Surveillance and Society

Traditional Surveillance

An organized crime figure is sentenced to prison based on telephone wiretaps. A member of a protest group is discovered to be a police informer. These are instances of traditional surveillance—defined by the dictionary as, “close observation, especially of a suspected person.”

Yet surveillance goes far beyond its popular association with crime and national security. To varying degrees, it is a property of any social system—from two friends to a work-place to government. Consider, for example, a supervisor monitoring an employee's productivity, a doctor assessing the health of a patient, a parent observing his child at play in the park, or the driver of a speeding car asked to show her driver's license. Each of these also involves surveillance.

Information boundaries and contests are found in all societies and beyond that in all living systems. Humans are curious and also seek to protect their informational borders. To survive, individuals and groups engage in, and guard against, surveillance. Seeking information about others (whether within or beyond one's group) is characteristic of all societies. However, the form, content, and rules of surveillance vary considerably—from relying on informers to intercepting smoke signals to taking satellite photographs.

In the fifteenth century, religious surveillance was a powerful and dominant form. This involved the search for heretics, devils, and witches, as well as the more routine policing of religious consciousness, rituals, and rules (e.g., adultery and wedlock). Religious organizations also kept basic records of births, marriages, baptisms, and deaths.

In the sixteenth century, with the appearance and growth of the embryonic nation-state, which had both new needs and a developing capacity to gather and use information, political surveillance became increasingly important relative to religious surveillance. Over the next several centuries, there was a gradual move to a “policed” society in which agents of the state and the economy came to exercise control over ever-wider social, geographical, and temporal areas. Forms such as an expanded census, police and other registries, identity documents, and inspections appeared, blurring the line between direct political surveillance and a neutral (even in some ways) more benign, governance or administration. Such forms were used for taxation, conscription, law enforcement, border control (both immigration and emigration), and later, to determine citizenship, eligibility for democratic participation, and in social planning.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the growth of the factory system, national and international economies, bureaucracy, and the regulated and welfare states, the content of surveillance expanded yet again to the collection of detailed personal information to enhance productivity [Page 817]and commerce, to protect public health, to determine conformity with an ever-increasing number of laws and regulations, and to determine eligibility for various welfare and intervention programs such as Social Security and the protection of children.

Government uses, in turn, have been supplemented (and on any quantitative scale, likely overtaken) by contemporary private sector uses of surveillance at work, in the marketplace and in medical, banking, and insurance settings. The contemporary commercial state is inconceivable without the massive collection of personal data.

A credentialed state, bureaucratically organized around the certification of identity, experience, and competence depends on the collection of personal information. Reliance on surveillance technologies for authenticating identity has increased as remote non-face-to-face interactions across distances and interactions with strangers have increased. Modern urban society contrasts markedly with the small-town or rural community where face-to-face interaction with those personally known was more common. When individuals and organizations don't know the reputation of, or can't be sure of, the person with whom they are dealing, they may turn to surveillance technology to increase authenticity and accountability.

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