Power and Control

Category: Social and Cultural Issues

People often respond to concerns about surveillance by saying "I don't mind because I have nothing to hide." However, a cynical response to this might be, "you don't mind what the consequences of surveillance are, so long as they happen to other people." As Gellman and Adler-Bell (2017) write, "Universalist arguments obscure the topography of power. Surveillance is not at all the same thing at higher and lower elevations on the contour map of privilege."

This is an argument frequently made by Edward Snowden. In a video made with Jean-Michel Jarre (2016) he says, "Saying that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about freedom of speech because you have nothing to say." And as he posted on Twitter (2015), "Ask yourself: at every point in history, who suffers the most from unjustified surveillance? It is not the privileged, but the vulnerable. Surveillance is not about safety, it's about power. It's about control." Desmond Cole makes a similar point (Neal, 2020), noting that armed police are never brought into rich white private schools, even though drug dealing and everything else may happen there, only the poor schools with minority populations.

The use of surveillance, analytics and artificial intelligence to exercise discretionary control is not a hypothetical. The University of Toronto's digital surveillance and human-rights watchdog, Citizen Lab, reports on spy software such as Pegasus (Marczak, 2018) and has publicly identified companies such as NSO Group as "bad actors" in world affairs. It reports having been targeted itself by companies using surveillance to exercise control (Farr, 2020).

Examples and Articles

Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?
"We are in the middle of a technological upheaval that will transform the way society is organized. We must make the right decisions now." Direct Link

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