THE LOADED X-RAY GUN

The Surveillance State through the PRISM of Fiction

In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) using Google, Apple, Skype and co to spy on people, Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984 shot up the Amazon sales rankings overnight. It was not lost on bloggers either that the NSA’s Prism surveillance program bears some uncanny similarities to the 1998 action thriller Enemy of the State, which portrays Your Average Citizen (Will Smith) being hounded by rogue NSA agents armed with surveillance capabilities that knows no bounds. Media watchdogs were quick to castigate The Washington Post for overstating the NSA surveillance program capabilities asserted by Snowden, yet the public’s gut reactions and gut feelings about the Internet opening a back door to surveillance states of the future seemed to be vindicated a week later when Snowden revealed to The Guardian that the British spy agency GCHQ had gone even further than the NSA. Britain’s so-called Tempora program taps into vast streams of Internet and telephonic data by attaching intercept probes to transatlantic fibre optic cables that intersect on British shores. The spectre of Orwell’s 1984 becomes even more tangible when you realize that Great Britain is already home to the most CCTV surveillance cameras in the world, approximately one per every fourteen British citizens and that “each person in the country is caught on camera an average of 300 times a day”. News of Britain’s GCHQ snooping on a constant flood of international Internet traffic – and sharing its findings with its American counterparts at the NSA – comes hard on the heels of revelations that during G20 meetings in London in 2009 international delegates were tricked into using specially prepped Internet cafes that allowed GCHQ spies to monitor emails and phone calls in real time. Four years on and it appears that everyone’s home is becoming a sham Internet cafe for the GCHQ and NSA to monitor at will. In fact, Snowden leaked his documents at a time when there was already heated discussion about Microsoft’s new Xbox One and the enhanced capabilities of the console’s Kinect sensor, which records and transmits user habits back to Microsoft servers. A device that is always listening to you, has become the mantra behind Microsoft’s public relations disaster that began earlier in 2013 when The Washington Post revealed that Microsoft had introduced a number of changes to Skype since taking over the company in 2011 – changes that allow Microsoft, or rather the investigating authorities working alongside Microsoft, to intercept and decrypt the once safe Skype

messages. Skype, which has been integrated into the new Xbox, is one of those Internet companies that has been named in the NSA’s clandestine surveillance program, along with Microsoft itself. Even if the

new capabilities of the Kinect sensor have been exaggerated by Internet fear-mongers, a microphone and eye-like camera constantly tracking you within your living room certainly does bear an uncanny resemblance to the omnipresent Telescreens of 1984. Indeed, Snowden has been quoted as saying that one of the reasons why he decided to leak the NSA Prism program was because he feared the Internet was becoming “a TV that watches you”. Similar concerns have been raised about the new generation of Smart TVs and the increasing Internet-connectivity of households in general, as exemplified by a Wired-influenced article in the Online Mail back in March 2012: “Spies will no longer have to plant bugs in your home – the rise of ‘connected’ gadgets controlled by apps will mean that people ‘bug’ their own homes, says CIA director David Petraeus.” 

Gary Susman of entertainment.time.com seems to sum up the more jaded attitude of many bloggers when he claims that people are not all too surprised to hear about the NSA scandal because “the movies have conditioned us to be all too familiar with the idea of living in a state of constant surveillance”. There is, in fact, a cornucopia of novels and movies that raise the ugly head of the surveillance state. The work that immediately springs to mind in the current context is not so much the totalitarian extremes of 1984 but rather the more prescient elements of the Tony Scott-directed Enemy of the State. When the film was first released in 1998 it was criticized by reviewers like Edvins Betiks for its supposed Big Brother clichés. Yet what seemed like science fiction just fifteen years ago – a technocratic government that is able to efficiently spy on and manipulate the lives of any one citizen through its all-pervasive surveillance network – has been superseded by the reality of American and British spy agencies intercepting and recording the communications of citizens on a global scale.

The technophobic paranoia of Enemy of the State was in many ways updated in the 2008 action thriller Eagle Eye, where it is no longer a mid-level security contractor like Snowden controlling the drones and surveillance data, but instead a supercomputer that has developed artificial awareness. The idea is far-fetched, but before we banish it to the fanciful sci-fi worlds of Terminator and 2001 Space Odyssey it’s worth keeping in mind that China now lays claim to the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the so-called Tianhe-2 (Milky Way 2), which has knocked the American Titan supercomputer off its pedestal. What’s disquieting about the Tianhe-2 is that it was developed by China’s National University of Defence Technology, which is “actively engaged in research on offensive network operation techniques or exploits”. Combine this with the fact that the Great Firewall of China has undergone a recent upgrade that enables authorities to spy more efficiently on its own citizens as well as international corporations doing business in China, in addition to the fact that China is rolling out CCTV surveillance cameras and facial recognition software at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world, and you have all the makings of a Chinese-style 1984. And now in the so-called Free World we have the spy agencies of democratically elected governments – the so-called Five Eyes of the United States and Great Britain, and to a lesser extent Canada, Australia and New Zealand – leaning on the corporate masters of the World Wide Web and tapping into their fibre optic nodes and combined satellite coverage to create a globally digitalized spy network that must be the envy of Iran and Saudi Arabia and every other repressive regime.

You don’t even have to be a Person of Interest to sense the growing surveillance powers of the Internet. Visit a hotel booking website or an online employment agency – just once – and it’s likely that their targeted advertising will follow you around the Internet for the next week or so, popping up in the corners of every second blog, website or online newspaper you visit. Companies both big and small are keeping track of your browsing and online buying habits through cookies, clickstream data, search engine queries and data mining, all of which enables these corporations to customize their adware at increasingly personal levels. This sort of ‘corporate stalking’ is magnified, or perhaps prophesized, in Spielberg’s 2002 Minority Report, a sci-fi film permeated with all the symbols of the surveillance state and which takes special delight in portraying public advertising screens equipped with facial recognition software that personally addresses each passer-by. This corporate stalking is taken to even dizzier heights in a short story by Suzanne Palmer called Adware that appears Asimov’s Magazine (September 2012) and which paints a world in which the air is literally polluted with floating adware viruses that can infect your brain. What Microsoft intends to do in future with the advanced facial recognition of its Kinect sensor and the adware it keeps ‘updating’ to its Xbox game menus is anybody’s guess.

In his brief introduction to surveillance movies, Susman also taps into another current of thought that has been running through the Internet for some time now, namely: “…it’s never been necessary to create an Orwellian dystopia in order to assume a state of constant surveillance. Big Brother exists, not because some sinister entity is out there watching us all, but because we’re all watching each other.” Indeed, few sci-fi writers of the past could have envisaged a future where we are all Little Brothers, constantly ‘spying’ on our friends and family through Facebook and Twitter; and gladly giving away our own geolocations, timelines, photos, curriculum vitae, uninformed opinions and television viewing habits for others to spy on ... including Big Brothers like the NSA, GCHQ and their Chinese counterparts. Not only are we freely publishing intimate details about our lives, but we are constantly editing or ‘re-branding’ this online image of ourselves, whether it be updating our online CV, deleting something embarrassing from Facebook or rewriting our last blog post. In all the hoopla surrounding the NSA Prism scandal, what was not so widely reported was that The Washington Post got some important details wrong in its breaking story. Instead of being honest about its corrections, as any quality newspaper in the past would do and as any quality online news outlet is expected to still do today, The Washington Post covered up its mistakes in silence, revising its story without noting the corrections. Although this occurred within the span of two days, The Washington Post could well be accused of rewriting history, or at the very least sending its embarrassing errors down an Orwellian memory hole. The main character of 1984 works at the Ministry of Truth where he must change facts and rewrite history to fit with party doctrine; and it’s unsettling to think that something similar has become part and parcel of life in China, where authorities use their Great Firewall to not only monitor social media websites but also to excise them of seditious passages, as detailed in The Diplomat. But we’re all doing it these days, aren’t we? Sending small mistakes and whole websites down the memory hole, never to be heard of again. Now apparently the online versions of respected newspapers are doing it too.

         

In the scramble to find fictitious precedents that foreshadow the dangers of our current surveillance state of affairs – futures that we subconsciously fear (or secretly desire), whether it be Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s theocracy in the The Handmaid’s Tale, Alan Moore’s graphic novel V for Vendetta or George Lucas’s dystopian masterpiece THX 1138 – the most insightful commentary, in my opinion, was provided by a succinct editorial in the French “Le Point” (June 2013, № 2126). And I’d like to sign off with a translation of Etienne Gernelle’s short piece:

Zamyatine’s Nightmare

"It was in 1920… Eugene Zamyatin, in his chef d’oeuvre, We, depicts a world where everything is of glass: walls, tiling, pavements… cells. Nothing escapes the attention of the guards of The Benefactor. Only intimate contact allows you to draw the curtain. This universe was invented by a Bolshevik disgusted by what had taken shape in the Soviet Union. A poetic, visionary warning, before Orwell, before Huxley, and well before the secret agents of the NSA in the United States, who, with the zealous help of a few Internet giants, have endeavoured to turn private life into a virtual reality. Obviously Obama is no Stalin and Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook, is no Lavrentiy Beria, master of the NKVD [Soviet Union secret police apparatus]. One must not forget that cyber war is not a game for Care Bears and that it is unthinkable to give free rein to the worst elements operating on our networks. It’s also worth mentioning that the great enemies of the Surveillance State, such as the Wikileaks televangelist Julian Assange, are in their own way proponents of the same 'transparency'. Transparency is always that of others. Even if there is some truth in this there is still no reason to yield to the dictators of Big Data. Fortunately in France we have the CNIL (French Data Protection Authority), even if the mere mention of this name is enough to provoke laughter in the small world of security intelligence. Laugh as we may, so long as we keep talking about it. For it’s strange that this social issue does not mobilize the masses. It’s a mistake because otherwise we’re accepting the fate of Zamyatin’s hero: We are always visible, always washed in light, for we have nothing to hide. This way of life eases the burdensome task of The Benefactor."