Page 520 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Surve llance and Pr vacy |

The privileging of the private realm as a locus of freedom and autonomy is a
historically distinct development that corresponds to the rise of the middle class
in modernity. Hannah Arendt points out that in the Athenian polis, the realm
of privacy was equated with unfreedom—a realm relegated to the satisfaction
of the most basic of human needs and functions (food, shelter, reproduction). In
the modern era, it becomes—at least for bourgeois men—a site of refuge from the
demands of public and professional life. For women, however, the private realm
tended to remain a site of domestic labor and dependence. The feminist rallying
cry that the “private is political” highlighted the way in which the construction
of the private sphere served as cover for the exploitation and disempowerment
of women.

PrivaCy ProTECTion

In part as a response to past abuses of state surveillance power, and in part as
an expansion of constitutionally guaranteed protections against illegal searches
and seizures of citizens’ property, the legislature has placed limits on the abil-
ity of intelligence agencies to monitor the populace. However, these limits have
been challenged by government agencies in their pursuit of national security
during the post-9/11 era.
Shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the
U.S. Department of Defense created the short-lived “Information Awareness
Office” to coordinate intelligence efforts in fighting terrorism. One of the goals
of the office was to create a “database of databases” that would aggregate infor-
mation about citizens contained in both public and private databases as a means
of identifying suspicious behavior. Because of concerns over such programs,
the office was shut down in 2003. However, the government continues to en-
list the aid of private companies to assemble and scour electronic databases of
information about U.S. citizens and residents in the name of national security
(O’Harrow, Jr. 2005). Critics of such efforts point to the lack of government ac-
countability associated with covert surveillance. Supporters invoke the notion
of a trade-off between privacy and security and argue that in the post-9/11 era
citizens need to surrender their expectations of privacy in the name of safety.
But the history of government agencies using surveillance against law-abiding
citizens was repeated in the post-9/11 era, when police and law enforcement
officers infiltrated peace groups and others opposed to government policy and
the Iraq war.

survEiLLanCE TEChnoLogiEs

The advent of digital technologies and of networked, interactive communi-
cation devices is helping to make surveillance cheaper, easier to conduct, and
more powerful. Recent developments on the cutting edge of surveillance strat-
egies include biometric detection and identification technologies, including
“smart” cameras designed to “recognize” individuals based on traits including
their facial features, retinas, and even the way they walk.