Transcript The Surveillance Society

What’s so bad about a
“Surveillance Society?”
Siva Vaidhyanathan
The University of Virginia
http://sivacracy.net
The Panopticon
Jeremy 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
Panopticon
Visible, 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
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 2.0
MySpace,
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 Principle
We should know
more about our
governments than
they know about
us.