The End of Privacy - How Total Surveillance Is Becoming a Reality

Reg Whitaker

The New Press, 1999, 195 pgs.

          While not necessarily evolutionary, the age we’re living in is certainly revolutionary. The most fundamental transformation taking place is in the organization and transfer of information. Information itself has become a commodity today’s businesses seek out and exploit with an insatiability previously reserved for natural resources. More effective targeting of consumers is the impetus for the changes; the market yearns to fulfill their every whim and fancy, to discover and cultivate every niche market for greater profitability.

          Private data banks are one of the most important results of this new thirst. These immense pools of electronic information on individuals, ranging from credit histories to detailed buying profiles, now have more information on U.S. residents than the most Orwellian state intelligence agencies ever kept on their subjects. The new reality, writes Canadian academic Reg Whitaker in The End of Privacy, is that everything from your favorite food to your most unsavory medical condition is available to anyone willing to pay the low, low price.

          Improvements in the collection of data are taking place at a frenetic rate. Rare are the physical spaces that aren’t being watched: earth-orbiting satellites, whose observational abilities can be rented by any individual, see objects even a few meters in diameter with crisp, clear vision; video cameras perch on roofs and walls throughout urban, suburban, and middle America; spy-cams have penetrated homes, being utilized by spooked parents to observe baby-sitters, or, even uglier, pry into their adolescent children’s drug and sex lives. While no unified body is currently using this grade information, law enforcement is relying increasingly on it, and further innovations are bound to follow.

          Concomitantly, computers can crunch information into a usable format at breakneck speeds. An Israel firm is developing a program that allows a computer to recognization motion patterns on a video screen that are potentially criminal: even the seemingly recession proof job of security guard may soon be downsized. The result of the accelerating technology is a sort of “dataveillance,” in which an electronic shadow is created for each of us, a second personality only eerily related to the real thing. And at a few keystrokes, any stranger can familiarize themself with this uncontrolable doppleganger.

          What’s unique about the new corporate panopticon is that many of those being watched don’t mind in the least. As corporations are the ones devouring the information, consumers get catered to more effectively. A defining characterisitc of this new age, writes Whitaker, is that we’re all actively participating in our own surveillance.

          The darker side is that satisfied consumers are not the only ones effected by the changing state of affairs. A significant part of business’s interest in profiling is risk-aversion: they want to know who can pay and who can’t. For those whose electronic shadows–data profiles they have no ability to change–speak ill of them, it will be increasingly difficult to access the necessities of life. Additionally, relatively benevolt enterprises are not the only ones who have access to this pool of data: stalkers, the government’s Big Brother types, and other nefarious schemers are all finding that their jobs to have become much easier. (The recent Hollywood flic Enemy of the State compliments The End of Privacy nicely).

          Even when it’s business holding the reigns, the ramifications of the new order are more than a little creepy. Writes Whitaker: “Statistical surveillance is never knowledge for its own sake... It is always knowledge for the sake of control.”

          And Whitaker’s got some ideas about who will be exercising this control. What’s not developing, he feels, is the sort of ‘corporate feudalism’ multinationals’ worst foes fear: a world in which, after corporations are through dissolving the nation-state, they’re rule openly in their own right (think of the somewhat outdated dystopia Blade Runner). Nation-states and national identities will endure, nominally. But their main purpose will likely be enforcing a sufficient level of order so that business can keep making money, with the least amount of interference.

          The technologies that are precipitating this global change do contain a silver lining. Their most striking characteristic is that they undermine hierarchy by facilitating horizontal communication. For business, this is a bonus because it cuts expensive managerial layers and allows employees to have more control over their work, inducing them to produce more. For those fighting, say, environmental pillage or authoritarian regimes, the new avenues of communication increase strength to the point where it could mean the different between victory and loss.

          For the most part the genre of pontificating about the future is cornered by free market hypsters like Newt Gingrich’s friends Alvin and Heidi Toffler, and Wired weenies who proclaim a most beautiful future inherent in new technologies. Looking at the future by extrapolating current trends, The Private Eyes is a much-needed antidote to the future schlock. As it doesn’t look like the future’s getting any brighter, it’s good to know what to expect.