Copyright 1993, 1996, and 2008 by Rick Crawford
The following is my chapter in . . .
"Invisible Crises: What Conglomerate Control of Media
means for America and the World"
edited by George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana, and Herbert I. Schiller
(Westview Press, 1996).
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Sections
Introduction
Society as a Technological Construct
Architectures of Captivity -- the Panopticon
The Media-Industrial Complex
Computers and Corporate Impacts
Electronic Banking
De-skilling the Workforce
Computer Simulations
Deception by Computer Simulation
Surveillance, Segmentation, Privacy, and Power
Residential Power Line Surveillance
Monitoring in the Workplace
Intelligent Vehicle/Highway Systems
Video Games and the Colonization of Consciousness
Educational Software
Pawns in a Panoptic Video Game?
Intelligence Agencies and the Political Economy of Encryption
The Information Superhighway -- to Where?
References
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COMPUTER-ASSISTED CRISES by Rick Crawford
Introduction
New developments in computers and information technology are profoundly
reshaping American society. But if "technology is the engine of the future,"
who is in the driver's seat? Most people would prefer a future of individual
freedom and autonomy, of responsible citizenship where participatory democracy
thrives, and where a reasonable degree of social justice and economic equity
prevails. Yet all these basic social goods are threatened by the
increasing concentration of information technology power in the hands
of unaccountable institutions -- both government agencies and
private corporations -- that currently are beyond democratic control.
A 1990 Harris poll found 45% of the American public agreed that,
"Technology has almost gotten out of control." But the poll neglected
to probe further by asking, "Almost gotten out of WHOSE control?"
If we are to regain some control over our future, we need to begin
asking questions about what forces are steering information technology
in which directions, and for whose purposes?
Every technology entails both costs and benefits. Because most
technologies are advertised and sold as commodity products, their
benefits need to be highly visible and concentrated in the hands of
the purchaser. On the debit side, technologies that succeed in the
marketplace tend to have costs that are relatively invisible and
dispersed or "externalized" onto other people. The costs of information
technology may be financial, but more often they are hidden in
structural changes, and take the form of surveillance, technological
dependence without control, and altered ways of life -- e.g.,
speeded-up lifestyles, or a more shallowly-rooted existence.
A balanced journalistic story featuring a new technology ought
to ask, "Will those who enjoy its benefits, bear their fair share of
its costs?" But balanced reporting on technology is rare. Since the
popular press has long been saturated with Pollyannaish perspectives
proclaiming technological "progress," this essay will attempt to
remedy that imbalance. Case studies of computer applications
will examine the ramifications of arguably unwise, and certainly
undemocratic, control of technological "evolution." The dystopian
visions presented here should not be considered inevitable outcomes.
Rather, the struggle between various contending forces will determine
where our futures will lie.
The case studies cover five major aspects of information
technology: corporate computerization, surveillance and power,
video games and consciousness, the political economy of encryption,
and the Information Superhighway. But before focusing on these
specific application areas, some background may be helpful to
provide perspective and establish an analytical framework.
Society as a Technological Construct
Information technologies -- computers and telecommunications --
are shaking and restructuring the foundations of societies worldwide.
Is technology our autonomous master, or is it our obedient servant?
The computer is only the latest manifestation in a long line of
technological "evolution," in which technological artifacts
and techniques become "adapted" to meet the demands of their
socio-economic environments. Biological adaptation is a two-way
process of co-evolution: the environment shapes the organisms, and
the organisms in turn alter the environment. Similarly, generations
of technological evolution produce a series of "built environments"
that, in turn, affect the human cultures enclosed within them.
But societies are not monolithic, and the co-evolution of
technology with society is strongly influenced by socio-economic
power relations. Various institutions impose significant strategic
"selection pressures" that influence the research funding
and regulatory environments of technological "evolution."
Large defense contractors exert such immense influence on the
development of military infrastructure that they earned the label,
"military-industrial complex." But multinational communications
corporations also wield enormous power. The communications
industries -- cable TV and broadcasters, entertainment companies,
computer makers, telephone companies, newspapers and electronic
publishers -- made over $50 million in campaign contributions for
U.S. federal elections during the decade ended December 1993.
These targeted sums generate significant leverage, but are
dwarfed by the communications industries' advertising budgets.
Public relations salvos promoting the latest technologies
invariably advertise best-case scenarios. In 1988, the
microcomputer industry alone spent over a billion dollars on
advertising.1 Any doubts about the "march of progress" are
assailed as Neo-Luddite. One explicitly anti-Luddite advertisement
by IBM closed with the slogan, "Smashing the clocks might destroy the
mechanism of progress. But it will never delay tomorrow."2 This
was a rhetorical device designed to preempt genuine debate. The
issue is not whether tomorrow should be delayed, but rather, "What
kind of world do we want to live in tomorrow?" Who decides how
technology will structure the space and time of our daily life?
Even in an ostensibly free market, the dominant social groups and
economic institutions influence the next generation of technological
development by embedding their own (often unconscious) biases,
value judgements, and social "rules" in the new technological designs.
Other social strata then adapt their lifestyles to the constrained
technological choices available in their new cultural environment.
In this manner, the dominant socio-economic power relations tend to
be reproduced -- and amplified -- in the technological enclosures
that arise to surround the lower social strata. "Relations of power,
subsumed into the functioning of technology, become automatic and
invisible."3 Technology is thus a key strategic site in the struggle
over socially- and politically-contested terrain.
The so-called "Information Age" and "Information Superhighway"
are ideological constructs. They are outgrowths of the prevailing
American ideology that claims this country has transcended
ideology; that, having outgrown false idols, there is now no god
but the Market. The ideology of the Information Age is heavily
intertwined with the myth of the benevolence of corporate technology,
or at least, the inevitability of something called "progress."4
But progress for which sectors of society, and at what cost?
The techno-ideology of Social Darwinism that serves to justify an
inequitable status quo is every bit as self-serving as was the Divine
Right of Kings in a previous era. Yet such ideological assumptions
cause people to accept the inevitability of whatever is labelled by
those in power as "technological progress." Neil Postman suggests
this has allowed the idea of human progress to be replaced by the idea
of technological progress. Many people are willing to sacrifice
shared cultural values if they stand to benefit from some form of
"progress." Such benefits can include money, market share, cultural
hegemony, and political power. In this context, it is important
to bear in mind one fundamental economic dynamic of private-enterprise
systems: private firms can prosper by internalizing benefits and
externalizing costs. The classic example is pollution, where, e.g.,
a community situated around a factory bears the externalized costs
of its production, while the factory owner and his customers
internalize the benefits.
The privatization of public security exemplifies another
dimension in which benefits are internalized and costs are externalized.
In the United States, the social environment has deteriorated as the
ratio of funds spent for public vs. private security has plummeted.
By 1989, the private security industry in the U.S. had revenues
50% greater than those of all public police forces combined.5
In the case of modern technology, those who succeed in
internalizing benefits "within" machines prosper. Yet the
resulting externalized costs -- the pervasive, often deep,
structural changes -- typically are debited against our common
social fabric and cultural environment. The modern corporation has
evolved into an entity that functions to internalize Rights, and
externalize Responsibilities.6
Architectures of Captivity -- the Panopticon
Due to the ideological nature of hi-tech terms, they
warrant oppositional decodings such as the "Mis-information" or
"Myth-information Age", and the "Information Super-Hyped Way",
"Snooper-Highway", or "Super Highway-Robbery." One myth in
particular may prove to be a fatal distraction. This is the notion
-- widely shared by computer-literate denizens of the cyberspace
networks -- that the only significant danger to society is the
emergence of an oppressive centralized government. Ominous steps
in that direction are indeed occurring (e.g., the Clipper chip).
But the emergence of civil society may be threatened less by
the iron fist of a public sector Big Brother, than by the velvet
touch of invisible private sector hands working to channel modern
life into a digital Panoptic enclosure.
The concept of a Panoptic prison originated with Jeremy
Bentham in 1791. The circular architecture would consist of a
central surveillance tower, surrounded by a series of individual
cells. Each cell was to be illuminated from the perimeter, thus
backlighting the inmates. But the central tower would remain dark,
so that the wardens inside could keep the inmates under constant
surveillance without being seen themselves.
Panoptic surveillance techniques allow architectures of social
control to be generalized beyond what are nominally considered prisons.
Today's new hi-tech Panopticon resembles a computerized virtual
prison planet under construction on the Information Superhighway, at
great social cost. New digital techniques for remote surveillance
and control have rendered physical enclosures, concentration camps,
and chain gangs obsolete. The Panoptic Information Enclosure is an
interlacing mesh of digital networks designed to channel the flows of
data, and of economic, and political power; a transnational effort
to overlay Planet Earth with a computerized surveillance grid.
The Panoptic project is not the result of one vast conspiracy.
Rather, it is driven by the decades-old dynamics of technological
evolution in the consumer marketing and national security sectors.
The would-be wardens of the Panopticon are drawn from the ranks of
corporate interests, intelligence agencies, and military elites.
The power of Panoptic architectures derives not only from data
surveillance, but also from techniques that classify, segment, and
isolate the population. In Bentham's vision of the Panopticon, the
inmates, isolated from communication with one another, would be reduced
to the status of "solitary sequestered individuals ... Indulged with
perfect liberty within the space allotted to him, in what worse way
could he vent his rage, than by beating his head against the walls?"7
These passages chillingly foreshadow the much-vaunted "consumer
choice" of modernity. As the public sphere erodes, the public space
available for community fragments, leaving individuals isolated inside
shrinking private spaces -- corporate-designed technological enclosures
such as the automobile and the "home entertainment center." While mentally
confined within these cells, individuals are "indulged with perfect liberty"
to choose among the commodities advertised as individual "solutions"
to collective social problems. Segmented by psychographic class into
virtual Panoptic internment camps, citizens and consumers are bombarded
with targeted images as symbolic substitutes for freedom and community,
thereby dissipating the forces available for genuine social change.
In what Foucault calls the "microphysics of power," the control of
time is as significant as the control of space. The power of Panoptic
structures inheres in their ability to induce self-discipline by
those under surveillance. The inmate "assumes responsibility for
the constraints of power ... he becomes the instrument of his own
subjection."8 When most citizens consider it normal to return to
their home entertainment centers after each day's "work furlough,"
it is clear that physical enclosures and chain gangs have been
superseded by more economically efficient disciplinary instruments.
Thus, for citizens, "'free time' becomes increasingly
subordinated to the 'labor' of consumption."9 People literally
spend their time trying to buy their freedom and happiness.10
What is portrayed as individual freedom under the rubric of "consumer
choice" is increasingly restricted to a constrained set of outcomes
that pose no threat to the established order. This notion of the
political economy of cultural power is essential for understanding
the new modalities of communications power in the Information Age.11
The Media-Industrial Complex
In the post Cold War era of low intensity conflict, corporate
technological power has outgrown the military-industrial complex.
A new media-industrial complex is arising that uses control of
information -- and disinformation -- as a more cost-effective means
of fine-grained social control. As the "saturation bombing" tactics
of mass marketing moved from the commercial to the political realm,
modern corporate firepower evolved to extract precise intelligence
data via Panoptic consumer surveillance, and then respond with
surgically targeted commercial "smart bombs."
The American public is increasingly concerned about
technological threats to personal privacy. The high visibility of
this issue helps ensure the periodic mobilization of forces to
defend against particularly egregious "invasions of privacy" (e.g.,
the Lotus Marketplace incident).12 But a report to the Club of Rome
suggests that the primary threats of the Information Age are not to
personal privacy as traditionally perceived. "The real issue ... is
power gains of bureaucracies, both private and public, at the
expense of individuals and the non-organized sectors of society,
by means of gathering information through direct observation and
by means of intensive record keeping."13
Contrary to popular belief, the shift from centralized computing
to distributed (and "ubiquitous") computing entails a further increase
in the concentration of power within the commercial sphere. These
distributed tendrils of computerized surveillance and control are
channels for what Foucault calls the "capillary functioning of power."
This fundamental shift in the balance of power between individuals
and institutions is likely to remain an invisible crisis.
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Computers and Corporate Impacts
Computers and Corporate Impacts
Computers have played a major role in facilitating the
transnationalization of corporate operations, and the growth of
centrally-controlled regimes. According to the Business
Roundtable, an organization composed of the CEOs from the Fortune
500 companies, "Telecommunications is central to the operations of
all multinational business activity ... the dependence of
multinational corporations -- whether they are pursuing
intracorporate functions or providing services or both -- upon
international information transfer is steadily increasing." 14
Electronic Banking
Transnational businesses are dependent on international
computer networks for more than mere abstract data flow. Some of
that data represents quite tangible promises to pay -- electronic
dollars. Each day, over one trillion dollars flows through a
perpetual motion money-market machine known as "CHIPS" -- the
Clearing House Interbank Payments System -- owned by a consortium
of New York banks. That's one billion U.S. dollars speeding
through cyberspace every minute! The dollar volume on this private
corporate network exceeds even that flowing through the network of
the U.S. Federal Reserve Banks.
Although the number of economic transactions made
electronically constitutes only 2% of the total, compared to 85%
that is mediated by "hardcopy" cash, the relationship is reversed
when we examine the total dollar amount. Cash covers less than 1%
of the dollar value exchanged, while electronic transfers between
computers account for more than 83% (the remainder is mostly in the
form of checks and money orders).
The "velocity" of capital flow through cyberspace continues to
accelerate. In 1980, the flow of electronic dollars per day was
already 12 times greater than the total balances held in accounts
at the U.S. Federal Reserve. By 1991, this daily dynamic flow had
grown to 55 times the static base of bank reserves. This degree of
electronic "leverage" is a crisis waiting to happen. It may be
triggered by electrical breakdown, software bugs, human error,
computer crime (by knowledgeable insiders), or by some nonlinear
dynamic coupling between different electronic financial markets.
The situation regarding foreign exchange transactions is
similar: less than 10% of total foreign exchange volume constitutes
payments for goods and services. The balance of power between
central banks and commercial currency traders was lost long before
the waves of selling by speculators forced Britain and Italy to
drop out of the EC Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992. As Wall Street
wizards conjure up new derivative financial instruments, the risk
increases that computerized cross-market arbitrage strategies will
destabilize the global electronic inter-market. The Wall Street tail
is wagging the Main Street dog, but few can perceive the volatile
ramifications of this dialing for data dollars.
Precisely because the corporate form of organization is so
dependent on computers, the magnitude of corporate computing power
dwarfs the computing power controlled by civil society. As just
one example of corporate computing scale, the private telecom
network operated by General Motors has 300,000 terminals, 250,000
telephones, and carries over one billion "transactions" per year.
Approximately half the volume of all transborder data flows is
internal corporate communication, carried on private networks. "As
technology advances, the importance of national boundaries will
decline and the communications network of the multinational
corporation, developed in form by the banks, will have the
potential to become the guiding force for the development of world
political and economic policies."15 Such disparities in power are
driving fundamental social change.
De-skilling the Workforce
The phenomenon known as de-skilling is a cumulative process
whereby skills are "extracted" from humans via "knowledge engineering"
and then replicated in (computerized) machines. De-skilling is not
merely a copying of skills, but results eventually in those skills
dying out in the human workforce. The de-skilling of workers is a
product of corporate competition, coupled with computerization.
In a different institutional context, the competitive dynamic might
instead have promoted different forms of computerization that
favored increases in worker skills across the board.
De-skilling of clerks and blue-collar workers is nothing new,
but there are powerful economic incentives to devalue human labor
throughout the white-collar echelons as well. "In 1980, out of
$600 billion spent on office personnel costs in the U.S., nearly
75% went to managers and professionals, with the balance going to
the numerically superior clerical and secretarial workers."16
Work flows and job descriptions will continue to be
restructured, in order to coalesce tasks that can be accomplished
more readily by technological capital than by human labor. For
these tasks, technology will be both cheaper and "smarter" than
labor. Whichever tasks meet this criterion will become fixed nodal
points in the flow of work, because their functioning can be
precisely specified. Driven by the imperative to rationalize work
flow, the wavefronts of future task restructuring will conform to
these technological fixed points, and will preferentially erode the
remaining human capital instead. The crux of the problem is that
American business culture designs technological capital as a
substitute for human capital, rather than as a complement to it.
De-skilling is another example of internalizing benefits (i.e.,
profits for the corporation) in machines, and externalizing costs
(e.g., unemployment, anomie) onto society at large. Computers don't
require wages, become fatigued, take leave to care for sick children,
or go on strike. Thus, the dynamic of de-skilling will act to shrink
the information society's "middle class," causing the knowledge
gap between the info-rich and the info-poor to diverge further.
Even the narrow macro-economic results of de-skilling are
detrimental: products can be produced more cheaply, but increasing
numbers of consumers -- being unemployed workers -- are no longer
able to afford them. Some label this trend a deep structural crisis
of industrial capitalism, and advocate radical changes, e.g., a
significantly shorter work week, or a guaranteed national income.
How can this crisis, too, remain invisible? It turns out this
is not a collective crisis of corporate capitalism, but merely 80
million individual human crises! Neoclassical economists -- true
believers in Schumpeter's "long wave" theory of economic decline
and technological innovation 17 -- preach that, just as the
Industrial Revolution catalyzed a period of rapid growth, so too
shall the Information Age enable a Second Coming of "Lite" growth.
But perpetual growth on a finite planet is unsustainable.
Computer Simulations
De-skilling -- the transfer of skills from workers to
computers -- might be viewed as an increasing "knowledge gap"
between workers and computers. In this light, it may be
understandable for de-skilled workers to view computers as
omniscient. After Weizenbaum constructed his ELIZA program
to simulate a Rogerian psychotherapist, he was horrified that
it fooled many ordinary people into thinking this trivially
simple computer program truly "understood" them far better
than any human therapist. But even psychologists were
snared by the lure of computer-assisted therapy. Prominent
therapists of the time expressed a desire to establish numerous
computerized psychology clinics, to make therapy available to the
masses. "Several hundred patients an hour could be handled by a
computer system designed for that purpose. The human therapist ...
would not be replaced, but would become a much more efficient man
.."18
Not only psychologists were attracted by the lure of a
"technological fix." Carl Sagan, in a 1975 article in Natural
History, wrote, "In a period when more and more people in our
society seem to be in need of psychiatric counseling ... I can
imagine the development of a network of computer psychotherapeutic
terminals something like arrays of large telephone booths, in
which, for a few dollars a session, we would be able to talk with
an attentive, tested, and largely non-directive psychotherapist." [18.5]
Why is it that "more and more people in our society" seem to
"need" counseling? Perhaps computer-assisted psycho-technology is
being called on to "fix" (or at least paper over) problems caused
by the social and psychological externalities resulting from
dependence on other forms of technology. If computers can heal
minds, then surely they can harm them as well. Rather than
embracing computer-assisted psychology as a cure for what the
Trilateral Commission [18.6] calls "democratic distemper," we should
regard it as a highly problematic technology of social control:
"If you are troubled, my child, enter the Tele-Confessional Booth
(tm). Open your heart, and reveal your mind to Big Cyber Brother."
Deception by Computer Simulation
More recently, economists have been fooled by computerized
economic simulation models, including those of their own
construction. In the debate over "free trade" and the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), most mainstream economists
cited computer projections claiming that NAFTA would create
thousands of new jobs in the U.S. The computer simulations on
which these NAFTA proponents rely are known as Computable General
Equilibrium (CGE) models, and to make their analyses tractable, the
neo-classical economists must make certain simplifying assumptions.
When simulating the impact of a trade agreement on labor, it
seems absurd to assume a priori that capital is immobile, that full
employment will prevail, that unit labor costs are identical in the
U.S. and Mexico, that American consumers will prefer products made
in America (even if they are more expensive), and that trade flows
between the U.S. and Mexico will exactly balance. Yet a recent
examination of ten prominent CGE models showed that nine of them
include at least one of those unrealistic assumptions, and two of
the CGE models included all the above assumptions!19
This situation bears a disturbing resemblance to computer-assisted
intellectual dishonesty. Human beings have always been masters of
self-deception, and hiding the essential basis of one's deception by
embedding it in a computer program surely helps reduce what might
otherwise become an intolerable burden of cognitive dissonance.
Perhaps those early psychologists who foresaw computer programs bringing
mental relief to overstressed humans were not so wrong after all!
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Surveillance, Segmentation, Privacy, and Power
Surveillance, Segmentation, Privacy, and Power
In June 1991, in response to a grand jury subpoena, Cincinnati
Bell searched the dialing records of 650,000 residential customers
to help Procter & Gamble identify employees suspected of leaking
embarrassing company information to a reporter. The balance of
power between individuals and institutions is terribly skewed when
one company's "corporate privacy" outweighs the privacy rights of
650,000 households. A computerized database shifted the balance
of power between workers and businesses: after winning the right
to workers' compensation insurance, any worker injured on the job
who has the temerity actually to file a claim, will find his records
entered in a national computerized blacklist. For a fee, employers
can examine these files for employment applicants, to weed out those
they deem high risk.
When people object to computerized surveillance, it is usually
because they feel it is an invasion of privacy. But the notion of
privacy is bound up with the inviolability of individual dignity and
autonomy. Both these attributes are inextricably linked to relations
of power. Clearly, personal autonomy suffers when institutions
compile information on one's past experiences, and use that data to
amplify their power to constrain one's future options. But the
attribute of personal dignity likewise is vulnerable to the exercise
of power -- the power to define an individual.
The global Panopticon under construction as an "Information Snooper-
Highway" is not a unified architecture, with a single central tower.
Instead, multiple central towers correspond to various institutions
-- including credit bureaus, insurance companies, media
conglomerates, and government agencies. These towers may obscure
each others' views of the inmates, but that problem can be
alleviated by the sharing or sale of surveillance data.
The wardens in the Panoptic towers utilize various digital
data-gathering practices to track the behaviors of inmates.
Many economic transactions generate long-lived electronic
records that identify the parties involved in, and the nature of,
those economic transactions. Such digital records carry
information that may have predictive value regarding future
economic transactions. Thus, a large secondary market has arisen
to trade in this Transaction-Generated Information (TGI).
Files of Transaction-Generated Information (TGI) on consumers
permit institutions to define an individual, e.g., as a poor credit
risk, or as a sucker for "Buy 2 get 1 free" sales ploys. The Panoptic
structures of modern life, coupled with fast interactive feedback
mechanisms, also mean greater power for institutions to influence the
self-definitions of individuals. Just as the media's control of news
surveillance and distribution carries the power to define events as
they happen, and to impose those definitions on the public as "instant
history," so control of the Panoptic surveillance grid increases
institutions' power to impose self-images on the subjects of private
life, thereby violating personal dignity as well as infringing on
individual autonomy.
Information generated for one purpose can be linked with data
gathered for another purpose, to produce a data shadow that reveals
more than the sum of its parts. Familiar examples include the use
of medical information to deny employment, and census information
to deny credit. Corporations use TGI to reduce their risks, thus
increasing their probable profits. But from the individual's viewpoint,
this is data-based discrimination. One's life chances may be
circumscribed -- not due to any crime one has committed -- but merely
because some aspect of one's digital persona resembles that of people
who are on record (rightly or not) as high-risk parties in various
business transactions. One may be blacklisted or redlined, not for past
transgressions, but based on computerized predictions of future behavior.
Besides using TGI data to deny options to targeted individuals,
another disturbing aspect of the secondary market in TGI is
its use to extend "opportunities" to them. Correct TGI does
have predictive value. Although few individuals' behaviors are so
invariant as to be deterministic, many businesses can profit
handsomely from increasing the probability that they guessed right.
And the more predictable is a person's behavior, the more power is
transferred to businesses that can access records of their digital
persona. Moreover, fine-grained surveillance data permits fine-
tuned manipulation through psychographically targeted corporate
communications. Economies of scale become significant. Even if a
company has correctly inferred intimate details of an individual's
psychological makeup, it is seldom worthwhile to invest staff
resources in constructing a custom-designed communication to
manipulate that one individual (unless the business involves
high-stakes fraudulent telemarketing). But once hundreds or
thousands of individuals can be lumped together in one psychographic
class, susceptible to the same forms of manipulation, these
techniques can generate a predictable, cost-effective revenue
stream. Moreover, such methods of segmenting the population allow
political organizations to conduct controlled experiments to hone
their propaganda techniques.
Residential Power Line Surveillance
Residential Power Line Surveillance
Many people are aware of telephone wiretapping. But few
understand the potential for gathering covert intelligence via
a form of "wiretapping" we'll call Realtime Residential Power
Line Surveillance (RRPLS).20
A primitive form of non-realtime RPLS has been used for years
by U.S. drug enforcement agents. By acquiring from local
electric utility companies the billing records for the top
residential electric power consumers, government agents can draw
plausible inferences as to whether certain residences may be using
banks of high powered lights to cultivate indoor marijuana
gardens. In the U.S., a search warrant is not required to gather
such data from an electric utility. U.S. law does not consider
residential electric bills "private," just as residential telephone
dialing records are not private.21
Innovative advances in computerization have given rise to
"smart meters," enabling an enormous increase in the data-gathering
ability of Residential Power Line Surveillance, to the point where
RRPLS now joins the panoply of techniques that, collectively,
constitute "data-veillance."22
Whereas primitive forms of power monitoring merely sampled
one data point per month by checking the cumulative reading on
the residential power meter, modern forms of RRPLS permit nearly
continuous digital sampling. This allows watchers to develop a
fine-grained profile of the occupants' electrical appliance usage.
A computerized RRPLS device may be placed onsite with the
occupants' knowledge and assent, or it surreptitiously may be
hidden outside, attached to the power line feeding into the residence.
This device records a log of both resistive power levels and reactive
loads, as a function of time. The RRPLS device can extract
characteristic appliance "signatures" from the raw data. For
example, existing RRPLS devices can identify whenever the sheets
are thrown back from a water bed, by detecting the duty cycles of
the water bed heater.23 RRPLS can infer that two people shared a
shower, by noting an unusually heavy load on the electric water
heater, followed by two uses of the hair dryer.
RRPLS may sound like just another expensive hi-tech spy toy,
used, e.g., only by the FBI against a few suspected terrorists.
But we ignore the data-gathering incentives of the market at our
peril. Several economic dynamics promote the widespread use of
RRPLS for commercial purposes. In fact, utilities already have
deployed RRPLS in pilot programs covering thousands of U.S. homes.24
One factor promoting "computerization" of residential power
metering is the electric utilities' desire to reduce their costs by
automating the job of reading residential meters. Thus, most of the
RRPLS devices installed in the U.S. today use packet radio techniques
to transmit their (your) data to the utility's billing department
(or to whomever else may be monitoring those transmissions).
Another factor driving the proliferation of RRPLS is concern
for the environmental impacts of energy use. The generating capacity
needed by electric utilities is driven by peak power demand -- the
maximum power required at any one time. As an incentive to reduce
peak power demand, some utilities already have deployed RRPLS monitors
to homes, so that customers using power during periods of peak demand
(e.g., when many air conditioners are switched on during a hot
summer afternoon) are charged higher prices. Thus, the laudable
goal of equitably allocating the environmental costs of energy
consumption is contributing to the spread of RRPLS techniques.
Once a utility company "owns" a profile of a household's
appliance usage, marketing motives tend to propagate that data.
Appliance companies might buy this data, enabling them to target
sales prospects more precisely. For example, field tests of a
prototype RRPLS device detected a malfunctioning underground septic
pump. The occupant was unaware of the urgent need for repair. Or
the household RRPLS data might indicate that its occupants own an
old-style washing machine, suggesting its possible replacement by
a modern, energy-efficient washer. Or perhaps the household RRPLS
appliance profile indicates its occupants use a microwave oven every
weekday morning. Targeted direct mail might then send coupons,
or even free trial samples of new microwave breakfast foods.
On the other hand, health insurance companies may pool the
RRPLS data from thousands of policy holders, correlating health
insurance claims with statistical appliance usage profiles. They
may determine that, for unknown reasons (perhaps due to a more
time-stressed lifestyle), morning microwave users constitute a high
risk group, and boost their insurance premiums accordingly. Those
who spend too many nights tossing and turning on their water beds
(whether due to insomnia or more enjoyable activities) may
experience a similar boost in car insurance rates.
Undoubtedly the greatest danger of widespread RRPLS is an
invisible one, that utility companies will gradually degrade the
norms of privacy as perceived by the public. Utility companies can
buy off most of the uninformed populace by offering "surveillance
subsidies" -- discounts or rebates to those who allow the sale of
their private data. These personal surveillance contracts may be
cloaked in the rhetoric of "new improved services," and "consumer
choice." But for a utility to obtain the genuinely "informed
consent" of its customers would require the utility to undertake
expensive campaigns to educate customers regarding the long-term
social consequences of this Panoptic surveillance. Given the
conflict of interest inherent in such a scheme, it is clear that
once again, the consent of the technological consumer will be
manufactured, rather than informed.25
Surveillance subsidies may become common in many transactions,
to induce individuals to communicate with corporations via interactive
feedback. But, as with advertising, it is the consumer who ultimately
pays the price for these "information subsidies." The net result
will be the further monetarization of "inalienable" human rights into
transferable corporate property rights.
Yet another economic factor contributing to the proliferation
of RRPLS is the "Smart House" campaign being pushed by builders
and the Electronics Industry Association. The Smart House concept
envisions "electronic systems that allow household appliances such
as televisions and dishwashers to communicate with each other."26
One wonders what would motivate two such disparate appliances to
speak with one other. Perhaps the dishwasher could tell the TV
what brands of detergent and cookware the occupants used, and
the TV could adjust its interactive advertising accordingly?
Another selling point of a Smart House retrofit is its reputed
advantage in terms of home security, since its motion-sensing
devices presumably could distinguish between occupants, invited
guests, and unwelcome intruders.
It is difficult to evaluate the degree to which fear of
violence will lead to electronic fortification of existing homes
via RRPLS, thereby locking its occupants in to perpetual
surveillance as effectively as it locks intruders out. But given
the thriving market in labor-intensive private security services,
the growing disparities between well-to-do homeowners and the
"restless underclasses," and the existing movement by the upper
classes to "fort up" in specially designed housing tracts, the wide
acceptance of RRPLS for home security purposes is quite likely.
One final economic incentive promoting the technological
evolution of RRPLS is the lure of profits from a high-speed
national information network. It could cost tens of billions of
dollars to install "on-ramps" (e.g., fiber optic cables) from
every residence to the "Information Superhighway". Yet utilities'
profits from RRPLS could generate enough surplus cash flow to
finance that construction. Through Realtime Residential Power Line
Surveillance, electric utilities "can sharply reduce the future costs
of making power at the same time they are capitalizing the cost
of building the great information superhighway."27 Once again,
corporations are poised to internalize profits by externalizing
costs -- in this case, the social costs of utility surveillance.
Fine-grained RRPLS monitoring of entire populations is not
inevitable. Much of the tension between privacy interests and
the need for incentives to reduce peak home energy consumption
could be resolved by limiting the "intelligence" of smart RRPLS
meters. But the level of RRPLS surveillance acceptable to
consumers may artificially be boosted by surveillance subsidies.
Given the corporate forces jockeying for position on the emerging
"Information Superhighway," electric utility surveillance
subsidies are of particular concern at the present time.
Panoptic RRPLS surveillance, once frozen into the architecture
of the "Snooper-highway" as an embedded technological bias, would
have pervasive and irreversible effects on any future cultural
trajectory through the "Information Age."
Monitoring in the Workplace
Computerized monitoring of clerical workers is commonplace.
In America in 1990, 26 million employees had their work tracked
electronically, and 10 million of those had their work evaluated -- and
their pay determined -- based on computer-generated statistics.
Airline reservation clerks are expected to arrange flight bookings
within 106 seconds. If the customer asks too many questions, it
increases the clerk's "TATT" (Total Average Talk Time), for which
penalties can result. Directory assistance operators have 29 seconds
to handle a caller's request. Any pleasantries, e.g., saying "please"
or "thank you," increase the operator's "handle time," and the
incident is logged immediately in that employee's evaluation file.28
But life in the lower occupational strata was nasty, brutish,
and short, even before modern technologies. How has computing
affected white collar workers? An examination of 25 popular
Macintosh programs -- for electronic mail, network management, and
integrated groupware applications -- found that, in the typical
modern networked environment, every product allowed a network
manager to "eavesdrop on virtually every aspect of your networked
computing environment with or without your approval or even
knowledge."29 Nor are such capabilities unique to Macintosh network
environments. An ad for networking software in "PC Week" magazine
-- clearly addressed to management -- boasts that their product,
"Brings you a level of control never possible. You decide to look
in on Sue's computer screen -- Sue won't even know you're there.
All from the comfort of your chair." [29.5] That chair may be in the
adjacent office, or it may be halfway around the world, far from a
corporate electronic sweatshop set up to exploit cheap labor. To
determine whether these surveillance capabilities were actually
utilized, Macworld magazine conducted a survey of 300 CEOs and MIS
(Management Information System) directors at firms of various sizes
in different industries.
They found that 22% of employers admitted they had searched the
networked communications of employees, such as electronic mail, voice
mail, or computer files. That figure rose to 30% for heads of larger
companies (over 1000 employees). Demonstrating the casual
justification for this intrusive behavior, only 18% of the
companies responding had actual written policies dealing with
employees' electronic privacy.
According to Cindia Cameron, a field organizer for "9 to 5,"
the National Association of Working Women, "technology now allows
employers to cross the line from monitoring the work to monitoring
the worker." In light of the publicity from Macworld's survey,
might we expect any federal legislation to limit employee
surveillance? Lawrence Fineran of the National Association of
Manufacturers (NAM), spoke against any such regulations. "NAM
opposes any legislation that will interfere with the ability of
modern and future equipment that can assist domestic companies
in their fight to remain competitive. Otherwise the U.S. may as
well let the information age pass it by." The rhetoric of
"competitiveness" was invoked, despite the fact that Japan and
much of Europe long ago imposed tougher restrictions than were
proposed in the "Privacy for Consumers and Workers Act" that
failed to pass Congress during the Bush administration.
Economic "competitiveness" is a weapon used not only against
government regulation, but also against workers. Some workers find
their computer screen will flash the message, "You're not working
as fast as the person next to you." Proponents argue that worker
surveillance software is an improvement, because it guarantees
workers' performance will be evaluated objectively. But such an
analysis ignores the context of underlying power relations.
Is workplace surveillance destined to fulfill the intent of
Bentham's 1791 Panopticon, that "for the greatest proportion of
time possible, each man should actually be under inspection?" Or
barring that, "the persons to be inspected should always feel
themselves as if under inspection," because, "the greater chance
there is, of a person's being at a given time actually under
inspection, the more strong will be the persuasion -- the more
intense ... the feeling he has of his being so."
Fortunately, in societies where some employers must fund
worker healthcare costs, there is a countervailing economic
incentive. A joint study conducted by the Communications Workers
of America and researchers from the Univ. of Wisconsin found
that electronic monitoring on the job increases boredom, tension,
anxiety, depression, anger, and fatigue. These findings are
consistent with earlier studies implicating electronic surveillance
as "a major workplace stress factor -- linked, in part, to the
sense of powerlessness that monitored employees feel."
Intelligent Vehicle/Highway Systems
Proponents of "Intelligent Vehicle/Highway Systems" (IVHS) say
that by attaching computers to all vehicles, and tracking their
positions precisely, traffic jams can be averted and air pollution
reduced. By transforming highways into electronic toll roads,
proponents hope to force drivers to internalize the environmental
costs of automobile use that would otherwise be externalized.
A rudimentary form of IVHS is already operational during
periods of peak traffic in Hong Kong. This system employs only
surveillance, not control. A chip is installed in every car, and
it responds automatically to queries from sensors installed along
the roadways. In effect, certain streets are toll roads during
peak traffic times. But rather than slow traffic further by
physically collecting tolls, the IVHS toll system does this
electronically. In a similar manner, vehicle speed and I.D. could
be recorded, and speeding tickets could be mailed automatically to
offenders.
A related technology presents similar prospects. The
Teletrac vehicle-locator system employs a frequency-agile
transmitter to announce vehicle location. Already in Los Angeles,
it is charged, "the courts have been utterly promiscuous in
allowing the police to clandestinely tag suspects' cars with these
devices. It is not far-fetched to imagine a situation in a few
years where everyone on probation, or entered in one of the
criminal databases, will have to submit to some form of 24-hour
electronic surveillance. We shall soon see police departments with
the technology to put the equivalent of an electronic bracelet on
entire social groups."30
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Video Games and the Colonization of Consciousness
Video Games and the Colonization of Consciousness
As arcades for video games have multiplied, video games
themselves have moved into American homes, so that by 1993, Sega
and Nintendo systems appeared in an estimated 50 million U.S.
households. The $5.3 billion spent on video games in 1992 in
America exceeded total ticket sales at movie theaters nationwide.31
A single video game company, Nintendo, had higher after-tax profits
than Apple Computer or Microsoft, higher than all Hollywood studios
combined.
Video games are big not merely in terms of money, but
especially when measured in that scarcest of currencies,
discretionary time. Estimates are that children in homes with
video games, on average, spend between 1.5 and 2 hours per day
hooked into them.
Consider Sega's "Night Trap" video game: This realistic,
live-action CD-ROM product features bloodthirsty vampires dressed
in black, who stalk scantily clad teen-age girls through a large
house. The girls are portrayed as powerless to defend themselves.
Unless rescued by the (male) player, they are caught by the
vampires, who drill holes in their necks and hang them up on meat
hooks.
Perhaps "Night Trap" is too complex as an object lesson, since
it mixes male chauvinism with violence. Fortunately there is a
purer form of video game violence to examine. Sega's "Mortal
Kombat" offers icing on the cake of gratuitous interactive
violence: "At the climax of Mortal Kombat, after an opponent is
beaten to the ground, the winner is invited to tear out the loser's
bloody, beating heart, or snap off the loser's skull and pull the
spine out of the body."32
Mortal Kombat was America's top-grossing [sic] arcade game in
1992, and versions for home systems (both Nintendo and Sega) were
propelled into the home video game market by a $10 million
advertising budget.
Given society's agonizingly slow response to the crisis of
television violence, those who sounded the alarm on that earlier
crisis are watching the growth of video game violence with the
horror usually reserved for watching a highway pile-up develop in
slow motion. USC professor Marsha Kinder sees a big difference
between video games and other media, because they actively engage
children in violent acts. "It's worse than TV or a movie. It
communicates the message that the only way to be empowered is
through violence."33 In terms of de-sensitization, actively
participating in virtual violence is expected to have even stronger
de-sensitizing effects than passively witnessing violence.
Educational Software
Video game proponents correctly point out that the genre is not
monolithic. For example, many educational software applications
masquerade as video games to pique students' interest. But even
"purely" educational software has its problems. These include the
perils of simulated reality, which frequently misleads even adult PhDs.
How realistic are the sets of rules and assumptions embedded in
educational software? After "test-driving" an educational simulation,
are children reminded that, "Your mileage in the real world may differ?"
Would such warnings be contradicted by the weight of (simulated)
experiential evidence?
Perhaps the assumptions most deeply embedded in educational
software are those of the Cartesian epistemology inherent in most
notions of "problem-solving." These Cartesian postulates include
the highly problematic notions of data as objective, technology as
value-neutral, and communication as a conduit between autonomous
individuals who construct their own ideas. When computerized
educational problem-solving software reduces the real world's
degrees of freedom to those of the Cartesian world view, this
precludes creative "solutions" that redefine the problems in a
larger (typically social) context. Cartesian software teaches
students to approach situations as narrowly-defined problems to
be solved -- not as circumstances to be comprehended by means
of organizing principles, animated by a set of values.
Education is a process of cultural transmission, and students
often learn unintended lessons from teachers. What implicit
lessons will instructional technology teach? It would seem that
surveillance is one such lesson: in order for teachers to monitor
students' progress, the instructional computer programs will track
virtually all aspects of each interactive lesson. Thus, one impact
of interactive computerized instruction will be the initiation of
students into the socialization of surveillance.34
Prevailing notions of "computer literacy" are often thinly
disguised economic ideology.35 The rhetoric of "economic
competitiveness" is used to prey upon parents' fears that their
child will lose the "educational competitiveness" contest, unless
they purchase a home computer.
Despite all the hype from the computer industry, one should at
least consider the possibility that computers are largely irrelevant
to our educational problems. An International Assessment of
Educational Progress survey ranked American students behind 13 other
countries in math and science proficiency, yet not one of those
other countries used computer technology in the classroom.36
The "digital convergence" of computers with video and telecommunications
will not be confined solely to adults. Trends toward news as
"infotainment" -- already accelerating in TV broadcasting -- undoubtedly
will be replicated in educational software. Competition between
educational video software makers can be expected to shrink youths'
attention spans further, and to reduce their tolerance for electronic
spaces that are only sparsely action-packed. Thus, even if teachers
rarely select a particular educational software package based on its
superior electronic babysitting capabilities, it would seem that a
Gresham's Law of Video Games nevertheless may apply to the educational
software market, so that the "tainment" crowds out the "info".
But even this volatile mixture of futuristic trends would be incomplete
without factoring in advertising. Given the "commercial convergence" of
movies, toys, clothes, breakfast foods, and video games, perhaps Teacher
of the Year honors soon will be awarded to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Think of the licensing fees to be reaped from every school district!
If your child can read this, thank a cartoon character.
Pawns in a Panoptic Video Game?
The "digital convergence" of most import involves the convergence
of advertising and other forms of propaganda with interactive video
or Virtual Reality (VR). Advertising modes that can gather data
portend fine-tuned personalized manipulation, rather than
coarse-grained statistical manipulation of large population segments.
Although the power relationship between "info-producers" and
"info-consumers" will be uneven enough as the corporate sector
develops more detailed files of consumers' transactions, that power
relationship will become utterly skewed if more citizens are
induced to accept technology that incorporates Involuntary
Input Devices (IIDs). This conceptual family of apparatus
represents the extreme pole of what Gary Marx calls "extractive"
information technology. Data are involuntarily extracted from the
objects of surveillance, regardless of their wishes as subjects.
One tangible example of an IID is a system to scan viewers'
pupils. Other involuntary input devices include galvanic skin
response transducers, infrared blood capillary sensors, etc. Such
sensors are a logical extension of current trends in virtual
reality gear.
An earlier IID was the Nielsen passive people-meter, designed
to scan viewers' faces and the pupils of their eyes. Image
recognition software was intended to categorize facial expressions,
enabling instantaneous measurement of audience response to TV ads.37
Today, with interactive multimedia, as soon as a frown is detected,
an interactive ad might be "morphed" into alternative colors and
scenes, until the viewer once again displays a docile, contented,
smiling face.
Supposedly Nielsen's passive people-meter project was (temporarily)
discontinued a few years ago because viewers were uncomfortable that the
device knew when they were drowsing or talking to somebody, rather than
watching the tube. This unfortunate lack of social acceptance can be
overcome by a suitably designed surveillance subsidy. The lure of
virtual reality technology is the ideal bait on the hook of interactive
surveillance. Much existing VR gear depends on an opaque helmet worn
by the subject and sensors attached to various body parts, so that when
the subject physically moves, the VR scene can change accordingly to
provide a convincing illusion. Virtual Reality absolutely requires
Involuntary Input Devices.
Whereas current advertising provides an information subsidy,
technology to implement the "pay-per-view" society would enable a
market in which competing messages might carry negative prices -- they
might "pay-to-be-viewed." How could advertisers ensure that receivers
actually watched their messages? Physiological surveillance
technology -- Involuntary Input Devices. Naturally, advertisers
would demand the "right" to use realtime surveillance feedback
to present their case in the most compelling manner possible.
Encounters with such interactive, morph-able messages might
literally be tests of wills, even if traditional hypnosis were
illegal. Interactive ads, coupled with IIDs, constitute a
giant leap in advertisers' ability to "get inside the mind of
the consumer" -- in a decidedly non-passive manner.
The following Virtual Reality (or video) game is represented
in the format of a crude ASCII-driven video game, coupled with a
"user-friendly" interface that employs a pupil-scanning Involuntary
Input Device:
ENTER COMMAND> Shoot convenience store clerk.
[Video of] Clerk, bleeding profusely, drops behind counter.
ENTER COMMAND> Take case from frozen foods locker.
[Video of] A frosty case of "Cyber-Suds" beer.
ENTER COMMAND> Open case. Take out bottle. Open bottle.
[Video of] Bottle being opened. [Audio track:] "Fizzz"
[Video of] Refreshing beer foaming out. [Audio track:] "Ahhh"
ENTER COMMAND> Tell Bob, "It just doesn't get any better
than this."
[ Interactive software checks response to verify that
Subject has properly memorized Product Slogan ] Bob agrees.
[Video of] Something falling from the sky.
ENTER COMMAND> Look up.
[Video of] The Swedish Bikini Team!
[Video of] You and Bob partying with the Swedish Bikini Team.
Bob smiles at you. The girl fawning over Bob turns
seductively toward the virtual camera and says [Audio track]:
"Cyber-Suds for Cyber Studs ... it just doesn't get any better."
[ Interactive software detects Subject's pupils straying
to Bob's girl, who is blond. It dynamically reprograms the
scene to switch the 2 girls, and logs Subject's preference for
blondes in its permanent files. ]
Bob's girl, now fawning over you, says [audio track]: "I'd
love to go for a nude swim with you, but your file shows
you only bought 3 cases of Cyber-Suds last month. You can
be a Real "Cyber Stud" Man by making your monthly Cyber-Suds
Bikini Team Quota. Let's DO IT right now! Whip out your
credit card ... and then we can go skinnydipping."
ENTER COMMAND> Debit -- 5 cases Cyber-Suds beer
ENTER COMMAND> MasterCard #1349 1277 8652 1109
ENTER COMMAND> Authentication Code #3381 7047 5944
ENTER COMMAND> Give bottle to girl.
[Video of] Girl thanking you gratefully as she opens the bottle.
[Video of] Frothy beer foaming out, [Audio track accompaniment:] "Ahhh"
as her bikini drops to the ground ...
Naturally such interactive applications would have contingency
video and audio footage for those who learn to mix their sex with
virtual violence.
Among young males, video games already serve as a significant
source of self-identification and self-esteem. In the future,
interactive video entertainment will be used to build brand-name
identification and loyalty. Yesterday's consumers were willing to
pay for the privilege of advertising a corporate logo on the clothing
they wore in public spaces. "Product placement" and corporate logos
on video game characters are already occurring in cyberspace.38
Perhaps tomorrow's cyber-consumers can be manipulated not only into
having their own virtual reality character display a logo, but also
into killing those virtual characters who display competing logos.
A variant of the above video game might offer "points" (exchangeable
for merchandise or free replays), whenever one's VR alter ego
encounters and kills an opponent wearing the wrong corporate
logo. Today's youth gangs kill over patches of color on clothing.
One can imagine hate groups using the power of interactive video
feedback to indoctrinate youngsters in the benefits of ethnic cleansing.
Home video game systems provide extremely high video resolution,
and Virtual Reality (VR) gear promises to provide an even more
realistic experience for technophiles of all ages. Barring the
cybernaut's dream of connecting the human brain directly to computer
interfaces, VR technology represents the culmination of the
Information Revolution -- the seamless replacement of warning
signals from the natural environment by synthetic constructs. This
ought to set many alarm bells to ringing. But we are told that,
beyond mere cultural relativism, ethics ought to be technologically
relativist: "I think it is good to beware of looking at the future
through the moral lens of the present. ... In a world of tens of
billions of people, perhaps cyberspace is a better place to keep
most of the population happy, most of the time."39
This sketchy solution should come as a relief to the Trilateral
Commission. But how might the governing elites be certain the
populace would remain docile in their virtual reality cocoons?
Cybernetic social control would require sensing (surveillance) and
precisely-calibrated feedback -- exactly those functions provided
by interactive Panoptic technologies. To maintain computerized
social control over billions of cybernauts might seem expensive, but
perhaps any resistance by the populace can be gradually degraded,
until they are willing to pay "surveillance subsidies" to ensure
their own comfortable incarceration.
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Intelligence Agencies and the Political Economy of Encryption
Intelligence Agencies and the Political Economy of Encryption
The metaphors of older communications technologies are extended
to cyberspace, but many do not make that transition well. Email
(electronic mail) is popularly conceived as sending a letter through
the postal service. But a more accurate analogy is to a typewritten
postcard. The distinction is crucial, since the contents of a postcard
are visible to many mail handlers in the delivery system. Furthermore,
a typewritten postcard carries no signature to authenticate its
origin. Proponents of generalized email surveillance argue that,
despite various laws, monitoring email is legal, since experienced
cyber-citizens should have no expectation of privacy.
Suffice it to say that, given currently installed software,
neither the confidentiality nor the authenticity of email can be
assured. Because email monitoring is cheap and undetectable
(unlike steaming open and then resealing postal envelopes),
practices of eavesdropping and forgery should be considered
widespread. A tapped telephone line is a closer analogy to email.
To legally tap an individual's phone in the U.S. formerly
required a search warrant, and visible hardware. In older days, a
government agent had to physically travel to a local telephone
company's Central Office switch, attach alligator clips to a
selected wire, and remain in the building, visible to telephone
company management and employees alike. This labor-intensive
process was eased somewhat by tape recorders. But even then,
someone had to listen to those tapes and transcribe them before
other observers could skim the contents quickly.
With email, the balance of power between observer and
subject has shifted. Once intercepted, the contents of email are
already transcribed and entered in a computer for easy keyword
searching. Moreover, email can be "intercepted" after transmission,
since the recipient's host computer contains a copy. Thus, an agent
can penetrate the system and copy the email anytime before the
recipient deletes the email. And as Lt. Col. Oliver North learned
to his dismay, even if the recipient deletes the email after reading
it, redundancy programs installed on many host systems make backup
copies of all data, which may persist indefinitely. Moreover, because
the labor cost of cyber-surveillance is so low, it enables a small
organization (with immense computer resources) to surveil the digital
communications of an entire population. Human labor is needed
only after a particular suspect is singled out. Thus, there is
the potential for "retroactive wiretapping" of an entire society.
How might a society defend itself against such a surveillance
program? One tactic involves avoidance of a single, uniform, easily
tapped network. Instead, multiple overlapping local, regional, and
national networks would be employed. Surveillance agents would
then need to install many physical "wiretaps" to guarantee
interception of all dataflow. Another tactic is security through
overload. If the volume of traffic is high enough, the recording
capabilities of the monitoring agents can be exceeded.
Curiously, descriptions of both tactics seem to characterize
the evolution of the Internet, an international collection of over
20 million users on 2 million host computers connected via 16,000
networks in 60 countries (concentrated in the industrialized nations)
that communicate in a manner best described as anarchic. Network
topology evolves rapidly, and is in a constant state of flux, making
it difficult even to measure the dimensions of the Internet. The number
of networks connected to the Internet currently is doubling every
year, and the volume of traffic on the Internet is expanding at the
rate of 20% per month. If an agency is trying to keep all this
under surveillance, the job must be a nightmare.
But to monitor such volume and complexity, it is not necessary
to access the contents of each message. Instead, a discipline
known as traffic analysis simplifies the task by recording only the
addresses of email senders and recipients (or those of telephone
calls, for that matter). Clustering or block modelling algorithms
can deduce shared interests among subgroups of communicators,
identify "leaders," etc.40 The surveillance potential is vast, and
once again alters the balance of power.
The ultimate solution to network surveillance is encryption,
coupled with anonymous re-mailer systems to foil traffic analysis.
If both the contents and the terminal addresses of messages are
strongly encrypted, that should suffice to foil any would-be
surveillance agents. But what evidence indicates this concern
with communications surveillance is more than simple paranoia?
A March 1992 proposal by the FBI would require all U.S.
telecommunication companies to provide the FBI with a remote-
surveillance capability. The FBI argues that with new forms of
digital telephony, it is becoming difficult or impossible for them
to wiretap enemies of the people, such as organized crime, drug
barons, etc. Naturally, citizens would continue to receive full
Constitutional protections of due process -- i.e., a search
warrant based on probable cause would be required (except in cases
of "National Security") before the FBI could initiate a remote
digital wiretap.
"If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry
about," we are told. "Don't you want to be protected from
criminals?" Intelligence agencies raise the spectre of hackers
breaking into TRW's database and destroying citizens' credit
ratings, or breaking into hospital computer systems and interfering
with the functioning of intensive care equipment. In the ultimate
irony, the threat of hacking is used to sell the public on the
benefits of government telecom monitoring. If the scheme succeeds,
all government-inspected email may one day carry the tag: "THIS
E-MAIL HAS BEEN MONITORED BY THE STATE TO PROTECT INDIVIDUAL PRIVACY."
To develop this remote wiretapping capability would cost hundreds
of millions of dollars. Who would absorb the cost? "Pass it on to
the consumers," responds the FBI, "Either that or let the taxpayers
foot the bill." But what about the social costs: the FBI has a habit
of illegally wiretapping social activists, such as Rev. Martin Luther
King, Jr. With this proposal, as usual, the benefits would accrue to
whoever controls the technology -- a government agency or transnational
corporation. The "external costs" would appear in the social column,
as an immense debit in the categories of freedom, privacy, and
personal autonomy.
Note this technology carries a similar risk to that of atomic power:
It must be safeguarded from misuse for generations. Just as stockpiled
plutonium represents concentrated military power, and thus must be
guarded in perpetuity, so centralized mass-surveillance technology offers
concentrated social power, and presents a long-lived irresistible
temptation -- an attraction that eventually may prove fatal to democracy.
The FBI's proposal to achieve "Universal Surveillance for All"
is opposed by many large corporations, since it would require every
company PBX system to include a port allowing the FBI access to
conduct remote surveillance. Thus, presumably armed with a search
warrant, the FBI could intercept all communications traffic
transiting a corporate site without ever visiting the site to
physically "tap" into its PBX switch. Corporate interests are
concerned that such a remote surveillance capability would be a
security hole that could be exploited by competitors engaged in
industrial espionage. The FBI's proposal seems ludicrous in light
of encryption technology. Why bother to intercept communications if
you are unable to decipher the language in which they are encoded?
That conundrum was resolved in April 1993, when a chilling
proposal surfaced, ostensibly from NIST (the National Institute for
Standards and Technology), to promulgate a "voluntary" government-
approved cryptography system for civilian computer and phone
communication. Documents obtained by CPSR (Computer Professionals
for Social Responsibility) under the Freedom of Information Act
reveal that, in violation of the Computer Security Act of 1987,
the real initiator of this proposal is the NSA (National
Security Agency) -- the agency charged with intercepting all
transmissions relevant to national security. The budget of the
NSA exceeds that of all other intelligence agencies combined --
e.g., the FBI, CIA, DIA -- and its computing power is measured
not in MIPS or gigabytes, but in acres of physical ground
covered by the most modern computing equipment.41
This proposal would establish a cryptographic algorithm,
called Skipjack, as a de facto civilian standard, despite the fact
that the Skipjack algorithm itself remains classified as a military
secret. It is customary to publish crypto algorithms, so that they
may be tested by all challengers to prove their mettle against
attacks by cryptanalysis. But the NSA refuses to allow public
testing. The Skipjack algorithm would be implemented in hardware,
in a chip called Clipper or Capstone, which could be installed in
computers and phones.
Central to this NSA/NIST proposal is that every user's private
crypto "keys" would be registered with government authorities. In
this manner, if an intelligence agency needed to decipher the
encrypted communications from a wiretap or intercepted email, the
agency could obtain the corresponding decryption keys from the
government key "escrow" authority.
In an unprecedented public appearance in July 1993 before the
Computer System Security and Privacy Advisory Board in Washington,
Dr. Clint Brooks, the Assistant Director of the NSA, readily
admitted that the Skipjack/Clipper system is not intended to catch
any criminals. Obviously, he said, those who have something to
hide will avoid inviting government wiretaps by using the system.
Those sentiments were echoed by NIST's Acting Director, Ray Kammer,
who recently said, "It's obvious that anyone who uses Clipper
[Skipjack] for the conduct of organized crime is dumb." [41.5]
Why then, would the NSA propose a "voluntary" cryptographic
standard, to which the government would hold the keys? The most
obvious explanation is that it is merely the first step in a
process to gradually degrade people's expectations of privacy,
until ultimately the NSA can outlaw any non-approved crypto
algorithms or devices. Establishment of Clipper as a de facto
crypto standard in the marketplace would make non-standard crypto
traffic stand out like a sore thumb. Every law abiding citizen
who used Clipper would have their crypto chip's serial number
transmitted at the start of each communication, thus rendering
the citizen's location known to authorities, and her activities
susceptible to traffic analysis, for which the U.S. government
doesn't even need a search warrant.
Suppose -- contrary to all historical evidence -- the public
trusts that no intelligence agency will mount an organized campaign
of general surveillance. If government-accessible cryptography is
widely used, is there a potential for rogue elements in government
intelligence agencies to abuse the public trust? The same week that
Dr. Brooks testified, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee held
hearings on abuse by police of the FBI's National Crime Information
Center (NCIC -- a computerized database of criminals and suspects).
In one instance, a former police officer accessed the NCIC without
authorization to track down and murder one of his former girlfriends.
In another case, a woman finagled access to the NCIC to check the
records of prospective clients for her drug-dealing boyfriend, so
they could avoid undercover operatives. It is widely assumed that
the broad collaboration between police agencies and private security
forces means that much of the NCIC data has already been compromised,
and is now duplicated in numerous private databases.
Clearly the move toward outlawing any crypto system that is
unbreakable by the NSA has extremely ominous overtones. But the
ramifications of widespread use of unbreakably encrypted
communication are not comforting either. Recall that not only
data, but also trillions of dollars of capital flow through
cyberspace every day: "It is imaginable that, with the widespread
use of digital cash and encrypted monetary exchange on the Global
Net, economies the size of America's could appear as nothing but
oceans of alphabet soup. Money laundering would no longer be
necessary. The payment of taxes might become more or less
voluntary. A lot of weird things would happen after that..."42
Widespread use of unbreakable encrypted communications would further
exacerbate the existing class-based discrimination by law enforcement
agencies: "If law enforcement is left to investigate only crimes in
which neither communications nor data are essential proof, it is
unlikely that prosecution of crimes such as murder, assault, rape,
and robbery, would be significantly affected. What would be affected,
however, is prosecution of business crime. The end result would be
a contour to law enforcement that is decidedly class-focused."43
Thus, it seems that neither technological alternative for
communications access by government would result in an acceptable
balance of power between business and government. In both cases,
it seems that civil society would be on the losing side of the
power struggle.
It is instructive to look beyond America's borders for
insight. The French government is known to use electronic
surveillance to eavesdrop on U.S. manufacturers in France.
Pierre Marion, retired head of the DGSE (the French CIA) was
dismayed that the Pentagon boycotted the 1993 Paris Air Show
in reaction to French industrial espionage against 49
American-based multinational corporations: "A national
intelligence agency that would not consider doing that
kind of intelligence work would not be fulfilling its
mission. ... Economic intelligence is a fact of life."44
Given the French policy of conducting industrial espionage
against multinational corporations originating in other countries,
widespread international use of Clipper would certainly enhance
the ability of U.S. intelligence agencies to play that same
game. This explanation fits well with the struggle of U.S.
intelligence agencies to justify their budgets and existence in the
post Cold War era. U.S. agencies have floated numerous trial
balloons regarding their entry into industrial espionage, for both
"offensive" and "defensive" purposes.45 Perhaps this putsch to
concentrate power in the hands of a central crypto authority will
be sold to the American public (like so many other raw deals)
with the rhetoric of "economic competitiveness".
This situation is one in which, to date, there appears to be scant
middle ground between competing technological dystopias. One
technological pole would doom Privacy -- personal and corporate
-- and thereby allow intelligence agencies to reign supreme.
The other technological pole would elevate Privacy over all other
"rights", and thus could end most remaining government (and
citizen) power to regulate business.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
[ I added this update in Feb 1996 just before publication ]
Events have moved rapidly since this section was written in Oct 1993.
Legislation (HR 4922, S. 2375) implementing much of the FBI's March 1992
"Digital Telephony" proposal was passed by Congress, with no floor debate,
in an unrecorded voice vote in Oct. 1994. To reimburse telecom companies
for the cost of making their equipment "surveillance-friendly",
this "Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act"
authorized $500 million dollars for the first four years.
The bill nominally precludes law enforcement from having remote,
automated surveillance capability. Yet in Oct. 1995, the FBI
published a "wiretap capacity notice" in the Federal Register
[ October 16, 1995 (Volume 60, Number 199), Page 53643-53646 ]
stating it intends to mandate a re-design of telephone networks
to allow it to intercept simultaneously up to one percent of all calls.
Such an unprecedented level of domestic wiretapping is at least a
thousand times greater than is currently reported by intelligence
agencies in the U.S.
So much for interception capability. What about the Clipper Chip?
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 14, 1995,
FBI Director Louis Freeh sounded a newly ominous note regarding the
voluntary nature of government-approved encryption:
"Powerful encryption threatens to make worthless
the access assured by the new digital [telephony] law."
And indeed, U.S. government documents released in Aug. 1995, in response
to a FoIA request by EPIC (Electronic Privacy Information Center),
reveal that -- contrary to the Administration's public statements --
the FBI and NSA had concluded as early as Feb. 1993 that the "Clipper Chip"
encryption initiative would succeed ONLY IF alternative encryption
techniques are outlawed.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Information Superhighway -- to Where?
The Information Superhighway -- to Where?
New technologies of communication are waiting in the wings,
poised to take center stage. The "digital convergence" of TV with
computers and telecommunications networks, is to culminate in a
National Information Infrastructure (NII) or Information Superhighway.
Once again, techno-optimistic visions of best case scenarios are
proclaimed with great and uncritical enthusiasm. "Electronic
democracy" is just one magic elixir. "The information revolution
is bringing with it a key that may open the door to a new era of
involvement and participation. The key is the self-motivating
exhilaration that accompanies truly effective interaction with
information through a good console through a good network to a good
computer."46
Some grandiose predictions regarding electronic democracy can
be excused as instinctive extrapolations from current trends.
Admittedly, trends in participation on the Internet are
encouraging. But Internet culture is a renaissance that represents
the flowering of a print culture, one composed almost exclusively
of First World educated elites. An equally significant factor is
that current Internet culture is primarily non-commercial.
In America, much of it is subsidized by the federal government,
ostensibly to promote research and education. Obviously, given
that half of Americans are functionally illiterate, this print
culture can not easily be "scaled up" to engage other segments of
society, despite commendable outreach efforts, e.g., to provide
online access to the homeless in Santa Monica. Moreover, the only
design goal for the NII that is shared by both government and the
private sector alike is the perceived need for massive bandwidth --
the capacity to carry gigabits of information per second. That
increased channel capacity will make viable the transmission of
video signals over the NII, and it is reasonable to assume that
much of Internet's current print culture will be displaced, washed
away by another triumphant stream of images.
Technological frontiers are key sites in the struggle over the
production and distribution of meaning. For critics to reject a
technology, for opponents to abdicate the struggle, does little
more than cede the field to those who remain. Contesting the
meaning of "electronic democracy" by struggling to establish
prototype applications on community and regional scales, seems a
more viable strategy than does ceding the field to electronic
demagogues like Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh.
Moreover, to reject a given family of technological
applications may be counterproductive, unless related applications
similarly can be rejected. For example, suppose opponents
rally sufficient forces to prevent the telcos and cable TV
companies from constructing a NII of their own design. But that
would ignore the electric utility companies. Through Realtime
Residential Power Line Surveillance, electric utilities "can
sharply reduce the future costs of making power at the same time
they are capitalizing the cost of building the great information
superhighway."47 Despite efforts to promote a public interest
vision for the NII, the lure of profits may drive de facto
mergers between telcos, cable TV providers, and electric utilities.
It is ironic that allegedly "decentralized, democratic"
technologies in fact engender such concentrations of power.
Much dispute over the NII appears to be about money: Who will
pay for it, and who will profit? It is by no means clear that a
NII will facilitate gains in productivity.48 If home gambling is
typical of the "killer applications" needed to induce consumer
demand for an NII "product," then the NII may be the ultimate example
of firms internalizing benefits as they externalize the net costs
onto society at large.
Economic considerations regarding a NII should not distract
our attention from more fundamental issues of normative values,
politics, and the distribution of power. Throughout history,
media technologies have co-evolved with the arts of politics.
The present crisis of democracy is inseparable from the ascendency
of television as the dominant source of "news." In the words of
computer pioneer Alan Kay, "Television should be the last mass
communications medium to be naively designed and put into the world
without a Surgeon General's warning!" [48.5]
Just as each new generation must learn for itself the lessons of
war, so must each generation renew its contracts with democracy, and
it must renegotiate those contracts in light of the prevailing media
technologies of the times. Hazel Henderson is correct to point out
that, "Fears about the misuse of instantaneous forms of democracy
-- technological hardware like ... call-in radio, television,
electronic town meetings, polling, have stifled the debate over how
to design these potential tools of democratic participation so as
to avoid abuse and new forms of totalitarianism."49
It is said that, no matter what form of government we have
in the U.S., it will always be called "democracy." Modern
communications technologies -- and the businesses that control
them -- already comprise a de facto "information infrastructure"
that profoundly influences politics. Whether the meaning of
"democracy" is further degraded and perverted, will be determined by
the struggle of contending forces. The NII is neither a hardware
mechanism nor a software application. Rather, it is a new name for an
old locus of struggle, between those who control today's communications
resources, and those who have suffered the "externalities" imposed by
previous generations of social architectures. What is needed is more
open debate over various forms of electronic democracy and dictatorship,
so a wider spectrum of people can be intelligent participants in shaping
the decisions that determine their future.
The metaphor of the NII as an "information superhighway"
evokes images of physical nuts and bolts -- which seem inherently
value-neutral until they are used for some specific purpose. But
values may be embedded in the very design of telecommunications
hardware, not merely in the software applications that run on
particular computer platforms. Cable TV hardware provides
an instructive example. Not surprisingly, the Cable TV
"infrastructure" was designed by profit-seekers whose thoughts
were constrained by the dominant (and dominating) paradigm,
that the purpose of a network is entertainment, and that there
are two separate and distinct types of entities connected to a
network: information producers and information consumers.
This schema is heavily value laden, and the asymmetric power
relation it engenders already is immanent in many technologies.
With Cable TV infrastructure, activists who want to use existing
Cable TV wiring to implement a local community network, typically
find that the bandwidth from information "producers" to "consumers"
is thousands of times greater than the capacity of the return leg.
The vast majority of Cable TV networking technology (repeaters on fiber
optic cable) has been "optimized" to suit a particular set of values.
Cable TV and telecom companies try to frame NII issues in
terms of hardware -- which segments of the communications network
should be "upgraded" first to fiber optic capacities, or should
satellite channels, cellular technologies, and packet-switched
radio be employed instead? The implicit assumption (embedded in
the ideology of the Information Age) is that to "upgrade" a channel,
it suffices to boost its bandwith, or capacity to support information
flow. The content of that information, and the nature of its sources,
are secondary considerations. We are told that a nationwide
high-bandwidth NII will usher in the next Golden Age: "Information
is power, and the key to empowering Americans is to give them access
to it. Information is the public's No. 1 need."50
To help deconstruct the dreams of computer romantics, Langdon
Winner identifies a complex of mistaken assumptions: "(1) people
are bereft of information; (2) information is knowledge; (3)
knowledge is power; and (4) increasing access to information
enhances democracy and equalizes social power. Taken as separate
assertions and in combination, these beliefs provide a woefully
distorted picture of the role of electronic systems in social life."51
The gap between the info-rich and the info-poor within an
industrial society is maintained partly because the info-poor are
confused and divided regarding their own best interests, and partly
due to disparities in communications competence.52 Mere access to
data will not alleviate that state. Rather, it will exacerbate the
knowledge gap, since, "Those best situated to take advantage of the
power of a new technology are often those previously well situated
by dint of wealth, social standing, and institutional position."53
For example, much of the economic value of data lies in its
timeliness. Even if an info-pauper could gain access to high-priced
financial data and interpret it, the opportunity to exploit that data
would probably pass within microseconds, as automated trading programs
in global financial powerhouses rose to gobble the bait. It takes
money to make money, even in cyberspace. Due to the social biases
and the differential benefits of new information technology,
today's underclass risks winding up as road kill on the shoulder
of tomorrow's information superhighway.
Mere information does not imply knowledge, nor does the latter
necessarily entail power. To transform raw information into useful
knowledge requires the application of values, and the production of
meaning. Thus, a sampling of principles that should be promoted
for the common good includes equal access, communicative freedom,
privacy, non-commercialism, collaborative education, community-
building, active engagement in citizenship, ongoing evolution of
the NII through participatory (re-)design, and more symmetric power
relations between individuals and institutions.
To illustrate the complexity of these principles, it is
instructive to attempt to "unbundle" the principle of equal access.
The public interest battle cry of "equal access to information"
neglects three important factors: (1) disparities in communications
competence by receivers; (2) the problem of information overload;
and (3) disproportionate abilities to communicate with targeted
receivers. The first factor might be addressed by active
outreach and training efforts -- affirmative programs for adult
literacy, rather than passive "availability" of self-tutoring
software that may be psychologically or culturally inappropriate.
The second factor -- information overload -- has not yet
been solved satisfactorily, even for the info-rich. Nevertheless,
as it becomes more widely recognized by the info-rich as their
limiting factor, methods to manage the information glut, such as
indexing and filtering tools, will become the next stumbling block
for the info-poor. We will then need equal access to meta-
information. Imagine if access to today's "Yellow Pages" (by
readers and/or writers) were by invitation only, or required
payment of a hefty fee. Differential access to sources of meta-
information, even among the info-rich, will engender new power
disparities. Whereas the limiting factor in many current media
environments is the control over distribution, the locus of
struggle will shift to control over indexing authorities and
information filtering standards. For example, what indexing
authority will decide whether fundamentalist Christian abortion
counseling centers will meet the selection criteria of a
computerized search for "abortion service providers"?
To address the third factor of "equal access" --
disproportionate abilities to communicate with targeted receivers
-- also treads in the realm of meta-information, since that is very
much the business of today's direct mailing list vendors. The
situation is further complicated by issues of privacy and
intellectual property: to reveal the names and addresses on a
mailing list might provoke (additional) unwanted invasions of
privacy, and it would give an advantage to competing vendors
of mailing lists.
Many fundamental concepts of industrial civilization will not make
the transition to cyberspace unscathed. Besides the struggle against
extensions of corporate intellectual property rights ("wrongs"),
a radical reassessment of the Cartesian model of communication -- as
a conduit for data between fully autonomous individuals -- will be
required. When human beings are viewed from a cognitive
information-processing standpoint, it is apparent that we read (and
then more or less critically interpret) printed material as data,
but we execute compiled visual images as code. In the language of
computer security, this inherent vulnerability to images will
result in serious breaches of system integrity. Personal integrity
and autonomy are, therefore, more foundational issues than are mere
notions of privacy. Human beings must be treated as subjects of
communication, not as objects of manipulation. Somehow the
technologies of control must, themselves, be brought under social
control.
Across the grand stage of history, several acts in the saga
of corporate development have passed in succession. The advent of
mass production entailed a crisis of distribution. Construction
of physical infrastructure for transportation alleviated the
distribution crisis. Then followed the vertical integration of
production with distribution, causing a significant shift in power
from the chaotic regime of the "invisible hand" to the controlled
regime of the "managerial hand" -- the institutional rationality
of the corporation.54 With manufacturing and distribution becoming
ever more productive under efficient, integrated managerial
control, the bottleneck in the economic system shifted to the realm
of consumption. The technology of marketing and advertising then
evolved to boost consumption through the cultivation of "needs."
Now, as the Media Monopoly gathers steam, the economic system
is poised for the next stage of vertical integration. With the
development of a "National Information Infrastructure," the
emerging Information Age conglomerate may bring under one
(distributed, virtual) roof the manufacture, distribution, and
(intensively cultivated) consumption of its information products.
Should the media-industrial complex ever reach that stage, the balance
of power between institutions and individuals could be irrevocably lost.
Institutions engaged in the manipulation of social reality would
then control the very "means of production" of meaning itself.
The increasing corporate influence over leisure or "free" time
prefigures the transition from the "Pay Per View" society, to a fragmented
populace trained to Pay Per Experience, who ultimately "Pay to Be Viewed."
Undemocratic, market-driven "advances" in information technology are
accelerating the commodification of existence, as citizens sacrifice
autonomy and privacy for consumer convenience and surveillance subsidies.
The road to freedom via a two-way Information Highway may turn into
a one-way Surveillance Street, used to condition people's thoughts and
control their behavior -- a form of "progress" that benefits only the
powerful. In their quest for profit and power, the wardens of the
Panoptic prison -- both corporate and military -- share a common mission:
assisted by the best computing power money can buy, they work to extend
their ongoing colonization of consciousness.
The initial stages of a virtual Panoptic prison planet have
already been constructed, even without a conscious, unified design.
Millions of people are essentially prisoners of television, even
before its metamorphosis via the "digital convergence." Although
these individuals are allowed to leave their living rooms on "work
furloughs," they have effectively ceded control of their "free" time
to the rhythms and dictates of institutional marketing strategies.
The most secure prison is one where the inmates think they are free --
because then they can harbor no thoughts of rebellion or escape. As the
outer walls of the Virtual Panopticon solidify into completion, few Americans
realize they risk a life sentence as prisoners of Panoptic disinformation.
To the degree that interactive feedback is linked to the engines of
computerized surveillance and classification, it will become economical
to distribute individually tailored Panoptic disinformation.
The warning signs of this invisible Panopticon were apparent to
Ellul as far back as 1954: "It will not be a universal concentration
camp, for it will be guilty of no such atrocity. It will not seem insane,
for everything will be ordered ... We shall have nothing more to lose,
and nothing to win. Our deepest instincts and our most secret passions
will be analyzed, published, and exploited."55
In 1982, Gandy predicted "the regular, patterned, and skillful
manipulation of the information environment to ensure that ...
perceptions of past, present, and future lead ultimately to the
selection of a preferred option or plan."56 More recently, he
writes, "Within the panoptic future, addressability and
verifiability mean that it is much more likely that each of us will
be exposed to a different, customized, administratively tailored
image of our immediate environment, our risks, our options, and the
opportunities for the realization of our dreams."57
The Panoptic Information Enclosure already has subverted the
information flow around millions of people. Perhaps before everyone
can be imprisoned snugly in virtual Panoptic cocoons, the external
environment will intrude on our media-induced sweet dreams.
Ecosystem collapse, coupled with social collapse, may prove
difficult to ignore. These disturbances may intrude even into the
sanctity of the (virtual) home shopping mall, with such force that
the hegemony of consumption cannot absorb them. Yet perhaps we can
still get organized as autonomous publics, and take back our cultural
environment by introducing a new, even democratic, mode of traffic
on the Superhighway. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, it's morning in
America -- time to wake up and cast off the chains of market-structured
consciousness.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
______________________
1 "In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival
of the Indian Nations," Jerry Mander / Sierra Club Books 1991
2 Ad in New Statesman, 25 May 1979
3 "Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life,"
K. Robins and F. Webster, in "The Political Economy of Information," ed.
Vincent Mosco and Janet Wasko / Univ. of Wisconsin Press 1988, p. 49
4 "Projecting a Positive Image of the Information Society," Jerry L.
Salvaggio, in "Ideology of the Information Age," ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack
and Fred Fejes / Ablex 1987, p. 154:
"The information industry is investing billions of dollars into
manufacturing an image as a guarantee that the information age is
not a futuristic illusion."
5 "Technology and Terrorism: Privatizing Public Violence,"
Stephen Sloan, in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine 10:2
(Summer 1991), p. 8-14
6 "Power and Accountability," Robert A.G. Monks (former Reagan economist)
and Nell Minow / HarperCollins 1991, p. 24:
"Despite attempts to provide balance and accountability,
the corporation as an entity became so powerful that it
quickly outstripped the limitations of accountability
and became something of an externalizing machine, in the
same way that a shark is a killing machine -- no malevolence,
no intentional harm, just something designed with sublime
efficiency for self-preservation, which it accomplishes
without any capacity to factor in the consequences to others."
7 "Panopticon; or, the Inspection House," Jeremy Bentham 1791
8 "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison," Michel Foucault
/ Pantheon 1977
9 "Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life,"
K. Robins and F. Webster, in "The Political Economy of Information,"
ibid, p. 55
10 "Energy and Equity," Ivan Illich / Harper & Row 1974:
Illich calculated that the typical American spends
more than four hours each day in car-related activities, including
not only driving and idling, but also earning money to pay for the
car, its maintenance and insurance, etc. "The model American puts
in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour." (p. 31)
11 The potential of home VCR technology for "temporal emancipation"
through "time shifting" is utilized by only a minute fraction of
VCR owners. The vast majority automatically internalize the
discipline implicitly imposed by the wardens' central
transmitting tower, and "choose" to watch -- synchronously --
whatever is currently being broadcast. The new consumer choice
of realtime interactive television promises to reinforce this
constraint of synchronicity.
12 "Privacy Concern Raised over Lotus Marketplace," CPSR Newsletter
8:4, Fall 1990, p. 24,5
13 "Information Technology and Society," K. Lenk, in A. Schaff
and G. Griedrichs, "Microelectronics and Society: For Better or
for Worse: A Report to the Club of Rome" Pergamon 1982
14 "International Information Flow: A Plan for Action," Business Roundtable,
New York, Jan. 1985, p. 6-11
15 "Telecommunications and International Banking," M. Buyer, in
"Telecommunications" 1982
16 "Office Automation and the Technical Control of Information Workers,"
Andrew Clement, in "The Political Economy of Information," ibid, p. 222
17 "Business Cycles: A Theoretical, Historical, and Statistical
Analysis of the Capitalist Process," Joseph Schumpeter, McGraw-Hill 1939
18 "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to
Calculation," Joseph Weizenbaum / W. H. Freeman 1976
18.5 "In Praise of Robots". Carl Sagan.
Natural History. v.84 n.1, Jan. 1975, p. 8-20 (quote is on p. 10).
18.6 The Trilateral Commission is a club of economic elites
that promotes a uniform globalized economy, with national laws
standardized to benefit transnational corporations. The quote
regarding "democratic distemper" appears in:
"The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to
the Trilateral Commission" / Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington,
Joji Watanuki. [New York] : New York University Press, 1975
19 "Continental Economic Integration: Modeling the Impact on Labor,"
James Stanford. Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science, Mar 1993, V526 p. 92-110
20 The electric utilities' term for RRPLS is more innocuous --
"Non-Intrusive Appliance Load Monitoring System" (NIALMS).
21 United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 (1976) Supreme Court
decision
22 "Information Technology and Dataveillance," Roger Clarke /
Communications of the ACM 31:5 (May 1988) p. 498-512
23 "Residential Energy Monitoring and Computerized Surveillance
via Utility Power Flows," George W. Hart / IEEE Technology and
Society Magazine (p. 12-16), June 1989
24 "Reaching Out with Two-way Communications," J. Douglas.
EPRI Journal, Sept. 1990, v.15, n.6, p. 4-13
25 "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media,"
Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Pantheon 1988
26 "Makers of automated-home systems see a future of
TVs talking to thermostats," Mitchell Pacelle / WSJ 9/28/92
27 "While the Cable and Phone Companies Fight ... Look Who's
Wiring the Home Now," S. Rivkin / New York Times Magazine, Sept.
26, 1993
28 Karen Nussbaum, then Executive Director of "9 to 5," the National
Association of Working Women. Panel discussion:
"Computer-Based Surveillance of Individuals"
First Conference on Computers, Freedom, & Privacy
March 27, 1991, Burlingame, Calif.
Sponsored by Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.
29 "Bosses with X-ray Eyes," Charles Piller / Macworld,
v.10, n.7, July 1993, p. 118-124
29.5 Ad in PC WEEK cited by Karen Nussbaum, "Computer-Based Surveillance"
30 "LA: The Fire This Time," Mike Davis. CovertAction, Summer 1992
(No. 41), p. 12-21. (quote on p. 19)
31 "The Video Game Culture: How it's changing kids' perception of
the world," Laura Evenson / San Francisco Chronicle 5/25/93
32 San Jose Mercury News, 25 May 1993
33 "Too Violent for Kids?" TIME magazine 9/27/93, p. 70
34 "The Cultural Dimensions of Educational Computing:
Understanding the Non-neutrality of Technology," C.A. Bowers
/ Teachers College Press 1988
35 "Computer Literacy: People Adapted for Technology,"
Y. Magrass and R. Upchurch. Computers and Society 18:2 April 1988, p. 8-15
36 "High-tech programs are no substitute for quality education,"
Michael Schrage. Los Angeles Times v112 (May 6, 1993):D1
37 "New Nielsen System is Turning Heads: Peoplemeter that reads
faces, and where they're looking, raises specter of Big Brother,"
Stephen McClellan. Broadcasting, v122, n21, 5/18/92 (p. 8)
38 "Computer Game Enters the Ad Age," Jamie Beckett /
San Francisco Chronicle 12/16/92
39 "Virtual Reality," Howard Rheingold / Summit Books 1991, p. 352
40 "Discovering Shared Interests Using Graph Analysis,"
M. Schwartz and D. Wood / Communications of the ACM 36:8 Aug. 1993, p. 78-79
41 "The Puzzle Palace," J. Bamford / Houghton Mifflin 1982
41.5 "A Plain Text on Crypto Policy," John Perry Barlow /
Communications of the ACM 36:11, Nov. 1993, p. 21-26
42 "A Plain Text on Crypto Policy," John Perry Barlow
43 "The Underpinnings of Privacy Protection," F. Tuerkheimer /
Communications of the ACM 36:8, Aug. 1993, p. 69-73
44 "International Spy Business Concentrates Mostly on Business,"
C. Hanley / AP, 6/4/93
45 "Administration to Consider Giving Spy Data to Business,"
R. Smith / Washington Post 2/3/93
46 "Computers and Government," J. Licklider, in "The Computer Age,"
ed. M. Dertouzos and J. Moses / MIT Press 1979
47 "While the Cable and Phone Companies Fight ... Look Who's
Wiring the Home Now," S. Rivkin / New York Times Magazine. Sept.
26, 1993
48 "Telecommunications Infrastructure and U.S. International
Competitiveness," J. Aronson, in "A National Information Network:
Changing our Lives in the 21st Century," Inst. for Information
Studies 1992, Falls Church, VA
48.5 "Four Images for the Information Superhighway Summit,"
paper presented 1/11/94 by Apple Fellow Dr. Alan Kay to the
"Superhighway Summit" sponsored by the Academy of Television Arts
& Sciences at UCLA.
49 "Perfecting Democracy's Tools," H. Henderson, in "After the
Nation-State: Reinventing Democracy," New Perspectives Quarterly,
Fall 1992, p. 22, Emphasis added
50 "Building America's Infostructure: Public Policy in the
Information Age," B. Farrah and D. Maxwell / Telephony. April
20, 1992, p. 52
51 "The Whale and the Reactor: A Search for Limits in an Age of High
Technology," Langdon Winner / Univ. of Chicago Press 1986, p. 108
52 "The Political Economy of Communications Competence," Oscar H. Gandy, Jr.
in "The Political Economy of Information," ibid
53 "The Whale and the Reactor," ibid p. 107
54 "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American
Business," Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. / Belknap Press 1977
55 "The Technological Society," Jacques Ellul /
Alfred A. Knopf (English translation) 1964, p. 427
56 "Beyond Agenda Setting: Information Subsidies and Public Policy,"
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. / Ablex 1982
57 "The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information,"
Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. / Westview 1993, p. 231
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