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Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society 165 ordering of the office was upgraded from an iron cage to an electronic cage, or that Frederick Taylor’s detailed work-task monitoring system shifted from scientific to technological management. The top-down style of management and administration, based on a rigid hierarchy of offi- cials, was reinforced by computerization. This process made possible a holding operation at just the moment when bureaucratic structures were crumbling under their own unwieldy weight. It also facilitated a fresh attention to the minutiae of workplace activities at a time when man- agers had an increasing number of processes on their minds that were harder to keep together. However, as personal databases proliferated within government de- partments, the very idea of centralized control became less plausible in many sectors. And as capitalist enterprises turned their attention toward managing consumption in addition to organizing workers, surveillance spilled over into numerous other areas, further diffusing its patterns within the social fabric. Numerous research studies have documented the ways in which computerization actually permitted new surveil- lance practices in the office and on the shop floor, thus adding the potential for qualitative as well as quantitative change to such settings (Gill 1985). At the same time, questions were raised whether “modernity” ade- quately describes contemporary conditions. Leaving aside the debates over aesthetics and architectures that often appear under the rubric of postmodernism, and the discussions of antimodern tendencies that sometimes enter the same arena, it can be argued sociologically that postmodernity poses questions about novel social formations. In partic- ular, postmodernity may be used to designate situations where some as- pects of modernity have been inflated to such an extent that modernity becomes less recognizable as such. The sociological debate over post- modernity has leaned toward examining either the social aspects of new technologies or the rise of consumerism, but a good case can be made for combining these two forms of analysis to consider postmodernity as an emergent social formation in its own right. It has taken some time to appreciate that surveillance technologies are vitally implicated in the processes of postmodernity. Analysts of con- sumerism have tended to underestimate the extent to which surveillance 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 165 166 David Lyon is used for managing consumers, while analysts of technologies are just now exploring the imperatives of consumer capitalism (see Strasser et al. 1998; Kline 2000; Blaszcyzk 2000). None of this means, of course, that “postmodernity” should necessarily be preferred to “network society” or “globalization.” Each of these concepts points up significant aspects of contemporary social formations. However, postmodernity, under- stood as the complementary development of communications technolo- gies and consumer capitalism, does raise some important questions about surveillance. The question of surveillance systems is central to the tilt toward post- modernity. There are pressing questions, not only of the role of surveil- lance in constituting postmodernity, but also of how surveillance should be conceived in ethical and political terms. While discourses of privacy have become crucial to legislative and political efforts to deal with the darker face of surveillance, they frequently fail to reveal the extent to which surveillance is the site of larger social contests. If the following ar- gument is correct, then surveillance practices and technologies are be- coming a key means of marking and reinforcing social divisions, and thus are an appropriate locus of political activity at several levels. Modernity and Surveillance Modernity is in part constituted by surveillance practices and surveil- lance technologies. In order to establish the administrative web with which all moderns are thoroughly familiar, personal details are col- lected, stored on file, and retrieved to check credentials and eligibility. This is a means of creating a clearly defined hierarchical management order, of rational organization, in a variety of contexts. It lies behind what has come to be called the information society (see Lyon 1988 and Webster 1995) or, more recently, the network society (Castells 1996). But it also lies behind their extension and alteration as electronic tech- nologies have been adopted to enhance their capacities. As we will see, in a technological environment the social practices of bureaucracy can- not be separated from their technological mediation. Theoretically, then, an approach deriving from the work of Max Weber is entirely appropriate for discussing modern surveillance 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 166 Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society 167 (Dandeker 1990). In this approach, a rational bureaucracy is seen as an effective and enduring mode of surveillance. It connects the daily and ubiquitous processes of tax collection, defense, policing, welfare, and the production and distribution of goods and services in all modern so- cieties with issues of state and class power in a rapidly globalizing world. Such an approach also characterized the first systematic study of the shift from paper files to computer records, James Rule’s Private Lives, Public Surveillance (1973). Indeed, one important finding from Rule’s ongoing work is that the introduction of computers, particularly in the workplace, has had unintended consequences for surveillance, even though those consequences make sense in the context of capitalist enterprise. Rule et al. (1983: p. 223) suggested that surveillance be thought of as “systematic attention to a person’s life aimed at exerting influence over it,” and that this has become a standard feature of all modern societies. The nation-state, with its bureaucratic apparatus, and the capitalistic workplace, with its increasingly detailed modes of management, exem- plify surveillance of this routine kind. Surveillance as intelligence gather- ing on specific individuals to protect national security, or by police to trace persons engaged in criminal activities also expanded, but it is the routine, generalized surveillance of everyday life that became a peculiarly modern aspect of social relations. As Anthony Giddens (1985) rightly observes, modern societies were in this sense information societies from their inception. One might equally say that modern societies had a ten- dency from the start to become surveillance societies (Lyon 2001). That tendency became increasingly marked as surveillance practices and processes intensified from the 1960s onward, enabled by large-scale computerization. Computerization was used at first primarily to add ef- ficiency and manageability to existing systems, organized as they were in discrete sectors—administrative, policing, productive, and so on. Cum- bersome bureaucracies acquired the means to handle vastly larger vol- umes of data at much greater speed. The routine processing of personal data was increasingly automated, whether for welfare benefits, insur- ance claims, payroll management, or tax calculation. Such generalized surveillance, using computing machinery for the calculating and pro- cessing of data, was described as dataveillance. 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 167 168 David Lyon For Roger Clarke (1988: p. 2) “dataveillance” referred to the “system- atic monitoring of people’s actions or communications through the ap- plication of information technology.” He concluded that the rapid burgeoning of such dataveillance, given that it tends to feed on itself, de- manded urgent political and policy attention. In the same year, Gary Marx (1988) released his study of undercover police work in the United States, which also warned of some broader social implications that he dubbed the “new surveillance.” Among other things, he showed how computer-based surveillance was increasingly powerful yet decreasingly visible. He also noted the trend toward preemptive surveillance and “cat- egorical suspicion.” This refers to the ways that the computer matching of name lists generates categories of persons likely to violate some rule. One’s data image could thus be tarnished without a basis in fact. Other kinds of consequences of computerized surveillance became ev- ident during the 1980s and 1990s, including particularly the increasing tendency of personal data to flow across formerly less-porous bound- aries. Data matching between government departments permitted un- dreamed-of cross-checking, and the ineffective limits on such practices permitted leakage even under routine conditions. The outsourcing of services by more market-oriented government regimes and the growing interplay between commercial and administrative sectors—in health care, for instance—mean that the flow of personal data has grown to a flood. And as Roger Clarke and others have remarked, a centralized sur- veillance system—the archetypal modern fear—is unnecessary when data- bases are networked. Any one of a number of identifiers will suffice to trace your location or activities. The “big event” of September 11, 2001, demonstrated that the U.S. government’s surveillance at all levels was surprisingly loose and ill co- ordinated. This can be seen dramatically in the mutual recriminations of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which each argue that if only the other agency had cooperated in data sharing the terrorists could have been apprehended beforehand. The in- tensified quest for new security arrangements has led to deepened sur- veillance in specific areas (airports, public sporting events, tall office buildings), as well as more general antiterrorism legislation enacted in the countries of Europe, the United States, and Canada. The pervasive 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 168 Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society 169 enthusiasm for high-tech solutions, given the absence of clear evidence that they actually had the capacity to prevent acts of terror, suggests something about their cultural meanings. Surveillance technologies tend to be trusted implicitly by government agencies as well as by their cor- porate promoters. At the same time, populations vary widely in their re- sponses to the new measures, with many seeing them as unnecessary and irreversible applications of intrusive techniques. Despite its best efforts, modernity does not always overcome ambivalence, but often creates it. The primary questioning and criticism of surveillance has been carried out very much along modern lines. From the start, “Orwellian” became the preferred adjective used to condemn computerized administration perceived as overstepping democratically established limits to govern- ment power. Orwellian concerns are still the ones addressed most fre- quently. Thus Orwellian arguments defeated the proposal for a national electronic identification card in Australia in 1986, and similar initiatives have met a similar fate elsewhere, such as in Britain, the United States, and South Korea. More mundanely, “Big Brother” was found in the “telescreens” of factory supervision or, by the 1980s, in stores and in street-level video surveillance systems. Until the 1990s—consistently with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four— the greatest dangers of computerized surveillance appeared to be in the augmented power of the nation-state, with the capitalist corporation as a decidedly secondary source of risk. Thus the strategies for resisting and limiting surveillance power were similarly modern in style. Legisla- tion relating to data protection (in Europe) or privacy (North America) muzzled the more threatening aspects or methods of surveillance. Pri- vacy advocates were understandably slow to recognize the peculiar traits that computerization had added to modern surveillance. Only in the late 1990s, for instance, did Canadians (outside Quebec) start to take seriously the privacy issues raised by the personal data-gathering activities of private corporations. Orwell had no inkling of these! Another notable feature of political life in the 1990s was the raised profile of “risk.” This is relevant to surveillance in at least two ways. On the one hand, as more and more organizations turned their attention to the future, to capture market niches, to prevent crime, and so on, they adopted the language of risk management. The events of September 11, 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 169 170 David Lyon 2001, raised awareness of risk, including technologically generated risks such as biological terrorism, and the risks that civilian populations face from enhanced surveillance. Surveillance is increasingly seen as the means of obtaining knowledge that would assist in risk management, with the models and strategies of insurance companies taking the lead. The growth of private security systems, noted later, is one example of how risk management comes to the fore in stimulating the proliferation of surveillance knowledge. On the other hand, surveillance itself presents risks, an aspect of what Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society” (see Brey and Mol, chapters 2 and 11, this volume). Beck has in mind the ways that the modern industrial production of “goods” seems to carry with it a less obvious production of “bads” in unforeseen side effects and in environmental despoliation. His description of how the risk society arises in “autonomised modern- ization processes which are blind and deaf to their own effects and threats” (Beck et al. 1994: p. 6) certainly resonates with the expansion of computerized surveillance since the 1960s, even if the risks appear in Orwellian terms. In his perspective, the two faces of surveillance may be thought of as securing against, and unintentionally generating, risk. At the same time, the scope of insurable or securable risks seems con- stantly to expand. Video technologies, mentioned earlier, could be used to monitor public as well as private spaces, especially through the appli- cation of closed circuit television (CCTV). Most if not all of the world’s wealthy societies today use surveillance cameras to guard against theft, vandalism, or violence in shopping malls, streets, and sports stadiums. Biometric methods such as thumbprints or retinal scans may be used to check identities, or genetic tests could be introduced to exclude the po- tentially diseased or disabled from the labor force. Risks may be man- aged by a panoply of technological means, each of which represents a fresh surveillance technique for collecting and communicating knowl- edge of risk. What is particularly striking about each of these, however, is their dependence on information and communication technologies. In each case of technological scrutiny that goes beyond personal checking and dataveillance, it is information technologies that provide the means of collating and comparing records. Any video surveil- lance that attempts to automatically identify persons will rely on digital 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 170 Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society 171 methods to do so. Likewise, biometric and genetic surveillance methods depend for their data-processing power on information technologies. Computer power enables voice recognition to classify travelers on the Saskatchewan–Montana border between the United States and Canada; and computer power allows researchers to screen prospective employee or insurance applicants for telltale sighs that indicate illicit drug use or early pregnancy. Information technologies are also at the heart of another surveillance shift. Not only does surveillance now extend beyond the administrative reach of the nation-state into corporate and especially consumer capital- ist spheres, it also extends geographically. Once restricted to the admin- istration of specific territories, surveillance is steadily experiencing globalization. Of course, part of this relates to the activities of nation- states acting in concert to protect their interests by enhancing their con- ventional intelligence capacities, as seen in the Echelon system that embraces the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and a num- ber of other countries around the world. However, the globalization of surveillance also relates to the stretching of social, and above all com- mercial relations enabled by information and communication technolo- gies. The partnerships between major world airlines, for instance, stimulates the global circulation of personal data. Similarly, the advent of electronic commerce entails huge surveillance consequences. One major Internet company, Double-click, collects surfing data from 6400 locations on the web; and a rival, Engage, has detailed surfing profiles on more than 30 million individuals in its database (Ellis 1999). By the 1990s, then, surveillance had become both more intensive and more extensive. Using biometric and genetic methods, it promises to by- pass the communicating subject in the quest for identificatory and diag- nostic data obtained directly from the body. Through video and CCTV, the optical gaze is reinserted into surveillance practices, which for a while seemed to rely mainly on the metaphor of “watching” to maintain their power. So what is new about these developments? From one point of view, they return us to classic sites of surveillance—the body and the city—reminding us of some long-term continuities in the surveillance practices of modernity. Even the projection of surveillance onto global terrain could be viewed merely as a quantitative expansion, a logical 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 171 172 David Lyon and predictable extension of the quest for control that gave birth to modern surveillance in the first place. But at what point do quantitative changes cross the threshold to become qualitative alterations in social formations and social experiences? The situation at the turn of the twenty-first century resembles in some respects the surveillance situations of the earlier twentieth century. The surveillance technologies that helped constitute modernity are still pre- sent, as is modernity itself. Persons find themselves subject to scrutiny by agencies and organizations interested in influencing, guiding, or even manipulating their daily lives. However, the widespread adoption of new technologies for surveillance purposes has rendered that scrutiny ever less direct. Physical presence has become less necessary to the main- tenance of control or to keeping individuals within fields of influence. Not only are many relationships of a tertiary nature, where interactions occur between persons who never meet in the flesh; many are even of a quaternary character, between persons and machines (see Calhoun 1994 and Lyon 1997a). Moreover, those relationships occur increasingly on the basis of a consumer identity rather than a citizen identity. The most rapidly grow- ing sphere of surveillance is commercial, outstripping the surveillance capacities of most nation-states. And even within nation-states, adminis- trative surveillance is guided as much by the canons of consumption as those of citizenship, classically construed. At the same time, administra- tive records sought by the state increasingly include those gleaned from commercial sources—telephone call data, credit card transactions, and so on. Thus is formed the “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Enabled by new technologies, surveillance at the start of the new cen- tury is networked, polycentric, and multidimensional, including biomet- ric and video techniques as well as more conventional dataveillance. These same information and communication technologies are the central means of time-space compression, in which relationships are stretched in fresh ways involving remoteness and speed, but are still sustained for particular purposes, including those of influence and control. In some respects, those influences and controls resemble modern conditions. However, in the consumer dimensions of surveillance, the influences 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 172 Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society 173 involved are at once less coercive and more comprehensive. All of which leads one to ask: are we witnessing the postmodern power of data-processing? Postmodernity and Surveillance Postmodernity, as understood here, refers to a substantive social trans- formation in which some key features of modernity are amplified to such an extent that modernity itself becomes less recognizable as such. Postmodernity serves as a tentative, interim descriptor for an emergent social formation. The key features in question include a widespread and deepening reliance on computers and telecommunications as enabling technologies, and an intensification of consumer enterprises and con- sumer cultures. Both technological dependence and consumerism char- acterize modernity, of course, as does surveillance. What is new is that surveillance increasingly depends on information and communication technologies and is driven by consumerism (Lyon 1999). Postmodern surveillance raises questions of meaning and political is- sues. Sociological accounts of the postmodern, with few exceptions, pay scant attention to technological development as such (Lyon 1997b). Thus while there is a robust literature on postmodernity, the technological shifts that I argue are central to it, while often mentioned, are infre- quently investigated in sufficient empirical detail. An examination of the co-construction of these emergent social and technological formations, as seen through the case of surveillance, promises to throw light on both of them. In a significant sense, the postmodern modes of surveillance are constitutive of postmodernity. This may be better understood by exam- ining in turn surveillance networks, surveillance data, and surveillance practices. Surveillance networks operate in so many parts of daily life today that they are practically impossible to evade, should one wish to do so. The establishment of information infrastructures and of so-called informa- tion superhighways means that many of our social encounters and most of our economic transactions are subject to electronic recording, check- ing, and authorization. From the electronic point-of-sale machine for paying the supermarket bill or the request to show a bar-coded driver’s 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 173 174 David Lyon license, to the cell-phone call or the Internet search, numerous everyday tasks trigger some surveillance device. In these cases, it would be a check to determine that sufficient funds are available, a verification of car ownership and past record, a timed locator for the phone call, and data on sites visited drawn from the parasitical “cookie” on the hard drive that targets advertising on your computer screen. No one agency is behind this attention focused on our daily lives. Centralized panoptic control is less an issue than polycentric networks of surveillance, within which personal data flow fairly freely (Boyne 2000). In most countries the flows are more carefully channeled when they are found in government systems, where “fair information princi- ples” are practiced to varying degrees. By contrast, commercial data move with less inhibition, as personal data gleaned from many sources are collected, sold, and resold within the vast repositories of database marketing. These polycentric surveillance flows are as much a part of the so-called network society as the flows of finance capital or of mass media signals that are taken to herald the information age or post- modernity. Zygmunt Bauman’s stimulating analyses of postmodernity (1992, 1993), which highlight its consumerist aspects, are remarkably silent about the mushrooming surveillance technologies used to manage consumer behavior. The fact that a single agency does not direct the flows of surveillance does not mean that the data gathered are random. The opportunities for cross-checking and for indirect verification through third-party agencies are increased when networks act as conduits for diverse data. Such net- works make it easier for a prospective employer to learn about traits, proclivities, and past records not included in a résumé; for taxation de- partments to know about personal credit ratings; or for Internet mar- keters to target advertising to each user’s screen. These surveillance flows erode the dikes between different sectors and institutional areas, leading to traffic between them that might not have been anticipated by the sub- ject of the data. Enhanced efficiency of administrative and commercial operations goes hand-in-hand with the greater transparency of individ- ual persons. These surveillance flows also undermine any sense of cer- tainty that data disclosed for one purpose, within one agency, will not end up being used for other purposes in far-removed agencies. We are 6641 CH06 UG 9/12/02 6:13 PM Page 174 [...]... chapter 2, the major obstacle to a synthesis of modernity theory and technology studies is that technology studies mostly operate at the micro (and meso) level, whereas modernity theory operates at the macro level.” I argue that infrastructure, as both concept and practice, not only bridges these scales but also offers a way of comprehending their relations In the last part of the essay, I apply these methods... equipment, led to misunderstanding and resentment and to different levels of compliance with the surveillance technologies Kirstie Ball (2000), one of the researchers, suggests that actor-network theory allows the subject to return to a mediating role between the social and the technological and that it also permits an understanding of how information categories both produce surveillance and are produced by... telephones, railroads, weather forecasting, buildings, even computers in the majority of their uses1— reside in a naturalized background, as ordinary and unremarkable to us as trees, daylight, and dirt Our civilizations fundamentally depend on them, yet we notice them mainly when they fail, which they rarely do They are the connective tissues and the circulatory systems of modernity In short, these systems have... dilatory styles In their study of computer-based monitoring systems in England, Ball and Wilson (2000) found that how well surveillance worked depended on a number of social factors and not just the supposedly inherent properties of the technologies themselves In a debt collection center, social relations in the workplace differed with the gender of the workers and their (supposed) knowledge of the performance... Edwards The argument of this essay is that infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped by—in other words, co-construct the condition of modernity By linking macro, meso, and micro scales of time, space, and social organization, they form the stable foundation of modern social worlds To be modern is to live within and by means of infrastructures, and therefore to inhabit, uneasily, the intersection... such as the police Thus, subtly and imperceptibly, the shape of modernity morphs into the postmodern This may be seen in several related contexts The large-scale social transformations referred to here under the rubric of postmodernity may be considered in terms of the growing social centrality of surveillance The accelerating speed of social transactions and exchanges, which makes them all the more... most of them directly related to the specific nature of modernity Among these is systemic, societywide control over the variability inherent in the natural environment Infrastructures make it possible to (for example) regulate indoor temperatures, have light whenever and wherever we want it, draw unlimited clean water from the tap, and buy fresh fruits and vegetables in the middle of winter They allow... example, that of call centers, we may see again the ways that surveillance technologies are woven into both local social arrangements and struggles, and into major societal shifts Call centers are themselves the product of postmodern times, as understood here They utilize the new technologies to reduce overheads associated with commerce, and Surveillance Technology and Surveillance Society 181 may be located... namely, consumer enterprises and consumer experiences Co-construction and Surveillance Practices The case of surveillance illustrates well the mutual shaping and influence of technological developments and social processes It also shows how that mutual shaping and influence may be imbricated within larger sociocultural shifts such as that described between modernity and postmodernity Modernity is characterized... sort of symmetry exists between the record and the individual person; the one represents the other for administrative purposes But with the proliferation of surveillance at all levels, enabled by new technologies, the very notion of a fixed identity, to which records correspond, has become more dubious At one end of the social spectrum, the carceral net has been spread more and more widely, although not . one of the researchers, suggests that actor-network theory allows the subject to return to a mediating role between the social and the technological and that it also permits an understanding. between the record and the individual person; the one represents the other for administrative purposes. But with the proliferation of surveillance at all levels, enabled by new technologies, the. properties of the technologies themselves. In a debt collection center, social relations in the workplace differed with the gender of the workers and their (sup- posed) knowledge of the performance