Confronting the 'Digital Panopticon' (La Jornada, Mexico)

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Confronting the 'Digital Panopticon' (La Jornada, Mexico)

"We should hold a celebration for the prize given to Edward Snowden by the Right Livelihood Foundation. He was the first to reveal the guts of this new panopticon. … Control, however, requires more than the act of surveillance. In Mexico over recent years, the digital sphere has become an area in which the state exercises direct coercion: threats, intimidation, the falsification of Tweets and the cloning of Web sites and magazines are part of a catalogue of practices designed to immobilize critics and suspend basic freedoms of expression. Automated bots used against the student movement, threats made against followers of 2012 presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, campaigns of falsification mounted against [columnist] Carmen Aristegui, and the cloning of Web sites in the state of Quintana Roo are merely symptoms of a new system of control."

By Ilán Semo

Translated By Ricardo Cidra

October 4, 2014

Mexico – La Jornada – Original Article (Spanish)

A few days ago a Japanese company launched a new kind of digital eyewear, SmartGlass. It comes with the same features as Google Glass: An iPad and smartphone combined in one device. But there's something novel: a spherical micro-camera capable of simultaneously registering the face of the user - as with Skype, and the user's visual field. It’s a kind of "third eye" observing what we see the moment we look at it. If network connectivity has reached (or rather colonized) the areas of voice and image, it now also takes in our line of sight.

"Third eye" technology has a history. In the second Iraq campaign in 2003, U.S. infantry troops wore infrared cameras on their helmets for night missions which would send signals to a satellite. The satellite would return images that included an extended field of vision which included enemy positions beyond the soldiers' field of view. The novelty today is that with SmartGlass, "third eye" tech is available to anyone.

Posted By Worldmeets.US

On the Web, a record is created of every click - every action is stored. We leave signs and signals of our existence everywhere. A 20th century policeman would never have dreamed of access of one one-hundredth of the information available on a single Facebook page. In the digital realm, one citizen amounts to a file: a profile is compiled going back years that includes intimate photos and even more intimate personal information. Tastes and preferences are registered, as well as successes and failures, and above all, the subject's way of thinking.

This profile contains a veritable Pandora’s Box which is at the heart of a new power: the society of control. Out of the same realm of freedom that the Internet makes possible, with its capacity for viral communication flows and the evasion of censorship, has emerged a system of digital immobilization.

In principle, all forms of power involve three basic operations: monitor, control and intimidate. In the 1970s, Foucault surprised everyone when he used the architectural metaphor of a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham to explain the operations of surveillance systems in the 19th century. Bentham imagined a prison in which a watchman located on a tower would watch over prisoners that could not observe him (the design was inspired by the Lecumberri Prison). The prisoners never knew when they were being watched. It is a system where the few observed the many and which allowed systematic control. Its effectiveness, according to Bentham, depended on locking up prisoners in isolated cells to prevent any form of communication among them.

In the digital panopticon imagined by Byung-Chul Han (Transparency Society, Herder, 2013), things work differently. On the Internet, everyone incessantly communicates with one another. People post their life stories voluntarily, and the process of surveillance is absolutely secret (there is neither tower nor watchmen to be seen). Performing the act of observation are search engines. The perverse aspect of this system is that the state doesn’t provide for laws to regulate or set limits on their actions (in the United States, Obama himself nipped in the bud demands for legislation to control Internet surveillance). This is a return to a form of absolute power.

We should hold a celebration for the prize given to Edward Snowden by the Right Livelihood Foundation. He was the first to reveal the guts of this new panopticon.

Control, however, requires more than the act of surveillance. In Mexico over recent years, the digital sphere has become an area in which the state exercises direct coercion: threats, intimidation, the falsification of Tweets and the cloning of Web sites and magazines are part of a catalogue of practices designed to immobilize critics and suspend basic freedoms of expression. Automated bots used against the student movement, threats made against followers of 2012 presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, campaigns of falsification mounted against [columnist and corruption fighter] Carmen Aristegui, and the cloning of Web sites and magazines in the state of Quintana Roo [to undermine press accounts critical of the government - graphic blow] are merely symptoms of a new system of control.

For the state, the dilemma is that information covers such dimensions, and the surveillance system is so scrupulous, that it has a tendency to create a sense of paranoia - something similar to what happened with the church in the 16th century when it saw demons around every corner. In Puebla in 2013, the local government arrested three young people for creating a Facebook page under the name "Revolución 2013 Puebla." They were beaten and tortured – but they weren’t members of any civic organization - just students.

Beyond faint allusions to other laws, there exists no specific legislation against digital crimes (particularly those committed by officials). Perhaps it’s time to demand some.

#NSA Tweets

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Posted By Worldmeets.US October 4, 2014, 11:45am

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