Fear, terrorism, surveillance, control
The manipulation of fear
Posted on October 20, 2005
An interesting article by Denis Duclos, sociologist, research director at the CNRS; author notably of The Werewolf Complex, The Fascination of Violence in American Culture (reprinted in 2005 with a new postscript), published by La Découverte, Paris.
Source: http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2005/08/DUCLOS/12433
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These thriving industries of perpetual fear
Domestically, the “war on terrorism” leads to an unlimited accumulation of all kinds of “data” about people: their occupations, friendships, purchases, reading habits. In a race to outdo one another technologically, every failed technology justifies deploying ever more complex arsenals—which remain equally ineffective when it comes to achieving their stated goals. But the growth of the fear market has other, more clandestine motivations...
The deadly attacks in London in July are part of a series of acts aimed primarily at countries involved in military occupation in the Middle East. They are products of an asymmetric war (1) that leaves little choice to those—religious or not—who believe they are fighting a “crusade” intended more to control resources than to spread democracy.
That said, whether through resistance or blind terrorism, affected countries must protect their citizens. And as G8 leaders have finally admitted, the real solution to violence lies in eradicating oppression and poverty (2). In the short term, the Spanish opted for effective defense after the horrific attack on March 11, 2004, in Madrid, which killed 186 people: withdrawal of their troops from Iraq, coupled with diligent police investigation.
This is not the path taken by other major countries concerned: priority was given to a “technology-centered” response, targeting large numbers of foreigners considered—for reasons unrelated to terrorism—“undesirable” (3), as well as entire populations.
Coming amid a total failure of U.S. intelligence, the spectacular September 11, 2001 attacks immediately led to a proliferation of mechanisms aimed at gathering precise information on millions of individuals, in order to extract data on the potential malevolence of a few.
Four years later, the techno-security apparatus operates at full capacity, especially in so-called free countries. Travelers and their luggage are x-rayed, biometric data is stored, mobile phones monitored, countless phone numbers archived, fingerprints digitized, and massive databases maintained by governments and corporations are cross-referenced.
This frenzy is no longer justified by the search for a “needle in a haystack”: while the FBI still doesn’t know the identities of some of the Twin Towers attackers, analysts at Matrix files sent it 120,000 names of ordinary Americans labeled “high terrorism risk.” Tens of thousands of “false positives”—almost judicial errors—result from biometric checks at imperial borders; the case of pregnant women arrested by body-heat detectors (supposedly betraying an emotional terrorist) deserves special mention!
Since 2001, many airports, municipalities, and companies have persistently repeated Tampa’s disastrous experiment: Graphco, Raytheon, and Viisage generously offered this city a comparative study of 24,000 criminal photos against the faces of 100,000 spectators at its famous American football championship. The result? Only a handful of unfortunate individuals were prosecuted...
Unrelated to the hunt for suicide bombers that supposedly motivated it, mass surveillance also bears no relation to controlling illegal migration flows, which by nature resist verification and will only subside in a balanced economic equilibrium between regions of the world.
So how can we explain this persistence, criticized by most practitioners—police officers or soldiers—of anti-terrorism? Why, despite its proven ineffectiveness and disproportion relative to its goal, does there remain such a hunger for data registration, computerization of personal and physical traces, tactile, visual, thermal, olfactory, and radiofrequency monitoring of human beings everywhere? Why photograph Londoners 300 times a day and constantly film them using 2.5 million cameras, when we know this did not prevent terrorists from detonating bombs on July 7 last year? Why want to bring back mandatory ID cards and abandon principles of privacy (4) and anonymity vis-à-vis public and private powers?
Beyond pretexts of maintaining order, there is only one valid explanation: institutions and corporations find in managing fear a sustainable source of power, control, and profit.
Since September 11, Mr. George W. Bush’s policy has proposed a plausible solution: mobilize the whole planet around security objectives. A stroke of genius. Unlike oil, the reservoir of anxiety fueled by economic crisis, climate change, and population growth shows no sign of drying up. Provocation, seizing peoples in indignant fear, remains possible at any time. Emergency justifies action without democratic safeguards; thus companies and institutions selling “security” can fully engage in the fear business (5), confident of state backing, even though an atmosphere of anxiety usually harms commerce.
Thus, under the pretext of a protean danger, a global security armada is being built, whose rapid and functional convergence suggests it is the nucleus of an emerging capitalism: capitalism of fear.
Four intertwined movements structure this transformation:
– Acceleration of connections between innovations in various segments of the fear market: identification, surveillance, protection, arrest, detention;
– Fusion between conversion of war industries and military organizations toward training and equipping repressive forces, and concomitant militarization of civilian security forces;
– Growing cooperation between public and private powers, both in terms of identity control and ability to restrict and forbid;
– An ideological drive, conducted jointly in legal, political, administrative, economic, and media spheres, aiming to perpetuate “controllable” anxiety and make generalized preventive control a new norm of human existence.
Most major industrial and tech groups now offer “security” services or products almost zealously, building on their traditional expertise. Every professional acronym denotes a growing market: AFIS (Automatic Finger Imaging System – comparing prints to computerized databases), classic CCTV (Closed Circuit Television – video surveillance), EM (Electronic Monitoring – remote individual control), EMHA (Electronic Monitored House Arrest – electronic tracking bracelets), universal GPS (Global Positioning System, adapted to tracking persons), RFID (Radio Frequency Identification – electronic tags storing info and transmitting it via radiofrequency), or all sorts of “X-Ray Systems” designed for passenger screening, not to mention numerous software programs for intelligence processing. Technological offers proliferate everywhere.
A few random examples. In France, a subsidiary of TF1, Visiowave, uses its TV expertise to detect suspicious behavior in public places (via gesture-interpretation software) and produces advertorial reports shown on subway and bus screens. Thales (formerly Thomson CSF) produces video-surveillance kits, unhesitatingly selling them to authoritarian states. IT and electronics giants aren’t far behind: Microsoft and its famous Palladium chip, capable of externally controlling PC file management; Sony plans to distribute worldwide its “contactless” tag detectable via radiofrequency (RFID), able to track products bought by consumers—or their thieves!
Already several groups employ similar methods: Britain’s Tesco chain (2,000 stores worldwide) experiments with radiofrequency tracking of packaging.
One can start from a specific profession to offer a “patriotic” contribution: a big producer of electronic connectors offers the Sticky Shocker—an electric “pacification” weapon (6). The small U.S. firm Applied Digital, once specialized in innocuous humidity-control boxes, car keys, or garage openers, invented the Verichip—a subcutaneous implant!—that tracks individuals...
We can also cite a major pharmaceutical trust (Eli Lilly), inventor among other things of Prozac, which develops research on remote control of home-detained criminals, e.g., a sensor bracelet detecting alcohol and cannabis consumption, triggering inhibitory substances or electric shocks.
Biometric records and subcutaneous chips
The eagerness of many states to electronically identify foreigners, criminals, and even their own citizens proves decisive. Orders from the “security state” are as massive as those from the former welfare state. Public budgets support the biometric market, estimated at tens of billions of dollars in 2007. Thus, the U.S. administration ordered Anteon to produce 1,000 readers for “US Visit (7)”, which monitors 13 million foreigners, permanent residents, and border-crossers.
Pre-collection of passenger data, marking personal indicators by customs, digitized fingerprint filing—such as Canada’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System (SAID) or the system planned for non-residents of Schengen countries (SIS)—represent a highly lucrative market companies wish to capture.
The state is also essential for laying foundations for a new socio-technical organization of society. Thus, from the UK to Estonia, Italy, and Belgium, European countries are mobilizing to reflect on the contents of a new universal identification medium: civil status, plus a photo, fingerprint, and iris configuration. Not to mention computer-based signatures usable in private transactions, turning states into automatic certifiers of contracts.
In France, the project for a mandatory, paid electronic national ID card (CNIE) was rejected by the National Commission on Computing and Liberties (CNIL) and deemed “evil” by the Human Rights League. It does not simply follow the two-century-old pattern of “more identification” repeated by all police forces in most developed countries, under perennial pretexts of fraud prevention, foreigner control, and state modernization. Instead, it merges four normally separate elements: the physical presence of holders, traces left by their bodies, a card combining traces and personal data, and a comprehensive central database managing issuance and reference of authentic cards.
By linking biometric data (new name for Alphonse Bertillon’s anthropometry) and social data, the project facilitates creation and interconnection of vast centralized databases (whose existence in 1943 would have prevented any escape from roundups). Moreover, combining embedded electronic chips with mandatory card-carrying—like under Vichy—it calls for subcutaneous chips, truly a civilian equivalent of branding repeat offenders with hot iron until 1832 in France or indelible ink in 19th-century Britain.
Of course, we’re not yet at obligatory implantation, and skin penetration probably won’t happen. But relieved to have avoided this horror thanks to majority rejection, we may fail to see that the CNIE will function “as if” the body were actually targeted. For instance, it could track our movements far more effectively than Napoleonic or Soviet police regimes tracked citizens via labor books or internal passports. Even more, such a “contactless” card could allow authorities of third countries capable of imposing their laws (like Mr. Bush’s United States) to know at all times where a foreign visitor is located. This evolution is underway: U.S. government agencies have already had millions of staff ID cards produced, capable of recording movement histories, computer usage, and personal data like salary levels, etc.
Finally, once connection to other computerized systems is ensured (health cards or credit cards with or “without contact”, electronic signatures on the Internet, etc.), the radio-computer fusion of information, traces, and bodies creates a new sociality where state and corporations merge into omnipotent control over individuals. The succession of security innovations thus reveals, in increasingly close succession, a society managed by unrestricted collaboration between private powers and public institutions.
Following this technological deployment preparing the “control society”, the second striking feature of this new capitalism is the gradual merging of fear of the enemy and distrust of citizens, of military and police... This phenomenon affects most Western countries, which partly redirect their arms race toward escalating civilian security. As security industry fairs like the aptly named Milipol (8) demonstrate, the combination of “civilianization” of armies and militarization of police—public and private—is accelerating. Military journals normalize the idea of “infantry controlling crowds”.
Nowadays, most security-specialized groups distribute their personnel almost indiscriminately between guarding premises, prison wardenship, bodyguarding, and “security officer” roles offered to official armies. Witness the alliance of multinationals Wackenhut, Serco, Group 4-Falk (U.S.-UK-Canada-Sweden based), worth $5 billion annually, employing 360,000 people across 100 countries. Their services range from managing private prisons (63 prisons, 67,000 inmates in the U.S.) and various private police forces to training entire military security companies... including research on remote control of convicts and development of identification and tracking systems.
Such professionalism does not preclude barbarity: Wackenhut faced accusations regarding treatment of U.S. prisoners; CACI International and Titan Corporation, heavily involved in “Homeland Security (9)”, were implicated in scandals involving torture inflicted by civilian contractors supervised by the CIA in U.S.-run Iraqi prisons (Abu Ghraib) or Guantanamo Bay (10). Is it coincidence that Titan also researches biometric fingerprints? Technologically, scientific, military, and police applications intertwine just as inextricably.
Thus, in France, Sagem manufactures helicopters, drones, sights, simulations, secure gaming terminals, or credit cards. But it’s also become the world leader in fingerprint measurement, offering “government solutions” for difficult issues like crisis management.
Another example: American Science and Engineering (AS&E), which installed radiography devices on missiles and now works on narcotics detection at customs. The company is proud of its Mobile Search device, which has helped arrest hundreds of illegal Mexican immigrants.
Sandia Labs—classic partner of the U.S. military-industrial complex—develops prisoner tracking via satellite positioning systems (GPS)... and makes explosive sniffers. The eclectic American firm Foster-Miller builds machines for making caramel or Pepsi... and also creates nets to capture enemies one doesn’t wish to kill. It helps build the Talon robot, capable of handling assault weapons in urban guerrilla warfare. Thus the novel concept of “non-lethal weapons (11)” helps combine very different industrial professions.
Among inventions in this intermediate field between capture and killing: the 7-hertz wave generator, built in France as early as 1972, which made people ill for hours. Since then, many advances have been made: “deference sound”, voice-to-skull (v2K) technology used to scare birds away from airports, but potentially redirectable toward human skulls. Radiofrequency thermal shock interferes with synaptic activity, remotely immobilizes victims and induces fever, eventually literally cooking or frying persistent adversaries. Ultraviolet lasers affect bone tissue, optionally inducing heart attacks or blindness...
Moreover, ideological work-sharing between industrial lobbies, police administrations, and the media-driven industry of perpetual fear is becoming systematic. Without it, reorganizing our societies around “total control” would be impossible. True, the Total Information Awareness program, which after September 11 aimed to gather all available data on 6.5 billion Earth inhabitants for the U.S. Defense Department, was delusional (12). But what it initiated was more lasting and dangerous: a planetary security proselytism seeking to break from democratic and liberal principles underpinning our societies.
Paranoid fortresses
Confirming this paradigm shift, FBI agents promote surveillance as a core value in an uncertain world. Hollywood follows suit: a film like The Interpreter (13), ponderous and implausible (who would try to assassinate an old African dictator at UN headquarters?), includes a catalog of gadgets allowing “homeland” cops to trap wicked Matabolians.
Facing danger, electronics consortium Gixel suggests in its “blue book” generalizing electronic tracking starting in kindergarten, to teach young minds the benefits of biometrics... Meanwhile, video games offered by most major U.S., Asian, and European producers make adolescents accept a universe where access is granted only via proper “keys”; initiatives like “Thumbprint Card” at Lyon Aquarium likewise normalize fingerprint identification for children.
This climate encourages ever-less scrupulous attacks on confidentiality principles established by the UN Human Rights Commission. Thus, the French Federation of Insurers now claims access to personal data in electronic medical files, calmly planning the end of medical secrecy. Australia’s Parliament passed laws permitting police to spy on emails. Switzerland listens to cell phones; German politicians increasingly endorse the slogan “Datenschutz ist täterschutz” (“protecting data means protecting criminals”).
In Denmark, democratic virtue doesn’t prevent passage of an anti-terror law restricting liberties. In the U.S., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows government surveillance of library reading habits. Worse, a federal judge ruled that installing a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car “is not a violation of privacy (14)”.
Taken together, these signs illustrate erosion of the “old” model of civil liberties. True, resistance exists: from the Madrid Summit against Terrorism (15), where participants reaffirmed the “absurdity” of fighting terror by limiting freedoms; to the European Parliament filing a complaint against the U.S.-EU agreement on airline passenger data; or Spanish and British populations showing admirable civic composure amid provocation. But elsewhere, particularly in France, every tragic event serves as pretext to demand more biometrics and overt repression.
Will the politics of fear prevail? Then legendary terrorists will have achieved their aim: in four years, they’ll have turned great democracies into paranoid fortresses suffocating their own citizens.
Denis Duclos
(1) Barthélémy Courmont and Darko Ribnikar, Asymmetric Wars, PUF, Paris, 2002.
(2) G8 Summit, Gleneagles, UK, July 2005.
(3) “Undesirable: category targeted by the centralized Schengen Information System (SIS II) managed in Strasbourg; see Jelle Van Buuren, ‘The Tentacles of Schengen System’, Le Monde Diplomatique, March 2003.”
(4) According to political scientist Didier Bigo (testified before the National Commission on Computing and Liberties, March 11, 2005), privacy is a “sphere forbidden to the State”, a positive right to anonymity.
(5) Filmmaker André Weinfeld gave us the idea of the “business of fear”.
(6) The Sticky Shocker is an electroshock projectile launched from ten meters away; it contains a small battery and electronics to deliver 50-kilowatt impulses causing total loss of muscular control in victims.
(7) Visitor and Immigration Status Indication Technology: tightening entry procedures at 115 airports and 14 seaports, requiring among other things fingerprint collection and electronic photo-taking of visa-holding foreigners upon entering U.S. territory.
(8) Next edition takes place November 20–25, 2005 at Le Bourget.
(9) Name of the new U.S. department responsible for domestic security.
(10) See Ignacio Ramonet, Iraq: History of a Disaster, Galilée, Paris, 2005.
(11) Bernard Lavarini: Winning Without Killing: From Flintstones to Non-Lethal Weapons, Stock, Paris, 1997.
(12) Ignacio Ramonet, “Total Surveillance”, Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2003.
(13) American film by Sydney Pollack, starring Nicole Kidman and Sean Penn (2005).
(14) Statement by Federal Judge David Hurd during a New York trial on January 8, 2005, echoed by all U.S. press.
(15) “Democracy, Terrorism, and Security”, May 17–18, 2002. EU-Latin America and Caribbean Summit; final declaration stipulates that “the fight against terrorism must respect human rights, fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law.”
These thriving industries of perpetual fear
Four intertwined movements structure this transformation:
Biometric records and subcutaneous chips
Paranoid fortresses
Denis Duclos