Schneier on Security

AlanS • April 17, 2014 10:33 PM

I do not have a positive suggestion for a title but I have some thoughts on what one might not want to use and in that discussion of what one might not want to use, suggestions for thinking about knowledge and power in a historical frame. There is a large, and often difficult, literature on these issues in the social sciences, history and philosophy that shouldn’t be ignored.

First, I would avoid a narrow focus on the Internet era or recent technology and simple notions of causation and subjects and objects. I also wouldn’t use “We/They already know”. There is always power and resistance. What’s interesting is not the we or the they but how power/knowledge functions. A lot of the more interesting writings on power look at the micropolitics of power, the discourses and practices, rather than the state actors or “big brother”.

I would not use titles like “Data: The New Currency of Power”. It’s not the new currency of power. Data or knowledge in some form has been the currency of power for a very long time but in different ways. It’s also not about “capturing your data”. It’s about decomposing the individual into data and communication.

Various people in the comments have also suggested the use of Panopticon in the title. I would avoid that. The usual source for references to panopticism is Michel Foucault (see “Panopticism” in Discipline and Punish, Part 3 section 3 ). Foucault used panopticism to illustrate the operation of certain disciplinary techniques. But disciplinary power is only one type of power. Discipline and Punish opens with a graphic description of a very different type of power, the exercise of sovereign power through the public spectacle of torture. And in later lectures he discusses the technologies of security that operate again very differently.

The metaphor of panopticism may not be very useful for thinking about modern surveillance phenomena, e.g. Google (maybe the NSA and state actors, although there are some serious limitations there as well). There are practices and discourses that operate in ways that are more subtle and pervasive than the disciplinary power located in institutions such as the prison, factory, school, etc. that still operate but which maybe had their high point in the 19th and early 20th century.

It is worth looking at short essay by Gilles Deleuze Postscript on the Societies of Control that was first published in 1990. Deleuze’s key points of reference are Michel Foucault and William S. Burroughs (see Electronic Revolution 1970). Societies of Control are along the lines of Foucault’s mechanisms of security, although there are some significant differences between Foucault and Deleuze. But the conceptualization of how power operates in this essay and Foucault’s security lectures is much more applicable to thinking about the power that operates through massive databases, networks, continuous knowledge in realtime. There is a very different logic at work that stems from certain statistical technologies of public health and later, cybernetics (Wiener, Shannon and Weaver). Pantopticism is a metaphor for techniques that are located in configurations within bounded spaces, are binary and discontinuous. The techniques of power in societies of control are about communication, networks, tracking and feedback. They are unbound by space, modulated and continuous. It’s power that is vastly more pervasive and efficient than that stemming from technologies of confinement. This is neo-capitalism as the Borg.

Also see Gilles Deleuze in conversation with Antonio Negri. Control and becoming. Futur Anterieur 1.

For an unpacking of Deleuze’s essay that explicates the relationships to Foucault, Burroughs, communication theory, etc. see Jia-Lu Cheng On Control Societies: A Deleuzian Postscript, The Unthinkable—Thinking Beyond the Limits of Culture, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan, December 13-14, 2008.

For a critique of panopticism in surveillance studies see: Caluya, Gilbert. The Post-Panoptic Society? Reassessing Foucault in Surveillance Studies. Social Identities 16, no. 5 (September 2010): 621–33.