The Spy Who Blogged Me

Just how blasé are we about a practice that, for decades, has been inseparably conjoined with tyranny? And what happens to a society that stops worrying about surveillance and starts asking for it?

In search of answers, I decide to visit the Surveillance Project. Based at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, it’s the only research lab in Canada devoted exclusively to the sociological study of surveillance. I expect to be met by grey-haired talking heads lamenting the death of a privacy nobody seems to want anymore, but instead I find a young graduate student doing research on Facebook users. Another Ph.D. student, teaching fellow Jason Pridmore, is about to defend a dissertation on loyalty and reward programs. Professor David Lyon, a long-time surveillance researcher and the founder of the project, is studying the current government trend toward biometrics. Since when did social networking, Air Miles, and better passports get lumped in with wiretaps and surveillance cameras?”

When I go into a classroom and I ask my students, what is surveillance, they think of cctv cameras and the fbi,” Pridmore explains. “They don’t think of the mundane activities they do when they go to the cash register and they’re asked, what’s your phone number? ” He discovered that we participate willingly in programs, such as Air Miles and Aeroplan, that record and sell information about our everyday purchases. We rarely, if ever, think of this as surveillance. As Pridmore tells me, “I did a survey that concluded that there is no correlation between people’s privacy/surveillance concerns and use of loyalty programs.” His survey subjects have pretty much the same indifferent attitude as the Montreal residents Leman-Langlois interviewed about cctv cameras in their neighbourhoods. “I think,” Pridmore says, “people are so wrapped up in themselves that they don’t really notice.”

Indeed, we seem to consider things like loyalty programs and even cameras on the street as value-added bonuses — the free stuff we get for working nine to five, paying our taxes, and taking the time to shop around for the best deal. If I’m not doing anything wrong, why would a little surveillance bother me? In fact, surveillance actually helps me. “There’s a whole bunch of people who say, ‘Yeah, I’m giving up something, but I get so much back,’” says Pridmore of loyalty program users. “And then there are people who are complete advocates — ‘Yeah, it’s great. They tailor things to my needs.’”

The revelation is not that the owners of schemes like loyalty programs are watching us — we already know that. What’s becoming evident now is that we actually enjoy being watched. Where once people might have balked at the idea of a corporation tracking their purchases, today we see it in terms of “something for nothing.” And why not let some faceless company know what I had for breakfast?

Surveillance caters to the two opposing, prevailing desires of the twenty-first-century consumer-citizen: we want the freedom to discover and reinvent our unique selves, but we also want mass-produced options that make lifestyle transformation quick and easy. The more the decision-makers know about us, the more they can tailor their decisions to fit our individual needs. The more surveillance seeps into everyday life, the more we reflexively facilitate our own monitoring, enhance the possibilities of prefab individuality, and earn points for a free trip to Florida in the process.

Allowing companies and governments to trade in the minute details of our likes and dislikes seems fairly innocuous. But as Nineteen Eighty-Four reminds us, it was only a few generations ago that the Nazis used the computing savvy of IBM to collect similarly innocent information about its citizens. Hitler’s fascists, operating in a democratic, capitalist society, wanted to know things like occupation, religion, place of birth, names of parents, uncles, aunts, cousins. Once the population was thoroughly and exhaustively chronicled, the world’s first genocide by database began. Given that, can we really — even as a society of lifestyle consumers who have trouble seeing past the next bargain bin — be that sanguine about surveillance? I need another point of view. I need to talk to someone less likely to accept that surveillance is now part of the casual infrastructure of our everyday lives. I arrange to speak with Jennifer Stoddart, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

When I reach Stoddart in her Ottawa office, she doesn’t reassure me. She tells me that “the public is really concerned about their privacy,” but it is also segmented. “People have different expectations of privacy, and highly personalized views on not only what people know about them, but also what they should know about other people.” Without coming out and saying so, she more or less agrees with what I learned at the Surveillance Project: people are happily choosing to jettison their privacy in return for the comforts and conveniences of different kinds of surveillance. “The private sector, which is now the main consumer of our personal information, offers us such rewards that it’s very easy to forget what’s happening with that information,” says Stoddart. “So it feels like the surrendering of our personal information is in fact a good thing.”

Does it feel like it’s a good thing, or is it, in the minds of most people, just plain and simple a good thing? When else have we had the opportunity to trade the mundane details of our lives, stuff that we never imagined had any value in the first place, for everything from free flights to more friends? Stoddart notes that Canadians are complacent about surveillance because “we haven’t seen too many major foul-ups, too many blatant injustices. People are starting to realize that if there’s a problem there’s a place they can go for redress.” An example is surveillance in the street. “Police have been listening to the privacy commissioners about how to use these cameras. Public authorities are listening to me, albeit reluctantly, and we are developing safeguards and rules.”

We’re secure in the knowledge that the Privacy Commissioner and her provincial counterparts are watching the watchers. But our naive notion of benevolent surveillance carefully monitored by government-appointed watchdogs blissfully ignores recent history. Even while locked in global warfare with the Communist threat, the United States, that bastion of democracy, was using Soviet-style surveillance tactics to infiltrate and intimidate everyone from civil rights activists to alternative newspapers to Hollywood screenwriters. It wasn’t that long ago that Canada’s principal intelligence service, csis, spied on anti-globalization activists. Bell Canada recently announced the theft of data containing contact information for 3.4 million clients. Since 9/11, there have been countless stories of abuse in North America and Europe under the auspices of homeland security.