Terrorism and State

Surveillance Many of us are further aware that, beyond criminals and hackers, as citizens we face additional threats to our privacy – for example, from corporations that collect data on individual purchasing choices (usually by consent in exchange for modest discounts or other economic incentives). Especially in light of corporations such as Apple, Google, Microsoft, and (even) Facebook going to ever greater lengths to protect consumer privacy, governments may be the worst culprits. On the one hand, the modern liberal state exists to protect basic rights – including rights to privacy; but, to protect our rights – especially so-called positive or entitlement rights, e.g. to education, health care, disability assistance, family benefits such as child support, maternity and paternity leave, and pension payments, etc. – governments clearly require a great deal of personal information about us. How governments ought to and actually do protect that information from illicit and potentially devastating use against their own citizens varies widely from country to country. Somewhat more darkly, especially following the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, governments throughout the world justify ever greater surveillance of their own (and other) citizens in the name of fighting terrorism. And so, especially as Edward Snowden made crystal clear, unknown (because secret) quantities of personal information – as transmitted through emails, phone calls, etc. – are collected and scrutinized for potential threats. By the same token, surveillance of citizens through security cameras – distributed ever more densely throughout the world – continues to expand. Such surveillance – e.g., as it identifies you while jaywalking – appears to play a role in Western “predictive policing” programs as well as in the emerging Chinese SCS.

The SCS is being cobbled together from several dozens of smaller versions – both public and private, including currently private credit- rating companies such as Sesame. Like credit- rating systems in the West, data are collected on income, debt, purchasing patterns – but also matters such as being a parent (a plus) or playing video games (a minus). Other versions track deductions such as whether or not you have paid fines, misbehaved on a train, stood up in a taxi, cheated in videogames, jaywalked, run a red light, or failed to show up for a restaurant reservation. These deductions can be countered by good behavior, such as donating blood, contributing to a charity, or doing a certain number of hours of volunteer work.

A sufficiently low score can get you blacklisted – as some 7 million people have already experienced. Once blacklisted, you can further be prohibited from applying for a loan, buying property, buying plane tickets, and “banned from travelling some train lines”. Alternatively, a sufficiently high score will “redlist” you, giving you easier access to governmental services and tax reductions, for example.

The Chinese government argues that the intention is to stamp out corruption and reward socially beneficial behavior, and so build trust within the larger society. But Western researchers and observers counter that the aim of such positive and negative reinforcement is “to create a citizenry that continually engages in automatic self- monitoring and adjustment of its behavior”. Anyone familiar with Foucault’s famous account of the Panopticon – and/or the Black Mirror episode “Nosedive” – will find all of this chillingly familiar. The upshot will be that “the Communist Party will possess a powerful means of quelling dissent, one that is comparatively low-cost and which does not require the overt (and unpopular) use of coercion by the state”.

At the same time, all of this again illustrates crucial differences in cultural assumptions about the self and privacy. In keeping with suspicions of – if not hostility toward – what modern Westerners presume about individual privacy as a positive good, Genia Kostka reports high levels of public approval of these systems in China.

Lastly: the SCS is especially significant not only for the citizens of China, but potentially for the rest of us. Most starkly, according to Freedom House, the past six years have marked the rise of “Digital Authoritarianism” as diverse regimes have expanded various forms of

online censorship and surveillance – in part by way of copying the Chinese model.

“Privacy” and private life: Changing attitudes in the age of social media and mobile devices These manifest threats to personal privacy and private life are further accompanied by changing attitudes toward privacy in both “Western” and “Eastern” societies – perhaps as an artifact of our growing use of digital media (Ess 2010). For example, in sharp tension with worries about hierarchical forms of surveillance by states and corporations, the terms first introduced by Albrechtslund – “voluntary” and “participatory surveillance” – are now commonplace understandings of our always-on behaviors. Lateral surveillance of one another is apparent on any given social media site (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) as well as on video sharing sites such as YouTube. Still more recently, our efforts to sustain some version of privacy are increasingly shared: we want to share what was once seen as primarily individually private information – but now within specific groups. “Group privacy” or “collective privacy” are terms that further refine and describe these changing privacy sensibilities – especially in an era increasingly dominated by “Big Data” approaches.

Similarly, the mobile phone and then tablets invert our earlier contexts as well: being “on the grid” is now the norm – and so these devices have turned traditional notions of “public” and “private” upside down. Earlier, privacy in the form of being “off the grid” of a public communications network was commonplace. And, especially for the sorts of philosophical and political reasons we will explore more fully below, the capacity to be incommunicado was seen to be essential to being human. First of all, such privacy makes possible the sort of space and time needed for the development of an autonomous self, one capable of reflecting on and carefully choosing among the multiple acts and values available to human beings, both in solitude and in community with others. As Virginia Woolf famously advised, women seeking their own self-development, creativity, and freedom need “a room of one’s own.” In this way, privacy is an essential condition for our creating our very selves. (We will see a clear example of this below in how the right to privacy is justified in the German constitution [Grundgesetz] in part as it protects our further “right to personality”. Such autonomy, moreover, is not only a necessary condition for our being suited to living and acting in a democratic society; most fundamentally, as modern political theory emphasizes, only such autonomous selves can justify the existence of democratic societies.