Surveillance

An omnipresent surveillance state ... makes democratic dissent impossible. ~ Chris Hedges

I watch you!

Surveillance is the monitoring of behavior, many activities, or information for the purpose of information gathering, influencing, managing or directing. This can include observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), or interception of electronically transmitted information like Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.

Quotes

• Like a black hole, NSA pulls in every signal that comes near, but no electron is ever allowed to escape.
  • James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (2008), Doubleday, p. 14.

• There is now the capacity to make tyranny total in America. Only law ensures that we never fall into that abyss—the abyss from which there is no return.
  • James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America (2008), Doubleday, p. 345.

• CCTV is seen either as a symbol of Orwellian dystopia or a technology that will lead to crime-free streets and civil behaviour. While arguments continue, there is very little solid data in the public domain about the costs, quantity and effectiveness of surveillance. However, using the Freedom of Information Act (FOI), it is possible to use local examples to understand the wider trend.
  • Heather Brooke, Investigation: A sharp focus on CCTV

• The monitor gone. Ender tried to imagine the little device missing from the back of his neck. I'll roll over on my back in bed and it won't be pressing there, I won't feel it tingling and taking up the heat when I shower.
  • Ender's Game written by Orson Scott Card p. 2

• Moira MacTaggert: Registration today, gas chambers tomorrow.
  • Chris Claremont and John Bryne Uncanny X-Men #141

• Big Brother in the form of an increasingly powerful government and in an increasingly powerful private sector will pile the records high with reasons why privacy should give way to national security, to law and order [...] and the like.
  • William Douglas, "Points of Rebellion," Random House, 1970, pp. 29.

• Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?
  • Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published by Random House in New York, 1977, page 228.

• Surveillance technologies now available - including the monitoring of virtually all digital information - have advanced to the point where much of the essential apparatus of a police state is already in place.
  • Al Gore, The Future: Six Drivers of Change, published by Random House in New York, 2013, page 86.

• The irony is that Barack Obama would not even be president if it were not for the courage of persecuted dissidents such as Martin Luther King or Malcolm X, spied upon by their own government. But Obama understands where power lies. It does not lie with the citizen. It lies with Wall Street and our corporate boardrooms, which have carried out a slow motion coup d’état. And a system of mass surveillance is designed to keep these elites in these boardrooms powerful and the rest of us powerless.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion,” 29th March 2014, 21:20

• An omnipresent surveillance state ... makes democratic dissent impossible. Any state that has the ability to inflict full spectrum dominance on its citizens is not a free state.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion,” 29th March 2014, 29:29

• The relationship between those who are constantly watched and tracked and those who watch and track them is the relationship between masters and slaves.
  • Chris Hedges, “Our Only Hope Will Come Through Rebellion,” 29th March 2014, 30:02

• We have Mr. Wright's allegation that a surveillance operation was mounted against Lord Wilson of Rievaulx when he was Prime Minister in the mid-1970s...Many criticisms can be made of Lord Wilson's stewardship—I have made some in the past and I have no doubt that I may make some more in future—but the view that he, with his too persistent record of maintaining Britain's imperial commitments across the world, with his over-loyal lieutenancy to Lyndon Johnson, with his fervent royalism, and with his light ideological luggage, was a likely candidate to be a Russian or Communist agent is one that can be entertained only by someone with a mind diseased by partisanship or unhinged by living for too long in an Alice-Through-the-Looking-glass world in which falsehood becomes truth, fact becomes fiction and fantasy becomes reality. The result of the allegation has been substantially to fortify the view that I expressed in a letter to The Times 18 months ago, which is that MI5 should now be pulled totally out of its political surveillance role.
  • Roy Jenkins, Speech in the House of Commons (3 December 1986)

• Need I say the C.I.A. be Criminals In Action
  Cocaine crack unpacking, high surveillance tracking
  Prominant blacks and whites giving orders for mass slaughters
  but I want all my daughters to be like Maxine Waters
  When they flooded the streets with crack cocaine, I was like Noah
  now they lower cause the whole cold war is over
  Communism fell to the dollars you were grabbing
  All the assault and battering in the name of intelligence gathering?
  • KRS-One, "C.I.A. (Criminals In Action)", Lyricist Lounge, Volume One (1998).

• If we are to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would deserve the chains that these measures are forging for them. The country will swarm with informers, spies, delators and all the odious reptile tribe that breed in the sunshine of a despotic power...[T]he hours of the most unsuspected confidence, the intimacies of friendship, or the recesses of domestic retirement afford no security. The companion whom you most trust, the friend in whom you must confide, the domestic who waits in your chamber, all are tempted to betray your imprudent or unguarded follie; to misrepresent your words; to convey them, distorted by calumny, to the secret tribunal where jealousy presides — where fear officiates as accuser and suspicion is the only evidence that is heard ... Do not let us be told, Sir, that we excite a fervour against foreign aggression only to establish a tyranny at home; that...we are absurd enough to call ourselves ‘free and enlightened’ while we advocate principles that would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity and establish a code compared to which the ordeal is wise and the trial by battle is merciful and just.
  • Edward Livingston, opposing the Alien and Sedition Acts as cited in Logic of History. Five hundred political texts being concentrated extracts of Abolitionism; Also results of Slavery Agitation and Emancipation; Together with Sundry Chapters on Despotism, Usurpations and Frauds, published and edited by S.D. Carpenter, 1864, second edition, page 228.

• One of the most frightening aspects of this alleged technology is the possibility of mind control by “remote control,” that is, through such technology as microwaves and radio waves...it is difficult at this point to determine how much of this is genuine, and how much comes from false beliefs deliberately induced to make survivors feel powerless...If some of this remote control it is genuine, we may need to develop technological means to combat it. However, we should not be intimidated. Even if “voices” are induced in the head by remote control rather than through alters doing jobs, survivors can learn to disobey such voices just as they do those of alters. Competent and compassionate therapy for the dissociation can help survivors to heal. Meanwhile, there are numerous survivors whose mind control is of the kind that can be treated through psychotherapy.
  • Alison Miller, Healing the Unimaginable: Treating Ritual Abuse and Mind Control, published by Karnac Books in London, 2011, pages 205-6

• A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: FACECRIME, it was called.
  • George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four, ch.5

• A close watch must be kept on the children, and they must never be left alone anywhere, whether they are in ill or good health. This constant supervision should be exercised gently and with a certain trustfulness calculated to make them think that one loves them, and that it is only to enjoy their company that one is with them. This will make them love their supervision rather than fear it.
  • Advice to Jesuit school ushers at Port Royal 1615; as quoted in Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter comics, 1941-1948 pp. 99-100

• Data is the pollution problem of the information age, and protecting privacy is the environmental challenge.
  • Bruce Schneider, Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2015.

• Study after study has shown that human behavior changes when we know we’re being watched. Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.
  • Edward Snowden, "NSA spying is causing Americans to self-censor their Internet activity," 8 May 2014, article by Gregory Ferenstein

• Facebook mistreats its users. Facebook is not your friend, it is a surveillance engine. For instance, if you browse the Web and you see a 'like' button in some page or some other site that has been displayed from Facebook. Therefore, Facebook knows that your machine visited that page. So, Facebook carries out surveillance over visitors to thousands of different Websites, even for people who are not Facebook users. I hope we will have something for free browsers to block Facebook 'like' buttons so that people won't be under surveillance. In any case, this is why I ask people not to put photographs of me on Facebook, because Facebook collects data about the names of people in photos. It might as well be working directly for Big Brother. Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. And it also collects data which isn't admitted. And Google does too. As for Microsoft, I don't know. But I do know that Windows has features that send data about the user.
  • Richard Stallman, Facebook is a surveillance engine, not friend: Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation

• China and the U.S. are two societies with very different attitudes towards opinion and criticism. In China, I am constantly under surveillance. Even my slightest, most innocuous move can - and often is - censored by Chinese authorities.
  • Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei: Despite flaws, America should be proud

• Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.
  • Cornel West, Forward to We Have Not Been Moved: Resisting Racism and Militarism in 21st Century America, published by PM Press in Oakland, 2012, page xvi.
• For those who could not believe, or were excluded from the fold, Communism was grim and repressive. Surveillance was the order of the day. The regimes had spies who helped them control the population. To begin with, at least, a wrong word could get you into big trouble. As often happens, for instance in the United States during the McCarthy era, some people made use of reporting on others to settle private scores. But the Communist parties went further than sheer control. Whole social or ethnic groups were suspected of enemy activity and excluded from society. Class enemies, of course, included the former aristocracy or those who owned property, shops, or factories, but also teachers, writers, or people with foreign or minority background. In Stalin’s last years, Jews were singled out for persecution. The point was to force everyone to conform to Communist ideals, though as time went by, a mere passive conformity gradually became enough. In the Soviet Union, campaigns against enemies peaked as the Cold War hardened in the late 1940s, even if mass executions ended. The population in forced labor camps, under the GULag system, reached its highest number, about two and a half million people, in the early 1950s.
  • Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History (2017)