Reflecting on surveillance from below
In this blog entry, Shaul Duke discusses the origins of his article, “Database-Driven Empowering Surveillance: Definition and Assessment of Effectiveness,” which was recently published in Surveillance & Society.
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Although so much has already been written about surveillance, and despite the current abundance of new texts on the subject, there is still much that is uncharted. My Surveillance & Society article was born out of two observations regarding such uncharted aspects. First, that most writing about empowering surveillance focuses on video surveillance and neglects other forms of countersurveillance, such as database surveillance (systematically documenting and disseminating information about government agencies’ actions/policies). Second, that although the term countersurveillance was mentioned with regards to the resistance done in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) in the name of Palestinian human rights (Zureik mentioned it in his 2016 book), there has been no significant examination of this issue.
While the almost exclusive focus of countersurveillance scholarship on video surveillance is understandable in light of its scholastic history — much of this writing has risen out of practices of video surveillance done by and on behalf of marginalized groups (mainly African-Americans in the US) — there is now a need to backtrack and identify other forms of surveillance enacted by the weak as they monitor the strong. For instance, in the OPT, Israeli NGOs began using video as a means for sousveillance around 2007, however they started using databases for monitoring Israeli government agencies as early as the end of the 1980s. Moreover, to this day these same NGOs do much more database-driven empowering surveillance than video-driven, by an order of magnitude.
Surprisingly, neither the NGO activists nor the scholars who study them in the case of the OPT have analyzed their work as counter/empowering surveillance. Are surveillance scholars living in a bubble? Are we deluding ourselves that nowadays at least professionals from academia and advocacy groups have sufficient awareness about surveillance in order to recognize themselves in it? While I believe that there is a way to go regarding awareness of surveillance issues among the public, I associate at least some of this lapse with the negative connotation that the surveillance term carries. Virtually all activists and the majority of scholars seem to uphold a clear distinction between the monitoring that advocacy organizations carry out and the monitoring from above by powerful government agencies. Yet by upholding such a conceptual separation, they miss the commonality between these acts, and the opportunity to compare their effectiveness in different settings. What is especially missed is that both are sophisticated power plays, operating through a mechanism that involves both technology and human agency, and whose dynamics need to be understood in order to be carried out efficiently.
As for the specific use of databases for empowerment, it is worth mentioning that the link between databases and surveillance has been somewhat neglected in the last two decades with the shift of focus to emerging technologies, such as smartphones and social networks — the drawback being that understanding databases, their strengths and limitations, helps us understand the specific forms that surveillance and sousveillance are taking in practice.
