{"id":15884,"date":"2013-06-06T06:14:19","date_gmt":"2013-06-06T10:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=15884"},"modified":"2013-06-06T06:28:11","modified_gmt":"2013-06-06T10:28:11","slug":"verizon-and-fisa-calling-all-surveillance-scholars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2013\/06\/06\/verizon-and-fisa-calling-all-surveillance-scholars\/","title":{"rendered":"Verizon and Fisa: Calling All Surveillance Scholars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"guardian-6june2013\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In case you missed when The Guardian<\/i> broke the story last night<\/a>, here\u2019s the TLDR: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) got a super-secret court order<\/a> from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or Fisa) that says that, on a daily basis and from 25 April to 19 July of this year, telecom company Verizon must give information to the National Security Agency (NSA)\u00a0about all the calls that take place through Verizon’s mobile and landline systems. The court order says that Verizon can\u2019t talk about the court order (the first rule of Sketchy Fisa Court Order is: do not talk about Sketchy Fisa Court Order<\/i>), but someone leaked the order itself\u2014and now we all know that, every day, Verizon is giving the NSA \u201cthe numbers of both parties \u2026location data, call duration, unique identifiers, and the time and duration of all calls<\/a>.\u201d[i]<\/a> Because these things are considered \u201ctelephony metadata\u201d rather than \u201ccommunication,\u201d the FBI doesn\u2019t need to get a warrant for each individual customer; instead, it can (and obviously has) demanded records pertaining to all<\/i> Verizon customers, whether those people are or might be or ever might be suspected of anything at all.<\/p>\n

The big questions now are: 1) whether this was the first three-month court order, or just the most recent three-month court order; and 2) whether Verizon is the only telecom that\u2019s received such an order, or just the only telecom that\u2019s received an order that\u2019s been leaked. While I don\u2019t know if I can call the first one[ii]<\/a>, the second seems to deserve a resounding \u201cwell DUH\u201d; I can think of nothing to distinguish Verizon in such a way as would make it more worth data-mining than, say, AT&T. If Verizon got one, then AT&T probably got one; Sprint and TMobile each probably got one, and so too did probably every other mobile or landline carrier with a US address of operations. It seems increasingly clear that, whether we’re presumed innocent or presumed guilty, we ourselves had best presume that we’re under direct surveillance.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

If there\u2019s one thing that frequently pops up when we talk about pervasive surveillance, it\u2019s good old Foucault\u2019s take on Jeremy Bentham\u2019s Panopticon. Accordingly, as I read The Guardian<\/i>\u2019s coverage last night, I wondered how long it would be before the first \u201cU.S. Government\/Obama\/Verizon (etc) as Panopticon\u201d blog post appeared on my radar. Yet, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed the Panopticon isn\u2019t an apt metaphor for what\u2019s happening with the Verizon phone records. A quick web search confirmed that, while the Verizon court order is news, the non-panopticon-ness of it is not\u2014so I\u2019m going to share what I was thinking at the time, and ask for those of you who know more about this to join the conversation in the comments section. [Please note that surveillance studies isn\u2019t my specialty, but that for some reason\u2014perhaps because I\u2019ve spent the last few weeks writing on topics I actually do know something about\u2014this is the post I\u2019m deciding to finish right now.]<\/p>\n

\"panopticon-sketch\"<\/a>For those readers not familiar, here\u2019s a quick crash-course in Foucault\u2019s writing about the Panopticon: It was a design for a cylindrically-shaped prison with a central guard tower, and individual prisoner cells along the inside perimeter. The guard would have the ability to see into each cell, but no prisoner would be able to see the guard. This means that each prisoner could<\/i> be being watched at every moment, but that no prisoner could ever know whether he (or she) was being watched in any particular moment. As a result, prisoners would have to behave all the time as though they were being watched, even though each individual prisoner would only be watched some of the time. Prisoners\u2019 self-regulation of their own behavior represented their internalization of the panoptic gaze, and therefore the disciplinary power of the Panopticon. The Panopticon itself may never have been built, but states and institutions (such as hospitals, schools, factories, military forces, etcetera) use similar principles to wield disciplinary power over citizens and subjects.<\/p>\n

So, here we go: we\u2019ve got a state\u2014the U.S. government\u2014watching everyone who has a Verizon number (and to a lesser extent, everyone who\u2019s called anyone with a Verizon number). The easy jump would be to \u201cPanopticon!\u201d, right? But here are my first thoughts about why I don\u2019t think the panoptic metaphor quite works: In the original panoptic prison, and in the hierarchical institutions Foucault wrote about, power\u2019s expectations for prisoner\/subject behavior are fairly clear. Everyone has a decent idea of what the normative expectations are, even when they fail to live up to them. There may be grey areas, but everyone knows what clearly \u2018good\u2019 behavior looks like and what clearly \u2018bad\u2019 behavior looks like. There\u2019s something to internalize when you internalize the watcher\/watched relation; you might not know whether you are being watched, but you do know what you oughtn\u2019t be doing in the moments when you are being watched. Without this knowledge, without at least vaguely certain expectations, the disciplinary effectiveness of panoptic surveillance would break down.<\/p>\n

\"verizon-iphone\"<\/a>Now think specifically about the state demanding phone records. I really want to believe there\u2019s no one left who still believes the state only demands phone records when specific people are under legitimate strong suspicion of having done something genuinely bad, but I\u2019m going to argue that an association between this level of surveillance and deviance or criminality\u2014\u201cthe state wants your phone records, therefore you probably did something bad\u201d\u2014still lingers in our popular imagination. (How often do you see movies or TV shows in which a government official is going through someone’s phone records or phone conversations, and that person turns out to be innocent?) I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve accepted \u201cthe government going through our phone records\u201d as simply a part of banal reality, the way we tolerate the near-ubiquitous presence of closed-circuit television cameras; if we had, the Verizon story wouldn\u2019t be getting as much attention as it is now. The state going through our phone records, then, seems more closely aligned with the idea of punishing the deviant than with a generalized disciplinary gaze; part of our alarm is that we don’t feel we deserve to be scrutinized in this way.<\/p>\n

Yet when potentially everyone who has a phone number is included in the \u201cpunishment,\u201d how are we to know what the \u201ccrime\u201d is? How are we to know how to shape our docile bodies? What is it that the state wants from us? Surely it can\u2019t be \u201cdon\u2019t use phones,\u201d but then\u2026what? Obviously, yes, the state would like us not to be \u201cterrorists\u201d (however it may define that term on any given day); we know that \u201cillegal activity\u201d will potentially be cause for getting in trouble. For most people, this doesn\u2019t help. We know now that we\u2019re all (probably) being watched, but what exactly is it we\u2019re supposed to do on account of being watched? I see a lot of things going on with the Verizon court order, but one thing I don\u2019t see is a clear disciplinary message.\u00a0 Maybe that\u2019s (part of) why we weren\u2019t supposed to know about it in the first place.<\/p>\n

As I said above, surveillance studies isn\u2019t one of my strong suits, so I\u2019ve no idea of any of that makes sociological sense (or, if it does, if someone else has already done a better job of laying out similar arguments). But these thoughts led me to go through some notes, run a couple quick web searches, and refresh my passing familiarity with Mark Poster\u2019s concept of the Superpanopticon<\/a>; that reading in turn led me to the work of (Theorizing the Web 2013 keynote speaker) David Lyon and the field of surveillance studies more generally. As Michael Zimmer asks in a review<\/a> of Lyon\u2019s edited volume Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond<\/i>,<\/p>\n

\u201cis the notion of the panopticon, characterized by subjects who persistently and consciously feel themselves under the watchful gaze of a centralized authority, useful when surveillance increasingly is hidden and dispersed among various private interests, such as in the tracking of commercial or Web-based activities?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The general consensus among surveillance studies scholars seems to be that, while we shouldn\u2019t throw the panoptic theory out entirely, we do indeed need to \u201cmove beyond\u201d it\u2014as panoptic theory can\u2019t quite capture a world full of electronic databases, digital social technologies, and more \u201cgazes\u201d than one could shake any sort of stick at.<\/p>\n

I therefore ask the surveillance scholars among Cyborgology<\/i>\u2019s readership in particular: What do you have to say about the Verizon court order? Which scholars and which theories or models seem particularly appropriate here? What sense are you making of this? And what do you think will happen next?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whitney Erin Boesel can be surveilled, in part, by watching her Twitter feed: she’s @phenatypical<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Front page of the Guardian from here<\/a>; panoptic prison sketch from here<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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[i]<\/a>Think about that\u2026and then, in addition, think about all the things your phone number is used to index. How many times have you encountered \u201cphone number\u201d as a required field when trying to buy something online? Ever signed up for any of those \u201crewards\u201d programs at various stores, which link your phone number to your address, to what you\u2019ve bought, and to the numbers of any credit cards you\u2019ve used to make purchases? And now that we\u2019ve brought some credit card numbers into this, let\u2019s stop to think about everything than can be indexed with those. Let\u2019s think about Acxiom Corporation<\/a> sitting out there in Arkansas (to name just one), and wonder whether the FBI will send them a court order or simply a purchase order. Do you feel uncomfortable yet? Because, wow: these days the only person with whom I regularly have voice conversations over the phone is my mother, and I always give fake numbers to \u201crewards\u201d programs, but I still feel uncomfortable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[ii]<\/a> As a Bostonian, I can almost<\/i> imagine a small chance that this is part of some new wave of intensified surveillance in response to the Boston Marathon bombings and the crazy week that followed them\u2026but that\u2019s probably optimistic. This phone records thing probably isn\u2019t that new.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In case you missed when The Guardian broke the story last night, here\u2019s the TLDR: the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) got a super-secret court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (or Fisa) that says that, on a daily basis and from 25 April to 19 July of this year, telecom company Verizon must […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":15885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[19988,2131,19985,2007,19990,19986,1902,19989,2143,10232],"class_list":["post-15884","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-david-lyon","tag-fbi","tag-fisa","tag-foucault","tag-metadata","tag-nsa","tag-panopticon","tag-phone-records","tag-surveillance","tag-verizon"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2013\/06\/guardian-6june2013.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15884","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15884"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15884\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15895,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15884\/revisions\/15895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15884"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15884"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15884"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}