July 7, 2002

Writing as far back as in January 1964, Vance Packard, better known as the author of The hidden persuaders, that classic study of the American advertising and political machine, quoted the American Civil Liberties Union as follows: “A hallmark of totalitarian societies is that the people are apprehensive of being overheard or spied upon.”

The book was called The naked society, in which Packard collected the evidence on how a citizen’s right “to be let alone” was being assaulted in the US, and asked the pertinent questions: “Are there loose in our modern world forces that threaten to annihilate everybody’s privacy? And if such forces are indeed loose, are they establishing the preconditions of totalitarianism that could endanger the personal freedom of modern man? ... Many of these new forces are producing pressures that intrude upon most of us where we live, work, shop, go to school, or seek solitude.... Privacy is becoming harder and harder to attain, surveillance more and more pervasive. Mr Justice William O. Douglas of the United States Supreme Court has commented: ‘The forces allied against the individual have never been greater.’”

The use of surveillance was justified by the government officials in terms we may not find unfamiliar. At one Senate hearing, Packard tells us, the Attorney General explained: “We are balancing off the right of privacy versus the better law enforcement”, and then goes on to comment that “many Americans, particularly those apprehensive about crime, would insist the ‘balance’ tips far more heavily towards law enforcement”. In those old, pre 9/11, cold war days, soft-sounding phrases like “law enforcement” could be heard in these contexts. Now one is more likely to come across words like “war against terror” and so on. And one is indeed likely to be subjected to much more severe forms of surveillance at the hands of governments that quickly abandon the pretence of being civilized or democratic when it comes to fighting terrorism. But it may be useful not to forget that even before the terrorist attacks on New York or Washington had occurred, the surveillance measures used to be justified by referring to the presence of a dangerous enemy. Packard says, “As we explore the subject we might bear in mind a haunting comment made to me by Representative Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, who has led several battles for individual rights on the floor of Congress. He said: ‘Basically I am not hopeful about the pressures that will in time make our country something of a police state. Unless we can bring a release from the prolonged Cold War and can check the inward drift of our country, I sense a losing game.’”

Little did the good Representative anticipate the resourcefulness of the capitalist government machine that was entirely capable of coming up with an Osama bin Laden to take the place of the erstwhile Soviet Union as the greatest threat to the American way of life and hence the most convincing justification for the continuing onslaught on a person’s right to be himself (herself) without being harassed.

The Sarai Reader 02: The Cities of Everyday Life (Delhi/ Amsterdam 2002) published by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (www.sarai.net) contains a section on “The politics of information” whose introductory text observes: “What we are witnessing now is a sophisticated compact between state institutions, public policy, businesses, voluntary groups and technologists to control ‘populations’ and to erect fortresses (and gulags?) of data.” In a sobering review of the goings on in the field of surveillance in countries like India, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, titled Everyday Surveillance, remarks that “it is not always the industrialized West that takes quickest to the dissemination of high-tech surveillance schemes on a ‘nationwide’ basis. Modernizing elites in the so-called ‘Third World’ are often better-placed (due to lack of constitutional safeguards to privacy or lack of awareness at the public level of privacy issues) to put in place ‘technologies of mass surveillance’”.

Sengupta informs us that “there are very comprehensive plans being made for a massive ‘citizen database’ to be owned and operated by the state.... This exercise will climax in various schemes... by which all citizens will have to carry identity cards containing identifying photographs, all relevant information (including legal records) about them, and biometric data (data about their body measurements, handprints etc.)” A report prepared by a software consultancy multinational based in India suggests that “the state actually make money out of it, by selling information that it gathers about citizens to corporate bodies”. Sengupta shows how these schemes can have extremely dangerous consequences. “Apart from the fact that in India pogroms (the anti-Sikh pogrom of 1984, for instance) have sometimes been administered with the help of electoral registers, and the computerised ID card system would make such exercises much simpler and more efficient, there are other serious implications of a regime of national identity cards. Information about each of us is scattered in various data banks. These could be police records, electoral registers, taxation records, etc. Their collation in a single database has devastating consequences....”

“The entries in one set of data can influence other, unrelated parameters. For example a centralized electoral roll could register whether or not someone has voted in any electoral exercise. I, for instance, don’t vote. If ‘not voting’ were ever to be considered a disqualifying factor in any other circumstance — applying for a passport, a phone, a gas connection, a job — then my non-voting behaviour would show up every time I did any of those other things.... A huge invasion of privacy gets legitimized. Suppose I am HIV positive and my medical records register that on my card. I need to rent a house. New regulations stipulate that all landlords have to have prospective tenants cross-checked at the local police station. The landlord (perhaps the whole neighbourhood) and the police station know that I am HIV positive. I don’t get to be the tenant they choose.”

In another article “Blind intelligence”, Sam de Silva tell us how on June 18, 1999, during an anti-globalization protest in London, the police cut faces from a video and photo surveillance and uploaded them on to the City of London website with a request to the people to help identify those protesters. It was before the 9/11 incident which, as we all know, was followed by the global media exposing the faces of 19 suspected terrorists to the world with the rhetorical question: “If these faces had been prevented from boarding those fateful flights, could the destruction and the loss of life have been averted?” The providers of the facial analysis systems seem to think so. “The face-cam... is a surveillance system that incorporates the camera with some computer software and a database of facial images of wanted criminals. The camera takes an image of a scene of people and the software extracts any faces that have been captured in the video frame. It then does a comparison against the database of criminal faces. If there is a match, the alarm goes off. Common sense makes us question the accuracy of such systems.... However, the businesses peddling these systems insist they work. Already, some airports in the US have installed face-cams.”

In March 1999, De Silva goes on to say, the Salk Institute of Biological Studies distributed a press release titled “Computer programme trained to read faces”, which claimed that their software could efficiently analyse the micro-expressions on people’s faces, which often expose their insincere emotions. Law-enforcement agencies are interested in the technology that is still being developed and is not used for any practical application at this time.

The idea of some businesses investing in the development of such surveillance equipment becomes very significant in the light of an observation of Sengupta, who says, “Incidentally, the kind of people who sell surveillance equipment are also often the kind of people who sell torture equipment (electrical appliances) which go under the name of ‘crime-control’ equipment. If you look hard enough on the Internet, you will find the same companies selling this kind of stuff in India, Turkey, Brazil and other democracies.”

The resistance to surveillance, however, has also been growing, and, at least at some places in the West, it is quite organized. One such organization creating awareness of the implications of this state-sponsored assault on the citizens’ private lives is Privacy International. (http://www. privacyinternational.org/) Privacy International (PI) is a human rights group formed in 1990 as a watchdog on surveillance by governments and corporations. PI is based in London and has an office in Washington, DC. PI has also conducted campaigns throughout the world on issues ranging from wiretapping and national security activities, to ID cards, video surveillance, data matching, police information systems, and medical privacy.

Headed by Simon Davies, the author of Big brother (Pan, 1997) PI undertakes a range of activities to achieve its objectives. It has been most prominent in North America, Europe and Asia, where it has liaised with local human rights organizations to raise awareness about the development of national surveillance systems. The network has also been used by law reform and human rights organizations in more than twenty countries to assist local privacy issues. In Thailand and the Philippines, for example, PI worked with local human rights bodies to develop national campaigns against the establishment of government identity card systems. In Canada, New Zealand, the United States, Hungary, Australia and the United Kingdom it has promoted privacy issues through the national media and through public campaigns.

Among PI’s activities this year, have been two Big Brother Award ceremonies, one in San Francisco in April and another in London in March. The “Orwell” statues were presented to the government agencies, companies and initiatives which have done most to invade personal privacy. A “Lifetime menace” award was also presented. Three awards were given to champions of privacy. The Brandeis Award is named after US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who described privacy as “the right to be let alone”. The awards are given to those who have done exemplary work to protect and champion privacy. The winners of the awards were selected by a judging panel made up of lawyers, academics, consultants, journalists and civil rights activists based on nominations made by the public and experts.

The San Francisco winners: Greatest Corporate Invader: Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle for championing a national ID card using his software. Worst Public Official: Attorney General John Ashcroft for attacking privacy and freedom of information. Lifetime Menace: Admiral John Poindexter for NSDD-145, “Sensitive but unclassified” and the new Office of Information Awareness to spy on everyone just in case you are a terrorist.

Brandies Awards: (1) State Senator Jackie Speier for leading the fight for financial privacy and consumer rights in California. (2) Warren Leach for exposing the dirty deeds of the credit bureaux for over 30 years. (3) San Francisco Chronicle editorial page (special mention) for opposing efforts by Governor Grey Davis to limit privacy in California.

Writer’s email: ak@citypress.cc

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