Surveillance

Surveillance occurs in multiple forms in modern society. Two sectors are primarily responsible for surveillance: the public sector (government) and the private sector (industry). When the public sector engages in widespread surveillance against its own citizens, a surveillance state results. At the same time, the private sector is known to be profiting from an extant surveillance economy. Since the public sector can always compel cooperation from the private sector, these two categories of surveillance may converge to reveal significant quantities of personal information about individual citizens.

Page Contents

Video Lecture
Government Surveillance
Private Sector Surveillance
Convergent Surveillance
References and Further Reading

Video Lecture

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Government Surveillance

The mere use of the word “surveillance” might conjure images of spies working for various government agencies collecting information about specific targets. Popular media often depicts this type of surveillance. For example, the entire James Bond enterprise centers around an agent associated with a fictionalized version of Britain’s MI6.

It also doesn’t help that the United States federal government has a significant number of different agencies involved in surveillance activities. Most of these agencies have names that reduce to three-letter acronyms, such as the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Homeland Security, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Department of Defense contains its own collection of such agencies, including the NSA, Defense Intelligence Agency, and an intelligence division for each of the armed forces (with the exception of the Coast Guard, which is under DHS). Even the Department of Energy, State Department, and Department of the Treasury have surveillance-oriented agencies within them.

The preceding list of surveillance agencies is long, which is in no small part a consequence of the Cold War. Following the end of World War II, the two resulting superpowers (United States of America and Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) were locked in a long-running conflict. Both sides threatened to use nuclear weapons against one another. In the United States, schoolchildren were taught to take protective action in case of a nuclear attack (Figure 1). This conflict continued for the better part of half a century, finally ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union (USSR) in 1991.

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Figure 1: Duck and Cover video shown to schoolchildren in the 1950s and 1960s.¹

Given the real threat of nuclear war, both sides in the conflict had a vested interest in knowing what the other side was doing. This situation led to the deployment of spies, who tried to acquire knowledge of weapons systems, locations of weapons deployments, and other types of strategic information. The act of knowing what an adversary is currently doing or planning is part of the field of intelligence.

Of course, while the United States had its own spies and surveillance programs in place, so did the Soviet Union. There was a concerted effort by each side to protect its own spies while finding the other side’s spies. Similarly, each side employed counterintelligence strategies, which (in simplified terms) are ways to prevent hostile intelligence gathering, stop the flow of sensitive information, and prevent attacks, assassinations, and other overtly hostile acts. Many of the privacy-invasive surveillance technologies we have today were developed as part of counterintelligence missions. With the end of the Cold War, some of these technologies (and techniques) have been repurposed for law enforcement missions. Indeed, one of the largest federal law enforcement agencies – the FBI – still has counterintelligence as part of its statutory mission to this day.²

When counterintelligence surveillance systems are turned inward to monitor a country’s own citizens for law enforcement purposes, the resulting environment can be described with the pejorative term surveillance state. Since this term is normally used as a criticism of government policies, there isn’t a precise definition for what is or isn’t a surveillance state per se. Law enforcement activities that encroach upon civil liberties, such as the monitoring of streets with closed circuit television (CCTV) or the use of so-called “geofence warrants,”³ are likely to provoke such criticisms. These activities tend to infringe upon the rights of a large number of innocent people in order to catch a small number of criminals.

Private Sector Surveillance

As of 2023, the surveillance threat from the private sector likely exceeds that of the government, at least in the United States. In recent history, roughly 75% of websites on the Internet have employed user tracking mechanisms.⁴ News sites tend to be the most likely to track users, while University websites and – surprisingly – adult websites tend to be the least likely to use tracking technology.⁵ Among websites that include tracking technologies from third parties, Google, Meta (formerly Facebook), and Twitter are the main companies doing the tracking.⁶

Tracking software is also widely deployed as a component of “free” applications found in the app stores for Android and Apple phones. These applications are capable of tracking users even when the app doing the tracking isn’t in use.⁷ The situation offline isn’t much different, as retail stores are utilizing a variety of ways to track customers as they shop.⁸ Individuals are also being tracked in their own homes by so-called “smart” devices like thermostats, televisions, speakers, and even light bulbs.⁹ Sometimes the poorly-written code running on these devices even results in unintended surveillance when connections are made to both domestic and foreign services.¹⁰

The reason why there is so much tracking of individuals is simple: companies make money selling personal information to other companies. Certain kinds of companies, called data brokers, aggregate this information with details available from public records and other sources.¹¹ The value of the information data brokers can provide increases as the level of detail about the individual data subjects increases. Hundreds of data brokers exist,¹² and anyone looking for information about an individual or a particular type of individual can purchase records from these companies.

With so much potential profit from the collection and sale of personal information, companies are creating, maintaining, and participating in what is termed a surveillance economy, also somewhat pejoratively called surveillance capitalism.¹³ There are two aspects to the surveillance economy that are particularly troubling. First, companies have every incentive to collect as much data about a person as possible, since each tiny data point adds to the overall understanding of an individual. Second, companies can profit by using this information to manipulate a person’s behavior in such a way as to produce a desired outcome, such as spending more money with the company, leaving favorable reviews, or willfully overlooking ethical or environmental issues with the company’s products or actions.

One widespread example of behavioral control can be found in targeted advertising. An advertising company uses surveillance (both its own and what can be purchased from other companies) to determine an individual’s preferences, habits, interests, personality, and similar factors. By knowing which websites a person visits, what they say in the presence of “smart” speakers, what kinds of entertainment they consume, and other insights gleaned from surveillance, a marketing company can select the most influential advertisement to show a person. This technique, which is euphemistically presented as a benefit to the user (“more relevant” ads), is nothing more than psychological manipulation. By engaging in the practice of manipulating people into buying, doing, or believing certain things, corporations collectively create an unelected, non-democratic pseudo-government that has been described as a “Big Other” in reference to Big Brother from 1984.¹⁴

Convergent Surveillance

Governments always have the power to compel the private sector to turn over any and all information that the companies have collected in the normal course of business. A recent example of the concerns this situation can raise is China’s National Intelligence Law, which requires Chinese companies to turn over information upon demand.¹⁵ In late 2022, the existence of this law was a major reason why Governor Henry McMaster banned TikTok on state-owned devices in South Carolina.¹⁶ Since TikTok is (or was, as of early 2023) owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, there is concern that the Chinese government could use this platform to collect intelligence on American citizens during a period of tension between the two countries. (In fact, on the day this paragraph was written, the United States military shot down a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach.¹⁷)

Although concerns about a foreign adversary collecting intelligence through a social media platform are not without justification, it is important to note that the US government can do exactly the same thing with limited judicial oversight.¹⁸ By utilizing subpoenas, which do not generally require judicial approval, a considerable amount of information can be obtained from any domestic corporation. While this information is in the form of metadata, such as times of calls, messages, or interactions, a comprehensive set of metadata can be used to construct a fairly accurate timeline of a person’s activities. Complete information can be obtained with a warrant, which requires only a statement of probable cause made to a judge. Unlike a trial, there is no adversarial procedure to balance the demands of a government agency against privacy and civil liberty concerns in the warrant application process.

While it may seem extreme to compare a Chinese intelligence law with United States legal procedures, the practical outcome is the same. Surveillance converges whenever the public sector makes use of information collected by the private sector. Even though the private sector might not willingly collude with the government, any company can always be forced to share whatever information it has. In this way, the surveillance economy can support the surveillance state.