own autonomy. And the creditable subject, as dividual, is more important, given more access, than we are as individuals. Just as in Guattari’s imaginary town, it matters more what the computer says about our credibility, our credit, than it does what we say. In accepting our habitation within the modulations of digitized credit, we are accepting the redefinition of our selves and the privileging of this new modality of identity.

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Part 3: Genetics, Security, and Biometrics

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8 From Bodily Integrity to Genetic Surveillance: The Impacts of DNA Identification in Criminal Justice Neil Gerlach

People don’t need to worry about Big Brother. If you’ve done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear from giving a DNA sample. – C. Honore, “Petty Thieves and Traffic Violators Caught in Police DNA Net” (1999)

This opening passage, expressed by a police officer, conveys a sentiment that appears to be shared by the Canadian public. At the time that DNA identification technology was first institutionalized in Canada, a 1995 COMPAS poll found that 88 percent of people surveyed agreed that suspects of crime, not just convicted offenders, should be forced to give DNA samples to police (Thanh Ha 1995). The officer’s simple comment is a rich statement packed with many assumptions and implications. Yet, to the critical scholar, there is something unsettling about it: in some ways, it is difficult to refute. Our faith in genetic science has grown to the extent that we are confident that DNA identification will benefit the innocent and identify the guilty, thereby assuaging our growing fear of crime and our concerns about the efficacy of the justice system. However, any new technology is a double-edged sword, and it is important that critical social scientists assess the costs associated with this new development. Ever since the invention of DNA identification technology in Leicester, England, in 1984, it has quickly spread around the world.1 Its primary use has been the identification of criminals from DNA traces left at crime scenes. The appeal of this technology is obvious, and governments wasted little time implementing DNA identification technology to detect crime. Since its early days, DNA identification, and forms of forensic crime detection more generally, have exploded in public consciousness and popular culture, inspiring a wave of forensic-themed television programs, movies, and novels. At the same time, students are lining up for admission to forensic science

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programs at Canadian universities, and a number of new programs have recently opened to accommodate them (McCabe 2005).2 The effectiveness of DNA identification technology is not in doubt; there have been thousands of convictions based on DNA evidence, and a number of wrongly convicted persons have been exonerated based on information revealed through the technology. Public discussions about DNA identification and DNA data banking in criminal justice tend to remain at the level of pointing out the effectiveness of these technologies in combatting crime. From this perspective, the development of DNA identification and banking is strictly beneficial in criminal justice. Are there broader, unforeseen consequences that go beyond the purpose of protecting public safety? Are these consequences entirely positive in their social impacts? Are we producing a genetic surveillance system that may limit our personal privacy? How are our institutions of criminal justice changing to accommodate this system? And does the technology influence the relationship between citizens and the state? In this chapter, I argue that, to answer these questions, the effects of DNA identification and banking should be viewed at three levels: crime detection, institutional operation, and political process. When analyzed from all three perspectives, it becomes apparent that the technology has had effects well beyond its originally intended purpose of better crime detection. I demonstrate how DNA technology is implicated in the development of a new genetic surveillance system that will have far-reaching effects that go beyond crime detection. DNA identification technology, I argue, will ultimately change the way in which the justice system operates and its impact on society in general. The DNA Regime in Canadian Criminal Justice In Canada, the DNA identification system for criminals includes two main components. The first is a DNA warrant, added to the Criminal Code in 1995. The second is the National DNA Data Bank, legislated in 1998 and fully operational by 2000. The process by which this system was established was not entirely smooth. When DNA identification technology first appeared in the late 1980s, Canadian law was ill equipped to accommodate it. The first Canadian case involving DNA identification technology occurred in 1988. At that time, judicial decisions on its use were inconsistent, with some courts accepting DNA evidence and others excluding it as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. With no legislative or common law authority to seize DNA samples, police resorted to rummaging through garbage cans and ashtrays to collect suspects’ DNA. The situation began to turn around in 1994 after the Supreme Court decision in R. v. Borden,3 in which the court ruled that suspects must consent to the use of their DNA samples in specific criminal investigations for that

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evidence to be valid in court. In response to this decision, and the public outcry against it, the federal government moved quickly to establish a DNA warrant system. After a public consultation in 1994, the Criminal Code was amended in 1995 to allow a provincial court judge to obtain a DNA warrant for certain designated offences. Three sampling procedures are allowed, including plucking of hair roots; buccal swabs of the lips, tongue, and inside cheeks; and the use of a lancet to take a blood sample. There are strong provisions to protect the privacy of suspects, and samples must be destroyed if suspects are cleared or acquitted of the offence. Officers are empowered to use “as much force as is necessary for the purpose of executing the warrant,” and consent is not required.4 After the DNA warrant regime came into effect, and after it survived a number of charter challenges, the government began a consultation process for instituting the National DNA Data Bank. In 1998, the DNA Identification Act was passed, establishing a DNA data bank at RCMP headquarters in Ottawa. The data bank is under the jurisdiction of the RCMP, and it consists of two indexes: a crime scene index of DNA profiles found at crime scenes, and a convicted offenders’ index of profiles taken from people convicted of designated offences. The list of designated offences was expanded from that of the DNA warrant legislation and divided into primary and secondary offences. Primary offences were generally more serious, violent offences for which convicted offenders would be required to surrender DNA samples. Secondary offences were less serious offences for which the Crown would have to apply for retention of a sample. The bill also made provisions for retroactive sampling of offenders designated as dangerous offenders. Samples are kept indefinitely, save for cases where a person is subsequently exonerated or qualifies as a young offender. During the policy consultation process preceding this legislation, a division developed between the Canadian Police Association (CPA) and victims’ groups on the one hand, and the privacy commissioner and the Canadian Bar Association (CBA) on the other. Police and victims’ groups advocated a strong public protection approach that would allow for DNA samples at the time of arrest rather than conviction, for storing these samples indefinitely, and for making the list of designated offences as broad as possible in order to maximize the effectiveness of the technology. The privacy commissioner and the CBA countered by arguing that, in the rush to identify the guilty and exonerate the innocent, we may be allowing the formation of a genetic surveillance system with broader impacts beyond criminal justice. In a sense, the fears of the privacy commissioner and the CBA appear to be coming true. Subsequent to passage of the DNA Identification Act, a number of amendments have been made that expand the list of offences included in the act and the categories of offenders from whom samples can be taken. DNA identification and banking have led to a number of arrests

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and been instrumental in solving a number of cases. But constant pressure to expand is a permanent feature of the genetic surveillance system. Genetic Surveillance The DNA regime that has been established in Canada can be viewed as a genetic surveillance system in the sense that it is about creating a database that contains coded information about individuals. As Robert Castel (1991) argues, the nature of databases in the information age involves processes of expert coding that develop virtual selves circulated and managed independently of the bodies to which they refer. Social subjects are constituted through a process of textual production that Mark Poster (1996) labels a “superpanopticon.” Electronic databases have new properties that make them particularly effective. They are digital and easily transferable in time and space. They have no identifiable authors; rather, they are authored by anyone who enters data, including machines that automatically record information. Nevertheless, they belong to someone – the corporation, the government, the university, the police, the hospital, the military – and they amplify the power of their owners. Shoshana Zuboff (1988) refers to this form of surveillance as “informating”: using information technology to record transactions automatically for the purpose of creating an electronic information environment. In this way, decision makers have an immediately visible window on the processes of social spaces. They know, in real time, how productive people are, what they are purchasing, and where they have been. Within the informated superpanopticon, there is no need for a complex bureaucratic architecture of power operated by experts on security, labour, and consumption. The one who is surveilled provides the necessary information through voluntary transactions that are automatically recorded and converted into texts through the cables and circuits that form the pathways of power and knowledge. These texts constitute their own object by producing a collective account of a multitude of private actions. Accompanying these developments in surveillance logic is a new conceptualization of the gene. Before genes can be manipulated, broken apart, analyzed, and converted into information about identity, they must first be imagined. They must be represented as something that is open to human observation and intervention. José van Dijck (1998) traces the history of dominant genetic representations since the discovery of the DNA molecule in the 1950s. Van Dijck argues that, initially, the gene was represented as a language or an alphabet, but over time it came to be seen as a disease agent in the 1960s and 1970s as concerns arose over secret genetic research. In the 1980s, the representation changed again as the gene became a type of manager responsible for regulating the processes of the body. Finally, in the post1990 period, during and after the Human Genome Project, the gene came

From Bodily Integrity to Genetic Surveillance

to be viewed as an information map that could be rendered into digital code and made readable as an unambiguous text. It is at this point that representations of the gene and the surveillance logic of informating combine to form a genetic surveillance system. Genetic surveillance involves informating the body as an objectified information map that bridges the gap between body and code to identify a person and link him or her to places and events with a certainty lacking in other forms of biometric surveillance. What is under surveillance, however, is not the person but the digitally generated DNA code that, ideally, can be matched immediately to crime scene DNA to shorten the time of investigation. DNA matching and banking are designed to create a real-time information environment that will allow the quick identification of criminals. This does not work by keeping people under surveillance. It works, rather, by collecting coded information about them into data banks, recording informated virtual selves within a superpanopticon of DNA codes. From the perspective of law enforcement, the technology and logic of genetic surveillance are in place, but there are barriers to its full implementation. The problem lies in gaining legal access to citizens’ DNA codes and finding ways to legitimate that power of access without initiating a public backlash. At the core of this problem is the legal principle of bodily integrity. The concept of bodily integrity is recognized in the common law and is generally viewed as implicit in section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” Arguably, section 8 of the charter also applies: “Everyone has the right to be secure from unreasonable search or seizure.” Generally, bodily integrity entails sovereignty over one’s own body and the right to make choices about invasive entries into the body. This legal principle is a manifestation of a larger cultural ethic in Western modernity – a way of thinking about the relationship between the body and the self, based upon an anatomical model of what the body is. It provides a boundary between the self/citizen and the state. This is why the state cannot legally penetrate that boundary without an overriding and demonstrable community interest. Bodily integrity has been the basis of several important Supreme Court decisions over the past few decades in Canada. For example, in R. v. Morgentaler (1988),5 the Supreme Court struck down the Criminal Code provision that criminalized therapeutic abortions outside an approved administrative regime, arguing that the provision clearly interfered with a woman’s bodily integrity and violated section 7 of the charter. Other important cases have involved attempts by the police to seize medical samples, most commonly in impaired driving cases. However, in the case of R. v. Dyment (1988), the Supreme Court ruled that, in the absence of a warrant, the seizure of a suspect’s

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medical sample or information from that sample is a “gross violation of the sanctity, integrity and privacy of the appellant’s bodily substances and medical records.”6 This was the situation when DNA-matching technology entered Canadian criminal justice. The Supreme Court was strongly defending the principle of bodily integrity just at a time when a promising new surveillance technology appeared that would require relatively easy access to citizens’ bodies. With the decision in R. v. Borden (1994), in which the Supreme Court ruled that police needed consent before seizing and using a suspect’s DNA sample, government and law enforcement officials realized that the doctrine of bodily integrity posed too much of a barrier to the implementation of a genetic surveillance system. In response, the government moved quickly to legislate DNA warrants and the National DNA Data Bank. The legislation that allows seizure of DNA samples is striking not only for what is included but also for what is absent. In executing a warrant, officers may use “as much force as is necessary.” This is a shift from similar provisions, such as impaired-driving provisions, that allow for seizure of blood samples. The conditions under which such a seizure can occur are highly restricted in terms of the degree to which officers may interfere with a suspect’s bodily integrity.7 Similar restrictions are absent from the DNA warrant provisions. The principle of bodily integrity has been replaced by the power to use “as much force as is necessary.” Entry of genetic surveillance technologies into criminal justice involves a complex set of changes in the powers of authorities and the relationship between citizens and the state. Framing the legislation required a certain care in how the issue of genetic surveillance was presented to the public because it involves redefining the relationship between the state and citizens’ bodies. During the public consultations over DNA policy, the rhetorical framework that developed to locate the new technology within existing discourse was privacy. The consultation questions posed by the Department of Justice were framed as privacy issues, and the primary voice of caution in the consultations was that of the privacy commissioner: “Retaining a databank of genetic samples from convicted offenders will inevitably attract researchers who want to analyze the samples for purposes that have nothing to do with forensic identification. This scientific curiosity, coupled with growing pressure to reduce crime by whatever means, no matter how intrusive, will almost certainly lead to calls to use the samples to look for genetic traits common to ‘criminals.’ This type of research, while perhaps of scientific interest and possible social value, raises complex legal, ethical and moral problems that we have yet to resolve” (Privacy Commissioner of Canada 1998, 4). In this statement, the privacy commissioner recognizes that continuing genetic research increasingly informates the human body and the

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human person – illuminating and codifying the fundamental building blocks behind our physical and personality attributes. In response, the Canadian Police Association, which advocated a much wider use of the technology, stated that “the argument against using broad base gathering [of DNA samples] ... is based on ‘what ifs’ and potential abuses imagined by those who oppose the use of this tool. No doubt, had the Office of the Privacy Commissioner existed 100 years ago, similar ‘objections’ would have been trumpeted to fingerprinting” (CPA 1998, 3). Eventually, the privacy issue was resolved in the policy process by converting it from an ethical question to a technical one – we can put privacy safeguards into the legislation that satisfy the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The charter became a mechanism for resolving the debate. Despite the government’s caution in legitimating the new technology as privacy conscious, there has been little cause for concern about public outcry. Public debate and interest have been minimal. The logic of genetic surveillance based on informating the body through a reconceptualization of the gene as an information map and establishing a panoptic database of criminal DNA profiles is shared between the public and law enforcement. Erosion of the principle of bodily integrity, another key component of the genetic surveillance system, has provoked little response. The question then arises, what have been the impacts of this system? Enough time has passed to begin to see the outlines of what a genetic surveillance system looks like and what it requires of citizens, criminal justice institutions, and the state. Effects on Crime Detection Public discussion and government rhetoric about DNA matching and banking tend to be restricted to questions of the benefits of the technology in criminal investigation. From this point of view, the benefits are indisputable. In countries around the world, DNA matching has led to thousands of arrests and convictions that may not have occurred if police had to rely strictly on witnesses and circumstantial evidence. There are other forms of biometric identification available – fingerprinting, iris identification, face recognition, voice recognition, and hand printing – but they have neither the level of accuracy of DNA identification nor the allure of genetic science behind them. A quick look at statistics from the National DNA Data Bank indicates the effectiveness of the technology. As of 1 January 2007, 106,451 DNA profiles were entered into the Convicted Offender Index, and 32,439 were entered into the Crime Scene Index (NDDB 2007). To date, there have been 6,266 matches between the Crime Scene Index and the Convicted Offender Index. These matches can be broken down into types of offences: 386 murders, 872 sexual assaults, 148 attempted murders, 412 assaults, 738 armed robberies,

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3,598 break and enters, and 112 other offences. In England and the United States, the numbers are proportionally much higher. In Britain, DNA samples from suspects of crime can be banked, and there is a concerted effort by the police to maximize the number of samples in the data bank. In the United States, each state has its own DNA data bank, as does the FBI, for a total of fifty-one DNA data banks with varying regulations. The second way in which DNA matching and banking contribute to the efficiency of crime detection is in demonstrating the innocence of those who have been wrongly convicted. There have been a number of cases in Canada and elsewhere in which imprisoned persons who claim their innocence have been tested against crime scene DNA and found to be no match. Emblematic cases in Canada include those of Guy Paul Morin and David Milgaard. Both men were accused and eventually convicted of sexual assault and murder. Both spent time in prison – Milgaard twenty-three years, Morin eighteen months – loudly proclaiming their innocence throughout. Both men were eventually exonerated by DNA evidence. It is interesting to trace the media coverage of these two cases. Both represent a rupture point in what is perceived by critical analysts as the normal reciprocal relationship between media and law enforcement (Altheide 1992; Sanders and Lyon 1995; Surette 1996). Rather than attempting to recuperate the justice system through their reports, journalists put criminal justice on trial and found it lacking (Hall 1994; Jang 1994; Tyler 1997; Vienneau 1997). The charge was a deficit of objectivity in the pursuit of truth and justice. In detailing the shaky evidence, aggressive state prosecution, and police intimidation of witnesses in both cases, the media constructed a narrative in which the ultimate hero is DNA-matching technology. Morin and Milgaard are saved, in the narrative, by the intervention of this new technology, which is not subject to contestation, and the state must provide justice in the form of an acquittal, an apology, compensation, and an inquiry. In the Milgaard case, the technology goes on to positively identify the true killer, Larry Fisher, and bring him to justice. Statistics on positive identification of offenders, and stories about the exoneration of the falsely accused, provide an image of DNA matching and banking as antidotes to a lack of objectivity in other forms of evidence gathering. DNA matching appeared at a time when only 15 percent of Canadians rated the criminal courts as doing a good job helping victims; when 33 percent rated the courts as doing an average job; and when 35 percent rated the courts as doing a below-average job, with the remainder giving no opinion (General Social Survey 1999, 109). With such a low opinion of the operation of criminal justice, the appeal of DNA evidence is strong, and public support is relatively unquestioning. Citizens are looking for a solution to perceived high crime rates and problematic trial processes, and DNA evidence seems to be a perfect answer.

From Bodily Integrity to Genetic Surveillance

Effects on the Institutions of Criminal Justice The CSI Effect Influenced by the power of DNA identification, criminal justice institutions have responded by adjusting how they operate in order to accommodate the potential of the technology. One of the most visible effects on criminal justice in the past few years has been the so-called CSI effect, named after the most popular television drama of the early 2000s, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Premiering in October 2000, CSI and a host of spin-offs and imitators have popularized the science of forensic investigation to an unprecedented degree. In these programs, teams of forensic scientists use scientific expertise to solve crimes based on material traces left at crime scenes. Many of these cases could not be solved through regular police methods, and the end result is often proof of guilt beyond scientific, rather than legal, doubt. Results of the investigations are trustworthy because they do not rely on human elements of police investigation that can include personal motivation, burnout, and corruption. The CSI effect is generally defined as the impact that current fictional representations of forensic investigation are having on the expectations of the American public, and more specifically juries, in regard to evidence at trial. The primary problem in the United States is that juries are coming to expect too much from police investigators. In some cases, before they are willing to convict, juries demand to see forensic evidence. There have been a number of instances where juries have delivered surprising verdicts on this basis. For example, a jury in Peoria, Illinois, acquitted a gang member in 2004 who was accused of raping a teenager. He was acquitted despite the fact that DNA from saliva found on the victim’s breast matched his DNA. Jury members stated that in a recent CSI episode they had seen a test showing that soil found on the victim matched that of the crime scene. Police in this case had not carried out such a test. To the amazement of the prosecution, the jury found reasonable doubt (Roane and Morrison 2005). Other famous cases of the CSI effect include actor Robert Blake’s 2005 trial for the murder of his wife and Texas millionaire Robert Durst’s 2003 trial for the murder of his neighbour. In both cases, despite considerable non-forensic evidence of motive and intent, the defendants were found not guilty (Willing 2004). In the Durst case, one of the first to be viewed as involving the CSI effect, a jury consultant, Robert Hirschhorn, asked prospective jurors if they were familiar with the CSI program. He managed to include a number of CSI fans on the jury in the hope that they would demand very thorough forensic evidence. In response, prosecutors in Arizona, Illinois, and California have begun to use “negative evidence witnesses,” whose task it is to convince jurors that DNA and other forensic evidence are not always present at crime scenes and are not necessary to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt.

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The CSI effect is bound to have less of an impact in Canada for the simple reason that most criminal trials are not jury trials. For most offences, defendants may petition for trial by judge alone. This is an option often preferred by both defence and prosecution. Juries are too unpredictable. However, when there is a jury trial, DNA evidence can definitely have an impact on decision making. Given that the odds of random matches of DNA can be as low as one in several billion, it is not surprising that juries and judges can be heavily influenced by DNA evidence – or its absence – in court. Nevertheless, the presence of DNA evidence in a trial does not necessarily produce a sure outcome. Researchers have found that how the evidence is reported to jurors will have a significant impact. Jonathan Koehler, a professor of behavioural decision making at the University of Texas at Austin, and a member of the O.J. Simpson defence team, reported that the precise words used to describe the validity of DNA analysis can have a very significant impact on the jury’s sense of guilt or innocence. Koehler’s research showed that, if jury members are told how unlikely it is that a suspect could match and still not be guilty, they tend to convict; the focus is on the defendant. If they are told how likely it is that someone else could also match, they tend to acquit; the focus is on those who are not suspects. Koehler points out that defence lawyers in the United States have been arguing for the latter approach as the standard for presentation of evidence to ensure that the presumption of innocence is maintained. DNA evidence, therefore, is not simply a matter of the pure application of science; people’s perceptions and misunderstandings of the actual meanings of the science come into play and must be accounted for in courts of law (Strauss 1998).8 Empowering Prosecution A second effect that DNA technology has on the criminal justice system pertains to the relationship between prosecution and defence at trial. Professional legal publications commonly exhort defence lawyers to become conversant with DNA science and its techniques in order to adequately defend their clients.9 However, the science is complex, and the need to master it leads to a number of problems for defence lawyers. Janne Holmgren and John Winterdyk (2001) interviewed twenty-two Canadian defence lawyers, each of whom had defended at least two cases involving DNA evidence. One of their common concerns was the need to understand the assessment of the evidence. All of the respondents agreed that they needed to learn about DNA evidence to defend their clients, but they pointed out a number of problems in acquiring that knowledge. One problem is that defence lawyers simply do not have the time to read large amounts of technical literature. Another involves funding: many defence cases are funded by Legal Aid, which has limited resources to help lawyers acquire the knowledge they need. Also, the funds are often not

From Bodily Integrity to Genetic Surveillance

available to pay expert witnesses to conduct their own assessments of crime scene evidence. Prosecutors employ RCMP and provincial laboratories for DNA testing or utilize private laboratories. The defence cannot use the same laboratories and often must resort to expertise in other countries. With private laboratories charging between $800 and $3,000 per analysis and expert witnesses charging around $1,200 per day for their testimonies, the costs become prohibitive for most defendants and for Legal Aid. Holmgren and Winterdyk conclude that “the end result may be that justice is being compromised by the seductive uses of science in some cases” (2001, 13). Funded by the state, prosecutors do not face the same acute lack of funds and technical resources. As the twenty-first-century courtroom becomes increasingly scientized, the defence lawyer is at a disadvantage. His or her antagonist is the alliance between forensic laboratories and prosecutors, which allows prosecutors to push for higher levels of scientific discourse within the courtroom. Consequently, there is a significant impact on the standards of evidence and proof in criminal cases. Without similar allies, defence lawyers must enter the courts as amateur scientists who are required to argue with forensic experts on their own terms rather than on the basis of legal principles. They recognize that a technological imperative is at work, and they must operate within it, increasingly employing scientific knowledge as well as legal knowledge in order to remain effective. Expanding the DNA Net A third institutional effect of DNA identification and banking is a tendency for the DNA net to constantly expand. The first expansion occurred in 1998 with passage of the DNA Identification Act, which established the National DNA Data Bank. It also expanded the list of designated offences that had been set out in the DNA warrant legislation. In 1999, after a Senate review of the DNA Identification Act, the list was further expanded by the inclusion of military offences. On 24 December 2001, in the immediate political aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on Washington and New York, six secondary offences were redesignated as primary offences requiring automatic DNA sampling upon conviction. All six are related to terrorism, including piratical acts, hijacking, endangering the safety of an aircraft, seizing control of a ship or fixed platform, using explosives, and hostage taking. In 2005, a five-year review of the operation of the National DNA Data Bank resulted in further changes to the provisions. More offences, largely gang-related, were added, including participating in the activities of a criminal organization, committing an offence for a criminal organization, instructing the commission of an offence for a criminal organization, uttering threats, and criminal harassment. Furthermore, robbery and break and enter

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were reclassified as primary offences. Certain categories of offences committed prior to the creation of the data bank were added to allow for retroactive sampling, and people judged not to be criminally responsible due to mental disorder were added to the net. In addition to legislative action, there have been a number of calls from police organizations and victims’ groups to further expand the DNA net. In May 2002, Toronto’s police chief, Julian Fantino, publicly called for a loosening of DNA collection laws by adding drug-related offences, child pornography, domestic assault, prowling, and indecent acts to the list of designated offences (Yourck 2002). In November 2004, Police Chief Fantino, in conjunction with the Canadian Centre for Abuse Awareness and the Ontario Office for Victims of Crime, called for a further expansion to include all offenders currently serving sentences for indictable offences, to allow for taking and storing DNA samples upon arrest for an indictable offence (Toronto Police Service 2004). New Brunswick’s attorney general also pushed hard for an expansion of designated offences to include lesser property offences such as vandalism (Schmitz 1998). In 2001, Ontario’s attorney general, David Young, published an open letter to the federal minister of justice urging her to close a number of “loopholes” in the legislation by expanding the list of crimes for which a DNA sample could be taken (Canada NewsWire 2001). Another measure of expansive tendencies in DNA sampling and banking is the actual number of samples entering the data bank. During the public consultation process that preceded the DNA Identification Act, the solicitor general estimated that roughly 10,000 samples would be entered into the Convicted Offender Index each year (Solicitor General of Canada 1998). That number has grown over the years. During the first six years of operation, the number of samples entered into the data bank each year has increased substantially. In the first year, 6,322 samples were entered into the Convicted Offender Index (NDDB 2001, 13). In the second, third, fourth, and fifth years, an average of 17,204 samples were entered each year (NDDB 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005). In the sixth and most recent year, 31,313 samples were entered (NDDB 2006). This latest figure is in keeping with the stated goal of the data bank to reach its annual processing capacity of 30,000 samples (NDDB 2001, 17). Canada’s National DNA Data Bank contains a very small percentage of the population’s DNA compared with that of the United Kingdom, with the largest DNA data bank in the world. According to the latest official figures, which are now two years old, 5.2 percent of the population is in the British DNA data bank. By the end of 2005, 3.4 million DNA profiles were stored, and that number will have grown since then (Home Office 2007). Currently, anyone arrested for a designated offence and detained in a police station can be required to provide a DNA sample for storage. If the charges are

From Bodily Integrity to Genetic Surveillance

dropped or a person is acquitted, the sample remains in the data bank. Arguably, the British model is the next step in the employment of DNA identification technology. The logical step after that is also already in process. In January 2007, the German government called upon all twenty-seven European Union members to produce a shared DNA database to combat crime and terrorism (DeutscheWelle 2007). There is already an agreement among seven members that allows automatic access to DNA databases, pursuit of fugitives across another EU state’s borders, and joint patrols within each other’s borders. This regionwide DNA database would be the preliminary step toward an international database. According to the German government, it has been approached by the United States to share DNA information in the hunt for terrorists. Since the mid-1990s, when countries began to establish DNA data banks, there has been constant pressure to expand the DNA net around the world. In Canada, it is apparent that there is nothing sacrosanct about the list of designated offences. Periodic additions to the list and calls for additions have become a barometer of the particular moral panic sweeping the nation at a given time. The direction of change is always toward adding more offences to the list, adding more categories of persons to the list, and reclassifying secondary offences as primary, thereby requiring automatic DNA sampling. Expansion pressures originate largely from the law enforcement community, including police and politicians. They are also a result of external pressures such as the American-led war on drugs and war on terrorism. Furthermore, other Western nations, such as the United Kingdom, provide models of expanded DNA testing and banking systems that could prove attractive to Canadian authorities. Consequently, it is likely that the DNA net will continue to expand. DNA Dragnets A fourth and final institutional impact of DNA identification technology is the growing police practice of DNA dragnets. These are police investigations in which people are asked to submit to mass DNA testing to exclude themselves from the list of suspects. To date, there have been four major DNA dragnets in Canada: Vermilion, Alberta (1994), Port Alberni, British Columbia (1996); Sudbury, Ontario (1998); and Toronto (2003). DNA dragnets are actually the oldest tactic of DNA identification. The first case involving DNA identification technology occurred in England in 1986; it involved a DNA dragnet to apprehend a rapist and murderer. Eventually, the guilty suspect was apprehended. The Vermilion case is an interesting example of the operation of a DNA dragnet and some of the issues it raises. Vermilion is a town of 3,800 people located 200 kilometres east of Edmonton. Beginning in 1994, men in the town were asked to submit to DNA testing in an effort to identify a rapist

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who had been active in the community for at least three years. Initially, no one refused to give blood because of the obvious stigma attached to a refusal. An RCMP investigator commented, “I’m sure if someone were not to give blood and that were found out, he would be really, really unpopular” (Plischke 1995, A3). A number of men in the town reinforced this view, telling reporters that they would not look favourably on someone who refused to give a sample. After eighteen months and 240 samples, there still was no match. The police, fearing a loss of enthusiasm in the community, called a town meeting to motivate people and to reveal a psychological profile of the rapist in the hope of gaining new leads. The mayor exhorted the townspeople to continue providing samples, stating that “anyone who wants to protect the system and wants to live in a safe society, why would we have anything to hide?” (Plischke 1996a). However, at the meeting, two men spoke out against the mass testing as a violation of privacy and were shouted down by the other residents. Following this meeting, the police praised the community for its cooperation and warned that anyone who did not give a blood sample on request would be subject to an intrusive background check (Plischke 1996b). Despite these tactics, the case was never solved. DNA dragnets are common in countries that have DNA identification systems in place. There are no regulations or laws about mass DNA testing in any of these countries. No one in Canada has challenged the practice in court, and informal public pressures to submit to such testing will likely mean that no one will challenge it for some time. In its favour, the practice holds out the possibility of identifying a suspect who is hiding among the general population. At the same time, DNA dragnets have shown themselves to be highly inefficient from a cost/benefit perspective; they rarely lead to the identification of perpetrators despite the efforts and resources that go into them. More important are the ethical questions that dragnets raise concerning the use of state authority to compel individuals to cooperate with criminal investigations. They may violate central values of the justice system, including the presumption of innocence and bodily integrity, which exist to protect citizens from the overwhelming power of the state. Conclusions: Effects on the Relationship between Citizens and the State The building blocks for the formation of a genetic surveillance system are firmly in place in Canada. Is there any cause for concern about these developments? Arguably, there is: they are material traces of a larger shift in how bodies and biotechnologies are being governed. There is more at stake than simply collecting identifying information about persons; these developments are also about informating bodies in ways that may change identity and embodiment. The familiar anatomical-physiological body of flesh and

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organs is itself a historically contingent construction resulting from the eighteenth-century combination of anatomical and experimental science (van der Ploeg 2002). It is to this understanding of the body that the common law right of bodily integrity was attached. Bodily integrity protects the physiological body from the power of state agents through a duty of those agents to avoid entering the individual’s body and violating his or her sovereignty except in extreme circumstances. However, during the course of the policy and legislative processes of the DNA system in Canada, bodily integrity was excluded from the legislation and replaced with a language of privacy. This change in language was an important event and marked a shift in the legal definition of the body from anatomical object to information. Privacy is about protecting information, while bodily integrity is about protecting the thing itself. If we define the body as genetic information, then we open it up to protection based on information privacy. This is what was occurring in the policy process; it normalized a shift in how we conceive of the body in criminal law, a shift that was enshrined in legislation through the exclusion of bodily integrity and the inclusion of privacy safeguards. Consequently, the locus of the right has shifted. It no longer occurs at the point of entry into the citizen’s body; rather, it occurs afterward, when the state comes into possession of genetic information. It is that information that is protected. This marks a reduction in the sovereignty of the citizen over his or her body and an empowerment of the state. It establishes the legal conditions for opening the subject up to the molecular gaze of genetic surveillance. DNA dragnets provide an interesting example of the outcomes of this redefinition of the body in informational terms. If the objection to giving DNA samples is one of privacy, and the police can guarantee genetic privacy, then there is no moral ground upon which to object to state DNA testing on demand. If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. In other words, viewing the matter as something other than the freedom to manage your own body means that there is an accompanying shift in governmental language from rights to responsibilities. Genetic privacy is not a right but a responsibility of the state toward the citizen. In return, the good citizen has a normative responsibility to submit to genetic surveillance in order to make criminal investigation more efficient and to do his or her part in protecting society. What is occurring is a distribution of responsibilities rather than an assertion of rights. This was the point made by the mayor and citizens of Vermilion as well as the RCMP, who were clearly warning residents that they had a responsibility to submit to DNA testing with no legitimate excuse to refuse. Returning to the police officer’s quotation at the beginning of this chapter, it may be an oversimplification to state that, if you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear from giving a DNA sample. Certainly,

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from a glance at crime detection statistics, DNA testing and banking technologies are purely a benefit and have led to numerous convictions of the guilty and exonerations of the innocent. These benefits come at a price, however. Before a new technology is implemented, it must pass through a set of cultural meaning-making processes and pre-existing institutional practices that shape the way in which it will enter society and that, in turn, are shaped by the new technology. As a part of broader developments in genetic science, DNA identification has quickly become part of the emerging information superpanopticon, which has the effect of informating genetic codes and adding them to the information flow overseen by governments, corporations, the military, and other powerful institutional actors. Consequently, genetic information becomes part of an emerging surveillance system that stores more and more types of information about individuals. Initially, genetic surveillance was limited by institutional regulations and cultural definitions regarding bodily integrity, which protect a person’s right to maintain the boundary of his or her body against those who seek to transgress it. However, through legislation and shifts in the practices of criminal justice, that right has been eroded since the introduction of DNA identification and -banking technology. DNA warrant and -banking legislation does not include provisions for respecting bodily integrity and has continued to expand the types of offences and offenders included in the DNA net. In some cases, juries are calling for DNA and other forensic evidence before they will consider guilt beyond reasonable doubt, placing an extra burden on prosecution and defence to argue at a scientific level as well as a legal level. At the same time, prosecution in Canada is ultimately empowered by this process because of its access to police forensic laboratories. The police have attempted to maximize their DNA evidence-gathering opportunities by conducting DNA dragnets that place informal pressure on community members to submit samples. It is clear that the institutions of criminal justice are changing to accommodate this new technology. Genetic science is beginning to play a central role in law enforcement and will be even more central in the future as it comes to be defined as essential for public safety. What is lost in the process is a political questioning of what it means for the extension of state power over the citizen’s body, the normalization of genetic surveillance within and beyond criminal justice, the responsibilization of citizens to participate in their own genetic surveillance, and the effects on legal principles such as the presumption of innocence and bodily integrity. It is likely too late to return to a legal principle that recognizes the citizen’s right to control access to his or her own body. Our bodies have been opened up to an ever-expanding surveillance net, and it remains to be seen where this process will end.

9 Communication and the Sorrows of Empire: Surveillance and Information Operations “Blowback” in the Global War on Terrorism Dwayne Winseck

While the global war on terrorism (GWOT) launched the United States onto a path of open-ended conflict, it is not without historical precedent. Just as the National Security Act of 1947 put the United States on a permanent wartime footing for the Cold War, the country has again been thrust into conflict with no end in sight. Three major policy initiatives have facilitated the war on terrorism: the Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF) granted by Congress to the Bush administration just three days after the 11 September 2001 attacks; the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, more commonly known as the USA Patriot Act; and the adoption of Information Operations (IO), a new and fundamental doctrine of US military and foreign policy (Defense Science Board 2004, 33). IO encompasses the surveillance, control, and destruction of communications networks, psychological warfare and propaganda, and more routine methods of public affairs and media relations. The pivotal role of these operations in the war on terrorism has sparked a revival of the study of propaganda (Brown 2003; Jowett and O’Donnell 2006; Knightly 2005; Snow and Taylor 2006). In this chapter, I take a fuller look at how IO changes the architecture of cyberspace (Lessig 2001). The information power of nationstates is a three-legged stool that rests on surveillance, censorship, and propaganda. Linking all three dimensions helps to illuminate the impact of surveillance on speech, especially its potential chilling effect. It also illuminates how people modify their behaviour in light of the possibility that their actions are taking place under the watchful eyes of the state. Going beyond the impact of propaganda on media messages draws our attention to the impact of IO on media infrastructures. Focusing on media infrastructures is crucial because civilian communication networks, including the Internet, are now fully intertwined with military communications, a situation that has led to networks being retooled for surveillance, control,

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and information warfare. These pressures are eroding formerly distinct elements of relations among media, public diplomacy, and the military, and they are tightening the nexus between the military, state, and commercial media, giving rise to what some call the military-industrial-mediaentertainment (MIME) complex (Burston 2003; Der Derian 2002). While Americans in the past could take some comfort in domestic laws that protected them from becoming targets of US government electronic surveillance, covert media operations, and propaganda, this is no longer certain (CRS 2004, 2006). According to the definitive US court ruling on these issues, a broad arc of journalistic, citizen, and professional rights, as well as the constitutional foundations of presidential authority and American democracy, have already been damaged badly.1 The “blowback” from international IO is the focus of this chapter. A Brief History of the Origins and Structure of C3I Things were not supposed to be this way. The work of renegade scholars from the late 1960s into the 1980s on the nexus of state-militarycommunications media power, dubbed the structure of C3I (command, control, communications, and intelligence), has been progressively pushed to the margins. Writing at the apex of the Cold War, scholars such as Herbert Schiller (1969) and Dallas Smythe (1981) were alarmed by the rise of a new economy based on the fusion of electronics, communications, and military spending. The pivotal role of the military could already be seen just after World War II, when Navy Secretary James Forrestal boasted before a startled Congress that the military-owned global communications grid was already larger than “all the private industries combined” (US Congress 1945, 12). “Diplomatic and military affairs are so vitally dependent upon the comprehensiveness, efficiency, reliability, and security of international communications that the continuation of private competition in such communications can no more be rationalized than could the administration by private enterprise of the diplomatic and military affairs themselves. In other words, they are so closely intertwined it is impossible to separate them. Senator Reed: You do not really mean that, do you? Mr. Forrestal: Yes sir. I have reached that conclusion reluctantly” (10). The drift toward ever-tighter links between national security and communications continued in 1948, as Britain, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada signed an agreement (which continues to this day) to create Echelon, “a global surveillance system ... targeting ... most of the world’s ... phone calls, internet, email, faxes and telexes” (Wright 1998, 18). Whereas the United States hastily created the Committee on Public Information and the Office of War Information during World Wars I and II respectively, that changed forever in 1953, as permanent tools of persuasion,

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diplomacy, and propaganda were created: Voice of America (VOA), the United States Information Agency (USIA), Radio Free Europe, and a slew of newspapers, books, magazines, journalists, and intellectuals covertly financed by the CIA in a bid to cultivate a global milieu of opinion favourably disposed to the US view of the world (Boyd-Barrett 2004, 8-39; Gerecht 2006). The convergence of state, military, and corporate communications gained additional momentum in the 1960s as the Defense Advanced Research Project Administration pioneered the Internet. By the late 1970s, the Pentagon had financed two-thirds of all computer research and development, and national telecom monopolies were set to expand into electronic databases and computer communications. Yet, within this context of hierarchically controlled communications, it was not surprising that a 1965 proposal in the United States to create a National Data Centre conjured up fears of Big Brother, while blueprints for wired nations sparked anxiety about civil liberties and people’s privacy. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and films such as Blade Runner and Brazil anchored dystopian images even deeper in the public mind. Technologies of Freedom and the Death Knell of Dystopian Worlds? By the late 1980s and early 1990s, however, technological changes, the demise of the Cold War, and shifts in academic fashion made dystopian views seem anachronistic. Telephone monopolies and mass-media oligopolies were being dismantled and privatized, and they were facing more competition than ever before. Moreover, the Internet had been explicitly designed as an open system, with its functionality, resources, and power placed at the ends of the network and in the hands of its users (Lessig 2001). Computers were in the hands of the people, not corporate- or state-regulated behemoths. Declining costs, powerful computers on the desktops of the nation, the proliferation of new media, and net-based applications appeared to be anything but the menacing colossus contained in the dystopian visions of Blade Runner and Brave New World. In this context, “surveillance now appeared much less sinister. The older metaphors of Big Brother or the panopticon, redolent of heavy-handed social control, seemed somehow less relevant to an everyday world of telephone transactions, Internet surfing, street-level security, work monitoring, and so on” (Lyon 2003a, 18). Nevertheless, copyright laws, media technologies designed for surveillance and control, and the retooling of public communications infrastructures for information warfare have steadily eroded the democratization of communication systems. Significant challenges to the media and entertainment industries posed by the ease of information distribution and copying, and the rise of peer-to-peer networks, have also sparked a powerful backlash against open media. Lawsuits against Napster, iCraveTV, My.MP3, Kazaa, and individual entertainment

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fans themselves have targeted the underground media economy, with varying degrees of success. New laws have extended the scope and duration of copyright, while digital rights management technology has imposed limits on what people can do with digital media content. The impulse to control information has also furthered vertical integration and cross-media alliances and the consolidation of media markets. Technologies, of course, can be designed to counter such forces. The greater availability of privacy-enhancing technology (PET), such as encryption, proxy servers, and anonymizing software, is an example. The Open Society Institute and Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, for instance, have created and freely distributed Psiphon, a program that “turns a home computer into a personal, encrypted server” allowing users to “access blocked sites in countries where the Internet is censored.”2 Microsoft was also forced to redesign its .Net service in 2002 to meet higher European Union standards of personal privacy. However, such measures do not counter the push by commercial and state interests alike to embed surveillance and control features ever more deeply into the infrastructure of mediated communication. In response to demands from the telecom and cable industry, for example, Cisco, Nortel, and Alcatel (the firms that build the equipment upon which the Internet and telecom networks run) are designing networks that, as Cisco Systems boasts, put “absolute control, down to the packet, in your hands ... You can identify each traffic type – Web, email, voice, video ... [and] isolate ... the type of application, even down to specific brands, by the interface used, by the user type and individual user identification or by the site address” (1999, 3; emphasis added). While these capabilities are framed by the communications technology industry as a critical element in the battle for greater mind share in increasingly competitive markets, they have also become the cornerstones of a powerful architecture of state surveillance and control, most notoriously in the People’s Republic of China (Zittrain and Edelman 2003). The US Committee on International Relations put the issues under the spotlight in early 2006, with Cisco, Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo chastised for tailoring their technologies, search engines, and web services to meet the Chinese government’s demands to have greater capacity for monitoring Internet traffic that flows in and out of China. As the committee chair, Christopher Smith, exclaimed, the Internet offers unprecedented “access to vast amounts of information for people the world over,” but in China these US firms have helped to turn the Internet into “a cyber-sledgehammer of repression of the Government” (United States, Committee on International Relations 2006, 1). The significance of the Chinese model also lies in the fact that China is promoting it as an international standard, with countries such as Yemen, Vietnam, Malaysia, Burma, Tunisia, Egypt, and, to a lesser extent, Singapore already emulating its key features.

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The Hard Reality of Soft Power: Information Operations and the GWOT The retooling of the Internet and infrastructures of public communication for greater surveillance and control has taken place in the United States through several processes: the convergence of military and civilian networks, new Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rules that require telecom and Internet companies to adopt strong surveillance and national security capabilities, and licensing conditions that require the multinational consortia of US and foreign firms that control the submarine cable networks linking the US telecom system and the Internet to the outside world to adopt similar mechanisms. The National Security Agency’s (NSA) Terrorist Surveillance Program, the aborted but still instructive cases of the Office of Strategic Influence, the Total Information Awareness program, and the USA Patriot Act are also propelling the slide toward a system of total infosphere control. According to the US Department of Defense’s recently declassified Information Operations Roadmap, information operations consist of five elements: cyberwarfare, psychological operations (public affairs and diplomacy, propaganda and psychological warfare), computer network operations, military deception, and operational security (2003, 9). The doctrine stretches from the traditional mass media to influential websites, cell phones, the Internet, blogs, e-mail, and prominent opinion leaders and decision makers. Leigh Armistead, an advocate of such ideas, argues that the aim is to “collect, shape, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or destroying an adversary’s ability to do the same” (2004, 19). The ultimate objective outlined in the Information Operations Roadmap is to achieve full “domination of the information spectrum,” an aim that involves “transforming IO into a core military competency on a par with air, ground, maritime, and special operations” (US Department of Defense 2003, 4). Information and media power, in other words, have taken on a wholly new degree of prominence in the global war on terrorism. The concept of “infowar” includes activities that run across the “soft” and “hard” ends of the power spectrum. The hard edge of information operations was on full display when the United States bombed the Al-Jazeera offices in Kabul and Baghdad in 2001 and 2003 (Brown 2003, 92; Collins 2003, 2; Reporters without Borders 2003). During the early stages of the War in Iraq, the US military also pondered destroying critical elements of the Iraqi information infrastructure. The military was reined in, however, by the concern that doing so could cause severe collateral damage to the European banking and financial system and by the possibility that destroying civilian communication networks could constitute an international war crime (CRS 2004, 11-17). Thus, rather than destroy the Iraqi Ministry of Information – the pillar of Iraq’s broadcast and telecom system – it was taken over and made into the rebranded Iraqi Media Network (IMN). The IMN remains under

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Pentagon control but is operated by a consortium of US defence contractors – Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) and the Harris Corporation – as well as the Lebanese Broadcasting Company International (LBCI) (Harris Corporation 2005; SAIC 2004). Soft power, by contrast, aims to get others “to want the same outcomes that you want,” through consent rather than coercion, and to promote particular values and policies (Nye 2002, 5). Its aim is to reinforce shared values between the United States and other democracies while changing the climate of opinion where such values are unwelcome. The rise of the 24/7 global commercial media ecology has propelled soft power to the centre of foreign policy and military strategy. Seen in this light, the apparent appeal of American culture alongside its bristling military power is crucial to girding the dominant position of the United States in the world system, despite the relative decline of its economic clout (Nye 2002, 81-96). Soft Power and the Military-Information-Media Complex The end of the Cold War severely eroded US soft power. Budget cuts were made to the Voice of America and other broadcasting agencies; these agencies were united under the fledgling Board of Broadcasting Governors in 1996, and the United States Information Agency was folded into the State Department in 1999. Information operations seek to change the status quo by restoring these agencies to their prior lustre, expanding them, and prising them away from the State Department so as to put them under the tighter control of the military and national security agencies (DSB 2004; GAO 2006; Snow and Taylor 2006). Steps in this direction have followed. Budgets and the numbers of Arab specialists and language speakers have been increased at the VOA. Ties to academics and think tanks with expertise in Muslim media and cultures have also been strengthened. More programs are being disseminated by every kind of medium possible, especially to Muslim audiences. The United States and Britain created Coalition Information Centres in Islamabad, London, and Washington in 2001 to counter the belief in some quarters that the Taliban had gained an advantage in the so-called information wars by getting its message out while London was sleeping and Washington was going to bed. The centres were subsequently folded into the US Office of Global Communications in 2003 to tighten control over government communications and daily messages from the White House, with the aim of influencing the continuous global news cycle. The $750 million “Initiative 9/11” fund created Radio Farda, directed at Iran, and the Mid-East Media Network, consisting of Al-Hurra TV and Radio Sawa. At least $400 million more has been spent on private contractors, the biggest of which are the Rendon Group, the Lincoln Group, SAIC, Level-3 Communications, and

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Harris Corporation (Bamford 2005; DSB 2004, 21-22; Robertson 2006; Schulman 2006, 5). Through the broad sweep of these initiatives, several things stand out. First, US state-owned media outlets and propaganda operations have been restored and expanded. Propaganda is also being privatized, and, crucially, the lines between normal public affairs and media relations, on the one hand, and propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other, have blurred beyond recognition. Indeed, this is an expected outcome of information operations, with advocates constantly promoting the elimination of the separate “silo” approach to public affairs and diplomacy, propaganda, and psychological operations. Yet this move is criticized even from within the foreign policy establishment and by public affairs officers in the State Department and the Pentagon who believe that their credibility, and the news media that rely on them, are being badly tarnished by such close ties to propaganda and psyop activities (DSB 2004, 12, 24; Snow and Taylor 2006, 400-1; US Department of Defense 2003, 23-25). The tightening connections between the state, the military, and the commercial media have further compounded the problem. Report after report advocates tighter cooperation between the government and the military, on the one side, and commercial media outlets, on the other, as well as for the state-owned propaganda agencies to mimic commercial media production values (CRS 2004, 14; DSB 2004, 2-4). This, too, has occurred. For example, just weeks after 11 September 2001, the Bush administration sent leading neoconservative Karl Rove and several others to meet media industry power brokers to discuss how they could contribute to the war on terrorism. In one such meeting, they met with thirty executives, including Peter Roth, the president of Warner Brothers TV; Leslie Moonves, the president of CBS Television; Sandy Grushow from the Fox Entertainment Group; Jerry Offsay of Showtime; Chris Albrecht and Colin Callender at HBO Films; and Bryce Zabel, the chairman of the Television Academy of Arts and Sciences (Bart 2001). The captains of media industry were ready, willing, and able to do their part in the GWOT, but some complained that the administration was moving too slowly and that Bush’s emissaries were unclear about “what they’re looking for ... and we need some direction” (Waxman 2001, C1).3 Nowhere are the ties between the state, military, and commercial media more evident than in the Iraqi Media Network. As briefly discussed above, the IMN was reconstructed out of the remnants of the Iraq Ministry of Information. Its first radio and television broadcasts took place in April 2003, before US troops had even entered Baghdad. Since then, the IMN’s television network, Al-Iraqiya, parallel radio network, and national newspaper, al-Sabah, have expanded to thirty cities serving 80 percent of the population. Although pitched as an Iraqi state-owned public media service, the IMN is controlled

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by the Pentagon but managed on a day-to-day basis by SAIC, Harris Corporation, and Lebanese Broadcasting Company International. SAIC and Harris are familiar members of the US military-industrial compact, while LBCI is a private broadcaster created in the mid-1990s and partly owned by Lebanon’s prime minister, Rafiq al-Hariri (Harris Corporation 2005; SAIC 2004). They are responsible for rebuilding the Iraqi media infrastructure and replenishing the ranks of media professionals, since all former journalists were fired as part of the “de-Baathification” policy. To this end, about 1,000 employees have been hired and are receiving training from American advisers such as former CNN executive editor Ted Iliff. While day-to-day operations are in the hands of Iraqi journalists, programming and editorial control rest with SAIC and Harris Corporation and, through them, the US government and military (Harris Corporation 2005; SAIC 2004). The thoroughgoing transformation of the media in Iraq has led to some 100 to 200 new newspapers, and a burgeoning market in satellite dishes means that many other Arab and global television channels are widely available (Mirrlees 2006, 6). While this is undoubtedly an improvement on the state of affairs under Saddam Hussein, the shadow of psychological operations hangs heavily over the Iraqi media as private contractors run the hardware and others similarly placed pay for content of suspect origins and questionable veracity to be distributed (Mazzetti and Daragahi 2005). “It’s all cloak-and-dagger stuff,” states Kevin McCauley, editor of O’Dwyer’s PR Daily (cited in Bamford 2005). The occupation of Iraq has also led to censorship, press closures, and the revocation of broadcast licences. The popular Al-Awaza newspaper linked to Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and another opposed to the US hand-picked Iraqi Governing Council were shut down under instructions from the Coalition Provisional Authority. The Iraq Higher Media Council temporarily barred Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya from the country (Mirrlees 2006). In the United States, Wall Street banned the Arab broadcaster from its trading-room floor, while almost every cable and satellite firm has refused to offer its service to US audiences. The Canadian regulator also imposed onerous rules that made it all but impossible to receive the service in Canada. As the US Air Force states, “the US will continue to lose ground in the global media wars until it develops a ... strategy to counter Al-Jazeera” (CRS 2004, 4). Using a strategy of carrots and sticks, officials from the Bush administration have begun to appear more frequently on Al-Jazeera to put forth their views. As for the sticks, the Al-Jazeera offices in Baghdad were bombed by US forces in 2003 – similar to events in Kabul two years earlier. Human rights and journalist groups wondered if these acts were intentional given the statement about “global media wars” above and the hard edge of information operations. The Daily Mail’s (London) disclosure – in the face of threats of prosecution under Britain’s Official Secrets Act – that George W. Bush had pondered blowing

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up Al-Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha during a meeting with Tony Blair further bolstered such suspicions (Reporters without Borders 2003, 2004). As a result of these actions, the lines between a free media and the normal media spin of diplomacy versus propaganda and information warfare have completely blurred. Nevertheless, the US attempt to promote democracy and freedom throughout the Middle East is in tatters. In fact, the view of “core American values,” people, entertainment, and foreign policy in Muslimmajority countries is getting worse, not better; soft opposition is hardening. Moreover, the decline has yet to hit bottom (DSB 2004, 44-46). As the DSB states, “US policies and actions are increasingly seen by the overwhelming majority of Muslims as a threat to the survival of Islam itself. [There is] an overwhelming conviction that the US seeks to ‘dominate’ and ‘weaken’ the Muslim World” (35). “There is consensus ... that US public diplomacy is in crisis” (16). Blowback and the New Normal: Retooling the Domestic Mediasphere for the “Long War” With the worldwide struggle for hearts and minds failing, and the scope of information operations off limits in the United States, perhaps the greatest impact of information operations falls on the communications media and the people of the United States and other liberal democracies. As bluntly stated in the Information Operations Roadmap, the “new normal” will have a significant impact at home: “Public diplomacy and PSYOP ... messages disseminated to any audience except individual decision-makers (and perhaps even then) will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public ... Today, the distinction between foreign and domestic audiences becomes more a question of USG intent rather than information dissemination practices” (CRS 2004, 26; emphasis added). If the intention of the Bush administration is the thin reed upon which the issues turn, then there is clear cause for concern. Indeed, Daniel Kuehl, the director of the Information Strategies Concentration Program at the National Defense University, strongly believes that the Bush administration does intend to have an impact on the information environment at home. “In my opinion, the global issue wasn’t the reason why [the Office of Global Communications was] ... created. They clearly had a completely domestic focus. They were part of the effort to re-elect the president ... I’m going to be real pejorative here: Their goal was psychological operations on the American voting public” (quoted in Schulman 2006, 8). The continued existence of three programs – the Office of Strategic Information (OSI), the Total Information Awareness Project, and the National Security Agency’s secret Terrorist Surveillance Project – suggests that he is right. The Pentagon’s plans for a new Office of Strategic Influence were revealed by the New York Times late in 2005. The OSI aimed to influence public opinion

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by planting stories and influencing journalists and media organizations throughout the world – in friendly, neutral, and enemy countries alike. It would use an indiscriminate mix of news stories planted in the media and a host of other methods that ran the gamut, as a senior Pentagon official stated, “from the blackest of black programs to the whitest of white” (Dao and Schmitt 2002). And standing in the midst of this flow of influence were the Rendon and Lincoln groups and SAIC. However, about to be caught in a maelstrom of corrupted information and covert media operations, and likely tipped off by disgruntled public affairs officers in the Pentagon, American and foreign journalists pilloried the OSI (DSB 2004; CRS 2004; Schulman 2006). It was reputedly shut down less than six months later, but the veracity of this claim is questionable. The New York Times exposure of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Total Information Awareness program late in 2002, just six months after the OSI had supposedly been closed, is another example of how information operations are spilling over into the United States. In this case, the aspect of IO in question was a broad surveillance program directed at gathering information from telephone records, Internet users, travel documents, and banking transactions, inside the United States and worldwide (Markoff 2002). The Total Information Awareness program, like the OSI, also relied heavily on the private sector, notably on huge database vendors such as Axciom. The project also relied on existing laws that permitted surveillance directed abroad, but it ran roughshod over tight restrictions against such methods in the United States. And like the OSI, the project was supposedly closed down. Yet, with his classic touch of hubris, ex-defence secretary Rumsfeld bluntly told reporters, “you can have the name, but I’m gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done, and I have” (quoted in Schulman 2006, 7). Although speaking in this instance about the OSI, Rumsfeld’s statement undoubtedly reflected his feelings on the surveillance program as well. Indeed, the Information Operations Roadmap, rather than conceding the lessons learned from these debacles, blithely folds its key elements into the new doctrine of information operations (CRS 2004). This cavalier attitude is visible in the writings of military officials tucked away in specialized publications. Writing in IOSphere, a publication of the Joint Information Operations Centre, Major James B. Kinniburgh (USAF) and Dorothy Denning (2006) lay out a strategy for extending information operations to the “blogosphere” and the Internet. Drawing on the concept of “full information spectrum dominance,” they present the case for using information operations across all three layers of the “global infosphere”: the top layer of traditional mass media; the intermediate layer of prominent websites, blogs, opinion leaders, and advocacy groups; and a microlayer of personal e-mails, cell phones, and discussion groups (7). While recognizing that media outlets such as CNN, Fox News, the Washington Post, and the New

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York Times continue to be the leading sources of news and current affairs even in the online world, they argue that prominent blogs, websites, and newsgroups also influence public discourses and perceptions. The upshot is that information operations need to map this terrain and intervene to shape the flow of information online. They also recommend that foreign intermediaries with established credibility in their own cultural milieus be identified and used as conduits of strategic communications whenever possible (9). To some extent, this is already being done by electronic media engagement teams operating under the US Central Command. Its tasks are to utilize the full surveillance capacities of new media technologies by scouring the Internet in order to “initiate contact with editors of Web sites that cover operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, offering the same news releases and stories written by military officials that are made available to journalists affiliated with the traditional media outlets.”4 In addition to identifying prominent sites, the group evaluates their accuracy, offers additional information and corrections where it sees fit, and tries to push good news stories in ways that “bypass traditional print and broadcast media.”5 The goal in inviting these sites to link to official military and government sites is to piggy-back on prominent websites and blogs. To this end, while only 300 blogs have taken up the military on its offer, the logarithmic scaling effect of Internet links offers connections to an additional 270,000 sites at two steps out from the original source. The biggest problem, however, according to a Centcom spokesman for the project, “is that most links are run by supporters ... It’s almost like we’re preaching to the choir.”6 And while these operations are run by media affairs staff, Kinniburgh and Denning highlight the fact that “there will be times when it is ... necessary to pass false or erroneous information through ... all three layers ... [of] the media” (2006, 10). They also accept that the “potential blowback” from such actions will violate the prohibition against the “US military ... conducting information operations against US persons” (10). However, instead of retreating from the precipice of a legal black hole, they charge over it, advising “a well thoughtout deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure” (10). Cavalierly tossing caution to the wind, the authors slip effortlessly from media affairs to more sinister forms of propaganda. It is a prescription for a virile and militaristic form of lawlessness in cyberspace. Kinniburgh and Denning (2006) are not renegade mavericks; they are moving well within the shadows cast by the Bush administration’s pronounced tendency to play fast and loose with established American law. Thus, at the same time that they were publishing their blueprint for extending monitoring and the propaganda war deeper into cyberspace, the Bush administration was being hauled before the court of public opinion and a district court in Michigan over the National Security Agency’s secret Terrorist Surveillance Program. The existence of the NSA’s electronic surveillance

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program was disclosed by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau in the New York Times in December 2005 (against White House attempts to block publication of the article and amidst even more intrigue created by the decision of the newspaper to delay the article for a year, without an adequate explanation) (see also Calame 2006). The NSA’s secret surveillance program was authorized by President Bush on the pretext that he could exercise such executive authority under provisions of the Authorization of the Use of Military Force legislation that had been hastily passed within three days of 11 September 2001 (CRS 2006, 2-4). Tapping into the telecom networks and switching hubs of AT&T, Verizon, and most other big US telecom firms (except, to its credit, Qwest), the NSA’s surveillance program eavesdrops on telephone, e-mail, and Internet communications between people in the United States and elsewhere in the world, targeting up to 500 people at any one time and thousands overall. The aim is to monitor the electronic communications of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda and thus to pre-empt terrorist plots. The rub, however, is that the Bush administration approved the surveillance of the US telecom system and Internet without following the legal course of obtaining warrants through the Foreign Intelligence Review Court.7 The leading court case is replete with sections of the government’s case blacked out for reasons of national security and claims that it was impossible to proceed with the case at all because doing so would reveal the existence of “state secrets,” a claim the court was admonished to give utmost deference to (Keisler et al. 2006, 2). Over and against the administration stood journalists, academics, writers, and lawyers who argued that they had been illegally caught up in the electronic dragnet because of their work involving Muslims living abroad. The president lacked authority, they stated, under the AUMF, the Constitution, or any law to create the secret program (CRS 2006, 34-44).8 Carolyn Jewel, a writer of futuristic action and romance novels, claimed that the surveillance program made it impossible for her to talk “openly about Islam or US foreign policy in e-mails to a Muslim individual in Indonesia and that she has decided against using the Internet to conduct ... research” (Keisler et al. 2006, 20). While government lawyers scoffed at such claims, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor was blunt in her decision: the Terrorist Surveillance Program was illegal and unconstitutional. The claims before the court were not speculative and general, she concluded, but “distinct, palpable, and substantial.”9 The surveillance program crippled plaintiffs’ “ability to report the news and ... to effectively represent their clients.”10 She also heaped scorn on the administration’s claims that the president’s unfettered authority in such matters stemmed from the “inherent powers” clause of the Constitution and the AUMF: “There are no hereditary Kings in America.”11 The administration withdrew for the next six months, but in January 2007 it announced that the surveillance project would continue – but only after warrants were obtained according

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to the rules of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Review Court. Creating Network Infrastructures for an Age of Cyberwar While the Terrorist Surveillance Program will apparently proceed in accordance with the law, the Internet and telecom grid continue to be retooled to meet the needs of national security and cyberwarfare. With an estimated 70-85 percent of all military communications depending on civilian communication networks, and submarine cables accounting for a similar volume of all intercontinental information flows, these are crucial areas in which security, surveillance, and control demands are embedded into the infrastructure of public communication networks (CRS 2004, 15). An estimated thirty countries are engaged in cyberwar preparations and these countries are probing the networks of others for vulnerabilities and potential military advantages. Russia and a few other countries have pushed for a global legal regime to restrict the weaponization of cyberspace, but such efforts have gained little traction. Global laws, in this setting, are derided as the means by which the weak seek to curtail the power and influence of the strong. The dependence of military communications on civilian networks reveals the extent to which such networks constitute the terrain of information warfare. Yet this dependence also raises the question of whether attacking the networks upon which the public depends constitutes an international war crime (CRS 2004, 11-12). Within this context, gold-plated public networks are being built to military specifications, with citizens effectively subsidizing the infrastructure of infowar. Networks have always taken such factors into account, but current conditions have been dramatically altered. Steps along this path began in earnest with several new “critical infrastructure protection” initiatives launched under the Clinton administration. Those initiatives have drawn the private sector, military, and government closer together and have been continued under the Bush administration’s National Strategy to Secure Cyber­ space. However, such efforts are widely seen as ineffective, leading some to believe that regulation is “needed to supplement, or replace market forces” (CRS 2004, 16). While the companies that run the public telecom networks and the Internet chafe about having to shoulder the costs of national security, the FCC imposed new rules in 2005 that required them to do just that (albeit after allowing them to offer broadband Internet services on a noncommon carrier basis, effectively pre-empting debates that continue to this day over network neutrality) (FCC 2005, sec. VI). Yet, in this context, the idea of network neutrality had largely been rendered moot by the increased national security obligations placed on the telecoms and Internet providers – so it was a short step from there to the sacrifice of “open network” principles in the commercial realm.

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While the character of surveillance and control has changed dramatically, nations have always used control over networks to achieve security and military ends. Throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Britain encouraged the British, European, and American companies that ran the world’s network of submarine cables to use London as the hub of their operations. They did so because it was good business and because it afforded it a great deal of control. The United States claimed similar powers, and the president has had concentrated authority over these matters since the first Atlantic cables connected the United States to Europe in 1866. Several companies challenged the basis of that authority after World War I, but any doubts about the president’s powers in this regard were silenced with passage of the Cable Landing Licenses Act in 1921. Whether in London, Washington, or Paris, those measures were put to good effect in the massive bout of cable censorship and the cutting of privately owned German cables in World War I (Winseck and Pike 2007). These powers remain the basis of presidential authority today, and they are used to implant national security interests into global communication networks, as a tool using the lure of US markets to gain entry for American firms into foreign markets, and to allow the US military, the NSA, and other national security agencies to review the ownership, control, technical design, and landing points of submarine cables landing on US soil (FCC 2003). Despite the massive changes in global communication between now and the distant past, the geography of the cable system still follows the paths set down in the nineteenth century. While the number of cables connecting the United States to the rest of the world is slightly larger today, the differences in speed and capacity are incomparable. Now, as then, the world’s communications – around 80 percent – depend on the global cable system for intercontinental communications. Just as the numbers of cables in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were comparatively small, they are surprisingly few still. Indeed, forty-five cables link the United States to the rest of the world: seventeen across the northern Atlantic to Europe, fifteen more to South America, and another thirteen to Asia (FCC 2003, 3233). Cables running to the Middle East and Africa are scarcer yet. As usual, weak states in zones of conflict have effectively become “electronic black holes,” coveted as potential military bases by imperial powers but disconnected from and underserved by the rest of the world. The concentration of cables is rendered tighter yet by the fact that they are clustered in a handful of metropolitan centres: Sacramento, Los Angeles, Palo Alto, Seattle, and San Francisco on the West Coast, and New York, Boston, Washington, and Miami on the East Coast. Moreover, these cables intersect with the domestic system in tightly clustered and shared telecom hotels. On the one hand, as US military planners note, this greatly increases

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network vulnerability. The sense of vulnerability is magnified further still by the fact that all of the world’s undersea cables are owned by a few multinational consortia consisting of the largest private- and state-owned telecom companies from the United States and other nations. On the other hand, however, the small numbers of ownership groups and cable landing points constitute the choke points at which the nation-state imposes its control over the global communications system. In the United States, that power still rests solidly in the president’s hands. Access to US markets is determined by an open “market test” and a secret national security assessment. In the first, the FCC and the Departments of Justice and Commerce pass judgment on the grounds of market power, ownership, price, and the existence of equivalent access to the foreign markets of the interests involved in the consortia – the cornerstone of the United States’ long-standing reciprocity policy and its obligations under the telecom agreement of the World Trade Organization. The other review is a convoluted process conducted entirely in secret. As personal correspondence with an official intimately involved in the review of cable landing licences indicated, “it is against the law for any member of the government to provide any information about a transaction, including even confirming whether we reviewed a transaction. No information is put out on any reviews unless the president makes a decision, and then the White House issues a press release with the president’s decision ... In many telecom cases, the members of the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States negotiate network security agreements to mitigate the national security concerns.”12 While the national security review is shrouded in the cloak of “state secrets,” the FCC’s review at least reveals who the parties to the review are and a general outline of what is at stake. Those insights can be gained in the fascinating case of Global Crossing, which occurred between the collapse of the speculative telecom bubble in 2000 and the final decision in the case taken by the FCC and the president in 2003. The collapse of the telecom bubble is relevant insofar as it led to the bankruptcy of Global Crossing and an attempt to rescue it through a transfer of control to a group of international investors, including Hong Kong multibillionaire and close confidant of the Chinese government in Beijing, Li Ka-shing. When the matter went to review before the Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), it was disclosed that the group had hired Richard Perle, one of the neoconservative architects of the Bush presidency, who continued to chair the Pentagon’s Defense Science Board concurrent with his new role as lobbyist for Global Crossing. Given that the Pentagon, alongside the NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and, as just mentioned, CFIUS, constitute the secret national security review committee for cable landing licences, Perle was in an obvious position of conflict of interest. The case was redolent with “star

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chamber” qualities and smacked of crony capitalism, an odour that eventually led Perle to resign from the Defense Science Board and a reshuffling of the ownership group so as to lose the ties to Li Ka-shing. With Li Ka-shing gone, the majority of ownership in Global Crossing fell to companies “indirectly controlled by the Government of Singapore” (FCC 2003, 41): Singapore Telecom and ST Telemedia. With a faithful and longstanding ally from the Asia-Pacific region now in control, the remaining issues fell within the scope of the national security review. Referring to the secret agreement between the Executive Branch and Global Crossing, the FCC notes that it covers “provisions for information storage, access to facilities and data,” and that all of its equipment on American soil must be “directed, controlled, supervised and managed by a domestic communications company” (2003, 40). Moreover, “50% of the members of the new GX Board must be ... U.S. citizens, [who] have or acquire US security clearances,” with the FBI, Pentagon, and director of Homeland Security all having a veto over such appointments. Global Crossing was thus firmly grounded on US territory and its operations calibrated so as to place it within the reach of the national security state. In sum, surveillance, control, and data-gathering capacities are hardwired into Global Crossing’s organizational and technological structure. Consequently, it has been utterly transformed from a commercial entity providing open channels of global communication into a tool of the state. Finally, outside a few of its specificities, these are common features of communications media built to operationalize the requirements of information operations in the long war against terrorism, a sprawling notion that reduces all of us to the level of those set up as threats to democracy and a whole way of life as we know it. Conclusion: Blowback, the American Empire, and the Consequences of IO The United States has an undeniable imperial past, given its turn-of-thetwentieth-century forays into the Philippines and Caribbean. Whether or not that status is being restored today is still an open question. Some argue that its declining economic clout makes it all but impossible to speak of an imperial America, others assert that the magnitude of its influence makes it so, while still others claim that it is an empire in denial, an imperial power in all but name. At the same time, there has historically been a current in American political culture opposed to imperial and military forays abroad because of their corrosive impacts on the character of the American people and their brand of republican democracy. Thus, it was Mark Twain who exclaimed at the height of early-twentieth-century US imperialism that it was a lot easier to get in than it was to get out. While the jury is still out on the ultimate question of US imperial power, this chapter has shown that concerns about the corrosive impacts of militar-

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ism and foreign misadventures are well placed. As Immanuel Wallerstein states, “over the last 200 years, the United States acquired a considerable amount of ideological credit. But these days, the United States is running through this credit even faster than it ran through its gold surplus in the 1960s” (2002, 68). And while its international legitimacy is in free fall, even US courts have condemned the Bush administration for acting beyond the law and at the lowest ebb of presidential authority (CRS 2006).13 These are the costs, the “blowback,” from the long war on terrorism and the pivotal role of information operations in that project. Among the casualties thus far is the increasing but uncomfortable tendency for the “rule of men” to replace the “rule of law,” as Judge Anna Diggs Taylor illuminated in her pointed rebuke “there are no hereditary Kings in America,” and “when structure fails, liberty is in peril.”14 While Taylor was speaking of the Terrorist Surveillance Program, a cast of characters closely tied to the Bush administration has implemented a range of information operations projects, all operating on the margins of the law and whose outcomes even on their own terms have been questionable. Arrayed around the round table of information warriors sit Bush’s spiritual adviser Karen Hughes, neoconservative strategists Richard Perle and Karl Rove, as well as John Poindexter, of Iran contra infamy, who led the Total Information Awareness project. And it was ex-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld who created the nominally defunct Office of Strategic Influence and formalized the doctrine of information operations. More than this, it is the elevated status of the military in information operations and the structure of American democracy, and the long-term and universal scope of the GWOT, that have a strong whiff of militarism and authoritarianism about them. The machinery of democracy is certainly out of kilter, although the culture of democracy offers more than a residue of hope. To their credit, a few American journalists and media organizations have clued into the problems at hand. In this, the unprecedented mea culpas of the New York Times and Washington Post for their slavish dependence on “official” and “anonymous” sources in the run-up to the War in Iraq stand as a hopeful sign. Those apologies may be too little too late, but they suggest that the tide may be turning, as do recent elections and Bush’s record low ratings in opinion polls. The courts have also been surprisingly blunt, condemning the administration’s surveillance program and other aspects of the “long war” that run afoul of domestic and international laws. The ongoing rift between media and public affairs staff, on the one hand, and the cadre of bold IO operatives, on the other, is another sign of a mounting backlash. Yet, while it is crucial to highlight the forces arrayed against militarism and imperial adventures, it is also necessary to candidly recognize that much of what is taking place occurs beneath the threshold of perception. Tears in the fabric here and there do not reveal the whole cloth from which current

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trends are cut. In this case, cyberspace has been retooled for surveillance, control, propaganda, and information warfare. This has largely occurred with a compliant private sector and under the initial press of copyright laws and the seemingly quixotic attempts of far-off authoritarian states to impose order and control on the Internet. However, a new citadel of power is rising in cyberspace, and the pressure to drive surveillance deeper yet continues unabated, with ISPs and electronic databases, including those used heavily by academics, journalists, and the public, such as Lexis/Nexus and Factiva, under relentless pressure to retain more detailed records of their users, to hold that data longer, and to cooperate further with national security agencies. Seen in that light, the “long war” is far from over, and the culture of democracy will have to draw on even deeper resources to stem the tide.

10 Bio-Benefits: Technologies of Criminalization, Biometrics, and the Welfare System Shoshana Magnet

Law enforcement officials and government agencies across North America are adopting biometric technologies for a variety of reasons. Utopian descriptions of biometric applications range from eliminating racial profiling visà-vis the neutral gaze of the biometric camera (Stein 2001) to the precise identification of criminals (Erbe 1997). Although biometric identification technologies were developed for use by law enforcement agencies, in the early 1990s state governments campaigned to add these technologies to existing welfare systems. Their efforts resulted in the widespread biometric fingerprinting of welfare recipients. By 2000, biometric identifiers were being used in welfare programs in more than twelve states (Office of the Inspector General 2000). In this chapter, I question whether biometric technologies are race-, gender-, class-, and (dis)ability-neutral mechanisms. I argue that biometric technologies help us to think about the differential application of the surveillant gaze of the state. In the context of welfare administration, biometric technologies are mobilized at the nexus of government agencies and biometrics companies as a powerful technology of criminalization: how specific technologies and state apparatuses problematize the legitimacy of certain kinds of bodies. Biometrics fit into the larger state project of attempting to visualize an expanding network of criminalized bodies – a network, moreover, in which welfare recipients are firmly situated. I focus primarily on California, the first state to introduce biometric technologies in the welfare system. In California, mandatory finger imaging was imposed on welfare recipients across seven counties (Office of the Inspector General 2000). California is the only state to significantly audit the alleged success of biometrics programs, and it proves useful to examine the ways in which empirical science is used to justify the adoption of new technologies to address poverty as well as the dangers associated with biological-scientific measures as indicators of worth.

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The chapter begins with a brief explanation of biometric technologies. This is followed by a detailed history of the significant cuts to welfare that formed the backdrop to the introduction of biometrics in the US welfare system. Having established the history of welfare regulation in America, I demonstrate that the use of biometrics in the welfare administration process helps to automate the long-standing attempt of the state to sort out the deserving from the undeserving poor. I illustrate how those who use biometrics claim to make the process of providing welfare benefits scientific, but I contest the notion that biometrics operate as an objective, scientific tool. Instead, I show how biometrics depend on flawed economics: rather than saving the state money, biometrics criminalize people living on the margins of the state and at great expense to the state, simultaneously generating profit for the biometrics industry. Biometric Technologies Biometrics is the science of using human biological measurements for purposes of identification, classification, and social sorting. I focus primarily on two related biometric technologies: finger imaging and retinal scanning. These biometric technologies are the two most commonly used methods to identify welfare recipients (Edwards 1997). Finger imaging involves taking a picture of the fingerprint. Retinal scanning involves taking a picture of blood vessels at the back of the eye. Unlike iris scanning, which simply takes a picture of the iris, retinal scanning is much more invasive: it uses infrared light to penetrate the eye and to produce an image of the vessels at the back. The invasiveness of retinal scanning has made many policy makers reluctant to use it; it has been most successful when used coercively, as a compulsory measure for access to services and valued or necessary resources. Retinal scans and finger images are converted into digital information that can be encoded onto a passport or a smartcard for purposes of identification. Data can also be stored in an information database. While they involve different measures of the body, the distinction between finger imaging and retinal scanning is in a certain sense artificial. In a neoliberal market of increasing consolidation, biometric identification companies are merging, resulting in multimodal biometric solutions that enable scans that simultaneously check fingerprints and retinal patterns (Swann 2007). Introducing Biometrics to Welfare Entitlement Interest in, and availability of, biometric imaging systems for welfare recipients emerged at a time when welfare programs were particularly visible in the press and in political debate. Biometric companies were interested in expanding markets for their newly developed products, allowing “yesterday’s technological exotica” to be translated into today’s “everyday tool” (Gugliotta

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1999). Biometric companies’ need for expanding markets drove the implementation of the technologies in the welfare system. In one of the earliest applications of biometrics to welfare, Unisys Corporation developed biometric fingerprint imaging for San Diego County (at no cost). In return, San Diego County granted Unisys the right to use the project as a testing opportunity to develop similar systems for other state and local governments. The system Unisys designed was one of the first “fingerprint imaging system[s] ... designed to detect welfare fraud” (Silver 1995, 22). In fact, when companies such as Digital Biometrics and Identix became involved in the biometric identification of welfare recipients, they reported “their first profitable quarters ever” (Adelson 1994). In the United States, the introduction of biometric identification technologies in welfare programs was part of a campaign of sweeping reforms. Biometric measurement technologies were introduced in 1991, one year before Bill Clinton pledged to end welfare “as we know it” during his election campaign of 1992 (Abramovitz 2000, 13). As Gilliom (2001) and KohlerHausmann (2007) document, the unpopularity of state-subsidized welfare in the United States dates to the 1970s. Welfare is a gendered program, differentially affecting women and their children. Contempt for welfare recipients, moreover, stems from stereotypes of the undeserving poor that are often related to race-, gender-, and class-based identities. Martin Gilens writes that the news media continually distort welfare, depicting “overly racialized images of poverty” (1999, 6), and associates these images with the suggestion that the poor are unwilling to work. He argues that “Americans who think most welfare recipients (or poor people) are Black express more negative views about people on welfare and are more likely to blame poverty on a lack of effort rather than on circumstances beyond the control of the poor” (206). The exaggerated stereotype of the African American welfare queen exploited by Ronald Reagan in 1976, and utilized by conservative politicians from Clarence Thomas to George W. Bush, epitomizes the sexist, racist, and classist nexus that has been essential to expansion of the criminalization of poverty to the criminalization of welfare; it is these oppressive categorizations that have been used to justify the rollbacks to federal and state assistance. Significant cuts to welfare began in the early 1970s under the quality control movement. This movement provided states with incentives to strive for accuracy in the allocation of funds (i.e., reducing fraud), and the movement imposed penalties for errors in welfare administration. Thus, the 1973 quality control regulations dramatically intensified the surveillance of welfare recipients (Gilliom 2001). This trend continued with President Reagan’s cuts to welfare in the 1980s. To achieve his goal of welfare reform, Reagan granted states a freer hand to tailor aid programs, beginning with the elimination of federal responsibility for state well-being (Kahn and Kamerman 1998;

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Rogers-Dillon 2004). This strategy was expanded by President Clinton through the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 (Kahn and Kamerman 1998), signed by most states in 1997 (Abramovitz 2000). PRWORA granted states a free hand in the administration of welfare programs. Major reforms to welfare included work requirements for aid recipients, time limits to welfare, mandatory job training, and the use of social programs such as health care and child care as incentives to encourage welfare recipients to work (Abramovitz 2000; Gilens 1999). The Clinton-era reforms allowed states the flexibility to introduce biometric identification programs into welfare.1 Two primary programs were targeted for biometric technologies: Home Relief (for single adults with no dependants) and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). The latter is now called Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF). Keeping pace with quick-fix solutions, the use of biometric technologies was described as a straightforward way to address the problem of welfare, capable of ensuring “biometric accountability” and eliminating fraud.2 The purported scientific simplicity of biometric measurements made them extremely popular as a solution to the complex and highly contested nature and administration of welfare. Biometrics are a trigger point for those interested in the single-issue policies that have come to dominate the socalled compassionate conservatism of the new right: single-issue policies aimed at gaining “popular support for economic policies favorable to the economic elite” (Reeves and Campbell 1994, 10) and fundamentally undermining the policies and spirit of the welfare state. As a result of the unequal distribution of wealth and power between cities and suburbs, cities are particularly vulnerable to cuts to the New Deal (Kahn and Kamerman 1998). The first location to be targeted for a biometrics program aimed at getting tough on welfare fraud was Los Angeles, followed shortly by New York (McLarin 1995a). The able-bodied poor without children are traditionally among the first welfare clients to be subject to cutbacks (Rogers-Dillon 2004). Los Angeles was no exception: the first recipients of Home Relief were finger-imaged there (Hauppage 1993). Biometric fingerprinting was quickly expanded to other counties, and in 1994 general assistance welfare clients in San Francisco, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties were biometrically fingerprinted. The majority of those scanned were single young men (Gunnison 1994). Men (particularly able-bodied men) are commonly constructed as independent and self-sustaining individuals. Therefore, they remain suspect as recipients of care from the state. It is thus not surprising that their benefits were among the first to be policed using biometrics. In 1994, the biometric identification program in Los Angeles was expanded to families receiving AFDC, making it the first place in the country to biometrically fingerprint families on welfare (McLarin 1995a). The pattern of fingerprinting Home

Bio-Benefits

Relief recipients followed by the expansion of fingerprinting to families was repeated in New York in 1995 (Fein 1995). There is a long history of sorting the poor into those deserving and those undeserving of relief. Although the basis for classification changes, the imperative to discover who is worthy of aid persists. Michael Katz (1986) describes a study done in the early nineteenth century in Massachusetts that sought to classify the impotent and the able-bodied poor. Similar attempts at classification continue, as those seeking aid from the state are classified by age, gender, race, mental ability, (dis)ability, and parental status in order to evaluate the legitimacy of their claims (Gilliom 2001). Biometric technologies are the latest technology of power utilized in this quest; they automate the process of social sorting. Yet, like all of their predecessors, biometric classification systems are prone to error. For example, when George W. Bush was the governor of Texas, he called for the expansion of biometric identification to families. Ironically, elderly, ill Americans became the prime targets of the new biometric tests, as Bush selected Medicaid as the target program requiring biometric identification (Charpiot 2004; Ratcliffe 1994). Once biometric technologies for welfare clients were established in one county, they spread to other counties in the same state (as in California). In Wisconsin in 1996, for example, largely as a result of Republican governor and notorious welfare reformer Tommy Thompson’s efforts (Rogers-Dillon 2004), biometric scanning of welfare clients was expanded to include retinal scanning (Edwards 1997). Biometrically identifying welfare recipients fits the “new paternalism”: a “supervisory approach to poverty” that advocates intense scrutiny of those receiving aid such as General Relief, Home Relief, or AFDC/TANF (RogersDillon 2004, 14). Paternalists emphasize that “some intrusion” into the lives of welfare clients is both necessary and acceptable (Rogers-Dillon 2004, 121); thus, welfare reform under new paternalism has led to an intensification of surveillance mechanisms, probing the lives of those on assistance and seeking to deny them benefits (Firestone 1995). This approach to restructuring poverty facilitates the introduction of biometrics to welfare programs and ignores suggestions that there are privacy concerns that need to be addressed. Indeed, many state politicians tend to believe that biometric technologies only affect the guilty. Hauppage (1993) quotes one politician: “‘I’m not after the people who deserve welfare, God bless them,’ said Joseph Rizzo, a Republican county legislator from Islip Terrace and a sponsor of the [biometrics] bill. ‘I’m after the people who are ripping off the system.’”3 Paternalistic welfare reforms make the state into the surrogate (and suspicious) father of those receiving aid, and biometric technologies give the sense that paternalism is scientific. A particularly dramatic example of the new scientific paternalism is the newfound emphasis on determining paternity – demonstrating the confluence of biological paternity testing and

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biometric identification. In one program, a hospital-based paternity ID program was implemented in order to ensure future child support (Gannett Company 1994). Anna Marie Smith (2007) has dubbed this newfound emphasis on discovering the paternity of the children born to welfare mothers part of a system of neo-eugenics: women receiving welfare benefits are subject to extreme forms of sexual regulation. Among neo-eugenic practices are invasive procedures that compel welfare mothers to disclose their sexual histories, open their homes, and make available their DNA to government officials. Neo-eugenics practices also introduce policies that force women fleeing from violent biological fathers to place themselves at risk.4 Making welfare scientific has been a continual goal of reform across the United States. Efforts to eliminate caseworker discretion and shift “the administration of welfare toward a more bureaucratic model that emphasize[s] adherence to rules and procedures” are ongoing (Rogers-Dillon 2004, 58). Mary Jo Bane and David Ellwood cite a Department of Public Welfare director of labour relations: “‘We’ve been trying to get the people who think like social workers out and the people who think like bank tellers in’” (cited in Rogers-Dillon 2004, 58). The past ten years of reform have produced a discourse of scientific rhetoric that emphasizes compliance with new welfare standards. Allowing biometric information to be captured by the state becomes an essential component of compliance – a necessary designation to continue to receive benefits. Biometrics help to make the business of getting benefits appear scientific by producing an image purporting to be “the only true form of identification ... And you carry it with you wherever you go” (Steinberg 1993). Biometrics not only facilitate state surveillance of welfare clients and help to determine whether compliance has been achieved, but advocates also claim that they replace the discretionary eye of the caseworker with the neutral eye of the scanner/machine. Some professionals have been uncomfortable with the introduction of imaging technologies since they transfer the site of expertise into the virtual hands of a machine (Kember 2003). In the case of welfare, however, administration officials have welcomed the transfer of authority. Most welfare professionals do not want the responsibility of striking clients off the rolls – authority that may be equated with the power of life and death. Others appreciate the change because it allows them to justify their decisions with scientific rhetoric. Faced with the impossible goal of reducing their caseloads, one can understand how some welfare workers would be grateful to defer this decision to a machine. In this sense, biometric technologies have a double advantage: not only do they fit the new emphasis on making welfare scientific, but they also claim to convert a subjective individual choice into one made by an “objective” machine. State officials argue that the addition of biometric technologies to welfare helps to prevent soft-hearted caseworkers from providing benefits beyond the terms of the welfare system. At the

Bio-Benefits

same time, these additions justify a hard-line approach to denying benefits with the rhetoric of the scientific gaze. Thus, the “scientific neutrality” of biometric technologies is essential to their popularity as a tool of welfare reform. In many cases, biometrics have become the “central feature of ... [the] campaign to reduce welfare spending” (McLarin 1995a). Although reformers claim that making welfare scientific has resulted in a more objective and therefore more just system, careful study of the impacts of applying a quasi-scientific model to welfare reveals many contradictions. Biometric technologies were introduced to welfare in the guise of pilot programs: preliminary programs used to test a particular reform. The scientific theory behind this process was that the success of the pilot projects would be reviewed – as in a lab setup in which a hypothesis is formulated, tested, then revised based on the success of the experiment. However, the impacts of pilot programs on welfare reform have been considerable. Rogers-Dillon documents that these programs have served to “restructure social policy outside of the legislative process” rather than to scientifically test welfare reforms (2004, 190). Additionally, pilot programs made a wider range of ideas politically viable (190), including fingerprinting every aid recipient, an idea that previously had been untenable. The pilot nature of the projects was used to make the case that these systems were only being tested rather than implemented, and thus the pilot programs succeeded where other attempts at instituting “reforms” had failed. Rogers-Dillon additionally demonstrates that, although the scientific discourse of experimentation was invoked, those actually responsible for implementing welfare reform “did not have a scientist’s view of experimentation” (2004, 72). Biometric programs demonstrate the failure of the socalled scientific process. Pilot projects involving biometrics were both expensive and politically popular, and failure became an unacceptable test outcome; the projects simply had to work (Rogers-Dillon 2004). The review stage necessary to scientific experimentation was completely undermined by political officials responsible for the implementation of biometric technologies. An audit done in California made clear that the biometric Statewide Fingerprinting Imaging System used to test welfare clients for fraud was implemented without knowing how much fraud actually existed in those programs. This uncertainty made it impossible to know whether the $31 million fingerprint program was necessary (Delsohn 2003). The report concluded that the additional $11.4 million a year to operate the program was far too high given that most of the fraud detected resulted from errors made by county staff. It was also concluded that the level of detected duplicate aid was small (Delsohn 2003). Yet, although this review was essential to the scientific process used to justify the implementation of a biometrics program, then-governor Gray Davis ultimately rejected the report produced by the review process. The governor’s office asserted that it was in “disagreement

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with many of the report’s fundamental findings ... which we find either inaccurate or unsupportable,” though it cited no evidence to support this claim (Delsohn 2003). Thus, while science was invoked to justify the implementation of the program, it was missed during the review process. In other cases, pilot programs that tested biometric technologies were not only institutionalized after the test period (even when audits questioned their effectiveness) but also expanded even when clearly illegal. Suffolk County, New York, voted to extend a pilot program requiring fingerprinting for welfare recipients even though the state legislature did not ratify the extension (Hauppage 1993). “If they don’t think it’s legal, let them take us to court,” blustered Joseph Rizzo, the Republican county legislator responsible for proposing the program (Hauppage 1993). This institutionalization occurred even though the program was questioned by Republican governor Cuomo, who was originally responsible for enactment of the biometrics program. Notwithstanding the questionable scientific process to which welfare recipients are subjected, science continues to be used as a primary method of justification for these programs. Scientific rhetoric continues to be admired by the American public, and positivist approaches to social problems remain popular. Sadly, attempting to quantify welfare reforms reveals a common error: basing studies in “social science or humanities on an ideal version of those in the natural sciences” (Hess 1997, 15). Scientific methods were imported into welfare reform, transformed, misused, and misapplied. The reforms were then justified and made permanent, backed by claims that they were supported by good science. Scientific methods only gilded the bars of the iron cage of bureaucratic patriarchy responsible for administering welfare benefits. Thus, those receiving aid become implicated in a powerful regime of “technobiopower,” in which “informatics, biologics, and economics” intersect in order to police the most vulnerable citizen-subjects (Haraway 1997, 2). Biometrics become the systems by which chip and gene can be joined as the borders between the natural and the artificial are imploded (Haraway 1997) and then manipulated by consolidated government powers driven by the hope of profit and electoral gain. This regime of technobiopower, despite protests to the contrary, makes more than a gesture toward criminalization. Intensifying the Criminalization of Welfare Recipients Welfare recipients have long borne the stigma associated with unlawful acts. Investigators “routinely order [welfare] applicants to empty their pockets, then flip through their wallets and personal possessions, demanding to know the identity of every name they come across” (Firestone 1995). In 1995, Governor Weld of Massachusetts claimed a link between “welfare, fatherlessness and crime,” arguing that there are “a lot of kids who come out of

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fatherless families who seem to have ice water in their veins and no milk of human kindness” (quoted in Wong and Phillips 1995). The Clinton administration’s reforms also brought new procedures that explicitly criminalized welfare. In Florida, panels were instituted to review the cases of welfare clients who had been found to be “noncompliant” (Rogers-Dillon 2004, 100). Although the review boards were established as “independent, communitybased panel[s] to review cases” (107), and could have been run quite informally, in practice they were set up to reproduce a judicial hearing. Indeed, Rogers-Dillon found that aid recipients who most represented “deviant femininity” (110) were the most heavily policed. Women were more likely to be found “guilty” by these panels if they failed to meet normative standards of femininity – and this type of sexual regulation raises questions pertaining to how queer women might have been policed by pseudo-scientific reforms to welfare. Finger imaging was introduced in a climate of expanding technologies of criminalization. Refined over a period of “20 years for its obvious first customer, law enforcement agencies” (Steinberg 1993), biometric fingerprinting development was driven by the FBI. It was also identical to the finger-imaging technology used to verify the identities of prison inmates (Adelson 1994). Despite links to criminalization, biometric companies and government officials continue to try to shake the association. One way they do so is to distinguish biometric finger imaging from manual fingerprinting. Another way is to claim that the process is entirely different because welfare bureaus take only two prints, while prisons take ten. Yet the relationship between the finger imaging of welfare recipients and the criminalizing of welfare is unmistakable. As Sack (1994) opines, “opponents argue that finger imaging equates welfare recipients with criminals and may intimidate legitimate welfare recipients from applying for benefits they deserve.” “‘There’s an assumption of guilt that goes with fingerprinting,’ said Democratic Assemblyman Herman D. Farrell Jr. ‘Why do we choose this class of people to fingerprint?’” (quoted in Sack 1994). The connection between biometrics and criminalization was only deepened as “function creep” – the process by which a tool designed for one purpose is applied to a new (usually larger) set of problems – took a frightening turn. Despite earlier claims that the “fingerprints will not be provided to any law enforcement agency” (Palazzetti 1995, 5B), the fingerprints of welfare clients are being made available to other state agencies. In Massachusetts, Governor Weld proposed sharing prints taken for welfare authentification with the judicial system: “Weld’s plan would also go further than current law by allowing law-enforcement officials investigating crimes to subpoena welfare fingerprint records” (Wong and Phillips 1995). This type of proposal is a reality in New York, where “state law also allows social service officials to pass on to law enforcement officials cases of fraud revealed through

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the finger-imaging program, which they had not been allowed to do under the earlier law initiating the program for Home Relief recipients” (Fein 1995). Thus, in the context of receiving aid from the state (a process that had already been criminalized), biometrics became a powerful technology of criminalization. In states where information can be shared, biometrics additionally transformed welfare fraud into a crime that is easy to prosecute; law enforcement agencies now have the necessary identifying information regarding the accused. Offices that biometrically fingerprint welfare recipients represent the first successful attempt of the US state to take the fingerprints of citizens and residents before they have committed crimes – making them the country’s very own pre-crime unit. Failures of Biometric Programs The expansion of biometric programs into other areas of civic participation has continued unabated despite the numerous failures induced by this system of bio-benefits. Although the difficulties ensuing from the application of biometric programs to welfare are many, I focus on three problematic outcomes resulting from the marriage of technology and state assistance. The first problematic outcome is economic. A cursory cost/benefit analysis reveals that biometric technology programs have failed in their objective of saving the state money. Similar to the claim of scientific method to justify the addition of biometrics to welfare, a quasi-economics has been used to defend the expenditure of millions of dollars on biometric programs. In California, cost savings in Los Angeles were extrapolated to the rest of California. A later audit revealed that the initial savings figures and the projections were flawed economics: “Auditors say the state erred in assuming that conditions in Los Angeles would hold true elsewhere.”5 Yet the California model is frequently used to rationalize the expansion of biometric programs in other states. In two counties of New York, for example, $500,000 was saved from the “4.3 percent of Home Relief [single, childless] who chose not to reapply for welfare after being informed they would have to be fingerprinted. When that figure was extrapolated across the entire state, the study projected an annual savings of $46.2 million in welfare benefits” (Steinberg 1993). Again, this claim is made without any evidence and in the absence of traditional economic models that emphasize the quality of the initial sample. New York City spent $40-50 million to implement increased biometric enforcement to save a projected $250 million (Firestone 1995). This target certainly could not be met given the unexpectedly low incidence of fraud in New York State at less than 3 percent (McLarin 1995a). Even Governor Cuomo of New York doubted the results of a study commissioned by his own department regarding possible welfare savings for the rest of the state based on savings in one county (Sack 1994).

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In other states, the economic rationalization supposedly driving implementation of expensive biometrics systems was barely justified. In California, Governor Wilson asserted that the best economic outcome that could be hoped for was that biometric technologies would save enough in fraud detection to pay for their implementation. As Michael Genest of the Department of Social Services proclaimed, “‘I’m absolutely confident we’re going to save enough to pay for the system’” (quoted in Gunnison 1994). If real savings were not anticipated, why were biometrics introduced as welfare reform in the first place? Huge spending on “fraud-proof” biometric additions to welfare usually was justified without reference to exactly how much fraud would be halted (Wong and Phillips 1995). As noted above, in California, a biometrics program costing $31 million to implement and $11.4 million per year to maintain was approved without information regarding the extent of welfare fraud in California. Nor can the vast expenditures on biometric programs be justified given the finding that most welfare recipients tell the truth (McLarin 1995a). Fewer than 0.3 percent of welfare clients in New York State have been convicted of welfare fraud (McLarin 1995a). In California, most cases of fraud were found to result from administrative error. This lack of fraud suggests that biometric programs and their costs are wholly unnecessary (Delsohn 2003). Partly, these expenditures on fraud-busting biometric programs were useless because fraud is not well defined. Most welfare fraud occurs when recipients work for pay under the table while still collecting benefits. This type of fraud is not detectable using biometric fingerprinting systems; fingerprinting is designed to detect somebody signing up for welfare benefits more than once (so-called double dipping). Thus, the projected figure of fraud used as a multiplier to calculate savings is inaccurate. In fact, many states found that 3 percent was an artificially high estimate for other types of fraud (McLarin 1995a). Moreover, considerable welfare fraud is committed not by clients but by service providers. The New York Times asserted that “most welfare fraud is not done by welfare recipients, but by providers, including doctors and landlords” (Hauppage 1993). As a result of the high incidence of provider fraud, lawmakers in Connecticut debated an “amendment that would have required doctors and others who supply goods and services to welfare recipients to be fingerprinted.”6 Not surprisingly, this proposal was rejected – revealing that more powerful citizens are able to reject a criminal classification, while those living at the margins are not. Fraud is not the only poorly conceptualized term within the broader discourse of welfare restructuring. The success of a biometrics program is similarly difficult to conceptualize. Similar to the term “fraud,” the definitional nature of “success” has implications for the administration and justification of biometric identification programs. The success of these

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programs is described in only one way: caseload decline. The accomplishments of biometric programs have been defined by their ability to “get people off the rolls” (Gunnison 1994; Ratcliffe 1994). Commonly, people dropped from the rolls are ousted not because they have found work and experienced upward mobility but because the overseers of the welfare system have not marked (i.e., fingerprinted) them. This occurs for one of three reasons: a welfare client has not understood the new process to be followed in order to continue to receive benefits, there is an outright refusal by the client, or a welfare client is not able to be fingerprinted for reasons I detail below. Yet this range of reasons is described by the all-inclusive term “refusal” (to be fingerprinted). Thus, Los Angeles is considered a biometrics success because 3,324 people were removed from the welfare rolls. Importantly, only 314 applicants were dropped for fraud, while 3,010 were dropped for “refusing” to be fingerprinted (Steinberg 1993). Here refusal is inaccurately confounded with fraud. The use of biometric programs in welfare services is widely identified as a disincentive to fraud: “Officials say that the program’s greatest value is as a deterrent” (Fein 1995). As I demonstrate below, biometric programs often act as a deterrent for reasons that go beyond fear of being caught committing welfare fraud. The second problematic outcome pertains to biometrics and the construction of disability. Biometric programs to test welfare clients for fraud create a discourse that works to manipulate the category of disability. Here I understand disability as a construct that may be manipulated by hegemonic systems of representation (Foucault 1965; Thomson 1997; Wendell 1996; see also Part 1 of this volume). One becomes disabled (and as a result impoverished) if he or she is afraid of being fingerprinted. The impact of biometric fingerprinting on those with mental health issues is highlighted by advocates, who assert that plans “to use new fingerprint technology to reduce welfare fraud may be unnecessarily frightening for people with psychiatric illnesses who depend on welfare” (Monsebraaten 1996). They further argue that “many of these people are already paranoid ... To ask these people to surrender their fingerprints to the welfare bureaucracy could put them over the edge. Many would simply refuse and drop off the system altogether” (Monsebraaten 1996). Other community workers note that psychiatric patients “have enough trouble just getting out of bed in the morning”; to require them to follow the complicated steps required by biometric fingerprinting is ridiculous (Monsebraaten 1996). Nor can fears about the ramifications of being finger-imaged be labelled wholly paranoid, given the ways in which this highly sensitive biometric information is shared between welfare and law enforcement agencies. No provisions are made for those welfare clients who are afraid to be fingerprinted. Suggestions of working hard to “identify” people with disabilities in an attempt to guide the mentally ill into SSI disability grants

Bio-Benefits

seem half-hearted and unlikely given the caseloads of most welfare workers. Nor is this disproportionate impact of welfare reform on disabled persons exceptional. Targeting people with disabilities using biometric programs repeats their targeting by other welfare reforms. In her study of a “noncompliant” community of welfare clients in Florida, Rogers-Dillon found that “noncompliant often means non-functioning.” She noted that a “sizeable portion of the ‘noncompliant’ population may have had serious functional difficulties” (2004, 209). Rogers-Dillon found that non-compliance was explicitly connected to disability by the aid recipients themselves. A disproportionate percentage of the non-compliant population “was, or considered itself to be, disabled” (210). The third problematic outcome is related to immigration; immigrants are also targeted by biometric additions to welfare programs. Officials assume that anyone who fails to re-enrol on welfare following the implementation of a biometrics program has previously committed or intends to commit welfare fraud: A “1994 study by the Cuomo administration found that fingerprinting had saved Rockland and Onondaga nearly $500,000 by trimming 4.3 percent of Home Relief recipients from welfare rolls. That 4.3 percent consisted of people who chose not to reapply for welfare after being informed that they would be fingerprinted, and the study assumed that ‘most of them had hoped to cheat the system or were already cheating it’” (McLarin 1995b). This means that no records were kept of those who refused re-enrolment because they “were afraid their fingerprints would be used for some other reason, such as to challenge their immigration status” (McLarin 1995b). Forms in English also made the process difficult for immigrants who were not fluent. For refugees used to harassment or intimidation by government officials in their countries of origin, biometric fingerprinting can serve as a frightening reminder of old perils. To label these fears wholly paranoid is problematic in a post-9/11 climate of increased harassment and intimidation of US residents, particularly racialized immigrants, as illustrated in the following case pertaining to welfare reform’s impact on the application process for benefits: The strict rules can be hard on people who do not speak English, who are homeless or who do not have traditional living arrangements. Yakov Gavritoc, a 61-year-old Russian immigrant who speaks no English and has a heart condition, was living with his son in an apartment on 63rd Street in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, when he applied for Home Relief benefits in April, according to his son, Gavril Gavrilov. When investigators came to the apartment to check his address, the older man did not understand the forms they slipped under the door, and he did not call the number listed. A few weeks later the son said that Mr. Gavritoc’s application was rejected for improper residence. ‘When we lived in Michigan last year, they gave him welfare,”

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the son added. “He does not understand why they will not do that here.’” (Firestone 1995)

The same hazards for people hoping to claim benefits are introduced by biometric reforms to welfare – which are dependent upon reading dense documentation about the new procedure and following a complicated process to go and get fingerprinted. If biometric technologies are not saving the state the vast amounts of money that politicians promised (the primary justification for their implementation), and if they make the lives of the most vulnerable people within the welfare system increasingly perilous, why do they continue to be such a popular approach to welfare reform? Visualizing Criminalization Why have biometric technologies been “so quickly embraced as a measure of humankind?” (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 301). Biometric technologies were introduced at a moment when massive efforts to visualize the body were being made. Projects such as the Human Genome Project and the Visible Human Project were (and continue to be) engaged in the work of making the body visible and hence intelligible. Biometric technologies represent a new method of seeing the body, one, moreover, purported to be highly effective at identification. Moreover, these technologies are understood as useful improvements on photographs, previously favoured as the primary method of civilian identification. Biometric identification is claimed as a more scientific way of looking at the body. A primary characteristic of scientific images is that they claim “the weight of truth” (Gladwell 2004). The context in which a scientific image is developed is ignored when attempting to understand the picture. The idea that scientific images need to be interpreted, and that there is a range of possible interpretations, often goes unacknowledged (Gates 2004). Yet the context is needed. Biometric technologies do not provide straightforward readings of the body. Rather, they have been developed in a climate in which “we are witnessing a conjuncture of popular and scientific interest in the criminal body and its functions in life and death” (Cartwright 1997, 123). Biometrics thus visualize culture in ways that make marginalized bodies vulnerable to new, technologized practices of looking. Biometric technologies facilitate the visualization of an existing connection between criminalization and poverty. Their adaptation to the welfare system occurs in the context of a long history of state attempts to visualize criminality by understanding how it is mapped onto the body. In keeping with this tradition of the visualization of criminalization, biometric technologies select some bodies for hypervisibility, while others remain invisible. Thus, they select impoverished, vulnerable bodies for hypervisibility, making

Bio-Benefits

their unique biological information available for consumption by the state. The “witnesses” to this process hide behind technological rhetoric, claiming the invisibility attributed to the clear glass screen of the biometric fingerprinting device. Although “scientific looking is as culturally dependent as any other practices of looking” (Sturken and Cartwright 2001, 279), biometric technologies are effective at simultaneously visualizing poverty and connecting it to criminalization. At the same time, they maintain that the scientific-imaging process is an “alternative to politics” and is a highly objective means of identifying fraud (Rogers-Dillon 2004, 4). Using biometrics to administer welfare benefits fits well with US engagement in a “rationality project” in which rationality, “efficiency and effectiveness ... are often raised to the level of values themselves” and in which a decided lack of attention is paid to a project’s original goals (Rogers-Dillon 2004, 3). Thus, biometrics do not need to achieve the goal of eliminating fraud and saving money. The technologies only need to appear to make the welfare system more efficient and, as we saw above, more scientific. Attempting to visualize the invisible fits an American tradition of attempting to make evident the evil that we cannot see. Biometric attempts to visualize and eliminate criminality represent a logical step in the evolution of the war against the invisible contaminant. The potential of new biometric identification technologies to mark some bodies has been realized in the welfare system, where they are employed to police marginalized citizens and residents. Fears of the pernicious potential of biometric technologies to be used for harm have come to pass. Conclusion A close look at the use of biometric technologies reveals the need to call into question the accuracy of the images as well as the benefits that they confer. In this chapter, I have demonstrated the ways in which biometric measurements as technologies of vision may be employed as a technology of criminalization; they redefine the limits of good and bad citizenship, and they equate good citizenship with compliance. The need to theorize technologized practices of vision is reinforced by the fact that the ramifications of biometric vision do not begin and end with the welfare system. Given the way in which the addition of biometric technologies to the welfare system “reinforce[s] what we have already learned to see” (Treichler, Cartwright, and Penley 1998, 2-3) with respect to systems of oppression, there is a continued need for analysis that highlights the consequences of these practices of looking in order to prevent their unfettered adoption.

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Part 4: Participatory Surveillance and Resistance

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11 Public Vigilance Campaigns and Participatory Surveillance after 11 September 2001 Mike Larsen and Justin Piché

The terrorist threat remains real and there is no room for complacency. The public should remain alert and aware of their surroundings at all times. If something strikes you as suspicious and out of place then trust your instincts and call the police. – Metropolitan Police Service, Radio Script: CounterTerrorism Campaign February 2007 (2007a)1

Critical reflections on the expansion of surveillance in the security control society often invoke the Orwellian image of Big Brother: a centralized totalitarian figure, simultaneously the source of hegemony and a proxy for the coordinated surveillance apparatus of the state. In some ways, contemporary developments in surveillance are reminiscent of Orwell’s (1990) vision of social control: they consolidate the gaze of the state and subject a growing number of routine daily activities to intrusive monitoring. If we want to fully acknowledge Orwell’s analogical contribution to the critique of surveillance, however, it is important to remember that the protagonist in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Winston Smith, lives in mortal fear not only of Big Brother but also of his fellow citizens. All citizens in Oceania monitor each other’s activities, and most of them are ready and willing to report “symptoms of un­ orthodoxy” (26). The panoptic gaze of “Big Brother” is diffused throughout society; a combination of fear and suspicion reinforces the authoritarian status quo. The spectre of “Little Brother” (Whitaker 2006, 160) exists alongside Big Brother in contemporary national security policy as much as it does in classical literature, although in both cases we are sometimes remiss and forget. In this chapter, we examine the current politics of public participatory surveillance by analyzing campaigns undertaken by authorities to enlist citizens to remain on the lookout for suspicious behaviour that potentially

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signifies terrorist activity. A variety of public participatory surveillance campaigns emerged in Western states after the 11 September 2001 attacks, ranging from centrally coordinated national undertakings to local efforts geared toward metropolitan environments. A common thread that runs through public participatory campaigns, regardless of their size, is an instruction for responsible individuals to constantly watch for suspicious activity and to immediately convey relevant information to authorities. Considered as a component of larger surveillant assemblages,2 public vigilance campaigns offer a window into the dynamics of social control in late modern societies. In particular, they reflect an attempt by governing authorities to reformulate their relationship with the public in a stated effort to obtain actionable information in order to prevent terrorism. They also exemplify how governance through uncertainty, suspicion, and risk can (re)produce a form of normative citizenship while simultaneously encouraging the imagination and identification of threatening others. To examine the public participatory dimension of social monitoring, we explore three ongoing public security advertising campaigns in New York City, Ottawa, and London, England. These campaigns instruct citizens to report suspicious activities, persons, or packages to authorities. We begin with a brief outline of the history of public enlistment activities as well as a short overview of current debates about participatory policing. Next we introduce our three case studies and discuss the key characteristics of the messages and images used in the public vigilance campaigns. Factors that have led to transformation in the campaigns and alterations in the vigilant gaze are also discussed. We then explore the characteristics of vigilant citizenship and public participatory surveillance before discussing the implications of simultaneously watching and being watched, along with the emergent roles of the “responsible citizen” and “suspicious other.” We conclude by locating public vigilance campaigns within existing debates on security governance and critiquing them for their failure to live up to a democratic ideal. Public Enlistment and Participatory Surveillance Vigilance campaigns are not new. They represent variations on a historical cultural theme – sanctioned fears over the presence of dangerous others and the cultivation of suspicion by authorities. These mechanisms of control can be traced to the witch hunts in fourteenth-century Europe and seventeenthcentury America (Ben-Yehuda 1985). During these periods, a political climate emerged where denunciation, othering, and panic over enemies within established communities appeared in the Western world. Similar rhetoric continues to legitimate the elimination of so-called evil segments of the population who, often through processes veiled in secrecy, are subjected to death, detention, deportation, and other forms of societal expulsion (Rapley 2007).

Public Vigilance Campaigns and Participatory Surveillance

Public vigilance campaigns in the form of posters instructing citizens to watch for and report suspicious activity emerged in North America during World War I (Miller 2005). Hillman (2004) notes that the mobilization of populations around constructed enemies has been a consistent feature of modern military conflicts. These initiatives combined the fear of spies, saboteurs, and infiltrators with large-scale propaganda campaigns. They also contributed to the emergence of national security as a concept that became an increasingly important mobilizing force in the Cold War period to government authorities seeking to encourage the public to identify subversives and other suspicious entities (Kinsman, Buse, and Steedman 2000). One of the most significant permutations of public enlistment has occurred in the sphere of policing. Examples include the watch and ward approach set out in the Statute of Westminster of 1931 and the model of public policing that emerged from the principles outlined in the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829. The latter was passed in the English Parliament; it privileged cooperation and information sharing between the police and citizens. More recently, there have been attempts to mobilize the public through the establishment of community-based crime prevention groups such as Crime Stoppers and Neighbourhood Watch (Garland 2001) as well as through community policing schemes that theoretically direct resources to address threats to security in given locales based on the input of the public (Simon 1997). To theorize the role of public vigilance campaigns, it is useful to focus on the types of watching and reporting that are involved and on the disciplinary effects of the process. Because public vigilance campaigns are coordinated around problems of security governance by or in cooperation with authorities, they can be understood as techniques of policing. Recent developments in the governance of security and in theoretical criminology have rejected the utility of the public/private dichotomy in the study of policing. For instance, Hermer et al. (2005, 23) suggest a reconceptualization that considers policing to be “any activity that is expressly designed and intended to establish and maintain (or enforce) a defined order within a community.” This shift toward an activity-based criterion of policing allows for a more holistic examination of the diverse actors involved in the governance of security, including state police, private security entities, and citizens enrolled in organized surveillance and security campaigns. Hermer et al. discuss the ways in which policing creates and shapes spaces and facilitates the sorting of populations according to these spatial dynamics (27-28). By considering policing as a diverse activity, as opposed to an activity exclusive to a professional class, they demonstrate the influence of neoliberal government strategies on the provision of security; policing, under neoliberalism, is increasingly organized in terms of nodal governance or network models, where dominant nodes (e.g., the state police) interact with a wide range of complementary and competing entities.

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The approach to policing suggested by Hermer et al. is useful because public participatory surveillance involves interactions between state policing strategies and diffused citizen-based practices of watching and reporting (Garland 2001). Public vigilance campaigns most accurately resemble what Hermer et al. (2005, 41) describe as the model of volunteer non-state policing or responsibilized autonomous citizenship. Some manifestations of this model take the form of unsanctioned and/or violent vigilantism, but other examples fall under an “umbrella of state regulation” (42) and involve structured watching and reporting activities (e.g., anti-terrorism vigilance campaigns). Contemporary Public Vigilance Campaigns Police and government campaigns to encourage vigilance are a hallmark of contemporary state discourses on terrorism. For the purposes of our analysis, we differentiate between the spontaneous, post-event instructions that often follow in the wake of major attacks or alleged thwarted plots and coordinated, long-term campaigns that encourage vigilance as part of everyday life. While we focus on the promotion of long-term vigilance campaigns, it is through spontaneous vigilance campaigns – manifest in press conferences, posted emergency bulletins, and broadcasted calls to action – that the command to be vigilant reaches its widest audience, albeit in a less-sustained manner. Our research combines a broad review of state-initiated efforts at public enlistment after 11 September 2001 with a focused analysis of three case studies. We examine the “if you see something, say something” campaign spearheaded by the New York City Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) in response to the 11 September 2001 attacks; the “if you see something, say something” campaign implemented by Ottawa’s OC Transpo in the wake of the July 2005 attacks3 on commuters in London, England; and the “if you suspect it report it” campaign developed by the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) and its partners – the British Transport Police, the City of London Police, Transport for London, and the Mayor’s Office of London – in response to the events of July 2005. The campaigns in New York, Ottawa, and London help us to understand the nature of contemporary public vigilance campaigns. The New York City MTA is a public-benefit corporation operated under the authority of the State of New York and governed by a board nominated by the governor and confirmed by the Senate. The MTA campaign invites vigilant citizens to report suspicious behaviour directly to the MTA or the police. The New York initiative addresses a public that recently experienced the largest non-state terrorist attacks in history. It is also set apart by its scope: with close to 8 million commuters per day in New York City and the surrounding areas, the MTA considers itself to be the largest provider of public transportation in North America (2006a).4

Public Vigilance Campaigns and Participatory Surveillance

The OC Transpo campaign in Ottawa brings a Canadian dimension to our analysis, and it stands out as a sustained public vigilance campaign in a city and a country that have not directly experienced a terrorist attack in the post-11 September context. Ottawa’s OC Transpo is a public enterprise responsible to City Hall and reports through the director of transportation services to the deputy city manager of planning, transit, and the environment (OC Transpo 2007). OC Transpo’s public vigilance campaign invites citizens to report to its own security service, which has recently been granted police powers.5 London’s MPS initiative addresses a public that has recently experienced several terrorist attacks on mass-transit spaces. The British campaign stands apart as being organized by a police service as opposed to a transit authority. The MPS is directly responsible for anti-terrorism policing, and its campaign invites members of the public to report directly to its own anti-terror hotline.6 Despite their differences, the three campaigns share several important characteristics. Each campaign employs a similar set of governing techniques, using posters in public and communal spaces as communicative media. Posted messages are accompanied by other forms of communication, such as advertisements in local print media (MTA 2005), radio spots (MPS 2007a), press releases (both online and through conventional media), and information websites. Each campaign also shares a common program impetus or goal, namely the encouragement of routine public watching and reporting organized around cultivated concerns about the persistent threat of terrorism. And the language used in each campaign reflects a shared vocabulary of risk, threat, (in)security, and suspicion. Public Vigilance Messaging The public vigilance messages used in the campaigns are characterized by two explicit components of content and two axes of differentiation. The two components of content are characterized by a depiction of a generalized or specific threat/source of suspicion and instructions about what to do when suspicions arise. Some messages feature another dual dimension: the consequences of failing to report something suspicious or the incentives associated with reporting something suspicious. The MPS campaign, for instance, informs citizens that “you are that someone,” that potential hero who could, through responsible vigilance, be the missing link necessary for thwarting a terrorist plot. There are, furthermore, two primary axes of differentiation in messaging and imagery: an emphasis on either a source of threat or the act of watching/reporting, and the specificity or ambiguity of the overall message. The second generation of posters in the New York MTA “if you see something, say something” campaign (released in 2004), depicting unattended

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bags in a variety of transit settings, exemplifies the first axis of differentiation – the nature and potential sources of terrorism-related risks. The posters present instructions for passengers to be on the lookout for suspicious knapsacks or packages (MTA 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2004d, 2004e). Similarly, the London MPS “if you suspect it report it” campaign has also featured posters that zero in on particular sources of threat. Captions for the posters read “terrorists won’t succeed if someone reports suspicious bags, vehicles or behaviour” (MPS 2006a), “terrorists need transport” (MPS 2006b), “terrorists need places to live” (MPS 2006c), “terrorists need storage” (MPS 2006d), “terrorists need money” (MPS 2006e), and “terrorists could use the river” (MPS 2006f). Each poster features an image of a potentially suspicious item or location, and the latest series (released in March 2007) locates risk squarely in objects. Featuring a caption reading “terrorism: if you suspect it report it,” and encouraging citizens to call the “confidential anti-terrorist hotline,” one poster from this campaign depicts a collage of images, including a digital camera (“terrorists need information”), a rental van, a piece of luggage (“terrorists need to travel”), a cell phone (“terrorists need communication”), and a desktop PC (“terrorists need computers”) (MPS 2007b). In terms of the second axis of differentiation – the specificity or ambiguity of the overall message – the posters are all relatively specific, especially the ones that depict unattended bags. Posters focusing on objects or contexts of risk invite a more discerning attitude of suspicion, as they suggest possible sources of harm without clearly describing how they might embody threats. It should be noted that, in the case of the New York and London campaigns, multiple images within the same generation are displayed at any given time. Other images also emphasize sources of risk and harm but in a decidedly ambiguous manner. The first generation of OC Transpo’s “if you see something, say something” campaign stands out as an example. These posters, deployed in 2005, depict three penguins standing in an arctic setting (OC Transpo 2005), one of which is wearing multicoloured swim trunks. The image is accompanied by a message instructing concerned commuters to call “if something does not look right.” The shorts on the penguin are intended to serve as a proxy for everyday examples of out-of-place or unusual objects or behaviour, but the campaign offers no instructions about what specific sources of risk entail. Instead, citizens are invited to use common sense to inform their vigilance. It is worth noting that the OC Transpo campaign was based on the much more specific New York campaign and that the MTA owns the rights to the “if you see something, say something” message. Ottawa’s posters borrowed the slogan created by Korey Kay and Partners, contracted to produce the MTA public vigilance posters (OC Transpo 2006a). The second generation of Ottawa’s poster campaign, released in August

Public Vigilance Campaigns and Participatory Surveillance

2006, shifted from emphasizing sources of threat to the act of watching and reporting, though it retained its singular ambiguity. These posters (OC Transpo 2006b) show a smaller Boston Terrier whispering into the ear of a larger Boston Terrier, acting as a metaphor that commuters (i.e., Little Brother) should report anything suspicious to the authorities (i.e., Big Brother). Examples from the other campaigns also emphasize the acts of watching and reporting. New York’s latest posters include the “16 million eyes of New York” image, which shows twelve sets of watching eyes with the caption “There are 16 million eyes in the city. We’re counting on all of them” (MTA 2006b). New York also uses posters to convey images of police dogs (MTA 2006c and 2006d), with captions reading “you use your eyes; she’ll use her nose.” And the radio ads associated with the last two generations of London’s MPS campaign emphasize watching. The most recent spot discourages public efforts to second-guess or analyze suspicions before contacting authorities. The radio spot poses several “how can you tell?” questions. How do you tell the difference between someone who’s just videoing a crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack? What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone acting suspiciously (MPS 2007a)? The spots also offer an answer: you don’t have to make that judgment. The MPS will discreetly assess all incoming intelligence and decide if, when, and how to act. Members of the public are clearly encouraged to act as collectors of information with a lowered threshold for reporting but not as “expert knowers” with a capacity for evaluation. Altering the Vigilant Gaze The advertisements in the public vigilance campaigns have not remained static in terms of messaging and accompanying visuals. In fact, new generations of ads have been launched on a near-annual basis in New York City, Ottawa, and London, mirroring variation associated with discourses about terrorism since the 11 September 2001 attacks. Two factors precipitate variation. One reason authorities launch updated ads is to increase watching and reporting. To accomplish this task, officials tap into an imaginary of what will better prompt public participation in surveillance. This pattern is illustrated by OC Transpo’s 2006 release of its “if something looks suspicious let us know” posters, depicting a whispering-dog image. The poster replaced the earlier 2005 “if something does not look right let us know” penguin poster. OC Transpo’s stated purpose in making the change was an attempt to address what the organization perceived to be the ambiguity of the original campaign.7 A related factor driving authorities to release new ads is an attempt to (re)focus the gaze of the public. Such efforts tap into existing knowledge and the imaginary of what groups require to organize and mobilize a terrorist attack. This is best illustrated by the second release of public vigilance posters

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in London (MPS 2007b), which emphasize that citizens ought to focus their attention not only on suspicious activities, behaviours, and abandoned bags but also on objects such as passports, goggles, and masks. Shifting the emphasis toward “being vigilant” about suspicious objects has also been part of the (re)focusing in the advertising campaign in New York City. Following the Madrid train bombings in March 2004, MTA and Spanish officials met to discuss “lessons learned” from the attacks. Through this consultation process, MTA officials were informed that “several passengers interviewed after the [Madrid] bombings remembered seeing the unattended knapsacks that turned out to contain the bombs, but did not alert anyone” (MTA 2004f). In response, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority decided to release a second generation of advertisements (see MTA 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2004d, and 2004e) with images of abandoned bags and packages in order “to enlist customers to join the police and MTA employees as the eyes and ears of the system” (MTA 2004f). In so doing, governing authorities attempt to securitize objects that occupy the landscape of everyday life, encouraging responsible citizens to view the world through a lens of (in)security. We have identified two explanations why officials have made alterations to each of the public vigilance campaigns. Each initiative is driven by the assumption that there is actionable information available and that, if reported, it might prevent terrorist activity. With this in mind, the texts and images of public vigilance campaigns are reconfigured by authorities who believe they are able to increase public reporting of “suspicious” activities and objects by expanding and refining the gaze of citizens. While we are unable to verify how these data are assessed and whether or not these initiatives are successful at preventing terrorism, we have seen examples of new ads generating additional tips. For instance, in the months following the release of security signage in New York City, which featured abandoned packages and baggage (see MTA 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2004d, and 2004e), the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (2004f) – drawing on internal statistics that cannot be verified – reported that response calls subsequently jumped from 71 in January and February 2004 to 104 in March and 124 in April. In a context where the dangers associated with risks to public security are potentially catastrophic, any opportunity to acquire information that might prevent terrorism is encouraged. Of course, such a framework also encourages false positives, and it is probable that innocent individuals have been wrongfully targeted as a result of this form of public participatory surveillance. Fashioning the Vigilant Citizen In this section, we examine the relationship between vigilance initiatives and public participatory surveillance, and we probe the implications of “responsible citizenship.” Public vigilance campaigns are embedded in a

Public Vigilance Campaigns and Participatory Surveillance

broader narrative of threat and peril, where the pervasive risk of suicide terrorism has become an authorized nightmare (Bauman 2006). The image of the archetypal enemy combines themes of otherness and familiarity, resulting in concerns about infiltration (at borders and particularly in the context of renewed debates about citizenship and multiculturalism) and “homegrown” terrorism (Pratt 2005). According to official discourses, the threat of terrorism might manifest in relation to any bodies, and in any place at any time, though certain situations are represented as more risky than others. In response to uncertain but pervasive risk, state security apparatuses have been expanded, entailing increased powers of surveillance, arrest, and detention. Private forms of security provision have also multiplied in the context of the “war of terror” (Johnston 2006). Extensions of sovereign power have been the subject of considerable and deserved debate and criticism in the post-9/11 context, and a healthy if belated dialogue about emerging forms of authoritarianism is under way (Agamben 2005; Giroux 2005). To date, however, this dialogue has not given much attention to what we conceptualize as public participatory surveillance. Initiatives of this sort are widespread, particularly in major metropolitan centres, and they represent an important deployment of power that is distinct from, but existing alongside and in support of, traditional state-run surveillance programs. Contemporary national security campaigns organized by Western states have emphasized the role of the public in watching for, recognizing, and reporting “suspicious” activity. This is especially manifest in organized vigilance campaigns. At first glance, public vigilance campaigns bear a resemblance to crime prevention strategies based on the concept of natural surveillance (see Chapter 5 in this volume). Natural surveillance involves “the overlooking of public space by members of the public in the course of their day-to-day lives” (Desyllas, Connoly, and Hebbert 2003, 643, cited by Parnaby and Reed in this volume). Advocates of natural surveillance encourage routine, everyday forms of watching by the public and watching of the public, and they modify spaces to facilitate “natural vision.” Public vigilance campaigns also modify the built environment, although the alteration takes the form of posters and images as opposed to structural transformations. This modification can be understood as an example of “official graffiti”: “visible forms of regulation [that] act to mark, scar, and deface public spaces” (Hermer and Hunt 1996, 456). While natural surveillance and public vigilance campaigns share several key features, they differ in their stated objectives and rationalities. Natural surveillance campaigns are based on the logic of a deterrence theory of crime prevention that understands public watching as a way to decrease deviance by increasing the likelihood that it will be observed. Public vigilance campaigns assume that clandestine terrorism is already taking place within the context of everyday life and that public watching is not a deterrent so much as a source of intelligence that will inform pre-emptive action

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by the state. At a basic level, public vigilance campaigns encourage and organize citizen participation in hierarchically coordinated anti-terrorism surveillance. Such initiatives reflect a certain hybridization of Foucault’s (1975) theorization of the panoptic and Mathiesen’s (1997) work on the synoptic. Whereas the panoptic is characterized by the few watching the many and the synoptic is characterized by the many watching the few, public participatory surveillance involves the many watching the many on behalf of the few. By enlisting members of the public as “junior intelligence officers” or “citizen spies” (Monahan 2006, 99), vigilance campaigns complement the disciplinary effects of being watched with a form of public pedagogy (Giroux 2005) organized around authorized practices of watching. Additionally, through citizen participation, the effective gaze of the state is extended, both spatially and conceptually, beyond the boundaries otherwise posed by technology, resources, and law. The operational effectiveness of such initiatives – as measured by actionable information acquired, plots thwarted, or investigations closed – remains unclear and requires further inquiry. But the actual transmission of information about threats to the police is only one aspect of public participatory surveillance. Perhaps of greater importance is the capacity of vigilance campaigns to embed or implicate members of the public in dominant narratives about terrorism and to govern them according to an official ideology of (in)security. Watching and Being Watched In theoretical terms, then, what does it mean to be a citizen involved in public participatory surveillance? In other words, how does one “do vigilance”? Doing vigilance is foremost a way of watching others and interpreting behaviours and appearances. When individuals partake in these performative acts, they do so through a set of conceptual lenses constructed by authorized knowledge about sources of (in)security. Put differently, it is a way of operationalizing official epistemologies through the medium of individual citizen engagement. For example, when a passenger on a London subway internalizes the instructions of the “you are that someone” campaign and begins sizing up fellow commuters as potential terrorists, he or she is deploying, and thereby reaffirming, dominant knowledge about security and risk. By engaging in this sort of watching, the watcher is transformed, even if he or she never acts on a suspicion by contacting authorities. Vigilance also denotes a role within the surveillant assemblage and a way in which the disciplinary power of the panoptic is merged with the sovereign powers of state security campaigns. Public vigilance campaigns operate within a precautionary logic that has increasingly come to inform neoliberal governance (Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 2007). Vigilant citizens are not

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only responsibilized for their own security, but they are inscribed as public participatory extensions of the panoptic, acting as embodied surveillance units connected to the state through official reporting channels (e.g., tip lines and direct contact with regulatory agents such as police officers). Those who take on the role of the vigilant citizen become links in a shifting chain, positioned between pervasive uncertainty and sovereign pre-emptive responses such as preventative arrest, the indefinite detention of non-citizens without trial (Larsen and Piché 2007), and even removal to torture through “extraordinary rendition.” Citizens are subject to disciplinary power insofar as they are governed by an authorized process of watching, as directed by the authorities. The vigilant citizen, informed by a messaging campaign, is not only “that someone” who might be the link in the chain between uncertainty and pre-emption but also “that someone” who is a constellation of suspicious variables in the eyes of other vigilant citizens. It is in this manner that knowledge of potential surveillance and observation might have a further disciplining effect on the individual. Ericson (2007, 29) suggests that “the police power is perfected when it results in self-policing among members of the population. The liberal imaginary of the ‘house of certainty’ is a house of discipline as self-policing. The individual who knows she is seen through by the surveillant assemblage, who recognizes her visibility, will internalize the gaze. That is, she will not only assume responsibility for the constraints of power, but will have that power inscribed in her to the point where she polices others as well as herself.” Indeed, Foucault (1975, 202-3) recognizes this internalization and dual-role inscription as the ultimate goal and “perpetual victory” of the panopticon, extending the panoptic controls of the nation-state by appropriating the micropowers possessed by individuals for the purpose of controlling populations. Responsible Citizens and Suspicious Others Public vigilance campaigns suggest new forms of responsibilized citizenship and novel opportunities for exclusion and othering. Torin Monahan (2006, 102) describes a type of citizen-subject who “is afraid, but can effectively sublimate these fears by engaging in preparedness activities.” He proposes that the contemporary citizen is “constantly terrified, but bravely embraces responsibility for contending with all known and unknown threats” (104). Public vigilance campaigns, if they are adhered to, are the perfect example of this: they simultaneously remind the public of terrifying uncertainties and suggest responsible precautionary activities. Failure to be vigilant is portrayed as risky and irresponsible. This is illustrated by an early version of the MPS (2006g) “if you suspect it report it” campaign, showing an unattended knapsack with the caption “Two ways to find out if it’s suspicious:

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Call 999 – The other doesn’t bear thinking about.” The image of the vigilant citizen that emerges is that of the suspicious and alert observer-reporter, empowered with enough knowledge to recognize the unusual and threatening (to “see something”) but only insofar as it allows him or her to alert the authorities (to “say something”). Underlying even this message is a deeper lesson that teaches the validity and viability of precautionary surveillance and pre-emptive action: watching, the posters tell us, works – or, at the least, it could work, provided it is widespread enough – as illustrated by the MTA’s (2006b, 2006c, 2006d) “the eyes of New York” campaign. One of the implications of this form of responsibilized citizenship is its exclusionary potential (Monahan 2006). Those who cannot meet the expectations of the new citizen-subject fail as citizens and simultaneously constitute weak links in the national security architecture. Public vigilance campaigns take this even further, constructing the “good citizen” and the “suspicious other” simultaneously through the same surveillant act. These initiatives reproduce the narrative of the society under attack, with the implication being that the mundane can suddenly become terrifying and that the potentially terrifying can take the form of the mundane. Generalized suspicion of the other is sanctioned since the exercise of vigilance is essentially an affirmation of the normative status quo – activities, persons, and situations emerge as suspicious only insofar as they depart from a notion of the regular, and in watching for these departures the validity of the norm is reconfirmed (Monahan 2006). The capacity of public vigilance campaigns to entrench a normative idea of citizenship is perhaps best illustrated in their more ambiguous forms of messaging. For example, OC Transpo’s (2005) first-generation “if you see something, say something” image depicts three penguins, one wearing swim trunks, and instructs citizens to call in if “something does not look right.” The vagueness of the image and message invites citizens to rely on commonsense understandings of what constitutes suspicious behaviour and to engage in processes of sorting and categorization based on deviations from the norm. Similarly, by asking British citizens “are you suspicious of your tenant or neighbour?” without providing in-depth information about what precisely constitutes suspicious activity, the MPS (2006d) is encouraging the public to trust their knowledge of what a “normal” citizen ought to look and act like. In the post-9/11 context, decisions about what constitutes suspicious abnormality are informed by particular narratives that circulate in the public sphere. The dominant themes link the presence of risk with ethnic, racial, and religious characteristics (Giroux 2005, 2006; Jackson 2005). Monahan (2006, 99) suggests that programs that enlist elements of the public to be on the lookout for suspicious behaviour not only fail to yield useful tips but also tend to

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“reproduce the general culture of racial profiling post-September 11.” The other appears as the enemy of the state, the archetypal embodiment of threat and uncertainty, dangerous by virtue of difference (Kinsman, Buse, and Steedman 2000). The othering potential of public vigilance campaigns emerges not from their explicit messages but from their ambiguity and mobilization of generalized suspicion. At a basic level, any processes through which citizens are so transformed into “Little Brother” can be said to have a fragmentary effect on the fabric of society, encouraging suspicion instead of solidarity, fear instead of understanding, and individualism instead of cohesiveness. As a result, a number of false positives have taken place in recent years, where tips from vigilant citizens acting on current understandings of what constitutes threatening behaviour have precipitated serious, and unwarranted, official action. Examples include the 2006 removal of six Muslim imams from a US Airways flight based on passenger tips about suspicious behaviour. Among their suspicious behaviours were prayer and critical discussion of America’s actions in Iraq.8 While the suspicions were deemed misplaced, the removal of the men sparked a debate about profiling and the criminalization of “flying while Muslim.” In another case from 2006, four Angolans and an Israeli were detained at Newark Airport after passengers reported suspicious behaviour. In this instance, the behaviour in contention included speaking Portuguese and carrying aircraft flight materials from a helicopter-training program that the men had recently completed.9 In both of these cases, state action based on false positives was initially reported by the news media as a response to a terror scare. Against “Little Brother” In this chapter, we have introduced the concept of public participatory surveillance, and we have described how it has been fostered through public vigilance messaging campaigns after 11 September 2001. These campaigns exist alongside a variety of security mechanisms and governing techniques within contemporary surveillant assemblages. As such, our analysis would be incomplete without some engagement with the broader debates taking place on the governance of security, particularly regarding the role of the neoliberal context and the relationships that exist between governing agents and the governed. Discussions of the governance of security in the contemporary context emphasize the role of neoliberalism as a guiding ideology and organizing framework. Neoliberalism can be understood as a system that facilitates diffused responsibilization coordinated by a central regulatory state (Braithwaite 2000). The state takes on a “steering” role in governance, while the actual “rowing” is left to other actors, be they private or non-governmental. With neoliberalism as a contextualizing backdrop, scholars have engaged in robust

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debate over the extent to which security governance has been “flattened” along the lines of a nodal governance model (Johnston and Shearing 2003) and the relative role of the sovereign state as a unique node (conceptually and normatively) among others (Wood and Dupont 2006). These debates are of direct relevance to a discussion of public participatory surveillance, which involves responsibilized public watching organized along neoliberal lines and coordinated state steering. One of the normative claims often associated with nodal governance relates to the ways in which multilateral and networked approaches to security provision can enhance democratic participation in the doing of security. It is in relation to this point – the democratization of security as a process and/or goal – that we need to examine public participatory surveillance. It is important to distinguish between democratic participation in security governance and public participation through responsibilized and directed watching. The former is attractive from a normative standpoint, mobilizing and reinforcing what Loader and Walker (2006) refer to as the social and constitutive, public-producing, dimensions of security. Several discussions of security advance a decentralized model for normative reasons, opposing it to a “state-must-do-it-all” approach (Shearing 2006, 31), a neo-authoritarian and centralized politics of exception (Giroux 2005) or a totalitarian security politics (De Lint and Virta 2004). Certainly, if it is seen as occupying a space on a continuum opposite expansionary neo-authoritarianism, a democratic approach to security governance is attractive. Public vigilance campaigns offer a participatory message about the governance of security, but they fall far short of a democratic ideal. They seek to increase the quantity of public participation in the doing of security, but the quality of the engagement – in terms of the potential for broad public steering and agenda setting – is not similarly augmented. A counter-argument is that the democratization of security is not one of the stated objectives or rationalities of public vigilance campaigns. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police Service’s (2007b) press release announcing the latest permutation of the “if you suspect it report it” campaign repeatedly notes that it is authorities who will assess incoming information, determine its validity, and decide whether and how to act on it. As we have noted, the radio portion of this campaign (MPS 2007a) is careful to point out that the public is responsible for vigilance but absolutely not for assessment – a task that is undertaken by specially trained police knowledge workers. So a critique of public vigilance campaigns for their failure to live up to a democratic ideal of security governance cannot be an internal one. It must originate externally, grounded in a critical normative agenda that makes robust democratic public steering a standard against which security campaigns are measured. It is with this in mind that we argue that public vigilance campaigns do not conform to a democratic

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conception of security governance for at least two reasons. First, while public vigilance campaigns speak to and involve the public, they do so in an atomized, individualized manner. They invite and foster suspicion toward others, contributing to the dissolution rather than constitution of community. Furthermore, while the messages of public vigilance campaigns depict citizens as necessary and important links or nodes in the provision of security, public participatory surveillance engages citizens in a carefully circumscribed and limited manner. The citizen-spy (Monahan 2006) occupies a role within the surveillant assemblage, but not a governing role, and certainly not a position of relative influence vis-à-vis the state. Within the dominant (in)security narrative deployed by government authorities, the ideal role of the citizen is that of the auxiliary security agent, responsibilized with identifying suspected threats to the security of person, family, community, and, most importantly, nation. But this duty to watch and report is not coupled with a role within the broader agenda-setting process (Giroux 2005). Second, the shortcoming of public vigilance campaigns in relation to democratic governance is their contribution to the expansion of sovereign power through the extension of the surveillant gaze of the state. By inscribing citizens within a surveillant assemblage through the mobilization of their capacity to watch each other, the state seeks to increase its intake of knowledge for the purpose of preventing terrorism. Public vigilance campaigns supplement other forms of surveillance, such as CCTV cameras in public and other communal spaces, the collection of personal data through identity checks and biometrics, and targeted observation through wiretapping, signals intelligence, and electronic monitoring. Importantly, public participatory surveillance can ignore the legal and jurisdictional boundaries that are associated with strictly state-operated surveillance, extending the eyes of authorities into otherwise unmonitored spaces, all in the name of pre-empting imagined sources of harm (Ericson, Baranek, and Chan 2007). While these campaigns appear to add nothing to the public’s capacity to govern security, they definitely contribute – or seek to contribute – to the state’s repertoire of surveillance, and ultimately to its capacity to control governed populations, in the name of precaution. These characteristics – atomized and responsibilized citizenship that rows without the capacity to steer and an expansion of the state’s surveillant gaze – reflect what Monahan (2006, 104) describes as a macropower structure of “fragmented centralization,” where centralized decision making is coupled with responsibilized individual preparedness and risk management activities. While it is reasonable for citizens to identify and report threats to security, our involvement in democratic agenda setting is non-existent (Giroux 2005). Threats that are located outside this box, such as human security issues, are

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left unaddressed and unaddressable (see Bauman 2006). Thus, while we strongly advocate for greater public participation in the “doing of security,” it is essential that this participation be evenly spread throughout all aspects of the process, particularly at the conceptual and agenda-setting levels. Under the current configuration of public vigilance campaigns, this is not possible, as we (the public) report our suspicions, while they (the authorities) decide how to manage and act upon the information provided. Our research has yet to explore the impact of public vigilance campaigns on the ground. However, should these initiatives manage to mobilize a significant portion of the 16 million eyes of New Yorkers (MTA 2006e), “to increase the level of alertness by gaining the participation of thousands of people every day” riding buses and trains in Ottawa (OC Transpo 2006a), and to create a forum through which Londoners can report anything suspicious to the authorities without having to be accountable for the result because in these times “you don’t have to” (MPS 2007a), then coexistence of the Orwellian spectre of “Little Brother” and “Big Brother” might become a reality. Presented with the possibility of living in a world where communal spaces are reduced to sites of uncertainty and suspicion, we argue that alternative frameworks are needed. Giroux (2005) suggests that this process must begin with the deployment of a critical public pedagogy aimed at subverting hegemonic understandings of security and establishing public spaces within which such discussions can emerge. Should we not engage in this first step, participatory reforms embedded in dominant understandings of threat and peril will not democratize security, but instead will help to create “wider, stronger and different nets” (Cohen 1985, 38).

12 Cell Phones and Surveillance: Mobile Technology, States, and Social Movements Simon J. Kiss

State officials and other powerful authorities regularly engage in surveillance to regulate what they perceive to be problems of collective dissent from the existing social order (Keen 2003; Lubbers 2002; Pulido 2002; Staub 1997). Surveillance practices have been introduced to gather intelligence about subversive people, to quash the contentious political activities of dissidents, and to prevent social movement organizing. Notwithstanding mounting evidence about the state’s use of surveillance practices for purposes of social control (see Chapter 9 in this volume), increased efforts to regulate group mobilization, or to eliminate dissent, can actually precipitate collective action. Repression and resistance, in this regard, are mutually entangled. While states and social movements condition one another’s existence, in recent years the relationship between states and social movements has changed with developments in communication technologies. In particular, growing use of the Internet by social movements and other advocacy-based organizations has led some observers to produce euphoric accounts of the capacity for new media technologies to transform social life and to enhance democracy. The possibilities of new media technologies were realized in September 1998 when two Silicon Valley software developers, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, distributed a petition on the Internet to censure President Clinton for his moral indiscretions and to “move on” (Schwartz 2002, 89). What eventually became a powerful advocacy group called MoveOn.org grew to almost half a million citizens within a few short weeks of the petition’s release; Congress received more than 2 million e-mails and 250,000 phone calls (Schwartz 2002, 89). Heeding the MoveOn experience, Joe Trippi (2004), campaign manager for 2004 Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, argues that new communications technology will allow the masses to reclaim an American political process that for too long has been elite-dominated. And for David Barnhizer, “the Internet has allowed NGOs to strip much of the ‘smoke and

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mirrors’ away” from decision makers who have become “accustomed to behaving without transparent processes” by allowing “activists to make early interventions into the institutions’ planning and decision-making processes in ways that challenge their assumptions and force other concerns onto the agenda” (2002, 104). Other authors emphasize the darker side of these technologies (Parenti 2003), however, noting that new media may not only lead to new forms of social organization but also enable more repressive surveillance practices by the state and other elite actors. The willing participation of major telecom companies in the Bush administration’s ongoing domestic wiretapping program, and recently declassified documents that reveal Cold War-era CIA surveillance of anti-war activists in Canada, reveal just how prevalent state surveillance of everyday life has become. Changes in new communication technologies make the study of surveillance and social problems imperative because they point to increasingly innovative ways in which agents of social control are able to monitor the daily lives of citizens. At the same time, they are important because they also point to the many creative ways in which individuals and groups who are subjected to surveillance resist state monitoring and social control efforts. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the place of new media, particularly mobile, wireless technology, in the dialectical relationship between states and social movements. The chapter begins with a review of previous work on wireless, mobile technology. On the basis of this review, I discuss several ways that social movements adopt wireless, mobile technology. I then examine how the possibilities afforded by these technologies are necessarily limited by state surveillance. Finally, I provide an outline of how the same technologies that work against the mobilization of social movements also enable new methods of resistance. In presenting these arguments, I rely on both primary and secondary sources of information. Interviews with relevant policy actors and the analysis of primary documents were conducted to obtain insights into innovative uses of wireless, mobile communications technology. Relevant websites (particularly www.textually-speaking.org) and news reports from major international media outlets were also examined for examples of innovative applications of mobile communications technology by states and social movements. Wireless, Mobile Technology in Contemporary Social Thought In Smartmobs: The Next Social Revolution, Rheingold (2002) examines the emancipatory potential of cellular phones and Short Message Service (SMS) technology1 by looking at a variety of case studies around the world. The 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) were one of the

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inspirations for Rheingold’s book. Those protests entailed street demonstrators who used dynamically updated websites, such as the Indymedia network, cellular phones, and other so-called swarming tactics to overwhelm the assembled officials and authorities. In short, the demonstrators comprised smart mobs – collectives whose cooperation was made possible by their connection to wireless devices with communications and computing capabilities. Although his work typifies the overly romantic view about the capacity of new communications technology to transform social life that accompanies technological innovations, he also acknowledges that these technologies provide increased capacity for surveillance. Nevertheless, his focus is intragroup surveillance rather than state surveillance of the citizenry. In his seminal book Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological Civilization, journalist and co-founder of Wired magazine Kevin Kelly (1994) offers a more sweeping and sophisticated examination of the impacts of new communications technology. There are no central maxims in Kelly’s work, but his arguments cluster around a few key themes. First, all living organisms are capable of creatively interpreting the rules and structures within which they exist. “The nature of life,” he writes, “is to delight in all possible loopholes ... Every creature is in some way hacking a living by reinterpreting the rules” (340). He also argues against a centralization thesis, maintaining that intelligence does not always have to lie with a central authority standing at the top of the social, political, or economic hierarchy. Rather, for Kelly, intelligence and decision-making capacities can be distributed across diverse populations, networks, and webs. According to Kelly, “when everything happens at once, wide and fast moving problems simply route around any central authority. Therefore overall governance must arise from the most humble interdependent acts done locally in parallel, and not from a central command” (469). Kelly identifies a wide range of intelligent decision-making capacities, from bee swarms and flat management structures in corporations to open social systems, all of which evolve organically. Thus, rather than bringing about an Orwellian society subordinated to a central authority, networks and technological innovations highlight that “everything about the actual possibility-space which computers have created indicates they are the end of authority and not its beginning” (466). Rheingold’s and Kelly’s contributions are significant, but the writings of Manuel Castells have enjoyed much wider acclaim in the scholarly community. Castells’ broad theoretical framework is outlined in a trilogy of studies known as The Information Age, the most relevant of which is its first volume, The Rise of the Network Society (1996). In this work, Castells challenges the excessive hype of much research about the information age. He argues that, while processes of technological transformation have created

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“an interface between technological fields through common digital language in which information is generated, stored, retrieved, processed, and transmitted” (29), the digital age has more fundamentally altered social, economic, and political life by amplifying and extending the human mind. “The growing integration between minds and machines ... [is] fundamentally altering the way we are born, we live, we learn, we work, we produce, we dream, we fight, or we die” (31). More recently, Castells et al. (2004) examine a large body of empirical data on cellular phone usage around the world. They also conduct four detailed case studies of how wireless, mobile technology has been used by social movements to achieve significant social and political change. The first case study involves the widespread protests in 2000 in the Philippines against then-President Joseph Estrada. Just two years into his presidency, political opponents alleged that Estrada had received kickbacks and that he was guilty of corruption. An impeachment process that began in the fall of 2000 culminated in a Senate committee vote in favour of Estrada. Enraged citizens poured into the streets within hours of the committee’s vote, demonstrated over the course of four days, and ultimately forced Estrada’s resignation. While many news accounts of the protests treated SMS and mobile technology as a decisive, causal factor in Estrada’s resignation, Castells and his colleagues argue that these claims must be approached with caution. For example, the public demonstrations spurred by wireless communication did not just force Estrada to resign, but the military also intervened, escorting him from the presidential palace at the climax of the protests. Castells et al. note that there was a distinct class bias to this case in terms of both who was using cellular phones and what their relationship was to Estrada’s presidency. In particular, the demonstrators of mid-January were primarily middle- to upper-middle-class citizens, already hostile to the Estrada regime. Subsequent events, however, demonstrated the limited contribution of mobile technology. Supporters of Estrada were able to mount a massive counter-demonstration on their own, without the use of wireless mobile technology. While causal claims have to be carefully considered, in this case wireless mobile technology did serve as a contributing (although perhaps not decisive) variable in the quick mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Estrada opponents. Castells et al. write that the mobile phone, and especially text messaging, did play a major role in message dissemination, political mobilization and the co-ordination of campaign logistics. Because it allows instant communication at any time, anywhere, it is most suited to assemble large-scale demonstrations immediately after emergent political events such as the Senators’ decision on the impeachment trial on January 16th, 2001 ... However, the mobile phone

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was limited in the social scope of its influence due to the digital divide. It is oftentimes a tool serving the interests of the middle class, traditional stakeholders (e.g., the Catholic Church), and global capital. It does not always have high credibility or sufficient capacity to spur two-way civic deliberation. For these reasons, mobile phones and texting have to work closely with other media, such as Internet and radio as shown in this case, in order to deliver actual political consequences. (2004, 206)

The second case study involves election campaigning by Korean citizens on behalf of President Roh in South Korea. President Roh Moo-Hyun represented a generational and liberal challenge to the Republic of Korea’s political establishment. In the years leading up to the presidential election in December 2002, his backers had formed an online organization dedicated to raising money, organizing members, and spreading publicity about their candidate. Yet, in the waning hours of the presidential campaign, the proRoh campaign was in crisis. The organization’s website had been shut down during the campaign, his party was internally divided, and one of his major political partners withdrew support just months before the election. Castells and his colleagues (2004) argue, however, that intervention by Roh supporters on the day of the election is what ultimately proved decisive. More than 800,000 e-mails were sent to mobile phones to urge supporters to make their way to the polls. Again, determining a causal connection between the role of new media technology and the outcome of the election is difficult. Roh’s supporters had built a widespread network of e-activists well before the election. Detailed analysis would be required to determine whether or not the network’s ability to instantaneously communicate with hundreds of thousands of supporters via mobile phones on the day of the election was decisive or superfluous: “It would be exaggerative to attribute too much credit to [the] mobile phone as the sole or even the most important device with some kind of magical, innate power. Yet, it would be equally erroneous to ignore the unique capacity of [the] cellular phone – as a gadget of perpetual contact – in the swift mobilization of certain marginalized social groups at critical political moments such as the Korean presidential election of 2002” (Castells et al. 2004, 211). The third case study involves the mobilization of protest and resistance against Spanish incumbent Prime Minister Jose María Aznar in 2003. Just days before the Spanish parliamentary elections in 2004, terrorists associated with al-Qaeda exploded bombs in the Madrid subway using cell phones as detonation devices. The attacks killed almost 200 people and wounded close to 1,000 more. In the wake of the bombings, the conservative government of Jose María Aznar either allowed or purposefully disseminated the theory that the attack had been carried out by the Basque separatist movement ETA.

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Mobile communications played a key role during these days. With the attacks on 11 March and the election only three days later, events moved quickly. The government called for massive demonstrations the day after the attacks to protest terrorism; Spanish news media (under government influence, as most media are in times of crisis) propagated the hypothesis that the bombings had to be the work of the ETA, even though the latter never claimed responsibility. In the wake of the Friday protests, and lacking an official, mainstream channel for expressing their distrust of the official line, activists started circulating alternative accounts of the attacks via SMS and mobile phones. Activists quickly called for a day of protest on Sunday, 12 March (technically illegal under Spanish law, which requires a day of reflection before an election). This communicative act, when combined with the fact that some news organizations were beginning to question the government’s official line, created sufficient pressure that a government cabinet minister was forced to concede on national television that al-Qaeda, and not ETA, may have been responsible for the attacks. According to Castells et al., this experience in Spain, coming three years after the flashmob mobilization that forced the resignation of Estrada in the Philippines, will remain a turning point in the history of political communication. Armed with their cell phones, and able to connect to the world wide web, individuals and grassroots activists are able to set up powerful, broad, personalized, instant networks of communication. Without prejudging the merits of this phenomenon (as it is subject, of course, to the diffusion of harmful, misleading information), this form of autonomous communication rings a warning bell for the control of information by governments and mainstream media. (2004, 215)

The final case study involves the use of cell phone technology by the organizers and participants in demonstrations at the 2004 Republican National Convention (RNC) in New York City. Motivated by deep concerns about American imperialism abroad and authoritarian domestic policies, activists were intent on launching sizable demonstrations of dissent. One of the most innovative uses of mobile phone technology lay in the use of software developed specifically for the protests, TXTmob. This technology was developed by the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA)2 to facilitate large-scale, decentralized, collective action. TXTmob allows mobile phone subscribers to voluntarily join a network of SMS senders and receivers. Any single participant in a collective action or protest can send messages to the entire group of participants who signed on to the service prior to the event. Two developers behind TXTmob wrote that, “after the J18 and Seattle protests, law enforce-

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ment has adopted a more aggressive approach to crowd control during large-scale demonstrations. Independent observers have come to call the current strategy ‘The Miami Model,’ named for its use during protests against the 2003 Free Trade Areas of the Americas summit ... The Miami Model in turn has prompted further decentralization among activists” (Hirsch and Henry 2005, 2). TXTmob functions roughly like an e-mail newsgroup. Users can subscribe to a variety of different forums, each of which carries slightly different levels of security (discussed below). Subscribing to any of the forums enables users to post and receive text messages during the course of any large-scale demonstration. The messages can communicate information such as times and locations of new actions; requests for assistance; warnings about movements, locations, and behaviours of state authorities; or postings of solidarity from within or outside the demonstration. During the course of the RNC protests, 5,459 people registered with the network sent 1,757 messages over 322 different forums (for a typology of the messages sent across TXTmob during the protests, see Hirsch and Henry 2005). This kind of organizational model is precisely what Rheingold (2002) and Kelly (1994) envisioned in their work, which emphasized the potential to decentralize decision making and distribute intelligence to large numbers of people. The designers of the technology were pleased with its effects, indicating that the protests were able to shut down and control major parts of Manhattan for more than a day (interview with Henry). Castells et al. are less sanguine about the technology’s impact during the protest, noting that the diverse agendas of groups participating in the protest hampered its overall effectiveness. “Admittedly, the convergence of all these groups in one place against a central political institution would be a formidable force. At the same time, the single-mindedness associated with other protests that have effected immediate change was absent from these demonstrations” (2004, 219). They concede, however, that, “insofar as the protestors’ objective was to peacefully make their voice heard during a central political event, while avoiding clashes with the police, one can say that the protests were successful. However, we do not have evidence to claim any direct impact on the political process itself” (219). Movements and Mobilization These case studies suggest four important ways in which social movements can use wireless mobile technology for political mobilization. First, wireless mobile technologies can be used to initiate mass protests and political action at key political junctures. The Philippine, Spanish, and South Korean cases all illustrate how information about political action can spread quickly across large geographic regions and demographic groups at key political junctures.

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Several questions arise. Who is being reached? Is there a class or sociodemographic bias that may be structuring access to this technology? How are the physical demonstrations (or elections) interacting with pre-existing social trends and structures? Do these possible biases or interactions magnify preexisting cleavages and/or activate latent political and social forces? Finally, is the use of the technology in these instances even necessary for these kinds of demonstrations to occur? Second, wireless mobile technologies can be used to conduct popular protests in novel ways. In the case of TXTmob, demonstrators were able to bypass the traditional position of parade marshals, who are commonly responsible for orchestrating the direction of street marches. This is not an insignificant development. During the 2001 protests in Quebec City against the Free Trade of the Americas, trade unions led protestors away from the barriers that protected summit participants. Other protestors, seeking a more direct confrontation, rejected the call and attacked the fence. The decision by the trade unions led to bitter recriminations in the wake of the summit and contributed to poor relations among the Canadian anti-globalization movement(s) about effective protest tactics. The point is that central control of political protests can become politically significant at some points in history. Technologies such as TXTmob circumscribe that influence and enable the capacities of more decentralized decision making. Third, wireless mobile technologies are being used as a tool of communication to link protest participants with the outside world. These technologies are also being used in protests to maintain constant communication. The integration of video and text and the linkage of the two formats with the World Wide Web allow for real-time transmission of independent and direct reporting about the conduct of protests to a worldwide audience. Two important consequences arise. The first consequence is that the reporting of popular demonstrations can be greatly democratized. Many studies have shown that the way in which the mass media cover protests or social movement activism (media rarely cover mobilization processes, alternatively focusing on outcomes) can have dramatic impacts on the internal organization and tactics of social movements and upon broader public perceptions (e.g., Gamson 1992; Gitlin 1980). Wireless mobile technology, which can link video, voice, and text to a global communications network with pervasive, cheap, and light personal communication devices has the potential to offer uninterrupted streams of coverage about street protests, demonstrations, and other instances of mass mobilization. All of this can potentially serve as an alternative or corrective to commercial mass media coverage. During an anti-poverty protest of the Ontario Coalition against Poverty (OCAP) in Toronto in 2000, for example, students of surveillance and computer science professor Steve

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Mann witnessed the demonstrations and filmed the events using wearable computer technology. They then transmitted the images to the broader world via new media networks. Mann and Niedzviecki write, “what my students and I undertook in deciding to ‘cover’ the OCAP protest was an experiment in media diversification” (2002, 175-76). The second consequence is that, by linking the inside of protests with the outside world, the potential arises to solidify people on the outside and inside of popular demonstrations. Returning to the case of the RNC demonstrations in Manhattan, Hirsch and Henry (2005) emphasize that not only can this maintain high levels of morale among protestors, but it can also generate new forms of collective solidarity across geographical space. This aspect of communication via mobile technology came through in their survey of feedback from TXTmob users after the Republican National Convention protests: “While it is easy to dismiss this as voyeurism or participation without risk, we would suggest that something important was going on ... The fact that some users chose to receive text messages without any expectation of being able to act on them speaks to the fact that users found such participation meaningful” (Hirsch and Henry 2005, 4). And fourth, wireless mobile technologies are being used to conduct political discourse in new and alternative spaces. Political talk is an integral element for social movement mobilization. Gamson’s (1992) Talking Politics emphasized the importance of developing news frames that are conducive to collective action. Gerhards and Rucht (1992) showed how social movement organizations must undertake important mesomobilization work by developing frames that can unite what are otherwise disparate groups of activists. Mobile wireless technology can thus create new forums for communication among political activists in two ways. First, given that youth adapt to these kinds of technologies faster than any other demographic, mobile phones open up a specific channel of communication that is more accessible to this generation than to others. This dominance by youth could enable mobilization by specific generations, previously denied access through conventional channels of communication dominated by elites (e.g., television and radio broadcasting). Second, the Spanish case indicates that mobile phones create a space for political talk that may be of particular relevance in authoritarian states, where the media are only partially independent from state authorities. This dependence of the media on state authorities is also a feature of democratic societies, although this relationship is more variable (Bennett 1990; Wolfsfeld 1997) than in the case of authoritarian states. In the Spanish case, the major news media tended to reflect the government’s line of the day; the connectivity arising out of cellular phone technology allowed youth to generate an alternative – and more accurate – frame of events.

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State Surveillance and Control of Mobile Phones As noted in the introduction to this chapter, new technologies not only create political opportunities for marginalized groups but also create opportunities for increased surveillance and control by states and other elite groups. In the previous section, I outlined some of the ways that activists have started to make effective use of mobile communication technology. In this section, I introduce three ways in which authorities attempt to restrict the use of this technology to restrain social movement mobilization in general. Increased State Surveillance of Mobile Phones Mobile wireless phone technology enables easier person-to-person communication, but it also opens new avenues for increased state surveillance. These mutually constitutive trends, moreover, will likely persist in the future. For example, the USA Patriot Act appropriated US$600 million over three years specifically for increased state capacity for surveillance. The revelations of a domestic spying program by the US government mean that mobile phone conversations are almost certainly subjected to the brute force of government surveillance. In addition, the major legislative changes contained within the Patriot Act mean that communications – and other data contained within cell phones – might become subjected to state surveillance. Table 12.1 summarizes the most relevant statutory changes enacted by the Patriot Act and their potential impacts on communications over cell phones. Mobile Phones as a Physical Target for State Investigations With the growing uses of mobile phones as a tool for activist mobilization, it is possible that the police will target those who possess mobile phones for pre-emptive arrests. This has already happened: an anti-war protestor from California was arrested by a police officer for simple possession of a mobile phone on the assumption that it was to be used for illegal activity. Although the charges were eventually dismissed, the incident raises the spectre of the state conducting surveillance of communication technology to facilitate mass arrests prior to political demonstrations as a means of coercion and intimidation. As cell phones become storehouses of greater amounts of information, the likelihood increases that police seizure of cell phones will become more important for investigations and arrests as police seek call logs, phone numbers, and recorded images and sounds stored on the mobile phones. One private firm currently offers an entire array of forensic products dedicated to uncovering information stored within cell phones (Paraben 2005). Police Use of Camera Phones Mobile phones have been adopted as policing technologies by many contemporary police forces. With the integration of video- and camera-recording

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Figure 12.1 Legislative changes in the USA Patriot Act that might specifically target use of cell phones Legislative section Legislative change

Impact on communication via cell phones

Section 206 Roving wiretaps allow the FBI to intercept communications made to or by subjects of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act surveillance, not just those communications made on one specific device. Section 209 Warrants now needed – as opposed to wiretapping orders that are more difficult to obtain – to get access to stored voice mail messages. Section 212 Telecommunication service providers are allowed to disclose contents of communications in instances where “life and limb” are at risk. Section 215 The government is more able to compel the production of tangible items.

Cell phone switching by activists or social movements becomes a less-feasible resistance technique.

Cell phone voice mail becomes much easier to obtain.

Cell phone service providers log and record massive amounts of information; this represents a significant window for the voluntary disclosure by corporations to to the state of personal information. As noted below, cell phones as physical items are storehouses of information (addresses, phone numbers, and SMS messages).

Source: American Civil Liberties Union (2002).

capacities in mobile phones, the potential exists for individual police officers to make greater use of the technology to record images or short movies of protests to be used as evidence. Police practices of videotaping protests have faced legal challenges in the United States, and the rights of police officers to engage in the activity vary from state to state. According to a news report in the Christian Science Monitor, prior to the RNC protests, New York police obtained the right to videotape protestors, which previously they had not been allowed to do on the ground that it was unjustifiably intimidating. This tactic resulted in situations in which protestors simply turned their own cameras back on the police to monitor them in a similar way (Farrell 2004). As cellular phones become smaller, more sophisticated in terms of their capability to record higher-resolution images, and more ubiquitous (even among police officers), this situation will become more acute.

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In addition to the myriad ways in which mobile phones can be used as surveillance cameras in their own right, it is possible that cell phones will also contribute to police officers seizing a greater degree of autonomy for themselves in their work. Manning’s (1996) study of the integration of the cellular phone into police work noted how open communication over police radio frequencies between officers in the field and police headquarters contributes to a trail of accountability and a panoptic form of discipline for police officers. Manning showed how officers carefully disciplined their speech when communicating over police radio nets, knowing their words were being monitored and recorded. When private cell phones were placed in the hands of on-duty police officers, they enabled communication between individual and group officers in the field, away from the surveillance of central headquarters. On this point, the Manchester Evening News reported that two police officers were suspended for sending racist messages to each other via text messaging (Scheerhout 2005). In the same way that mobile communication devices can be used by citizens and activists to coordinate activities, agents of state authority have similar opportunities to coordinate their activities in real time and on a permanent basis, away from the apparatuses of accountability and transparency that may already exist. Corporate Control of the Mobile Communication Infrastructure The TXTmob case highlights another interesting possibility for the surveillance and/or interference of wireless social movement communications. During the 2004 protests at the Republican National Convention, the T-Mobile cellular network was shut down, denying all customers in the New York region cellular service and thereby severing the link of TXTmob subscribers to the network. It is unknown whether the order to shut down service originated with T-Mobile or on the basis of state requirements as a means of interrupting activist communications. The point is that the potential exists for a privately owned communications infrastructure to be shut down, most likely in the case of localized protests. However, this also means that, if network providers are to close channels for activist communication, they will also be shutting down the network for all other regular paying customers (interview with Henry). Social Movements Resisting Surveillance An important essay by Gary Marx (2003) examines tactics of resistance to surveillance by individuals. Marx categorized eleven distinct ways that individuals might resist surveillance by the state. They range from what he calls “discovery” moves, where the subject of surveillance registers opposition by uncovering deceptive surveillance tactics, to “blocking” moves, where subjects interrupt surveillance through physical disruption. I am more interested in collective forms of resistance to surveillance, however, and I delineate

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Figure 12.2 The four sectors of TXTmob

Public

Private

Moderated

Communications Flash mobs

Central dispatch functions

Unmoderated

Meet-ups Open discussion forums

Closed discussion forums

Source: Adapted from Hirsch and Henry (2005).

four categories of collective resistance based on a review of the public record and the research of secondary and primary resources: gatekeeping, overwhelming, counter-surveillance tactics, and cultural/artistic resistance to surveillance. TXTmob integrated a form of gatekeeping as a way of keeping unwanted state authorities from having access to certain forms of information. The TXTmob network was divided into four “spaces,” each of which had its own degree of identity verification, moderation, and security procedures for access. Again, all four spaces required voluntary, opt-in registration. The most secure area of the network required personal identity verification in order to gain access and was moderated by a volunteer. The least secure area was open to any subscriber, was not moderated, and could distribute postings from any subscriber. Table 12.2 is adapted from Hirsch and Henry (2005, 3) and graphically maps the four segments of TXTmob. While this anti-surveillance tactic can keep unwanted eyes from seeing important information by restricting the flow of information, it also goes against the organizing principles of TXTmob, which are to ensure that information is shared widely across a social network to facilitate decentralized and autonomous mobilization. This contradiction that arises from antisurveillance measures somewhat limits the effectiveness of the network as a tool for information distribution and mobilization. Inherent in the design of TXTmob is another form of resisting surveillance, namely overwhelming it. This tactic makes gathered information meaningless, not by subterfuge but by brute force. One of the supposed advantages behind decentralized, autonomous decision making is that it is more flexible and can respond to local conditions more quickly. Over 1,700 messages were sent via TXTmob during the course of the RNC. Assuming the police had subscribed to open TXTmob areas (and news stories indicate that protest organizers operated accordingly), it is difficult to see how a police force, with orders flowing down and accountability flowing up, could meaningfully respond to such heavy flows of information (interview with Henry). The problem is identical to one faced by telecommunication companies that use data-mining techniques to prevent cell phone fraud in real

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time. The technology and programs exist to identify calls that raise suspicions of fraud; the problem is that a bottleneck exists when a human being must take steps to prevent the fraud from taking place. Undoubtedly, in the context of the RNC protests, police were able to exert significant influence on the spaces where the demonstrations took place through tactics such as mass arrests and the cordoning off of certain areas. Within those boundaries, however, the organizers behind TXTmob insist that activists were able to operate with autonomy and in a flexible manner (interview with Henry). The spread of elaborate camera phones linked to global communication networks also offers opportunities for protestors to turn the spotlight of surveillance back on agents of authority in an example of what Foucault described as the “strategic reversibility of power relations” (1982, 221). The same news story in the Christian Science Monitor that described the increased use of surveillance by police officers during the Manhattan protests also described how protestors used digital camera technology to videotape the actions of police (Farrell 2004). With camera phones capable of capturing images, movements, and sounds, the potential exists for a constant monitoring of state activities during the course of tense and confrontational protests. An artist collective in Germany has integrated wireless mobile technology in one innovative project designed to heighten awareness about the potential of wireless surveillance. 0100101110101101.org is a group of new media artists who devise artistic exhibits to generate publicity and highlight the contradictions in contemporary life. They describe their work as follows: 0100101110101101.org uses extreme oppositions to show that life is absolutely mediated, constructed, fabricated and that there is a speculative identity of the computer paradigm and of life in itself. It shows that instead of being a substantial force, life is composed of cliché. This is an attempt to create empathy where apathy reigns, and to create anxiety without ecstasy. The strategy is not to make fakes, but to develop tactics of political and aesthetic articulation of a proper reality and the politics of resistance, as, perhaps, Homi K. Bhabha would say, around a specific kind of subject that is constructed at the point of disintegration.3

Inspired by the situationist philosophy of resistance through art, in 2000 they launched a two-stage artistic effort known as Glasnost. The first stage was known as life sharing, and the second stage was known as Vopos.4 The point of Glasnost was “to give an account of how vast amounts of personal information are moving into corporate hands, where they can be developed into electronic profiles of individuals and groups that are potentially far more detailed and intrusive than the files built up in the past by state police and security agencies. 0100101110101101.org reveals how ordinary citizens

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are losing control of the information about them that is available to anyone who can pay for it.”5 In the first phase of the project, the participants made their personal computer files open to the world by sharing their contents on the Internet. The second phase went a step further in integrating wireless technology into their understanding of surveillance and control. In that project, the participants wore GPS transmitters connected to a satellite and from there to a website. The connection broadcasts the participants’ exact positions and movements and plots them on a topographical map of the urban environment, on the website, for all to see. In addition to just mapping the physical locations and movements of the participants, 0100101110101101.org placed a participant’s mobile phone completely at the disposal of the project, making all conversations held over that phone available to the world over the Internet. While this form of resistance does little to alter the day-to-day practices of state authorities, the idea of using art, contrast, and irony as forms of political resistance has a long pedigree. According to Edelman (1988), art derives its power from properties that operate at odds with the nature of contemporary political language. Edelman contrasts the treatment of crime and criminals in everyday political talk with the way in which the same subjects are treated in artistic works, such as Dostoyevsky’s (1953) Crime and Punishment. In the former instance, politicians, news media, and interest groups rely on two or three stock arguments that rarely change, regardless of the situation. One is either tough on criminals or in favour of rehabilitation. Crime and Punishment, by contrast, deals with conventional questions of guilt and innocence but also reveals the oppression of poverty and the anguish of the guilty conscience. Similarly, the projects launched by 0100101110101101.org offer the opportunity to experience or see the nature of information gathering and surveillance through wireless, mobile technology in ways that transcend binary debate between overzealous security hawks in conservative political movements and privacy advocates who argue from the perspective of libertarian principles. Conclusion The advent of new communication technologies has been heralded by many writers as ushering in a new era of cyberoptimism. According to writers such as Rheingold and Kelly, mobile technologies can distribute decision making and enable coordinated collective action. Rheingold encapsulates this view concisely: “Location-sensing wireless organizers, wireless networks, and community supercomputing collectives all have one thing in common: they enable people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before. An unanticipated convergence of technologies

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is suggesting new responses to civilization’s founding question: How can competing individuals learn to work cooperatively?” (2002, xviii). It is evident, however, from this examination of the public domain that the same technologies that are ostensibly so liberating can also be integrated into the activities of the state and its agents of social control. Although this study presents the tension between emancipatory and authoritarian tendencies that these technologies entail, the vexing question will remain whether or not these innovations tip the balance in one direction or the other. Regardless, the prospects for innovation and further study are profound. The research for this project took place during 2004 and 2005. At that time, the most common form of widespread, mobile, wireless technology remained sophisticated cell phones with audio- and video-recording quality. In the time since then, the BlackBerry and the iPhone have taken mobile communication technology even further, combining more data-processing and communication capabilities into simpler devices. The speed of these technological innovations is breathtaking, as is their rapid dissemination throughout the populace. The tensions highlighted in this study will only be exacerbated in the future and become more common. Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Surveillance Project and Professor Vincent Mosco, Canada Research Chair in Communication and Society in the Department of Sociology at Queen’s University.

13 Subverting Surveillance Systems: Access to Information Mechanisms as Tools of Counter-Surveillance Laura Huey

In the spring of 1999, I was introduced to a local community group seeking research assistance for a project on the use of private security guards in public spaces. Their neighbourhood had rapidly undergone gentrification, and their concern (which turned out to be well founded) was that private security guards were operating at the behest of local businesses to clean up the neighbourhood by pushing poorer residents out (Huey, Ericson, and Haggerty 2005). Throughout the study, which was subsequently expanded to encompass security initiatives in two downtown Vancouver neighbourhoods, we learned that the primary techniques employed by guards on patrol were forms of overt and covert surveillance. For example, guards would openly trail what they perceived to be suspect individuals so that targeted people would feel pressured to leave an area. This research raised a number of methodological and ethical issues about how to capture data on surveillance and counter-surveillance techniques that subjects would clearly not want revealed (Kemple and Huey 2005). One of the methodological choices that I made during this study but have not previously discussed was to use provincial access to information (ATI) legislation to acquire information about private security surveillance activities in public spaces. Based on information revealed in interviews, I discovered a number of formal and informal links between private security programs and the local police force (Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006). However, interviewees were often hesitant to discuss details or had limited knowledge of these connections. To find out more, I turned to provincial ATI legislation to gain access to data on private security surveillance initiatives that the police were aware of, potentially involved in, and kept records on. Six weeks after filing my initial request, I received twenty pages of documents about a public policeprivate security surveillance project that involved private security guards sending text messages on suspicious activities in their patrol areas that were received by pager subscribers. Included in these documents was a very valuable and surprising source of data: several pages of text logs that revealed

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the types of personal information that guards were routinely capturing and recording. The idea to use ATI legislation as a research tool in the field of surveillance studies came to me as a result of my advocacy work with civil libertarian causes. Canadian public policy groups (e.g., journalists and opposition politicians) routinely use ATI as a means of acquiring information on government initiatives. Thus, when asked to write on the subject of counter-surveillance in Canada for this volume, I reasoned that I am not alone in using ATI as a tool of counter-surveillance – that is, as a tool for exposing and challenging the surveillance activities of the state and third-party actors. Discussions with colleagues associated with advocacy groups and other non-governmental organizations (NGOs) supported my reasoning. Yet these discussions also left me with the impression that, although some academics might see these activities as counter-surveillance (Lyon 1994; Roberts 2005), stakeholders from various anti-surveillance communities are often uncomfortable with categorizing their work (particularly their use of ATI legislation) as a form of counter-surveillance. I realized that, before we can begin to fully explore the idea of counter-surveillance, some conceptual clarity is required. This chapter is thus an initial attempt at fleshing out the concept of counter-surveillance; it contextualizes the use of accountability legislation within the panoply of anti-surveillance measures. I begin the chapter with a brief discussion of the methods used to acquire data. Next I turn to the research literature on surveillance in order to explore various social scientific definitions of counter-surveillance. In doing so, I highlight the fact that the meanings of the social scientific concepts of surveillance and counter-surveillance are contested among surveillance scholars. I then discuss how anti-surveillance advocates interviewed for this chapter view the term “counter-surveillance,” particularly in relation to their own attempts at exposing and defeating surveillance-based schemes through the use of ATI legislation. These discussions reveal a distinct fracture between academic uses of counter-surveillance as an analytical and (possibly) politically neutral concept and the politically charged meanings that anti-surveillance stakeholders associate with the concept. I conclude the chapter with some final remarks on issues of academic accountability in our use of terminology as well as on the need for further work in the area of counter-surveillance and its political meanings and potential uses. Defining Counter-Surveillance: A Review of the Literature Surveillance: close observation or supervision, esp. of an enemy or suspected person.

– Oxford Canadian Dictionary (2000, 1460)

Subverting Surveillance Systems

The past few years have witnessed incredible growth in the field of surveillance studies. Remarkably, despite this growth, there is no consensus on what forms of human activity are encompassed by the term “surveillance.” Derived from the French for watching over, surveillance encompasses the basic activity of watching others. Brian Martin (1993, 115) uses surveillance in this sense when he describes it as “keeping a close watch on others.” However, this basic definition has been variously expanded upon and/or challenged. Gary Marx (1998), among others, suggests that there has been a notable shift in what constitutes surveillance. Marx distinguishes between what he terms traditional surveillance, involving close observation of a targeted individual (e.g., the police officer who trails a suspect), and the new surveillance: technologies designed to systematically extract and collect personal data (e.g., the database that collects, sorts, and creates data profiles of targeted individuals and groups). Whereas traditional surveillance is an exceptional activity, proliferating technologies have made the new surveillance a routine, everyday activity that is largely invisible to those people whom it targets. What these two forms of surveillance share, however, is that each seeks to “eliminate privacy in order to determine normative compliance or to influence the individual” (Marx 2003, 370). For Colin Bennett (2005), such an understanding of surveillance is insufficient. Bennett argues that the use of technology to systematically capture and analyze data must be understood in relation to institutional, cultural, and political contexts and goals: an action alone does not constitute surveillance; it does so only in relation to its stated uses and goals. To illustrate this point, Bennett distinguishes between the mundane collection and use of his personal data when taking a flight to Toronto and the experience of someone who has been targeted for close observation and special treatment by virtue of his or her name or meal preferences. According to Bennett, then, understanding surveillance as the simple act of watching over – the mother over the child, for example – “trivializes” its meanings, its uses, and the experiences of its targets. Among the various definitions and understandings of surveillance, there nevertheless remains common terrain. In the simplest sense – the act of watching over – surveillance encompasses activities that may be socially desirable. We might refer to the image of the nurse who keeps close watch over the ailing patient (Martin 1993) or even the police detective who watches the suspect in order to gather evidence or to prevent the commission of a crime (Marx 1988). In its more complex forms, the term carries nasty connotations (Martin 1993) – hence the frequent use of the metaphors of Orwell’s Big Brother or Bentham’s panopticon. Whether viewed as beneficial to society or detrimental to individual privacy, surveillance is about power and its manifestation in the world. The nurse who systematically collects the patient’s

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vital signs uses this information to make decisions concerning the patient’s well-being – a benevolent exercise of power. In contrast, the systematic collection of data on particular ethnic groups to target their members for increased observation by law enforcement can only be understood as power negatively manifested. I want to be explicit on this point: however a person is situated in relation to the exercise of power, understanding surveillance as the expression of power is necessary for understanding the politics of surveillance and, in particular, the beliefs and values of those who oppose its use and spread. Despite the ever-increasing volume of work on surveillance, countersurveillance, and other anti-surveillance measures, there remains “a relatively diminutive theme of study” (Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006, 151). References to counter-surveillance are scant, as are definitions of the term in the research literature. Indeed, a search of social science databases using the keywords counter-surveillance and counter surveillance yielded one result: Gary Marx’s (2003) article “A Tack in the Shoe: Neutralizing and Resisting the New Surveillance.” A search of the Internet yielded four scholarly articles: Torin Monahan’s (2006) “Counter-Surveillance as Political Intervention?,” Brian Martin’s (1993) article on “Antisurveillance,” and Steve Mann’s (2004) work on “sousveillance.” A search of print sources on surveillance in university and college library shelves produced Lyon’s discussion of counter-surveillance movements in The Electronic Eye: The Rise of the Surveillance Society (1994). In “A Tack in the Shoe,” Marx (2003) considers counter-surveillance in light of other anti-surveillance measures aimed at resisting or neutralizing the surveillance activities of others. Marx defines counter-surveillance as actions or behaviours that result in the surveillance of those who are surveilling others or that seek to neutralize or subvert the collection of personal data. Furthermore, Marx suggests that counter-surveillance techniques may involve an ironic “turning of the tables” in which the very technologies used to control others function to advance the interests of those controlled (384). In his examination of counter-surveillance as political resistance, Monahan (2006) picks up the second part of Marx’s definition, suggesting that countersurveillance can include activities such as “disabling or destroying surveillance cameras, mapping paths of least surveillance and disseminating that information over the Internet, employing video cameras to monitor sanctioned surveillance systems and their personnel, or staging public plays to draw attention to the prevalence of surveillance in society” (515). Exposing the surveillance activities of others is also central to how Martin (1993) views counter-surveillance, defined as “surveillance of powerful organizations” (118). The focus for Martin, as for Monahan, is what he terms “anti-surveillance,” counter-surveillance being just one of many possible ways of mounting political resistance to powerful entities.

Subverting Surveillance Systems

Resistance to surveillance is also central to the political and academic work of Mann (2004), who has recently added the term “sousveillance” to the social scientist’s lexicon. Mann uses sousveillance to denote what he calls undersight processes involving the use of surveillance technologies and tactics by the “lower orders” to expose and challenge the surveillance activities of the powerful. Sousveillance thus represents a new means of categorizing the older activity of counter-surveillance. This cursory glance at the literature reveals two important facts: first, counter-surveillance remains an underdeveloped field of scholarship, requiring further theoretical and empirical activity; and second, both countersurveillance and its progenitor, surveillance, remain largely contested and variable terms within the academic literature. These facts at once suggest the complexity of these activities and reflect variations in the ideological approaches and/or theoretical perspectives of those working in this field. In my original research on surveillance, I remained relatively unreflexive about my methodological choices and definitions. In my work, I used a definition of counter-surveillance that was ostensibly objective, defining it as systematized data gathering on the surveillance activities of others. My former understanding lacked an explicit, foregrounded awareness of my own implication in the contested political debates I analyzed and in activities that could potentially affect stakeholder battles. My former definition of counter-surveillance also lacked ethical-political context. In the following section, I seek to remedy this deficiency – variously addressed by Mann (2004), Martin (1993), and Monahan (2006) – by framing ATI use from the perspective of those individuals and groups who view their activities not as counter-surveillance but as political action informed by democratic principles. Methodological Issues A central concern of this chapter is to examine the meanings attendant on the use of ATI by public advocacy groups as a means of subverting surveillance systems. To do so, qualitative interviews were conducted to understand the meanings participants ascribe to the work they do and how representatives of selected advocacy groups understand and explain their use of ATI in relation to their anti-surveillance goals. Eight individuals representing seven public policy and/or community interest groups were interviewed. To ensure some diversity within the sample, interviewees were selected from two types of NGOs: privacy advocates who engage in public policy work, and community groups who had become involved in anti-surveillance activities in response to particular schemes affecting their constituencies. Furthermore, the groups represented here are also a mix of local and nationally based organizations across Canada. In the interests of protecting identities, where

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group members are quoted, they are identified in generic terms such as “advocate” and “representative.” Following the preference of some of those interviewed for this project, their organizations are identified as “antisurveillance groups.” To further the goal of conceptually clarifying the term “counter-surveillance” and its use in relation to ATI, I also interviewed three individuals who are recognized experts in the field of access to information. In doing so, I explored their views on the uses and limits of ATI as a tool of counter-surveillance as well as their beliefs about how this activity should be conceptualized. A final comment is needed on method: the overall sample size of privacy advocates from which I am drawing is relatively small. This is for two reasons. First, the objective of this phase of research was to pursue a preliminary exploration of an identified theme. It was rightfully anticipated that further themes worthy of exploration would emerge through the interview process that could be more fully examined in a future study. Second, and this is an important consideration when pursuing studies involving smaller NGOs, such groups frequently lack the time to assist in research activities outside their immediate concerns because of a significant lack of resources. Several of the organizations that I contacted promised interviews but were unable to follow through because of staffing issues or due to a need to respond to immediate events (e.g., “fighting fires”). Others simply ignored requests. In speaking about this turn of events with a friend involved in civil libertarian causes, she sighed and advised that many of the groups involved in antisurveillance work are overworked, some being “little more than one-man bands operating on shoestring budgets.” Such sentiments were also echoed in interviews with frequently tired and/or burnt-out privacy advocates. Access to Information: A Tool for Addressing Social Problems? Administrating public information and data-handling systems in Canada requires the daily collection of an enormous volume of personal and public information. Personal and public information runs the gamut, from entries on a driver’s licence form or notations in a patient’s medical file to minutes of federal cabinet meetings. Information is converted into data that can be processed into usable formats, accessed to assist in administrative decision making, and stored. The type of information that may be gathered not only relates to individuals or governments but also includes information on the operations of businesses and organizations. In 1982, the Canadian government passed the Access to Information Act (ATIA). This act established the right of citizens to access information held by the federal government and its agencies. It also created rules with respect to the conditions under which information can be accessed, how requests are to be handled by public agencies, and how information can be collected, stored, and corrected (when required) by government officials. The framers

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of the ATIA also set out the circumstances under which federal bodies could refuse to release information, including fashioning exemptions for reasons of national security or violations of individuals’ personal privacy. To ensure that public agencies respond to requests in good faith, an independent oversight office was created: the Access to Information Commissioner. Citizens who have complaints about how a request for information is handled by a given agency may lodge their complaints with this office. The office has the power to investigate, make recommendations, and refer cases to the Federal Court of Canada for review. A significant limitation of the Access to Information Act is that it applies only to information held by federal agencies. If citizens want to know whether their personal information is being collected and used by a large commercial interest, such as a major bank or airline, they are not able to use ATIA to access this information. In 2001, the federal government attempted to rectify this problem with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). In a similar fashion to ATIA, PIPEDA sets out rules for the management and accession of citizens’ personal information. While PIPEDA expands the scope of protections and rights available to citizens with respect to the privacy of their personal information, as is the case with ATIA, it applies only to private interests that operate at the national level. Thus, a person can find out how data mined from customer loyalty cards is being used by a major retailer but cannot use PIPEDA to find out what types of information are being collected by local retailers. Furthermore, neither ATIA nor PIPEDA can be applied to government agencies under provincial jurisdiction. To remedy this latter defect, every province and territory in Canada has passed its own version of ATIA, creating access to information possessed by provincial or territorial government bodies. These laws, while similar in scope and content to ATIA, are often called freedom of information (FOI) laws (to avoid confusion, I am using the generic ATI, or access to information, to refer to requests under both ATIA and provincial FOI laws). Three provinces – Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec – have also enacted provincial versions of PIPEDA. Federal and provincial legislation governing the treatment of public and private information represents major enhancements of citizens’ democratic rights. As Alasdair Roberts (2002b, 648) notes, “the right to access to information held by public authorities is recognized as an important instrument for protecting several basic human rights, including political participation rights, due process rights and the right to privacy.” ATI legislation facilitates democratic processes through creating means by which citizens can access information to be used in informing personal and public views on public policy as well as shaping attempts at influencing government policy making. Furthermore, without reasonable levels of transparency in government decision making, which ATI attempts to provide, public officials cannot be held

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truly accountable for the decisions they make. As an expert on federal ATI interviewed for this chapter stated, “it’s a straightforward conception: keeping Ottawa honest. That’s it, that’s the role. It’s unpaid, but it’s part of my civic duty.” ATI laws thus provide the means by which public interest groups can uncover public policies and plans with respect to the treatment of various social issues that affect people at local, national, and global levels. For example, news journalists in the United States have reported on a clandestine operation run by the CIA involving flights of suspected terrorists transported to holding facilities in Eastern Europe. These detainees are being held without benefit of the due processes afforded individuals in either domestic or international law. Due to the covert nature of the operation, evidence relating to these detentions has been hard for journalists and scholars to locate. However, one of the experts interviewed for this chapter advised that he had recently obtained such proof through the use of federal ATI: “I managed to get some information out of the government on CIA registration of various CIA flights to Eastern Europe that transited through Canada involving detainees.” The Canadian Oxford Dictionary entry for the word surveillance, quoted earlier, suggests that the use of surveillance is particularly found in relation to enemies and suspects. Although there are many surveillance-based programs today that promise discounts on toilet paper for allowing one’s shopping habits to be observed and recorded, other programs, both public and private, are more closely tied to this particular conception of surveillance. These are programs that monitor, record, and process people’s behaviours in order to determine which individuals, groups, or populations are social threats. Not entirely surprisingly, groups that frequently find themselves the targets of surveillance are often the same racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and other groups that face discrimination and marginalization in other aspects of social life. And, as is the case with the detainees noted above, the operating rationale of such programs rests on the premise that one is suspect until proven otherwise. Moreover, because such programs operate in secrecy, targeted individuals seldom find out that they are on a watch list and thus have few, if any, opportunities to defend themselves. For civil libertarians and other public interest groups, ATI legislation provides a means, although often only a partial one, of uncovering covert government-sponsored programs that infringe on citizens’ rights. Another excellent recent example of how this process may work is the use of ATIA by a privacy rights group to uncover closely held federal government plans to implement a law that would provide police with greater access to personal information about Internet subscribers. A frequent complaint by civil rights groups is that laws and policies that may infringe on citizens’ rights are often revealed only shortly in advance of their tabling by a house of legislature,

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so that such organizations are often unable to marshal sufficient public attention to the potential pitfall being faced. This was certainly the case in 2001 when, in response to the 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York, the Canadian government passed a sweeping omnibus bill with little public consultation, the Anti-Terrorism Act, which holds serious implications for Canadians’ rights. By using ATI to learn about government plans to introduce wider police access to Internet records in advance, concerned citizens’ groups were able to draw public attention to the issues at stake much sooner. This is not to suggest that ATI is a panacea or corrective for all social issues. As many scholars, lawyers, and public interest groups have pointed out, there are a number of significant limitations with using ATI legislation at both provincial and federal levels. One major problem is that there is wide scope for the exercise of discretion by government agents (see Roberts 2002a). For example, as one expert on the federal ATIA legislation notes, “section 15 and other sections can be deployed quite readily to preclude release of information on national security issues ... They are deployed, very readily.” Another problem is that ATI legislation allows for government agencies to charge photocopying costs for larger-volume requests. Public interest groups complain that costs assessed are often so high as to appear punitive: “I’ve found that sometimes ... the agency refuses to disclose the material without prepayment of large copying or research expenses.” Such costs can inhibit large-volume requests when the requestor is a small NGO with minimal funding and resources. Other organizations have criticized what they believe to be internal practices of removing or destroying information that may be politically sensitive. One interviewee spoke of her discovery that members of a government agency were routinely using easily peelable “sticky notes” to evade ATI requests that might expose information that they did not want publicly released. Despite these limitations, ATI remains a tool for citizens seeking to address social issues. As one expert wryly explained, “I’ve got very little other resources or choice available to me as a member of the public other than ‘access,’ and the bureaucrats got the filing cabinets.” Using ATI to Subvert Surveillance Schemes: Views from the Field Individuals and groups who attempt to dismantle the surveillance regimes of the state and/or powerful private entities are clearly engaged in inherently political struggles. This point is also expressed in Haggerty and Ericson’s (2006, 3-25) analysis of the role of “stakeholders” in the “politics of surveillance.” For these scholars, surveillance is a modern political battleground over which various stakeholders – both pro and con – attempt to “influence the volume or configuration of surveillance” (7). On the “pro” side of surveillance are frequently politicians, police organizations, business interests, and other groups who view surveillance as necessary to ensuring safety and security. On the “con” side of surveillance are oppositional groups such as

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civil libertarian and/or privacy organizations as well as temporary coalitions that spring up in response to a particular surveillance initiative. What the latter often share, according to Monahan (2006, 516), is a set of disparate ideologies and intentions and a “unified ... mission of safeguarding – or creating – the necessary spaces for meaningful participation in determining the social, environmental, and economic conditions of life” that surveillance is perceived as endangering. In this section, I focus on the activities and beliefs of differently situated groups who share an opposition to various local and/or national surveillance schemes. What these groups also have in common is that representatives from each have said that their organizations have used or would use ATI mechanisms as a means of uncovering state and/or public-private surveillance to potentially subvert such initiatives. In interviews, it became clear that ATI usage varies widely among the organizations selected. Two of the groups contacted rarely access these mechanisms, doing so only in response to specific surveillance proposals; the majority of them use these channels on a more routine basis. One group representative noted, “we send approximately one [ATI] request each month on various issues,” whereas other organizations use ATI less frequently. Regardless of differences in frequency of use, the purposes underlying ATI use by the selected groups were remarkably similar: “We want to know information,” and it is “an information opportunity.” Furthermore, the stated uses of information gathered through ATI requests were also similar among respondents: to expose surveillance initiatives to the public in order to garner support for a particular group’s aim to block a given surveillance project. For example, one group representative described his organization’s use of ATI as follows: “We are generally looking for information that contradicts the ‘official line’ on the purpose and intent of the specific surveillance program in question, information that more adequately expresses the true purposes of the surveillance program and thereby ultimately supports the position of our agency on the particular issue.” A representative from a different organization used the same language to express her group’s purpose in using ATI: “The documents we request more truly reflect the intentions behind the surveillance programs and agencies we are seeking the information on and from. Often when the intentions behind otherwise apparently benign programs or agency activities are revealed, public political discourse concerning that program or agency activity is better informed and comes to more appropriate conclusions.” A third interviewee described the subsequent release to the public of documents acquired through an ATI request as “a public education campaign to get people to understand what was being collected about them.” Given my own use of ATI to discover information about the surveillance activities of what are essentially private actors operating in public spaces, I

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was curious to know whether the anti-surveillance advocates whom I interviewed had ever used or considered using ATI requests as a means of learning about third-party involvement in surveillance-based projects. Only one organization had done so in the past, but all the group representatives said that they would not hesitate to do so in the future if third-party involvement was an issue. As one interviewee explained, “as private agencies are not subject to [ATI] requests, this would be one of the only possible ways to gather information about certain organizations’ activities and certainly a helpful one.” In relation to the possible use of ATI to trace public-private surveillance partnerships, another interviewee asserted that “monitoring the relationship between private and public agencies ... I think that’s fair game.” In relation to the politics of surveillance, Haggerty and Ericson (2006) find that much of the discourse and rhetoric can be pared down to one or more of six stakeholder concerns: effectiveness, privacy, identity, technology, error, and function creep. These authors further suggest that, “cumulatively, these six dimensions provide an appreciation for the complexity of the politics of surveillance and the challenge posed to anti-surveillance strategies and discourses” (8). What is only obliquely present in this list, however, is a principal means by which anti-surveillance activists frame their work – that is, with reference to the language of democratic ideals, particularly those ideals that are intended to structure the citizen-state relationship. Indeed, when asked to conceptualize their use of ATI to uncover state-based surveillance schemes, representatives from each of the groups repeatedly invoked words such as transparency and accountability as conceptual frames. For example, one participant defined her organization’s use of ATI in the following terms: “What we’re doing is trying to hold the government accountable. It’s more like an almost transparency exercise.” A representative from another group explained his work in these terms: “The state is a tool of the citizens and must be as transparent as possible.” I am hardly alone in noticing the common framing of anti-surveillance work in this fashion – another interviewee similarly commented that “the rhetoric that’s deployed by the requesting agency or person is always accountability and fairness.” Is This Counter-Surveillance? More Views from the Field In each of the interviews conducted, participants were also asked whether they might conceptualize their use of ATI to uncover and/or defeat surveillance as a form of counter-surveillance. Given that interviewees had previously framed their work using the political language of accountability and fairness, it is not entirely surprising that the majority of respondents replied immediately in the negative. Indeed, the most frequent response was “we’re not engaged in surveillance” or “it couldn’t possibly be a form of countersurveillance.” There was, however, one notable exception: one respondent

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answered this question by replying, “we have never used the word surveillance or counter-surveillance to describe our [ATI] activities; however, that is certainly what we are doing.” As noted, the transparency of the ATI process – the requestor typically reveals his or her name, contact information, and the scope of the information sought (and presumably the intent in seeking it) to the target agency – is frequently cited as a principal reason why anti-surveillance activities are not seen as a form of counter-surveillance by participant organizations. Countersurveillance would appear to imply a covert element around both one’s intentions and methods that respondents find problematic. For example, an anti-surveillance advocate explained that he wouldn’t use any variation of the term “surveillance” in relation to his work because “the word surveillance imparts a certain feeling of covert activity that [ATI] requests by their very nature do not have.” Transparency not only in methods but also in sub­sequent uses of information gained is also cited as a rationale for opposing the use of the term to describe ATI work: “If there’s anything interesting, we’ll post the information on our website and tell the world.” Some interviewees were also opposed to what they view as negative meanings attached to the term: “Even to frame it in the language of counter-surveillance already reveals your [negative] perspective in a sense.” The issue of possible negative connotations with the term “countersurveillance” was also raised by the ATI experts interviewed for this chapter. One individual asserted that the use of ATI to uncover and oppose surveillance schemes “does meet the dictionary definition of surveillance.” The primary difference between this form of surveillance and others, this expert reasoned, is that “it’s the kind of surveillance where the target is aware that they are under surveillance.” I found this comment particularly interesting given that groups involved in anti-surveillance who oppose the use of counter-surveillance to describe their ATI activities frequently cited the open nature of their work as a reason for not viewing it as a form of surveillance (read covert activity). Again, it is the perceived clandestine nature of countersurveillance that makes anti-surveillance groups uncomfortable with the word. Another expert suggested that the use of the term “counter-surveillance” is problematic because “it’s a little too adversarial.” However, it was also noted that invocation of the term “surveillance” to describe the activities of others might be seen as adversarial in and of itself. Indeed, another mused, “how could [counter-surveillance] be any more adversarial than the term ‘surveillance’ itself?” To explore their perceptions more fully, I subsequently engaged each of the anti-surveillance advocates who responded negatively to my question in a discussion about how surveillance scholars use and understand the concepts of surveillance and counter-surveillance as neutral terms (with

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meanings and associations to be negotiated on a case-by-case basis). Examples used to illustrate this point included, among others, the watchful gaze of the parent over the child and the systematic data capturing of marketers. When asked to give further reflection to the term, its meanings, and whether it might apply to their own work, respondents highlighted the politically strategic nature of their activities. For instance, in the following quotation, an interviewee characterized her use of ATI mechanisms as a potential trump card in the politics of surveillance: “I mean it depends how you define the word surveillance. We could define it as any observation, or we could say recorded observation, or we could say systematic observation, you could have different grades of what constitutes surveillance. It’s funny how you define it. Of course, access to information regimes kind of beat that kind of surveillance.” Other interviewees similarly mulled over the rather fluid nature of the concept of surveillance in trying to understand what is meant by counter-surveillance. Sometimes these attempts led individuals to highlight contradictions in their own thinking about both these terms and their work in the surveillance field (contradictions, I note, that are also present within the academic literature): It’s a funny term. Counter either means against or in opposition to in some sense ... I would rather use anti-surveillance than counter-surveillance. I’m against something. I’m against surveillance. I’d like to find out what they’re doing. I’d like to have them justify why they have this endless secret stuff that we never find out about, in which people’s rights might be violated, they do what they want, and we don’t know about it. I would like to counter that. I would like to have them on the defensive ... Just on a fast thought about it, I like the term “anti” rather than “counter.” (Emphasis added)

Even though engaged in work that serves to counter (oppose) the surveillance activities of the state and other bodies, and using terms that certainly indicate that what is being attempted is a countering of surveillance activities, representatives of anti-surveillance groups interviewed shied away from using this term. Again, what they were rejecting was the perceived negative association of counter-surveillance with clandestine observational activity, which not only are they opposed to when engaged in by the state but which is often viewed as largely, if not solely, a state-based activity (e.g., the spyversus-spy scenario was invoked a number of times in interviews). Thus, to use the term “counter-surveillance” to describe their own work would seem to imply a selection of methods, if not aims, not entirely dissimilar to those used by targeted entities. Interestingly, use of the term “anti-surveillance,” suggested by the group representative noted above as an appropriate substitute means of characterizing his organization’s work, was deemed problematic by one of the ATI

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experts interviewed: “Anti-surveillance would be taking steps to block the capacity of government to surveil your activities. Using covert messaging mechanisms and all that sort of thing. But you’re not talking about blocking surveillance.” According to this individual, the use of ATI to surveil the activities of government and private businesses is a form of “watching the watchers.” Describing this work as a form of democratic oversight neatly coheres with similar views expressed by those anti-surveillance advocates interviewed (though perhaps I should now refrain from calling them that). Several respondents raised a further rationale for rejecting the term “counter-surveillance” to describe their work by noting that the term implies a certain degree of parity between observers. Equivalence between parties, as was repeatedly noted, is clearly not the case when citizen groups seek to dismantle state-based surveillance projects. One of the interviewees who raised this objection stated, “I’m for counter-surveillance most generally,” meaning that he supported the levelling of power vis-à-vis the citizen’s relationship to the state and the asymmetries found between the citizen and the large-scale private interests that the term seems to imply. However, the levelling of disparities between actors engaged in the politics of surveillance is a political objective and not an existing reality, as his next words suggested: It’s my impression that there’s a major problem in our society with information creation, storage, and retrieval. The reality is there’s some private and public agencies that have enormous capacity to create and manage information, but most of us plebeians have almost none. We don’t have control over human resources or technological resources. It’s time consuming and expensive to do that sort of thing. What we’re left with is that there are information haves and information have-nots, and there’s a growing, widening disparity between those two groups. It’s leading to informational asymmetry – that is, it’s becoming one of the most pronounced forms of empowerment and disempowerment available.

This view was echoed by an ATI expert: “I think the difficulty might be that if you characterize it as counter-surveillance the implication might be that the techniques being used for counter-surveillance were of equal power to the techniques being used for surveillance. My hunch would be that the techniques available for counter-surveillance, or the resources available, are much more crude than those being used for surveillance itself.” Other interviewees who spoke to the issue of a lack of parity between observers noted that ATI mechanisms are frequently an inadequate tool for uncovering surveillance-based and other governmental activities that their proponents might wish to keep from public exposure. One interviewee described the use of ATI as “inefficient” and “a needle in a haystack exercise”

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because, assuming that one knows what materials to request and from whom, “you’ve got to spend the time going through stacks of documents, trying to find what’s relevant, what’s not.” Furthermore, NGOs typically lack the personnel and resources to invest in cumbersome ATI requests that might, because of the plethora of government exceptions and the possibility of expensive copying costs, cost much and reveal little. Indeed, one slightly frustrated privacy advocate indicated that “on the NGO side there’s not enough people, not enough resources. There’s lots of things that we could and should be doing together and separately, but we can’t. We don’t have the resources.” Understanding and Using Counter-Surveillance I will begin my concluding remarks with two observations. First, countersurveillance clearly remains an underdeveloped field of scholarship requiring a significant amount of additional theoretical and research activity. Second, both counter-surveillance and surveillance remain largely contested, fluid terms in the academic literature; this is both suggestive of the complexity of these activities and reflective of variations in the ideological approaches and/or theoretical perspectives of those operating in this field. Use of the term “counter-surveillance” in the context of using ATI legislation to subvert surveillance systems reveals an interesting tension between the more theoretically inflected terminology of academics and commonsense understandings of those involved in anti-surveillance work. For example, Monahan (2006) echoes the views of other scholars in the field when he suggests that any definition of counter-surveillance must include the potential for inherently political acts or sets of acts aimed at correcting asymmetries of power expressed through surveillance activities (see also Huey, Walby, and Doyle 2006; and Marx 2003). Monahan’s definition would seem to incorporate the use of ATI legislation as a means of uncovering and attempting to level and/or defeat the surveillance activities of the state and powerful private actors (where possible). And yet, when we take into account the views of actors who are engaged in anti-surveillance work, a different picture emerges. Those interviewed for this chapter framed their work not as a form of counter-surveillance but with resort to the language of democratic ideals and values (i.e., accountability, transparency, etc.). And, while acknowledgment of their role in the politics of surveillance was present and central in each discussion, interviewees saw themselves not as front-line warriors in the battle over surveillance but as advocates and defenders of civic freedoms, particularly, but not exclusively, that of privacy. To the extent that the groups interviewed consist of traditional civil libertarians and more radical social justice organizations, this finding is rather thought-provoking.

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The task of offering conceptual clarity in relation to human activities is a difficult, often problematic one requiring significant theoretical work based on rigorous empirical analysis. Although this chapter has been useful in highlighting operational difficulties in relation to the application of the concept of counter-surveillance to certain anti-surveillance activities, given its preliminary nature it would be imprudent to attempt to draw larger conclusions about how we ought to understand and use the term “countersurveillance.” Again, I emphasize the critical need for further work in this field. I would also suggest that such future conceptual work on countersurveillance be governed by two important considerations. First, academics must consider the critical necessity of incorporating into our work the meanings and values that actors themselves attach to their own actions. This point is put most succinctly by the sociologist Alfred Schutz (1964, 85): “Each term used in a scientific system referring to human action must be so constructed that a human act performed within the lifeworld by an individual actor in the way indicated by the typical construction would be reasonable and understandable for the actor himself, as well as for his fellow-men.” If academic concepts are to have real meaning in the world, then they must be accountable to the actors whose behaviours we study. We should also be attentive to the “double hermeneutic” – that is, to the dialectical nature of the relationship between social scientific knowledge and human practices and the fact that, as we incorporate lay concepts into our work, so too does our knowledge of human behaviour hold the potential to influence our subject matter (Giddens 1987). Second, as Monahan (2006) points out, any understanding of countersurveillance must take into account the inherently political nature of surveillance and anti-surveillance activities. In an analysis of the political struggles of marginalized groups over the definition and application of the concept of dependency, Nancy Fraser and Linda Gordon (1997, 122) make an important general point that may help us in our task: “Particular words and expressions often become focal in such struggles, functioning as keywords, sites at which the meaning of social experience is negotiated and contested. Keywords typically carry unspoken assumptions and connotations that can powerfully influence the discourses they permeate – in part by constituting a body of doxa, or taken-for-granted commonsense belief that escapes critical scrutiny.” Thus, as these authors suggest, we need to consider and reflect on the multiple meanings and uses of words, particularly in relation to the task of recasting them as concepts to be operationalized as modes of understanding the world. The issue of how the use of ATI legislation by anti-surveillance advocates is labelled may seem to be simply a matter of semantics. This chapter reveals that such labels have significant meaning within the politics of surveillance.

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For those individuals and groups who are attempting to defend existing civil rights, seeking to effect social change through subverting the surveillance schemes that preserve social inequities, how their work is understood has meaning both for them and for those whom they seek to oppose. In contemporary Canadian society, the term “surveillance” has negative social meanings attached to it, hence its frequent use as a pejorative in battles over various programs or policies that utilize systematic observation of populations. When anti-surveillance groups use the term “surveillance” as a label, they do so to highlight asymmetries in the balance of power between the state and the citizen and the state and civil organizations. Thus the objection to the label “counter-surveillance” on the ground that it creates a false sense of parity. In framing their own work using the language of democracy, these groups seek to draw our attention to one of the few means available to citizens to address these unequal power relations: democratic rights and freedoms. In doing so, they remind us that surveillance may offer an illusory promise of security but that this promise comes at the cost of some of those democratic freedoms.

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Foreword 1 This process is typically referred to as the construction of “public” problems or “social” problems. I prefer the term “political” problems as it foregrounds the inevitable political factors and repercussions inherent in marshalling assorted forms of capital and advocating for social change on a public stage. Introduction 1 “Leading Surveillance Societies in EU and the World 2007,” Privacy International Website, http://www.privacyinternational.org. Chapter 2: Kid-Visible 1 This includes the overabundance of fast-food outlets and the call for federal government (financial) support for the development and maintenance of parks, recreation facilities, swimming pools, community centres, walking paths, and the like. 2 One exception is Fotel and Thomsen’s (2004) work on the monitoring of children’s mobility in Denmark. 3 Excluded from this profile are the specific concerns and obesity-combatting strategies targeted at First Nations and Inuit, as these children (and their parents) are recognized as having needs unique from those of other Canadian children. Approximately 55 percent of First Nations children living on reserve and 41 percent of Aboriginal children living off reserve are overweight or obese (Standing Committee on Health 2007). 4 The categorization of overweight/obese is based on the BMI. People with a BMI over twentyfive are tagged “overweight,” and those with a BMI over thirty are labelled “obese.” Several researchers claim that this classification is inappropriate because weight does not necessarily predict health, and therefore the BMI should not be at the centre of public health debates (see Campos 2004; Campos et al. 2006; Gaesser 1996; and Oliver 2005). In fact, a study conducted by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that people in the “overweight” category actually had the lowest rate of mortality (Flegal et al. 2005). It should be noted, however, that this research on weight/mortality is not being conducted on children. 5 Authoritarian is defined as a style of feeding whereby eating demands placed on children are high and responsiveness to children’s needs is low. 6 Note that this is a more limited framing of the “built environment” than that found in the Healthy Weights for Healthy Kids report (Standing Committee on Health 2007). 7 Such a ban has been in place in Quebec since 1978 – and the CSPI points to Quebec’s lower childhood obesity rates as a reflection of this ban. However, it should be noted that the lowest rate of childhood obesity in Canada is found in Alberta, which does not have a ban on television advertising to children. The effectiveness of this ban on childhood overweight/obesity remains contested.

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8 This is in contrast to the self-surveillance demanded of adults in order to monitor their bodies. As Vaz and Bruno (2003, 284) argue, the rhetoric of risk often frames the individual as a victim of his or her behaviour. Obese children, however, are victims of others’ behaviour (i.e., victims of a toxic environment). Chapter 3: Police Surveillance of Male-with-Male Public Sex 1 The term “tearoom” risks homogenizing the sorts of places in which male-with-male impersonal sexual activity takes place. I use the term in this chapter because, empirically, the places I discuss are public washrooms, as in Humphreys’ (1975) study. Humphreys does not know where the term originated but claims it could stem from the use of the signifier “tea” in British slang to connote “an encounter” (2). Edelman (1993, 561) also uses the term “tearoom.” He argues that public washrooms are an interesting liminal zone that “emblematizes the intrinsic uncertainty of its positioning between the public and the private through its spatial juxtaposition of public urinals and private stalls.” A genealogy of this term remains to be conducted. 2 Jacques was a shoeshine boy on Yonge Street. Reports say he was led into an apartment above a massage parlour, strangled, and drowned in a sink. 3 The media attention that the Orillia and other cases attracted was tremendous, and the issue of publishing the names of men charged became one of major contestation. Although the mass round-up approach makes for a story papers have to cover in detail, media outlets were split as to how to report the offence. The Orillia Packet printed the names of those charged in the Orillia Opera House raid one week after it occurred. The Guelph Daily Mercury printed the names of those found guilty of offences in the Silvercreek Park washroom, as with those caught in Kitchener’s Victoria Park washroom in 1984. The same day that names were published in the Kitchener case the story of a three-year-old girl who had been raped and put in hospital made only one paragraph in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record compared with the province-wide coverage the raid received. The newspaper in Peel withheld names of those charged despite the Supreme Court of Ontario judge’s ruling that the public’s right to know trumped any stigma experienced by those exposed. 4 Ontario Brief is used in several references because the freelance authors of the articles could no longer be identified on the archival materials used. The author information has not been made available electronically in academic search engines. 5 In June 2003, residents of an affluent Calgary suburb called for video surveillance to regulate cruising in a neighbourhood park. As reported in one article, “the beauty of North Glenmore Park is magnified by spectacular views of the foothills in the distance and the Weaselhead Natural Environment Park below. But among the lush trees and bushes lurks a dark shadow which continues to anger and frustrate regular users of the park and residents of surrounding neighborhoods” (Toneguzzi 2003). The “dark shadow” referred to men looking for what the article called “homosexual encounters.” Debris left behind by men involved was identified as the basis for intervention. “The problems seem to be getting worse,” said a member of the Friends of North Glenmore Park (FNGP), which was formed to “take back the park.” “We want our park back and we don’t want our children exposed to what’s happening in there now,” said another member of the FNGP. A spokesperson for Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere argued that cruising in the park had tripled since Calgary police raided a bathhouse in December 2002. 6 Police identified thirty-five of sixty men caught on tape after a three-month police investigation into men masturbating and performing oral sex in a washroom at the Village Mall. Cameras were hidden in the common area of the washroom. Handing down sentences to four men, provincial court judge William Baker spoke of the purported “devastation and havoc” wreaked on innocent people such as family members by the publicity of the scandal (Whiffen 1993b). The surveillance project started after reports that children were being propositioned (Westcott 1993). “The general public has a right to go in these washrooms without being confronted by these types of activities,” said Judge Baker in another sentencing (Whiffen 1993a). The activities were referred to as an “adult male sex ring” (Whiffen 1993c), making it sound as if participants were involved in the purchase of sexual services.

238 Notes to pages 59-82













Chapter 4: A Kind of Prohibition 1 Ferguson Government’s Papers, F8 MU 1029, Archives of Ontario. 2 At first, the LCBO simply cancelled the liquor permits of those whom it deemed unworthy to drink; however, with the need to pre-eliminate those receiving “relief” from their municipalities starting in 1929 and the opening of establishments licensed to sell liquor in 1934, the LCBO adopted the interdiction model, developing a legally distinct, though procedurally identical, classification of “prohibited” that not only mimicked interdiction regulations in every way but was also fully integrated with the interdiction category, making its distinction simply a legal formality acknowledged only at the LCBO head office. 3 See also Ferguson (1926, 2); and the Liquor Control Act, S.O. 1927, c. 70, s. 25.2. 4 See Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, “Interdiction Records of the Liquor Licence Board of Ontario.” 5 The series is named after the Liquor Licensing Board because interdiction records were transferred to the LLBO in 1976 following an alteration to the interdiction procedures within the Liquor Control Act, R.S.O. 1976. 6 Only a random sample was kept in the files (Lang and McNeely 1963, 8). 7 LCBO Circular 1717, 1928; Liquor Control Act, S.O. 1927, c. 70, s. 95(1). 8 See Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 164; Archives of Ontario 192990, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 178. 9 Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 64. 10 Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 283. 11 A separate regression was run to determine the significance of this relationship (p = .004**). 12 However, the board was quickly forced to lengthen store hours due to social unrest caused by “working men who came hot from their benches ‘to get some good beer’” and were upset at being “turned away.” “They Line Up Quickly to Get Their Liquor Once Stores Are Open,” Globe, 2 June 1927, 1. 13 A separate regression was run to determine that this difference was significant (p = .002**). 14 Liquor Control Act, S.O. 1927, c. 70, s. 25.2. 15 Ibid. 16 Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 352. 17 Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 166. 18 Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 271. 19 Liquor Control Act, S.O. 1927, c. 70, s. 95(1), s. 43(1). 20 Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 147. 21 “Welfare Minister to Visit Region,” Kenora Minor News, 7 July 1974, 1. 22 Archives of Ontario 1929-90, RG 36-13, Interdiction File 119. 23 Under Canadian law, the term “Indian” refers to a specific group of legally defined individuals to whom certain rights and obligations are attributed to (see British/Canadian Treaties; Indian Act). In addition to this applied legal classification individuals could have their status as “Indians” removed either voluntarily or involuntarily by means of the legal act of enfranchisement. As such, not all individuals of Aboriginal origin or members of the First Nations held or hold this status under the law. Within more generalized discourses the term has come to signify a racial distinction and is seen by some as an offensive term. As Valverde (2003, 193) points out, this dual social/legal construction often puts systems of classifying and knowing “Indians” into conflict, and has led to much confusion concerning this social group. The use of the term “Indian” within this text is due to the importance of this legal classificatory history within this work, and acts to distinguish those who trace their origins to the First Nations of Canada and those defined as “Indians” under Canadian and British law. 24 Indian Act, 1876 S.C. c.18, s. 79-85; Liquor Control Act, S.O. c. 70, s. 44. 25 This is a racist construction that was held by many throughout Canadian history and eventually incorporated into culture and law. See Valverde (2003, 193-222); and Heron (2003, 134-35). 26 Archives of Ontario 1927-76, RG 41-3, LCBO Circular 1292, 1931.

Notes to pages 82-119 239

27 Archives of Ontario, RG 49-132, file D-53 1953, 560. 28 Archives of Ontario, RG 49-132, file D-53 1953, 560. Chapter 5: Natural Surveillance, Crime Prevention 1 See “The Safest City Report” on the official site of the Mississauga Crime Prevention Association at http://www.mcpa.on.ca/safest.html. 2 See “Officers Won’t Be Charged in British Subway Shooting Death,” 17 July 2006 at cbc.ca (http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2006/07/17/london-subway-shooting.html). Chapter 6: Administering the Dead 1 Following the 2004 tsunami, for example, there was a single public inquest held in London, where the names of all British dead were read out and the causes of death specified. In fact, as this chapter was being written, an inquest into the bombing of Air India Flight 182 (June 1985), which took the lives of 329 innocent victims, was taking place in Canada. 2 The only other person to write about the concerns of survivors and the bereaved is Ann Shearer (1991), who found that, in contrast to popular belief, many survivors and relatives of victims welcome the opportunity to talk to journalists. Chapter 7: Identity Theft and the Construction of Creditable Subjects 1 In 2004, there were 11,938 complaints worth $19 million in losses; in 2005, there were 12,409 complaints worth $8.6 million in losses; and in 2006, 7,778 complaints were laid. 2 Thirty-two percent of complaints were associated with credit cards, with false applications for cell phones at 10-12 percent of total complaints. See PhoneBusters, http://www. phonebusters.com/english/statistics/E02.html. 3 The Canadian Bankers Association report for 2002 indicates that Canadian banks spent more than $100 million annually to prevent and detect fraud and banking crimes, including identity theft. 4 In 2002, the number of complaints increased to 161,836, and in 2003 the number increased again to 214,905. By 2004, the number of complaints was 246,500 (FTC 2004). The US Department of Justice released a study in April 2006 indicating that 3.6 million American households (3 percent of the entire population) were victimized by identity theft during a six-month period in 2004 (Stern 2006). 5 These numbers are echoed in the more self-interested Chubb Insurance survey that suggested in 2005 that one in five Americans has been the victim of identity fraud. 6 Given the widespread nature of the crime, the stressors and time demands add up. The FTC reported that victims spent 300 million hours in 2002 resolving the problems created from identity theft (Solove 2004). 7 In the FTC survey, for example, complaints broke down according to age in the following ways: 3 percent from people under eighteen; 29 percent from people eighteen to twentynine; 25 percent from people thirty to thirty-nine; 21 percent from people forty to fortynine; 13 percent from people fifty to fifty-nine; and 10 percent from people over sixty. 8 While an overwhelming amount of identity theft is conducted for economic gain, there have been some instances of the same data being used to provide a false identity to police to avoid criminal prosecution (see Perl 2003). 9 Community mailboxes are particularly vulnerable given their distance from the private residence. 10 Skimmers will also target employees in businesses such as bars and restaurants; they offer potential accomplices a percentage of profit for their co-operation in double-swiping cards – once through the legitimate machine and the second time through the skimmer. 11 A study by the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard University examined “why phishing works” and found that 90 percent of respondents were simply fooled by a welldone website that looked authentic. Twenty-three percent of individuals did not look at the URL or any of the security indicators. As well, 68 percent of respondents ignored the pop-up warnings from their protective software (Dhamija, Tygar, and Hearst 2006). 12 “Spear phishers” are even more specific; they target employees of an organization by posing as a person of importance within the organization sending an “internal” e-mail.

240 Notes to pages 121-25



13 This followed on the heels of a previous reprimand of CIBC by the commissioner for an incident that began in 2001 and continued for three years; CIBC inadvertently faxed confidential information about hundreds of customers to a scrapyard operator in West Virginia. 14 A laptop stolen from a car in Edmonton in June 2006 provided thieves with financial and other data on about 8,000 clients of the financial services company of the Canadian Medical Association. And in September 2006, the Bank of Montreal warned 900 customers to monitor their bank accounts because a laptop containing client files was stolen from a local branch. 15 Seventy-seven percent of Canadians were very or somewhat concerned about becoming victims of identity theft; 25 percent reported that they have received phishing e-mails from financial institutions requesting verification of password and other personal information; 15 percent reported having had their credit cards used fraudulently; and 14 percent claimed to have been the victims of a phishing scam. At the same time, a late-2004 survey revealed that almost 20 percent of respondents would give their account numbers and personal passwords over the phone if doing business with a familiar company, and 27 percent would do so when the exchange took place over the Internet (Ipsos-Reid 2005). 16 The FTC created the Identity Theft Data Clearinghouse in 1999. There are also other agencies such as the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network and the Internet Crime Complaint Center. In Canada, the RCMP have organized the Reporting Economic Crime Online for law enforcement agencies, private commercial organizations, and regulators. The PhoneBusters National Call Centre is the Canadian anti-fraud call centre, operated by the Ontario Provincial Police and the RCMP. 17 Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act, 18, U.S.C., s. 1028(a)(7). 18 In 2004, the Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act was enacted into law in the United States in response to critics who argued that the ITADA was not effective enough. It established a new federal offence of aggravated identity theft that carries a mandatory additional two consecutive years of imprisonment. Identity Theft Penalty Enhancement Act, 118 Stat. 831, Pub L. 108-275, 2004 (U.S.). 19 One report indicates that fewer than 1 in 700 instances of identity theft result in a conviction in the United States (Solove 2004, 111). 20 Section 342(3) provides that “every person who, fraudulently and without colour of right, possesses, uses, traffics in or permits another person to use credit card data, whether or not authentic, that would enable a person to use a credit card or to obtain the services that are provided by the issuer of a credit card to credit card holders is guilty of (a) an indictable offence and is liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years; or (b) an offence punishable on summary conviction” (R.S., 1985, c. C-46). 21 Much to the chagrin of critics, according to the Supreme Court of Canada, possessing confidential information on its own is not a criminal offence. See R. v. Stewart [1988], 1 S.C.R. 963 (S.C.C.). 22 Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, S.C. 2000, c. 5. 23 In December 2006, parliamentary hearings were held with respect to PIPEDA as part of a mandated five-year review. Critics, including the privacy commissioner of Canada, Jennifer Stoddart, suggested that the Act be amended to provide for mandatory notification of customers in the event of a security breach (Geist 2006; Stewart 2007). Not surprisingly, business and financial institutions are very opposed to such a requirement. Increasingly, however, we are hearing calls for greater state engagement and enhanced corporate security in order to limit the possibilities of identity theft (see Bi-National Working Group 2004; Cavoukian 1997, 2005; Geist 2006; and Stewart 2007). It remains to be seen whether any revisions will be made to PIPEDA as a result of the hearings. 24 The rise of various forms of genetic surveillance troubles, to some extent, Lyon’s thesis of the disappearing body. Irma van der Ploeg (2002) instead suggests, in a more nuanced argument, that what we are witnessing is a shift in body ontologies. 25 This is a claim also made in a work on marketing in control society by Greg Elmer (2004).

Notes to pages 129-57 241













26 The fact that she is then revealed to be once again on some unidentified surveillance system is de rigueur by this point in the film and does not pose a serious threat. 27 For an interesting discussion of credit scoring as an emerging form of governmentality, see Leyshon and Thrift (1999). Chapter 8: From Bodily Integrity to Genetic Surveillance 1 The initial DNA identification process, known as the restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) method, was developed by Alec Jeffreys and a team of researchers at the University of Leicester in 1984. Its first use in criminal investigation was in 1986 to solve a double sexual assault and murder case in the Leicester area. 2 Recent university and college forensic programs that have opened in Canada include the British Columbia Institute of Technology with a bachelor degree in forensic technology training, the University of Windsor forensic science program, and Laurentian University’s new Forensic Science Department. The University of Toronto, Simon Fraser University, and McGill University offer forensic-related courses within other programs (see McCabe 2005). 3 R. v. Borden (1994), 3 S.C.R. 145, 92 C.C.C. (3d) 404 (S.C.C.). 4 Criminal Code, R.S., c. C-34, s. 487.07(1)(e). 5 R. v. Morgentaler (1988), 1 S.C.R. 30, 37 C.C.C. (3d) 449 (S.C.C.). 6 R. v. Dyment (1988), (S.C.C.) 263, 2 S.C.R. 417. 7 Criminal Code, R.S., c. C-34, ss. 254(3) and 256. 8 In two experiments with college students, Koehler reported that he had asked the students to act as mock jurors to evaluate the efficacy of DNA evidence. In the first experiment, 249 students were divided into two groups. One group was told that there was only a 0.1 percent chance that the accused would match the crime scene sample if he were not the perpetrator. The other half was told that there was a 1 in 1,000 chance that another person would have the same genetic fingerprint. Of the students in the first group, 82 percent found that the defendant was definitely the source, and 75 percent concluded that the defendant should be found guilty. Of the students in the second group, only 43 percent viewed the defendant as definitely the source, and 45 percent concluded that the defendant should be found guilty (Strauss 1998). 9 In an interview, Leo Adler, a prominent Canadian defence lawyer, set out the steps necessary to defend against DNA evidence. He pointed out that “the first question you want to ask yourself is have [the scientists] done all the work up to the production of [DNA evidence] properly ... Take a look at the various samples and follow the chain of continuity right into the lab and through the various lab procedures” (Lawyers Weekly 1993). He goes on to detail further steps, including examining lab notes for signs of carelessness, looking at computer matching to see if the operator has overruled the computer’s assessment, examining population database calculations, and, if possible, running independent tests of samples found at the crime scene. The point is to add up all of the margins of error that may be involved in calculating a DNA match. Chapter 9: Communication and the Sorrows of Empire 1 American Civil Liberties Union et al. v. National Security Agency et al. [hereafter ACLU v. NSA], 2006. Memorandum Opinion, Case No. 06-CV-10204. Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, United States District Court Eastern District of Michigan, 17 August. 2 Citizen Lab, University of Toronto at http://psiphon.ca. 3 Hollywood and the military have always maintained close ties. This nexus tightened a year into the GWOT with the Pentagon and Disney/ABC announcing plans to co-develop a thirteen-part “reality–TV” series on the lives of soldiers in the war on terrorism, to be produced by Jerry Bruckheimer (Pirates of the Caribbean, Black Hawk Down, Pearl Harbor, and the CSI series) and Bertram van Munster (Amazing Race and Cops). Bruckheimer and van Munster received daily access to soldiers in Afghanistan, while Disney gave prime-time billing for the series, which ran from February 2002 until being yanked just over a year later in March 2003. See ABC, “Profiles from the Front Line,” http://abc.go.com/primetime/ profiles; Barringer 2002; and Der Derian 2002). Bruckheimer, in particular, has parlayed his status as a top producer of popular television programs and blockbuster films into a starring role in

242 Notes to pages 161-88



4



5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

the US military propaganda machine, overseeing the design of the Pentagon media briefing centre in Doha, Qatar, and advising its media affairs staff. The military is also taking on media “style” by mimicking the production, marketing, and branding values of the entertainment and persuasion industries as communications consultants to the military underscore the point that strategic communications must adopt modern media methods that resonate with commerce and youth culture, in particular. To this end, former Secretary of State Colin Powell appeared on MTV to sell the US war on terrorism to a global audience of music video lovers – a hearty mix of politics, pop, and the kids. Jason Sherman, “Centcom Eyes Blogs to Shape Opinion,” Military.com, http://www.military. com, 3 March 2006. Ibid. Ibid. ACLU v. NSA. See also ibid. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 40. I have kept the name of this source anonymous out of appreciation for the potential negative professional consequences of identification. I have retained a copy of the correspondence, however. See also ACLU v. NSA. Ibid., 40.

13 14 Chapter 10: Bio-Benefits 1 Parallel cuts to welfare were made in Canada during the 1980s. In 1990, the federal government imposed limits on its funding to welfare programs in Canada’s three richest provinces – those, moreover, containing over half the nation’s poor (Little 1998). As in the United States, welfare was increasingly tied to work incentive programs despite substantial evidence that these programs cost more than they save (Howse 1996). Federal cuts to welfare, coupled with the requirement that provinces pick up the tab, paved the way for steep welfare cuts by provincial governments. In Ontario, a conservative majority headed by Premier Mike Harris made workfare and learnfare mandatory for many recipients under the Ontario Works Act of 1997 and resulted in large numbers being struck from the rolls. Hier (2003, 408) documents how the devastating potential of the cuts was actualized when “college student Kimberly Rogers died eight months’ pregnant while under ‘house arrest’ in her apartment.” Hier notes that Rogers is thought to have succumbed to the extreme temperatures in her apartment as a result of a late summer heat wave. Significantly, the Ontario Works Act also called for the use of biometric fingerprinting technologies to avoid fraud; although millions were spent developing the technologies, privacy legislation in Canada prevented their implementation. 2 “Connecticut Lawmakers Approve Strict New Welfare Rules,” New York Times, 4 June 1995, 44, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/. 3 The rhetoric of nothing to hide, nothing to fear, is an oft-repeated refrain of the promoters of biometric technologies that obfuscates the way in which they are reliably used against those living at the margins of the state. 4 In a similar way, Canada’s pre-1987 “spouse in the house” rules, which deprived women of welfare support if they were cohabiting with a partner (Little 1998), qualify as an extreme form of sexual regulation. 5 “Fingerprint Failure: Fix or End Flawed Welfare ID Program” (editorial), Sacramento Bee, 21 January 2003, http://www.sacbee.com. 6 “Connecticut Lawmakers Approve Strict New Welfare Rules,” 44. Chapter 11: Public Vigilance Campaigns and Participatory Surveillance 1 All references to MTA and MPS refer to online sources. Page numbers are not available. 2 Haggerty and Ericson (2000) draw on the work of Deleuze and Guattari to describe the “surveillant assemblage,” a potentiality that arises from the convergence, integration, and/or

Notes to pages 190-217 243



3



4



5



6



7



8



9







linkage of dispersed sites and mechanisms of surveillance. Surveillant assemblages emerge from the multiple technologies that have appeared for the biopolitical purpose of “knowing” the population. Haggerty and Ericson present this idea in order to emphasize the “disconnected and semi-coordinated character of surveillance” (2006, 4), in opposition to the dominant Orwellian and Foucaultian metaphors (Big Brother and the panopticon), which posit a co-ordinating force or purpose behind surveillance. At the same time, they note that powerful institutions are able to harness the products of a variety of components of the assemblage, which allow them to act in a controlling and hegemonic fashion. We use the concept of the surveillant assemblage here to draw attention to the multiplicity of technologies, actors, and sites involved in contemporary surveillance (indeed, public vigilance campaigns inscribe individual members of the public within the assemblage) – but we also utilize the concepts of “Big Brother” and the “panoptic,” which retain their validity and utility, particularly in theorizing the relationship(s) between the surveillant assemblage and practices of power and control. Here we are referring to the cumulative events of July 2005 in London – the 7 July attacks, the failed 21 July attacks, and the state slaying of Jean-Charles de Menezes. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority launched its original campaign in 2002. The second and third generations of the campaign emerged in 2004. The fourth generation emerged in 2005 and the fifth in 2006. OC Transpo began its campaign in August 2005. The second generation of the campaign emerged in August 2006. The Metropolitan Police Service launched its campaign in March 2006, and it released the second generation of the campaign in March 2007. This information was obtained through personal communication with the transit information supervisor for OC Transpo, City of Ottawa Transit Services, in October 2006. CNN, “Airline Checks Claims of ‘Muslim while Flying’ Discrimination,” 21 November 2006, http://www.cnn.com. CBC, “Five Men Held after Speaking Foreign Language on US Airliner,” 6 May 2006, http:// www.cbc.ca.

Chapter 12: Cell Phones and Surveillance 1 This technology allows mobile phone users to send short text messages to other mobile phone users instead of communicating via voice. This technology was adopted in many parts of the world very early as a cost-effective form of communication. Canada and later the United States adopted this technology. 2 The IAA is a research collective dedicated to using technological improvements and innovations to increase individual and collective autonomy. 3 0100101110101101.org, “Vopos Concept,” 7 October 2005, http://www.0100101110101101. org/home/vopos/concept.html. 4 Vopos is short for Volkspolizei and was the German slang and abbreviation for the former East German police force. 5 “Vopos Concept.”

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263

Contributors

Charlene D. Elliott is an associate professor of communication studies in the Faculty of Communication and Culture at the University of Calgary. She has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters pertaining to issues of communication and the body (ranging from obesity and public health, sensorial communication, and taste communication), with a specific focus on childhood obesity. She is co-editor of Communication in Question: Competing Perspectives on Contentious Issues in Communication Studies. Neil Gerlach is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University. He holds degrees in sociology, anthropology, law, and education. His research interests include criminal justice and military applications of biotechnology, and he is the author of The Genetic Imaginary: DNA in the Canadian Justice System and co-author of the forthcoming Becoming Biosubjects: Governing Biotechnology in Canada. Josh Greenberg is an assistant professor of communication studies in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. He is a co-editor of The Surveillance Studies Reader and Communication in Question: Competing Perspectives on Contentious Issues in Communication Studies. He has authored numerous journal articles and book chapters on various topics that engage the broad themes of communication and civil society, promotional culture, social problems, and inequality. Kevin D. Haggerty is an associate professor of sociology and criminology at the University of Alberta. He is the editor of Canadian Journal of Sociology and book review editor of Surveillance and Society. He is a member of the executive team for the Major Collaborative Research Initiative on “The New Transparency.” In addition to his assorted journal articles and book chapters, he has authored, coauthored, or co-edited Policing the Risk Society, Making Crime Count, and The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility.

Contributors 265

Sheryl N. Hamilton is the Canada Research Chair in communication, law, and governance at Carleton University. She is cross-appointed to the School of Journalism and Communication and the Department of Law, and her research and teaching interests sit at the intersection of law, culture, and communication. She has two books forthcoming from the University of Toronto Press, a monograph entitled Impersonations: Troubling the Person in Law and Culture and a co-authored text, Becoming Biosubjects: Governing Biotechnology in Canada. Sean P. Hier is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Victoria. He has published more than two dozen chapters and articles and has a number of recent edited books in print. He is currently completing a book on CCTV surveillance in Canada (with Josh Greenberg) for UBC Press. Laura Huey is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario. She has conducted extensive research in the fields of policing, surveillance, and social exclusion. In addition to being a member of the Security Camera Awareness Network, the author of several articles and other publications on surveillance and related fields, Dr. Huey is the author of Negotiating Demands: The Policing of Skid Rows in Edinburgh, San Francisco, and Vancouver. Simon J. Kiss is a post-doctoral fellow at the John F. Kennedy Institute of North America Studies at the Free University of Berlin. He received his PhD in political studies from Queen’s University, which focussed on political communication and Canadian politics. Mike Larsen is a PhD student in the sociology program at York University. He is a researcher at the York Centre for International and Security Studies and a fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School’s Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime, and Security. His dissertation, entitled “Governing through Suspicion: The Politics of (In)security,” explores the diverse ways in which governments and other actors adopt future-oriented security policies based on the identification and control of individuals or situations deemed “suspicious.” Shoshana Magnet is a SSHRCC postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University. Her research uses feminist theories of intersectionality to consider the implications of using the gendered, raced, sexed, and abled or disabled human body as a source for the collection of biometric information. Her published work has appeared in journals such as New Media and Society, Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme, Journal of Men’s Health and Gender, Atlantis, Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Qualitative Inquiry. She is also a video artist, and her work has been screened at festivals in New York, Toronto, and the Czech Republic. Patrick F. Parnaby completed his PhD at McMaster University and is now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Guelph. His research interests

266 Contributors

include environmental criminology, crime prevention through environmental design, social constructionism, and the sociology of risk and governance. Currently, he is exploring the relationship between risk discourse and social control among financial planners. Justin Piché is a PhD student in sociology at Carleton University. His doctoral dissertation examines the political economy and governmentality of Canadian federal penitentiary placement. The project also explores the impact of prison location on prisoners and their loved ones. His MA thesis, entitled “Restorative Prisons?,” was awarded the Commission on Graduate Studies in Humanities Prize from the University of Ottawa in 2006. Currently, he is the organizational planning coordinator of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons. C. Victoria Reed is a master’s student in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Guelph. Her research interests include environmental criminology, GIS, and quantitative methods. Joseph Scanlon is a professor emeritus and the director of the Emergency Communications Research Unit (ECRU) at Carleton University. He has been doing disaster research since 1970 and has published several hundred book chapters and articles in this field. His most recent research was a study of how overseas police and forensic scientists got involved in the handling of the dead after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Scott Thompson is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Victoria, currently engaged in research concerning classification and its consequences during the pre-electronic period. He has published three papers on surveillance and liquor control in Ontario and is currently writing a book with Gary Genosko tentatively titled Punch Drunk: Alcohol, Identity, and Surveillance in Ontario, 1927-1975. Kevin Walby is a PhD candidate in sociology at Carleton University. He has published in the Canadian Journal of Law and Society, Social and Legal Studies, Qualitative Inquiry, and Critical Sociology. His areas of interest include surveillance, emotions, risk, and institutional ethnography. Dwayne Winseck is an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at Carleton University. His research focuses on the political economy of communication, media history, communication policy, theories of democracy, and global communication. He has co-edited two books on these topics, Democratizing Communication? Comparative Perspectives on Information and Power and Media in Global Context. His most recent book is Reconvergence: A Political Economy of Telecommunications in Canada. He has also published several articles in the Canadian Journal of Communication, Gazette, Media, Culture and Society, Information Society, and the European Journal of Communication.

Index

9/11. See terrorism: 11 September 2001 1984. See Big Brother; Orwell, George 101st Airborne Regiment, 104 0100101110101101.org. See Internet: 0100101110101101.org. ABC (television), 105 aboriginal alcohol use, 82-83 access to information (ATI) legislation, 219-20, 233 access to information mechanisms, 219-35 passim ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union), 213 Active Healthy Kids Canada, 42 activism: anti-globalization movement (Canada), 210; anti-war activists, surveillance of, 204; claims making and media, x; communications technology, via, 203; e-activism, 207 ad libitum, 43 Agamben, Giorgio, 195 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 172 Al-Hurra TV, 156 Al-Qaeda. See terrorism: Al-Qaeda Alcoholics Anonymous, 80 Alexander, Priscilla, 47 Althusser, Louis, 20 Anderson, Elijah, 93, 94 anti-globalization movement (Canada), 210 anti-surveillance, 220-35 passim Anti-Terrorism Act (Canada), 227 Armstrong, D., 36-37 art as protest, 216-17 Atwood, M., 4 Australia, 102, 152

Authorization of the Use of Military Force (AUMF), 151, 162 Automated Fingerprint Information System (AFIS), 111, 113 Baker, Stewart, 3 Becker, Howard, 48-49 Beckford, Calvin, 98 Bennett, Colin J., 17-18, 221 Bentham, Jeremy, 22-23 Big Brother, 4, 5, 19, 124, 135, 153, 187, 193, 202, 221. See also Little Brother; Orwell, George bio-benefits, 178 biometric: accountability, 172; and body visualization, 182; camera, 169; Digital Biometrics, 171; finger imaging, 170, 171, 183; and “function creep”, 177; hospital-based paternity ID program, 174; identification and welfare programs, 171-75; Identix, 171; measurements, 34; and “new-paternalism”, 173; passport, 3; private biometrics industry, 11; retinal scanning, 170; Statewide Fingerprinting Imaging System (California), 175; surveillance, 139, 141; technologies, 169-83 passim. See also body mass index BlackBerry, 218 Blade Runner, 153 Blades, Joan, 203 Blair, Tony, 3 Blake, Robert, 143 body: disappearing, 35-36 body mass index (BMI), 38-39, 42, 44 Body Politik, 53 body surveillance. See surveillance: body Borovoy, Alan, 56 Boyd, Ken, 52

268

Index

Boyd, Wes, 203 Bush, George W., 158, 171, 173 Bush administration, 151, 157-73 passim, 204 Brantingham, Patricia L., 89 Brantingham, Paul J., 89 Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), 153 Brazil, 153 Brighenti, Andrea, 24-26 Britain. See United Kingdom Broadcast Standards Council (United Kingdom), 106 C3I (command, control, communications and intelligence), 152 Cable Landing Licensing Act (US), 164 Canada, iv, 9, 33-44 passim, 61, 82, 91, 108, 118-36 passim, 136-50 passim, 204, 220-26 Canada Temperance Act, 60 Canadian Bar Association, 137 Canadian Centre for Abuse Awareness, 146 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 55, 57, 136 Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA), 53-54, 56 Canadian Police Association (CPA), 137 capitalism, 73, 131, 166, 207 Castel, Robert, 138 Cavoukian, Ann, 120, 124, 240n23 CBS (television), 157 CCTV. See closed-circuit television cameras cell phones: camera surveillance, 212-14; fraud, 215; and identity theft, 117, 121, 215, 239n2; information operations, use in, 155, 160; Patriot Act, implications of, 212-13, 213(f); police use of camera phones, 212; technological advancements, 218, 243n1; and terrorism, 192, 207 cellular telephony. See cell phones Centre for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), 43 China, 4, 111, 154 cholera: surveillance of epidemic, xiv-xv Christian Science Monitor, 213, 216 civil libertarian movement, 220-35 passim CIA, 165 Cisco systems, 154 Clinton, Bill, 171-72, 203 Clinton administration, 163, 177 closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV): abuses of, 17, 53; as asymmetrical monitoring, 87; biometric camera, 169; camera phones, police use of, 212-14; as counter-surveillance, 222; footage as

courtroom evidence, 47, 56; industry, 3; media depictions of, 128; and public vigilance campaigns, 201; and regulatory projects, 47; resistance to, 222; surveillance camera players, xiii; surveillance of male-with-male public sex, 7, 47-58 passim, 237n5; and visibility of bodily behaviour, 36; as visual text, 50-51 Coalition for Gay Rights in Ontario, 51 Cold War, 151-53, 156, 189, 204 Committee of Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), 165 Community Homophile Association of Toronto, 52 computers: and childhood obesity, 42; computerized transactions, 130; as control mechanism elements, 116; databases, 14, 111, 126; hacking, 119-20, 127-28; paradigm, 216; science, 95; as terrorists’ tools, 192 conservative criminology, 46 Convicted Offender Index (Canada), 141, 146 Corrigan, Phillip, 50 counter-surveillance, 12-13, 215, 219-24, 230-35 Crawford, R., 35 credit card fraud, 116-23, 126-30 creditable subject, 9, 116-19, 121, 123, 125, 127-31 crime: Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED), xii, 91-92; detection through surveillance, 10, 136, 141-42; deterrence through surveillance, xii, 90-91, 180, 195; prevention through surveillance, 87, 90-100, 195; technologies of criminalization, 177; and wearable computerized surveillance technology, 211 Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (book), 89 Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED). See crime: Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) Crime Scene Index, 141 Crime Stoppers, 189 criminalization of welfare recipients, 171-75 criminology: conservative, 46; environmental, 99; positivist, 48; theoretical, 189 CSI, 10, 111, 143-44, 231n3 cyberspace, 4, 151, 161, 163, 168. See also Internet cyberwarfare, 155, 163

Index

Daily Mercury (Guelph), 55, 237n3 data doubles, 9, 19, 24, 117, 124-25 database theft, 119 dataveillance, 9, 117, 126 Davis, Mike, 94 Dean, Howard, 203 death. See mass-death situations; media: mass-death situations, coverage of Defense Advanced Research Project Administration, 153 Defensible Space, 88 Deleuze, Gilles, 19, 116, 125, 130-31, 242n2 Department of Defense (US), 155, 157, Department of Homeland Security (US), 84 Department of Justice (US), 123, 239 Desroches, Frederick, 49 deviance, 46-49, 72, 197 dialectics of discovery, 58 disability, construction of, 180-81 Disaster Research Center (University of Delaware), 103 Disaster Victim Identification (DVI) (Interpol), 109, 111 diving, 119 DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), 10, 104, 109-15, 135-50, 174, 241n1; banking, 150; dragnets, 147-49; international database sharing, 147 DNA Data Bank (United Kingdom), 146 DNA database (Europe), 147 DNA Identification Act, 137 domestic wiretapping program (US), 204 doxa, 234 Doyle, Aaron, 222, 233 Durst, Robert, 143 e-activism, 207 economies of text, 47, 57-58 Edelman, Murray, 217 Edwards, C., 170, 173 El Al cargo plane crash, 107 Elliott, Charlene, D., 6 England, xv, 12, 63, 205, 112, 135, 142, 147, 188, 190, 205 environment, toxic. See toxic environment Epstein, H., xv Ericson, Richard, 5, 15, 19-25, 27, 124-25 Estonia (Ferry), 105 ETA, 208 eugenics, xv, 174 European Union, 147, 154 everyday surveillance, 44 exception, politics of, 200 Eyre, Anne, 105

face recognition technology, 141 Facebook, 16 fair visibility thresholds, 25 Fanon, Franz, 26 Fantino, Julian (Police Chief, Toronto), 146 FBI, 142, 165-66, 177, 213 FCC (Federal Communications Commission), 155, 163 Ferguson, Howard, 61 flawed economics, 11, 170, 176, 178 folk devil, 59. See also deviance forensic dentistry, 111 forensic science: genetic, 10, 103-4, 109-15, 135-50 passim, 174, 241n2; and law, 145 forensics. See forensic science Forrestal, James, 152 Foucault, Michel: bio-power, 8; discursive properties of databases, 125; the governed body, 35; hegemonic systems of representation, 180; panopticon, 18, 22-23, 28, 196-97; power-knowledge, xiv; power relations, 216 fragmented centralization, 201 France, 105 Fraser, Nancy, 234 full information spectrum dominance, 160 function creep, 177 Gander, Newfoundland, 104-5 Gandy, Oscar, 124 Gardner, Carol Brooks, 93 Garfinkel, Simson, 130 Garland, David, 99 Gerlach, Neil, 10 Germany, xv, 216 Glasnost, 216 Gleason, M., 38 Global Crossing, 165-66 global war on terrorism (GWOT), 10, 151-68 passim, 247n3 Globe, The, 81 Goffman, Erving, 98 Goodwin, Charles, 51 Google, 154 Gordon, Linda, 234 governance, 46-58 passim, 188-89, 196, 199-205 Great Britain. See United Kingdom Greenberg, Josh, 14 Guelph Gay Equality, 55 Haggerty, Kevin, 5, 15, 18-25, 27 Hamilton, Sheryl N., 9, 27, 35 Handmaid’s Tale, The, 4 Harris Corporation, 158 Heald-Moore, Tamara, 93

269

270

Index

Herald of Free Enterprise, 105 Hermer, J., 189 Hier, Sean P., 14, 20, 27, 50 Hirschhorn, Robert, 143 Holmgren, Janne, 144-45 homophobia, 51-52 homosexuality, category of, 47, 49, 51-58 Honore, C., 135 hooks, bell, 95 hospital-based paternity ID program, 174 House of Commons Standing Committee on Health (Canada), 33-34, 39, 41-42, 44 Huey, Laura, 12-13, 219 Hughes, Karen, 167 Humphreys, Laud, 48-49 Huxley, Aldous, 153 IBM, xv, 121 identity theft, 9, 27, 35, 116-31 passim Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act (ITADA) (US), 122 immigration, 107, 181 IMS Canada, 17 Indian Act (Canada), 82-83 Indian drinking, 82 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 101-14 passim Indymedia, 205 Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), 17 Information Operations (IO), 151-68 passim Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario, 124 Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), 208 Institute of Medicine on Food Marketing and the Diets of Children and Youth (US), 43 Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act (US), 151 interdiction, 59-84 passim Internet: 0100101110101101.org, 216; blogosphere, 160-61; censorship, 154; cyberspace, 4, 151, 161, 163, 168; Federal Communications Commission (FCC), 155; fraud, 119; identity theft, 121, 12627; military use of, 11, 151, 163; monitoring by governments, 154; National Security Agency (NSA) Terrorist Surveillance Program, 155, 162; National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, 163; as open system, 153; and resisting surveillance, 222; social movements’ use of, 203, 222; spam, 119; surveillant assemblage, 22; telecommunications over, 154 Interpol Disaster Victim Identification (DVI). See Disaster Victim Identification (DVI)

invisibility machine, 25 iPhone, 218 Iraq, 155-58, 161, 167, 199 Iraqi Media Network (IMN), 157 Ireland, 105 iris scanning/identification, 141, 170 Jackson, S., 6 Jacobson, Michael F., 43 Jacques, Emanuel, 51 Japan, 104-5 Jeffery, C. Ray, 89 Kafka, Franz, 4 Kaiser Family Foundation, 43 Kelly, Kevin, 205 Kemple, Thomas, 219 Kent Constabulary (United Kingdom), 107 Kiss, Simon J., 12 Koehler, Jonathan, 144 Lang, V.H.K., 74 LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department), 94-95 Larsen, Mike, 12 Law and Order, 10, 111 LCBO (Liquor Control Board of Ontario), 59-84 passim Lebanese Broadcasting Company International (LBCI), 156, 158 Li Ka-shing, 165-66 Liquor Control Act, 61, 63, 78 Little Brother, 187, 193, 199, 202. See also Big Brother Loader, I., 200 long war, 159, 166-68 Lyon, David, xvi, 34-36, 44 Magnet, Shoshana, 11 Manchester Evening News, 214 Mann, Steve, 210-11 María Aznar, Jose (Spanish Prime Minister), 207 Marx, Gary, 221 mass-death situations, 8-9, 102-15 passim McNeely, J., 74 McRobbie, Angela, 56 media: artists, 216; children’s intake of, 6, 42; covert media operations, 160; democratization of, 56; and disaster management, 101-9, 114-18; economies of text, 47; electronic media engagement, 11, 161; global commercial media ecology, 156; and identity theft, 122; law enforcement, relation to, 7, 142; massdeath situations, coverage of, 105-6;

Index

military-industrial-media-entertainment (MIME) complex, 152, 156; Muslim, 156; in 1984, 4; new media technology, 203, 207; new technologies, 11-12; and social-networking, 16; surveillance, coverage of, 4, 38-45, 51-58 passim; templates, x; and terrorism, 151, 199; underground media economy, 154; welfare, distorted depiction of, 171. See also C3I Medicaid, 173 Menezes, Jean Charles de, 116 Metropolitan Police Service (MPS), 190202 passim Metropolitan Transport Authority (MTA), 190-94 Miami Model (of crowd control), 208-9 Microsoft, 154 Mid-East Media Network, 156 Milgaard, David, 142 military-industrial-media-entertainment (MIME) complex. See media: militaryindustrial-media-entertainment (MIME) complex Ministry for Personnel, Public Grievances, and Pensions (MPPG) (India), 3 Mississauga Planning and Development Committee (MPDC), 92 mobile phones. See cell phones modernity: late-, ix, 188; modern statehood, 5; post-, 27-28; surveillance, 22; Western, 137 Monahan, Torin, 197 Morin, Guy Paul, 142 Most Heinous Government Award, 4 MoveOn.org, 203 MySpace, 16 Nation, The, 43 National DNA Data Bank (Canada), 137, 141, 146 National Security Act, (US), 151 National Security Agency (NSA) Terrorist Surveillance Program, 155 National Socialism, xv National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, 163 natural surveillance, 8, 87-100, 195 natural vision, 195 Nazis, xv Neighbourhood Watch, 189 neo-biological civilization, 205 neo-eugenics, 174 neoliberalism: and evaluative monitoring, xiii; governance, 196, 199-200; government strategies, 189; markets, 170; and risk management, 117

.Net service, 154 Net, The, 126, 128 Net 2.0, The, 128-29 New Zealand, 152 New York Times, 159-60, 167, 179 Newman, Oscar, 88-89 Norway, 105 obesity, 12, 33-44 passim OC Transpo, 191-93, 198, 202 Office of Global Communications, 159 Office of Strategic Influence (OSI), 159-60 official graffiti, 195 Ontario Coalition against Poverty (OCAP). See protest: Ontario Coalition against Poverty (OCAP) Ontario Human Rights Commission, 51 Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner, 124 Ontario Office for Victims of Crime, 146 Ontario Police Commission (OPC), 47, 51, 56 Ontario Temperance Act, 60 Open Society Institute and Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, 154 Operation Hammer, 94-95 OPP (Ontario Provincial Police), 64, 77 opportunity theory, 8, 88 Orwell, George, 4, 19, 124, 153, 187, 202, 205, 221. See also Big Brother Ostlandets Blad (Norwegian Newspaper), 105 Packet, The, 52 Pan Am Flight 103, 105-6 panopticon, xiii, 15, 21-23, 153, 197, 221, 242n2. See also superpanopticon Parnaby, Patrick F., 7-8, 94 Pentagon, 102, 153, 156-60, 165-66 Perle, Richard, 165-67 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), 172 phishing, 119, 239n11, 240n15 PhoneBusters, 118 Piché, Justin, 12 picturing, 50, 57 Pine, Vanderlyn, 110 Pioneer, The, 62 Poindexter, John, 167 Poster, Mark, 20, 125-26, 129, 138 postmodernism, 27-28 postmortem, 110, 112-14 poststructuralism, 15, 27-28 privacy: and biometrics, 173; of the dead and their families, 102-6, 110-15; genetic, 149; homeless people’s valuation of,

271

272

Index

98-99; law, 54-56; rights, xiii, 3, 51, 226; violations of, due to surveillance, 44-45, 136-37, 148, 221; and visibility, 7; workers, 13. Privacy Act (Canada), 102 Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 120, 140-41 Privacy International, 3 privacy-enhancing technology (PET), 154 prohibition. See interdiction protest: through art, 217; about autopsy practices, 114; Ontario Coalition against Poverty (OCAP), 210-11; Republican National Convention (RNC) (2004), 214, 216; WTO (World Trade Organization), 204-5 public-area video surveillance. See closedcircuit television cameras public vigilance campaigns, 12, 187-202 passim public vigilance messaging, 191-93 Putin, Vladimir, 3 Quarantelli, E.L., 103 Quebec city protests (2001), 210 R. v. Borden, 136, 140 R. v. Dyment, 139 R. v. Morgentaler, 139 race: and asymmetrical surveillance, 26; and biometrics, 169; and interdiction, 66, 82, 84; and natural surveillance, 8, 93; technological racial zoning, 95; and welfare, 26, 171, 173 Radio Farda, 156 Radio Sawa, 156 rape investigation, use of surveillance for, 147-48 RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police), 83, 104, 110, 137, 144, 148-49, 240n16 Reagan, Ronald, 171 Recessed Pest: Reducing Crime Opportunity in Recessed Doorways, 97-98 Reed, C. Victoria, 7-8 Republican National Convention (RNC) (2004). See protest: Republican National Convention (RNC) (2004) retinal scanning, 36, 170, 173 rhizome, 19-22 Right to Privacy Committee, 51 risk: and fragmented centralization, 201; and intensification of surveillance, ix, xvii; and surveillance medicine, 36; terroristic, 192; “virtual” versus “real,” 127 Rizzo, Joseph, 173, 176

Rogers-Dillon, R., 172-75, 177, 181, 183 Roh Moo-Hyun (President of the Republic of Korea), 207 Rove, Karl, 157, 167 Rumsfeld, Donald, 160, 167 Sacks, H., 94 Scanlon, Joseph, 8-9 Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), 156 scoffing, 119 Scooby-Doo, 43 Scotland, 105 Scott, James C., xi September 11th, 2001. See terrorism: 11 September 2001 Sesame Street, 43 shocking statistics, x Silicon Valley, 203 Simpson, O.J., 144 situational crime prevention, 88, 97-99 situationist philosophy, 216 skimming, 119 Smith, George W., 51 Smith, Winston, 187. See also Big Brother Snow, John, xiv-xv social sorting, xvii, 8, 11, 19, 35, 84, 102, 170, 173, 189 social-networking, 16 soft power, 10, 155-56 sousveillance, 222-23 South Korea, 12, 207, 209 Spain, 194, 207-8 St. John, Craig, 93 Standing Committee on Health. See House of Commons Standing Committee on Health Statewide Fingerprinting Imaging System (California), 175 statistics: shocking, x subject: creditable, 9, 116-19, 121, 123, 125, 127-31 suicide bombing, 96, 109, 194-95 superpanopticon, 125, 138, 150. See also panopticon Supreme Court of Ontario, 56 surveillance: body, 38-45; covert, 219; definition of, 220-21, 226; everyday, 44; genetic (see forensic science, genetic); intensification of, ix, 11, 99, 171, 173; medicine, 36-38, 44-45; natural, 8, 87100, 195; overt, 219; peer-to-peer, 16; resistance to, 55, 117, 213-17, 222-23; and urbanization, xiv; video (see closedcircuit television cameras). See also antisurveillance; counter-surveillance

Index

surveillance data, uses of: intimidation, 54; moral regulation, 54; victimization, 16 surveillant assemblage, xvii, 20-28, 126, 188, 196-201 synoptic, 196. See also panopticon Sutton, Adam, 100 Sweden, 105, 109 Swissair Flight 111, 101-13 passim T-Mobile (telecommunications network), 214 technique of care, 33-34, 40-41, 44-45 technologies of criminalization, viii, 177 television: advertising, 43, 236n3; and childhood obesity, 42; coverage of massdeath situations, 105-6; and forensic genetics, 10, 111, 135, 143-44; as medium of surveillance, 15-16 television cameras, closed-circuit. See closed-circuit television cameras television programs. See CSI; Law and Order; Scooby-Doo; Sesame Street Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF), 172 terrorism: Al-Qaeda, 162, 207-8; antiterrorism, 14-15, 227; and contemporary public vigilance campaigns, 190-94; criminal offences, redesignation of, 145; and DNA databases, 147; 11 September 2001, 12, 102, 108, 145, 151; homegrown, 195; London subway and bus bombings (2007), 15; Madrid subway bombings (2004), 194, 207-8; prevention of, in relation to surveillant assemblage, 201; Terrorist Surveillance Project, 159, 161-62; terrorists, construction of, 46, 95-96; World Trade Center, 102. See also global war on terrorism; terrorists Terrorist Surveillance Project, 159, 161 terrorists: CIA detention of, 226; construction of, 46, 95-96. See also terrorism Tewkesbury, Richard, 48 text: economies of, 47, 57-58 Thai Tsunami Victim Identification Information Management Centre (TTVI-IMC), 111 Thomas, Clarence, 171 Thompson, Scott, 7 Thornton, Sarah, 56 Total Information Awareness Project, 159 toxic environment, 34, 42

Trippi, Joe, 203 TXTmob (cell phone collective action software), 208-16 UN International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAS), 3 United Kingdom, 3, 4, 8, 41, 91, 96, 106, 142, 146-47, 152, 156, 158, 164 United States: Most Heinous Government award nomination, 4 United States Information Agency, 156 urbanization, xiv US Commission on International Relations, 154 USA: governmental electronic surveillance program, 152; imperialism, 166, 208; military, 11, 104, 151, 155, 158, 164, 242; political economy, 11 Vermilion, Alberta, 147-48 video games: and childhood obesity, 42 video surveillance. See closed-circuit television cameras vigilance campaigns, 12, 187-202 passim vigilant citizen: fashioning the, 190, 194, 196-99 virtual/informational profiles, 125 voice recognition technology, 141 Walby, Kevin, 6-7, 50 Walker, N., 200 wearable computerized surveillance technology, 211 White, Rob, 100 Winseck, Dwayne, 10-11 Winterdyck, John, 144-45 Without a Trace, 10 Women’s Christian Temperance Union, 77 World Trade Center. See terrorism: World Trade Center. World War I, 152, 164, 189 World War II, 152 World Wide Web. See Internet Worst Public Official award, 3 WTO (World Trade Organization). See protest: WTO Yahoo, 154 Young, David, 146 Zeebrugge ferry disaster, 105, 107

273