What’s so bad about a “Surveillance Society?”

Siva Vaidhyanathan

The University of Virginia

http://sivacracy.net

The PanopticonJeremy Bentham: “sentiment of an invisible omniscience”

Ruthless efficiency

Administration -- Max Weber

Architecture of control -- Michel Foucault

Culture of mistrust -- Stasi in East Germany

The Urban PanopticonVisible, general,

impersonal, incredible surveillance structures

Valuable yet flawed

Virtue: no “profiling” or dossier building

Vice: Unlimited funding and justification

“Nonopticon”The opposite of the Panopticon -- the “nonopticon”

More corporate than state-sponsored

Virtue: Free to be a freak -- not about social control

Vice: Free to be profiled, tracked, flagged, and snared

Four hazards:

False positives

Insecure systems - data dumps

Lack of systematic transparency, due process, appeals

False negatives

Copyright as Surveillance

Julie Cohen (Georgetown Law School) and Sonia Katyal (Fordham Law School)

Digital Rights Management (DRM)

Content scanning ‘bots

RIAA pressuring universities to monitor students and faculty

Snared in the Web 2.0MySpace,

FaceBook, Google, YouTube, Orkut, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.

“User-generated content” is just another name for massive corporate data collection, mining, and profiling

Subject to state seizure (or just a request)

“Cosmopolitan Librarianship”

This is not a national issue

Libraries are nodes in a global flow of information and culture

Therefore standards and practices must be generated and maintained globally

“Technofundamentalism”

Simple interventions to address complex problems

Inventing something to fix the problems that the last invention created

Trust vs. “trusted systems”

Transparency = Trust

Panopticon preferable to the “nonopticon”

The more we know about how institutions surveil the more we can monitor their activities and correct for abuse

The more we understand about their motives, standards, and methods, the more we can trust their requests and results

Mythical Paradox: Too much systemic transparency undermines trust by revealing flaws and weaknesses

eg. TSA and its secret laws

First PrincipleWe should know more about our governments than they know about us.