Watching ourselves become the watchers

[sawyl]

I finally feel like I'm starting to hit my stride with my dissertation, partly because I've found help from some slightly unexpected directions.

For those not already in the know, my thesis topic involves an analysis of the problems raised by national identity cards for societies founded on liberal principles — or, more broadly, societies that have historically provided strong support for individual autonomy. But in order to address the philosophical and political questions, I first need to lay out the details of the UK's national identity scheme, the associated database and, very briefly to skim out some of the details about the implementation, e.g. biometrics, if only so that I can then set them aside in favour of more essential questions.

So naturally, I found myself looking around for a good source and what should I find at hand, but Ross Anderson's excellent Security Engineering. This, I've discovered, contains a chapter (number 24, if you're interested) entitled Terror, Justice and Freedom, which spans enough ground to provide me with a decent starting point for my initial sections.

Reading through it, I was surprised to encounter this intriguing summary of David Brin's suggested response to pervasive state surveillance:

[Brin] reasons that the falling costs of data acquisition, transmission and storage will make pervasive surveillance technologies available to the authorities, so the only real question is whether they are available to the rest of us too. He paints a choice between two futures — one in which the citizens live in fear of an East German-style police force and one in which officials are held to account by public scrutiny. The cameras will exist: will they be surveillance cams or webcams?

Anderson, R., (2008), Security Engineering, Wiley: Indianapolis, 811

Which seems eerily prescient, given the way that videos of London G20 are being used to hold the police to account.

So maybe David Brin is right. The only way to deal with the panopticon which, we have to accept, is already here, is to demand open access to everything. To allow us to watch the watcher as they watch us; to undermine the normal Foucauldian disparity that exists between the watchers and the watched by making us all watchers.

How about that? Maybe we really can save the world simply by watching it on TV...