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Information Communication & Society Feature Article - Vol 1, Num 1, Spring 1998

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Contents


THE WORLD WIDE WEB OF SURVEILLANCE

The Internet and off-world power-flows

David Lyon
Queen's University, Canada

A b s t r a c t

Surveillance, as the automatic electronic gleaning of personal data, has developed rapidly on the Internet, and the process is likely to intensify with the commercialization of such networked, computer-mediated communications. After placing this phenomenon in the context of already existing surveillance systems, some aspects of 'cyberspace surveillance' are examined. These include employment monitoring, policing and security, and marketing, the latter of which is the most generalized and the least perceptible to data subjects. 'Cookies' and 'spiders' are among the newer technical innovations mentioned, in relation to their social purposes.

Possible explanatory frameworks are discussed, among which risk management, simulated surveillance, panopticism, and biopower are of particular importance.These may be used to question any mere theoretical preoccupation with discrete individuals, and readily identifiable organizations. It is argued, however, that such theoretical advances may often be complementary with, rather than exclusive of, those explanations that focus on questions of identity and personhood, or of difference and social division. How apparently 'off-world' powerflows in simulated surveillance situations actually reinforce real social inequalities, and the vulnerability of certain social groups to constraint or control, should be the focus of efforts to understand 'cyberspace surveillance'.

K e y w o r d s
surveillance, Internet, panoptic, biopower, risk, privacy

Much is made of the enabling character of the Internet. We are told that this amazing tool liberates us to do things hitherto undreamed of. The idea of a 'World Wide Web' suggests a global network of interconnected electronic nodes that make possible a new level of communication, that goes beyond the older broadcasting mode, into a sphere of interchange that promises to better even the democratic structure of the telephone system. The decentralized character of telephones, and the interchangeable positions of sender and receiver, are augmented and enriched in the Internet, with the potential for new communicative relations within a burgeoning cyberspace (see e.g., Poster 1995).

Webs can have other purposes, of course. The spider spins the web in order to entangle and entrap the unsuspecting fly. The more the fly struggles, the more it is stuck. Without disputing whatever inherently democratizing possibilities lie latent in the Internet, it is worth exploring the capacity of the 'Web' to capture and control, to target and to trap, to manage and to manipulate. Although much has changed since the birth of the Internet's precursor as a Cold War military communications system, power has not simply been discarded as an infantile trait. Rather, power is now bound up with an extensive, increasingly integrated, surveillance technology.

'Personal' data caught in the Web are of many kinds.The Internet makes possible new levels of surveillanceintegration, relating to work-situations, government administration, policing and, above all, marketing. You may see a surveillance camera in the shopping mall, or even suspect that someone else is listening in to your cellular phone call. But Internet-based surveillance is far more subtle. You are part of a user group? 'People-finding' tools such as Alta Vista or Dejanews gather personal data from them. You visit Websites? Many such sites automatically create visitors' registers, collecting directly from the user's computer data such as the kind of computer you own, your e-mail address and the previous page you visited. The fine threads are almost imperceptible, and although each 'fly' movement creates more entanglement, the 'fly' remains blissfully unaware of what is happening.

In order to understand the World Wide Web of surveillance, first, some background is needed.The precursors to contemporary surveillance are many, but the Internet helps to shift such activity into a different register, a different plane. Where once the monitoring of place was significant, now surveillance data flows in a kind of 'off-world' sphere. 'Off-world' real estate is advertised in the movie, Bladerunner. Here, my use of the term echoes Manuel Castells' (1989) reference to economic 'flows', uncoupled from physical places, enabled by communication and information technologies (CITs). Such flows are essential to the 'remote control' exercised by corporations over aspects of geographically dispersed production and, increasingly, consumption. The various forms of such 'cyberspace surveillance' activity generated on the Internet are explored in the second section, and common traits are noted.

Third, the question is asked, how should these surveillance practices be understood?Are they an extension of capitalist control, or further evidence of our identityless incarceration in an electronically-enhanced 'iron cage' of bureaucratic organization? Or are they better understood as a form of panoptic power, where an unseen observer oversees a regime of truth and knowledge? Or should social theory attempt to go beyond these modern/postmodern tensions? Lastly, comment is made on the prospects for critical social research, given both the need for, and the difficulty of, such inquiry.

SURVEILLANCE: A MODERN GROWTH INDUSTRY

Watching others' activities, as a means of monitoring and supervising them, is hardly a new practice. The most ancient records – say of Egypt or Babylon – indicate that surveillance has been carried out to keep tabs on populations for taxation or military purposes, or to ensure that work was carried out satisfactorily. In modern times, however, surveillance became much more routine and general, involving whole national populations, across a range of activities and life situations. Births, marriages and deaths were recorded systematically, individual persons were listed as being of an age and status to vote in democratic elections, and workers were assembled under one roof to facilitate supervision.

In the twentieth century, these processes intensified. Government administration undertook surveys of populations, and departments such as health, welfare, immigration, taxation, customs, housing, vehicle and driver licensing kept more and more detailed records. Rational mechanisms for bureaucratic organization, analysed par excellence by MaxWeber, employed a panoply of methods for creating and maintaining files, and ensuring that a hierarchy of rule-observing officials kept control thereby.The logic of capitalist development also entailed supervision and monitoring in order to maximize productivity and profit. Scientific management represented this trend towards greater surveillance-intensity, with its focus on detailed time-and-movement analyses. By the mid-twentieth century it had become clear that surveillance was constitutive of modern organization.

However, the term 'surveillance' was still reserved mainly for intelligence and security services, not the routine business of everyday life. 'Surveillance' was really only popularized as a social research area in its own right in the mid-1980s, for several interesting reasons. One was that organizations of all kinds started to computerize, from the 1960s onwards.The massive collection of personal data, begun during the Cold War era, when state socialist societies still exerted tight political control over their citizens, generated fears of Orwellian police states and Kafkaesque faceless bureaucratic machines. Investigations of the social implications of electronic technologies suggested to some the advent of 'surveillance societies' (Marx 1985; Flaherty 1989).

At the same time as widespread and accelerating computerization occurred, enthusiasm was mounting for Michel Foucault's ground-breaking studies of modern forms of discipline. These appeared in a series of related books, but most famously for present purposes in his Discipline and Punish (1979). In that book, the architectural plan for the 'panopticon' prison was elevated to exemplary status for modern disciplinary techniques that subject the human body to regular and predictable regimes. What Foucault did not attempt, however, was an extension of his analysis to electronic forms of surveillance. Those analysts who have done so tend to focus on the panopticon as the key to the power of networked databases, perhaps at the expense of other conceptual candidates such as 'biopower'. I return to this below.

At least two major debates began concerning surveillance. The first focuses on whether electronic technologies contribute to a qualitatively different kind of surveillance from that characterized by paper files and classic bureaucratic organization. Analysts such as James Rule (1973) and Gary T. Marx (1988) argue that they do, and present sociological explanations of how this happens. The second question, however, is how far Foucault's work can be applied to electronic surveillance (see Lyon 1993). Analysts such as Frank Webster and Kevin Robins (1986), Shoshana Zuboff (1988) and Diana Gordon (1987) were early exponents of the relevance of panopticism, while others were less sure.

The two debates now converge in the area of most rapid expansion, consumer surveillance. The use of the newer technologies raises the question of how far database marketing goes beyond older styles of mass advertising, coupon delivery and 'loyalty' club memberships. So-called 'mass customization' creates incentives for collection of personal data for use in the production-marketing process. Manufacturers or retailers wish to establish a service-type relationship with customers, collecting, storing and manipulating information about them in order to control their behaviours (Samarijiva 1994: 91).

Database marketing works by clustering consumers by social type and location, and by more and more tightly trying to personalize advertising and consumer advice. This is linked directly with the question of Foucaldian analysis. The panopticon works by both classification and observation. Webster and Robins explain the attempt more closely to influence consumers as 'social management' – an extension of Taylorist practices of scientific management.This is elaborated and refined in Oscar Gandy's work on what he calls the 'panoptic sort', where database marketing is seen as a 'discriminatory technology' for grading and guiding consumers (Gandy 1993, 1996). In each case, personal data is gleaned from public sources, or from information provided, wittingly or unwittingly, by the consumer.

Consumer surveillance uses many of the same techniques as other forms of dataveillance, such as profiling, record linkage, and so on, but in North America operates largely beyond the reach of regulatory limits placed on government use of these practices (Québec is the exception). This, coupled with the apparent effectiveness of the crude behaviourist sociology involved in channelling choice and directing desire, means that database marketing has mushroomed in a few short years. Until recently, the only other brake on its progress was the relative lack of communicative means for transmitting data, not only within, but also between countries and continents. Enter the Internet.

CYBERSPACE SURVEILLANCE

The term 'World Wide Web of surveillance' is more a metaphor than a precise indicator. 'Internet-based surveillance' comes closer to designating the field, but even this, technically speaking, would not encompass e-mail systems, despite the fact that many refer casually to e-mail as being 'on the Net' or their e-mail accounts as 'Internet addresses'. Perhaps 'cyberspace surveillance' would serve better, referring to any forms of surveillance that occur in computer-mediated communications. From the viewpoint of the data-subject, all these are part of the Web whose weaving is triggered at the keyboard and which can be seen – if one knows where to look – on the screen.

Three main categories of cyberspace surveillance may be discerned, relating to employment, to security and policing, and to marketing. These categories blur in practice, for at least two reasons. One is that the very existence of electronic networks makes it easier in principle for data to be shared between different agencies, even though in most countries regulatory regimes limit this. The other is that the same network used by large and powerful bodies, such as governments or corporations, can also be used by individuals or groups with far less power. At the very least this means that cyberspace surveillance is not necessarily centralized. As William Bogard (1996: 134) observes, this is not just a global system,'but an orbital and cellular network linking the macro and micro levels of information-gathering'.

In employment situations, monitoring and supervisory forms of surveillance are common, so it is hardly surprising that increasing use of the Internet, and above all e-mail, by employees has created new challenges. In December 1996 a Canadian federal scientist at the Department of Defence was arrested for allegedly downloading more than 20,000 pictures and video clips of child pornography, using his office computer (MacLeod 1997). Also in 1996, Compaq Computer in Houston, Texas fired twelve employees for using work-time to visit sex sites. With respect to e-mail, concerns have arisen among employers about the use of company time and resources for private correspon-dence, within and beyond the organization.

Responses to such practices generally take the form of technical measures to minimize the risk of recurrence. Software is installed to record and report all activities entailing use of the Internet and email. All company information technology services divisions have the capacity to track the use of electronic network use, and to monitor the content of email messages. In most of North America, whether they do so or not is a matter of company or organizational policy. A few years ago, a US survey of managers revealed that 22 per cent had searched employees' computer files, voicemail, email and other electronic communications (Pillar 1993: 7). The results are sometimes dramatic. A Los Angeles police officer, Laurence Powell, got into deep water after sending an email to a friend, describing his involvement with Rodney King; 'I haven't beaten anybody this bad in a long time' (Weisband and Reinig 1995: 41).

These examples, from work-situations, also spill over into the area of policing and security. Part of the policing is private, as when Canadian service-provider i-STAR removes certain risqué groups in the alt.sex hierarchy from public access. But another part is public, when Internet-based surveillance is undertaken by legally-constituted police services. In 1995, for instance, the American FBI undertook 'Operation Innocent', an undercover sting involving the interception of America On-Line (AOL) e-mails of people who had responded to messages purporting to be from paedophiles. Raids were conducted on 125 homes and offices in fifty-seven cites and many arrests were made (New York Times, 16 September 1995, cited in Zuijdwijk and Steeves 1995).

The best-known effort to enable widespread 'security' surveillance on the Internet is the so-called Clipper Chip. In 1994 the US government proposed to introduce a uniform encryption standard, that would effectively prohibit the proliferation of codes designed to protect the privacy of electronic communications. While individual users could rest assured that their messages would remain private, the one exception was that, in the interests of 'national security', government agents would be able to listen in, when appropriate and necessary. Needless to say, the controversy aroused by this proposal has been fierce – on and off-line – and is, as yet, unresolved (see Levy 1994).

While the preceding examples of cyberspace surveillance in employment and policing are interesting and, for many, alarming, they are on a small scale when compared with the massive armoury of commercial surveillance used by marketers. Many suspect that Netscape itself tracks the virtual movement of its users, and Netscape admits that they know each time a browser of theirs is in use. Curiously enough, when in May 1996 a new 'Communicator Suite' was being launched by Netscape, a Danish software firm discovered that Website operators could read anything on the hard drive of a computer logged onto the Website, this was described merely as a 'bug' (CNN 1996). Many other companies are certainly engaged in extensive profiling of Internet users. Some of these use the well-worn ploy of registration – as when one fills a warranty form for an appliance, thus giving extensive personal data to the company – to profile visitors to Websites. In this case, some informed consent is required of netsurfers.

In many other cases, however, no such consent is sought or required. Websites frequently send automatic messages back to their owners, providing data about users' needs, habits and purchases, based on their visits to the site in question. Some transactional information is passively recorded, such that the Webmaster can determine what files, pictures or images are of interest to the user, how long was spent with each, and where the user was before and after visiting that site. Internet Profiles, known better as I/PRO, indicates just how well and by whom a site is used. I/PRO's clients include Yahoo!, Compuserve, Netscape, and others such as CMP Publications and Playboy (Stagliano 1996).

So-called 'Cookies' (Client-Side Persistent Information) give extensive tracking capacities to companies, eager to exploit commercially the valuable segmented personal data on discrete individuals. Cookies allow Websites to store information about visited sites on the user's hard drive, then they read the drive each time a site is visited to discover if the user has been there before.The latest marketing techniques applaud these practices, as offering benefits to the consumer, of customized advertising, tailored to their needs. But the title of one such manual – Strategic Marketing for a Digital Age (Bishop 1996) – also leaves little doubt about who else will benefit from this 'military' manoeuvre.

Recently, much has been made of the potential for using 'intelligent agents' to short-circuit the often tedious process of deploying Internet search engines to find usable data. Not without irony, the 'agents' that now use increasingly sophisticated tracking processes, including 'mapping techniques', are called 'spiders'. NetCarta Corporation, that makes mapping technologies, stresses the enhanced productivity of these spiders.Though little evidence is as yet available of their use in consumer tracking and profiling, the potential is obvious (see Elmer 1997: 185). Another technique, known as data mining, is used with increasing frequency on the Internet. The Chicago Tribune Company, for instance, used data mining to analyse the behaviour of consumers as they move from site to site. While it is true that many data gathered via the Internet are available to any user with a credit card, the fact is that only large corporations can afford large scale techniques such as data mining.

A so called 'privacy panic' arose, in late 1996, over the activities of Lexis-Nexis and their P-TRAK system, designed to help police and lawyers locate litigants, witnesses, shareholders, debtors, heirs and beneficiaries. In response to an outcry regarding the availability of Social Security numbers along with names, addresses and telephone numbers, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) called for broader privacy protection, and Lexis-Nexis eliminated access to Social Security numbers. As it happens, other companies offer much fuller services than P-TRAK, also for fixed fees per datum. Information Resources in Fullerton CA, for example, offers items such as criminal and court records, Social Security numbers, driving records and employment background checks.

Although one cannot obtain such information directly from the Web, all such companies – Information Resources, CDB Infotech, Information America, and so on – have Websites for marketing purposes (<isworld@listserv.hea.ie>). Some companies do, however, offer handbooks for sale, that give details on how to use Internet search engines for finding personal data, gleaned from multifarious sources, including 'private' bulletin boards (e.g. the 'Snoop Collection' from 'Background Investigation Division' in Chico, California). One might be forgiven for asking why such companies often accompany their statements with claims about commitment to 'freedom of information'.

Much uncertainty still surrounds the Internet use of personal databases and personal information sources. No one seems to object to having national white-pages directories available as a means of locating people and businesses (such as Canada411: <http://canada411.com>). Yet when the city of Victoria put its tax-assessment rolls on the Internet, British Columbia Privacy Commissioner David Flaherty announced an investigation. The fear was that people could be located when they may have legitimate reasons for withholding details of their whereabouts. The site proved extremely popular but the mayor closed it down after the investigation was announced (McInnes 1996).

THEORIZING THE SURVEILLANCE WEB

What John Beniger (1986) calls the 'control revolution' extends through all modern organizations. Especially in the police, the military, and in business corporations, a bureaucratic drive is evident, pushing towards tighter predictability as a means to greater control. For Beniger, such control is understood as increasing the probability of a desired outcome. This is the logic behind surveillance of many kinds. All contemporary institutions in the so-called advanced societies are characterized by an internal imperative to obtain, store, produce and distribute data for use in the risk management for and of their respective populations.

The examples given earlier show how this works in practice. Employers try to reduce risk – of workers using office time or equipment for their own purposes, for instance – in employment situations. The police, in concert with other institutions, work towards preventing the risks of crimes being committed, or, more generally, of threatening behaviours. And marketers do all in their power to avoid risks of lost opportunities, market niches, and, ultimately, profit. All engage in data gathering procedures to try to pinpoint risks (or opportunities) and to predict outcomes. So surveillance spreads, becoming constantly more routine, more intensive (profiles) and extensive (populations), driven by economic, bureaucratic and now technological forces. Within the latter, we refer particularly to CITs, and thus to the internal logics of such systems that serve to render as 'real' the risks in question.

The surveillance literature becomes fuzzy at this point.Two of the main concerns have to do with the outcomes of surveillance situations. One refers to social participation, the other to personhood. The first sees surveillance outcomes in terms of social division and inequality, and thus social access and exclusion.The second focuses on questions of 'invasions of privacy', on identity and, sometimes, on human dignity. Unfortunately, some theorists seem so concerned with the one that they ignore or minimize the significance of the other.Yet the two dimensions overlap, indeed, are two sides of the same coin. Identification and identity, for example, may be the means of inclusion and exclusion. Personhood is therefore realized in participation.

Surveillance is clearly implicated in the maintenance of social inequality and division. The panoptic sort (Gandy) distinguishes between different classes of consumers, which has the effect of reinforcing the lifestyle patterns and expectations of each group, and maintaining an invisible but effective barrier between consumers and non-consumers. The latter form marginal populations – due to their age, ethnicity, income, neighbourhood and so on – that are in part constituted by the workings of surveillance systems that concentrate on the more rich and respectable echelons of society. Such marginal groups have their own surveillance, that tend to be much more punitive, found in health, welfare and penal systems (Lyon 1994; cf., Ericson 1993).

Surveillance also deepens questions of identity, when – from the perspective of the data-subject – the capacity to control communication about oneself is wrested from the individual. This is one strand in the debate over privacy, the right to which is often held to entail taking – or being given back – such control by various means. Legal recourse through privacy and data protection legislation is one means, the proliferating technical panoply of encryption devices and 'privacy enhancing technologies – PETs', is another.Analyses of surveillance that start from a premise of privacy are really focusing on fairly philosophical questions of personhood, and, in particular, what sorts of expectations one might have for communicative self-determination. Such analyses tend to assume that autonomous, individuated 'selves' are threatened by intensified surveillance.

These issues are clearly ones of considerable political and ethical import, and that is why they should be discussed in relation to the burgeoning practices of cyberspace surveillance. However removed from daily life and remote from public control these practices seem to be, the drives behind them are very powerful, and their material consequences are all too real. As Stephen Graham says, many of these systems are directly 'geared to the protection and fortressing of affluent consumer neighbourhoods and corporate districts ...and to the exclusion, enforcement and control of the groups and areas that are marginalised by labour market and welfare restructuring' (1996: 28). The distribution of life-chances and of communal and personal well-being are increasingly dependent on the increasingly efficient systems of advanced surveillance.

Beyond these questions of participation and personhood, however, lie some further concerns about the nature of contemporary cyberspace surveillance. The kinds of issues just discussed assume that modern discourses of human rights or social justice still hold good in the world of the Internet. Yet the Internet is implicated in certain cultural shifts that call in question just those kinds of categories. Mark Poster, for instance, argues that the way that today's 'personal' databases function makes them more like a 'superpanopticon' (1995). Surveillance practices are not so much a threat to the 'privacy' of an individual subject, but are actually involved in the very constitution of subjects. This puts a new slant on surveillance, that is glossed in some other treatments of the 'superpanopticon' (e.g. Mehta and Darier 1997).

The 'new slant' may be observed in more conventional settings. In the case of medical practice, notes Robert Castel, there has been a shift of emphasis away from face-to-face examination of the patient and towards an examination of records 'compiled in varying situations by diverse professionals and specialists interconnected solely through the circulation of individuals dossiers' (Castel 1991: 282). This process has, he believes, crossed a threshold and taken the character of a mutation, a newformof surveillance that has prevention of risk at its core. Individual subjects are nowless significant than statistical correlations; autonomized management becomes the order of the day. If one can guide and assign individuals rather than take responsibility for them, then the management strategy has worked. This could even be seen, argues Castel, as a 'post-disciplinary' situation, where the quest of efficiency has become paramount. To 'forward plan social trajectories from a “scientific” evaluation of individual abilities' is the new – maybe mythical – goal (1991: 296).

The focus on risk management may also lead theory beyond the panopticon, and towards Foucault's notion of 'biopower', which is discussed not in Discipline and Punish, but in his History of Sexuality (1978). What Richard Ericson and Kevin Heggarty say of police-related biopower may equally be applied, on a broader scale, to cyberspace surveillance: 'Biopower is the power of human biography, of constructing biographical profiles of human populations for risk management and security provision . . . aimed at fabricating people into the social body . . . according to the logic of the norm' (1997: 91–2). Space forbids expansion of this point, but it does connect nicely the social logic (beyond the panoptic disciplining of bodies) and the technologic of surveillance.

The idea that there might be a 'mythical goal' of surveillance is explored by William Bogard (1996). He argues that a 'simulation' of surveillance is contributing to 'hypercontrol' in societies infused with communication and information technology networks.The 'mutation' described by Castel seems to have wider relevance. Bogard adds the work of Jean Baudrillard to that of Foucault to try to obtain theoretical leverage on the simulated or virtual aspects of surveillance. Where the panopticon originally dealt with real time and physical space – it is, essentially, an architecture – today's 'hyperpanoptics' exist in a realm of electronic environments, where time is asynchronous and speed of flows is crucial, and where distance and proximity are blurred in 'cyberspace'. Existing surveillance literature often speaks of data-images or data-shadows, and of blurring boundaries between images and realities, but Bogard's work suggests that this is central rather than epiphenomenal to today's situation.

Bogard stresses that the simulation of surveillance does not mean it is illusory, unreal. Indeed, 'the better a simulation, the less awareness there is of the artifice that identifies it as a simulation' (1996: 31).This connects with the idea of a 'mythical goal' of surveillance, namely, that the problem of perceptual control over a distance is solved through new electronic means. Knowing in advance who is likely to engage in welfare fraud, buy Benetton or vote Liberal is seen as the means of maintaining order, normalizing populations, maximizing efficiency.

Unlimited surveillance is the unspoken goal 'and it is attractive to politicians, police, marketers and high-tech companies alike) but it is, as Bogard says, 'actual only in simulation' (1996: 49).Alongside older forms of monitoring and supervision (such as the use of software for checking on employees or children's use of the Internet) are these newer methods, that more and more involve the subjects of surveillance, now part of the total surveillance scene. And the Internet serves only to make the mythical goal more (seemingly) realizable.

These reflections aid analysis insofar as they help theory to move beyond the confines of physical space and real time – a task already accomplished in the virtual realm of cyberspace. But it would be a mistake to pull Wittgenstein's ladder up behind us as we rise through the clouds into this next level of surveillant simulation.The danger of discourses that inhabit a world of simulations is to forget the realness of the 'real world' (see e.g., Robins 1995). This demands that whatever constructive insights are gleaned from Foucault and Baudrillard, they be articulated with those of access, inclusion/exclusion and participation on the one hand, and identity, dignity and personhood on the other. As Graham reminds, in respect of the city, 'webs of simulated surveillance system become woven into supporting and constructing the fabric of 'real' urban life, just as the 'real' landscapes of cities themselves become transformed into a realm of surveillant simulation' (1996, 28; see also Robins 1995). Much work remains to be done to understand how these systems work.

BRINGING CYBERSPACE SURVEILLANCE DOWN TO EARTH

The World Wide Web of surveillance exists as a means of control, enhancing through electronic networks already existing forms of surveillance. Exactly how that control is sought and is achieved – panopticism? biopower? – remains debatable, although it is clear that on present showing, existing inequalities of power and access are reinforced, and, for those who are aware of their digital transparency, fears of being held in an unseen gaze are unrelieved.

The foregoing discussion suggests that modern surveillance, based in the so-called control revolution, has evolved rapidly in new directions since the inception of computer-power. While such computerization started as a way to enhance and augment already existing systems of surveillance, its technical possibilities have provided opportunities for novel practices, geared to coping with risk by pre-empting and preventing or by managing and manipulating.The convergence of computing with telecommunications, seen for example in the Internet, has enabled the growth of virtual surveillance, off-world data-flows, detached from their erstwhile moorings in time and space, but with real enough effects in those settings.

Surveillance theories have struggled with these changes,and the classic work of Marx andWeber has been augmented by that of Foucault, and now, Baudrillard. However, theory is still in a somewhat rudimentary condition.Yet if thepreceding argument is correct, surveillance including surveillant simulation, has all too real social, material, spiritual effects. Understanding these, and thus developing some critical discourses to deal with them, is of paramount importance.

As use of the Internet expands rapidly among the well-heeled communities of the so-called advanced societies, so the scope of newer surveillance methods will also grow. At present, most 'critical' debate is couched in terms of 'privacy' concerns, in which rights to be left alone (protected by law), or to 'free speech' (guaranteed by encryption security) are voiced most stridently. Resistance is all too often understood in terms of charging royalties on the use of personal data, which simply falls back on market solutions. Some encourage at least voluntary compliance with data protection conventions, but it appears that companies may do this and continue their surveillance practises.

Some theories of privacy, recognizing classic liberal conceptions as a cul-de-sac, have attempted to introduce a social dimension to the argument. Priscilla Regan's (1995) work is exemplary in this respect. David Flaherty, also going beyond individualized solutions, appeals to the Internet community to promote a culture in which digital tracking is illegal, unethical and immoral without informed consent (Flaherty 1997: 6). This places the onus of responsibility on the surveillor rather than on the data-subject.

But until the inequality-reinforcing and personhood-threatening aspects of contemporary surveillance are seen together, and until these dimensions are understood in relation to the virtualizing of surveillance, the real issues of contemporary surveillance will continue to elude us. Whatever the social benefits of the Internet – and, stripped of hype, there are many – their realization cannot responsibly be theorized in isolation from the existence of the World Wide Web of surveillance. This is not something added to or different from the 'rest of' the Internet, but an aspect intrinsic to its constitution.

This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the Canadian Association for Information Science, meeting in St John's, Newfoundland, June 1997.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Thanks to Bart Simon and Tamara Sayers for their helpful comments.

David Lyon, Sociology
Queen's University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada K7L 3N6
lyond@post.queensu.ca


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