The New York Times reported last week that France, like clockwork, has responded to January’s terrorist attacks with its own legally authorized surveillance state, one that “would give the intelligence services the right to gather potentially unlimited electronic data.” This unlimited data gathering would include, mais oui, “almost no judicial oversight.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/world/europe/french-legislators-approve-sweeping-intelligence-bill.html?_r=0)
The only way for the Times to put the French legislation into perspective was by way of comparison with an American surveillance state that is, with a nod to Governor Tarkin, fully armed and operational: “Among the types of surveillance that the intelligence services would be able to carry out is bulk collection and analysis of metadata similar to that done by the United States’ National Security Agency.”
The Times also notes that “American lawmakers are reconsidering the broad surveillance powers assumed by the government after Sept. 11,” which judicial activity is like attending to the fact that one was once pregnant when one is long since an empty nester. The peculiar horse known as the American surveillance state has already left the proverbial barn. Or, since we are discussing France here, we might just call it a fait accompli.
Like anyone else attempting to understand a confusing and frightening world, I consulted the oracle for guidance on my life under surveillance. When I typed “surveillance state” into Google one of the first few items on my search results was a 2013 article, “The Internet is a Surveillance State,” by Bruce Schneier. (http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/16/opinion/schneier-internet-surveillance/) Schneier cuts to the heart of the matter with a pithy summary of digital surveillance that sounds like hyperbole, except it isn’t: “All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever.” And if you think your data’s safe with your corporate friends at Facebook or Instagram, Schneier has this to say about a lot of mutual back scratching going on between Big Data and, e.g., Uncle Sam:
“Governments are happy to use the data corporations collect -- occasionally demanding that they collect more and save it longer -- to spy on us. And corporations are happy to buy data from governments.”
But Schneier’s conclusion, in which he is as exasperated with us folks as he is our demonic overlords, raises at least one important question. Here is Schneier: “Welcome to an Internet without privacy, and we've ended up here with hardly a fight.” So: Why haven’t we fought back?
As the situation so very recently unraveled here in Baltimore I instinctively turned, all kidding about the pseudo-oracular aside, to my own version of a prophetic voice in the wilderness. We all have shit we turn to when, as Pema Chodron puts it, things fall apart. But while dear Pema has been much help in the past when my own personal things were falling apart, when the whole world is falling apart I prefer the late Jean Baudrillard, an arrogant French intellectual who earned at least some of that arrogance with self-described “theory-fictions” that somehow still meet the criteria of “Just the facts, Ma’am.” Especially when it is the very facts of events like those just passed in Baltimore that are in question; if you can get down with this quote from The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact, then you can get down with Baudrillard: “Hence the dilemma posed by all the images we receive: uncertainty regarding the truth of the event as soon as the news media are involved.”
But back to our question: why haven’t we fought back against the surveillance state? Another passage in The Intelligence of Evil, or the Lucidity Pact, one that details our relationship with the digital, may hold some clues:
“The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn’t see you. Now, you only see things if they are looking at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of ‘response’).”
I would translate that by saying that the loneliest feeling in the world is checking your status update for likes or comments.
We haven’t fought back because our fear that no one is watching is so great that it leaves no room for the fear that Big Brother is watching. In fact, it is our certainty that no one is watching (“The screen reflects nothing”) that drives our desire for Big Brother’s gaze. We haven’t fought back against the surveillance state because, in the words of Princess Leia (whom, we should note, was exactly whom Governor Tarkin was explaining his fully operational battle station to), it’s our only hope.
