The Surveillance State or the Anxious City?
>> Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The New York Times reports that Britons are becoming weary of living in a “surveillance society” citing a covert surveillance operation to trap a woman suspected of falsifying her address to get her daughter into the neighbourhood school.
There is no doubt, as the report argues, that Britain has many security cameras and a fair number of databases full of our intimate personal details. But how should we understand the relationship between ourselves, the state and surveillance? After all the aspiration to improve the education of our children doesn’t seem like the biggest threat to state power. Like the vetting procedures that have been in the news recently, surveillance today doesn’t seem like the exercise of state supremacy, as much as a reflection of official anxieties. These anxieties have now spread to many areas of life that previously would have operated according to established and widely accepted codes of conduct.
From the point of view of the public, we may be weary of some aspects of surveillance, but there is little sign of any widespread principled objection to the idea that we need to be watched, and to watch each other. Take for example this report in The Daily Mail recently on a new internet game which allows 'super snooper' players to plug into the nation's CCTV cameras and report on members of the public committing crimes. The 'Internet Eyes' service involves players scouring thousands of CCTV cameras installed in shops, businesses and town centres across Britain looking for law-breakers.
The article raises some important questions about how we understand surveillance. For a start, for all the emphasis on Big Brother, it is clear that CCTV is not necessarily being used by the state to constantly watch over us. While there are over four million CCTV cameras in the UK, according to the article only one in a thousand is actually monitored by someone in authority. The fact that many cameras are not monitored (and that few crimes are actually solved as a result of CCTV) strongly suggests that the current desire for surveillance needs to be understood differently from the past. In fact, Internet Eyes is a good example of the way that today surveillance is less about them watching us, than us all watching each other.
In recent years we have seen a shift in crime policy (and consequently urban planning policy) from the aim of cutting crime itself, which after all has been going down for 15 years, to the objective of reducing the fear of crime. Yet few ask the question why we are we so fearful of crime at a time when crime is actually going down. In fact our perception of the threat that we face from criminal activity is less to do with the level of crime itself, and more a product of our anxieties about our position within society. At a time when the social bonds within communities have become frayed, social anxieties have grown. Seen in this light, we can understand how CCTV is motivated not so much by Big Brother as much as by our own need to feel that someone is looking out for us. As the CCTV camera whirls round to track us as we pass, it is to some extent operating as our own comfort blanket. CCTV appears to represent a technical attempt to overcome our fears and our social estrangement.
Civil rights campaigners have argued that the new game is effectively 'a snoopers paradise'. But as the broadcaster Mark Lawson highlighted earlier this year, snooping is now official Government policy. Lawson points to the development of anti terror policies and highlights university lecturers asked to alert authorities as to students who don’t turn up for class, and communities asked to spy on what neighbours put in the bins. He suggests that policies today echo the awareness campaigns of the second world war when the public were urged to look out for fellows with bratwurst in their sandwich boxes. But the snooping agenda is by no means limited to potential terrorists. Lawson might also have pointed to the way we are encouraged to keep an eye on what our neighbours recycle, on the benefits they claim, and, in the London Borough of Southwark, the type of clothes worn by their children – apparently an indication of whether they are likely to be abusers.
Narking on your neighbours reflects Government policy in an age of anxiety. Whether related to crime and terrorism, or ill defined notions of abusive and anti social behaviour, in the absence of genuine social ties, social policy frequently homes in on what is viewed as the only aspect of life which appears to have some capacity to unite us – our distrust others within our communities. But fear as the basis for community can only breed ever more anxiety and distrust.
