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." 

From Fleet Street to Tabloid Superhighway 

We’ve all been there, we’ve all been tempted to click. We should be working, researching something on the Internet, but we’re distracted by that bizarre photo and intriguing headline shimmering at the corner of our screen. Okay, just one little click, one quick peep … and before you know it you’ve wasted fifteen precious minutes scrawling through ‘Ten Really Awkward School Photos’ and then reading about Mark Zuckerberg’s glamorous new home. The new wave of tabloid websites, or rather, parasitic hubs that beg, borrow and steal from the rest of the Internet, can be high on entertainment and low on moral fibre, in true Fleet Street tradition. WTFHub and Wahoha are two classic time-wasters. You could say that wtfhub.com panders to the female market with its celebrity tidbits and sickeningly cute dogs dressed like Ewoks while the raffish wahoha.com is something of a mutant Lads’ magazine, seriously hung up on celebrity breasts, fast cars, and before-and-after bodybuilding pics. Both hubs are big on headlines and lots of lists and glossy images; and very short on text. Oh yeah, and they seem to have an unhealthy obsession with everything Mark Zuckerberg. According to w3snoop, the kitty-cute WTFHub receives just 50 unique visitors per day compared to the staggering 180-plus million daily visitors at the testosterone-pumped wahoha.com. If these figures are any indication, then it seems the men are wasting a whole lot more time online than their female counterparts. It doesn’t matter which site you choose, though, because many of their articles are interlinked, and linked to other similarly gaudy sites, the lot of them leeching off the rest of the Web like an invisible army of drooling paparazzi.

Movie poster for 1932 Freaks

All in the name of good fun, of course. Click on a story (or more likely an image) at WTFHub or Wahoha and you never know where you’ll end up: one instant you’re chuckling over the 15 biggest movie mistakes at feedbox.com (“Quality news and entertainment”, their masthead promises us), the next you’re frowning at the Schwarzenegger Dog at animalslook.com (an over-muscled bully-whippet with mutated genes). Quite a few of these eye-popping images are obviously photoshopped and some of the sites don’t even bother to lie about this. In any case, if you’re not careful with this kind of surfing you’ll soon have a dozen windows open on your screen, the half of them trying to fleece money out of you or trying to cajole you into making that leap from soft celebrity porn to the harder stuff. Indeed, some of the grubbier sites appear to be booby-trapped with hard-porn backlinks. For all its girly pomp, WTFHub is my pick of the litter for harmless fun. If you can get past the cute cats in hoodies there are some gold nuggets to be gleaned here. The Top 12 Most Modified People, for instance, is well worth wasting a few minutes on (and you can find variations on this highly popular list at half-a-dozen different tabloid hubs). In the old day, you'd have to go to the cinema to see Tod Browning's Freaks, or rent the video from Blockbuster. Now all the freaks are on the internet under the aegis of 'modified'. I'm probably just jealous. In fact, I can never decide who from this bunch of lovable wackos I’d like to be seen out having a coffee with: Rick the Zombie Boy, who is tattooing his entire body in homage to the living dead; the Enigma, who's completely tattooed with puzzle pieces and likes to hammer nails through his nose; or the truly disturbing Catman, whose extreme plastic surgery has give rise to permanent cat whiskers, teeth filed to sharp points, and the weirdest cheek implants you’re ever likely to come across. Now back to work!               

Massacre of the Innocents

A FRIEND of mine posted on Facebook that a certain episode of Game of Thrones left her gasping. I thought she was being melodramatic until I watched the penultimate episode of Season 3 myself. If the various YouTube compilations of people’s reactions to this climactic episode is anything to go by, I wasn’t the only one caught off guard. It might even be a seminal moment in television history; yet not for obvious reasons.

Only those who have read the novels (A Song of Fire and Ice) were fully prepared for the grisly turn of events in the episode entitled The Rains of Castamere. One would think accolades should go to the writers and the director for finding the right pacing and style that managed to lull audiences into a false sense of nuptial merriment shortly before having the throats of their favourite characters slit in quick succession. Genuine shock and awe for a television series is no easy feat in this day and age of media saturation and it seems producers nowadays will go to any lengths. Most reviews on the Internet have been quick to attribute the shock tactics of the Red Wedding, as it is known among fans, to some clever direction combined with the sudden killing off of many beloved characters all at once. Yet if we dig a little deeper we will see that perhaps the real reason why the scene continues to resonate is because the HBO writer- producers have broken a television taboo while simultaneously alluding to an even darker one.

One gets the feeling that HBO is competing with AMC’s The Walking Dead in the shock and gore stakes, an assumption which has less to do with the White Walkers and everything with the wedding’s pivotal murder: the stabbing to death of Robb Stark’s pregnant wife. This barbaric fœticide – she is stabbed right in her stomach multiple times – sets in motion the whole wedding massacre sequence. Yet in spite of all the slit throats and spraying blood that follows, the viewer is left feeling bewildered, if not slightly numb from that opening murder. I’ve sat through quite a number of fantasy and horror movies in my time and yet I can’t seem to recall any instances of a pregnant woman being explicitly stabbed in her stomach – certainly not in a made-for-television program. If there are such cases, then they are extremely rare. Conan the Barbarian of early Schwarzenegger fame comes to mind, albeit young Conan’s pregnant mother is beheaded rather than stabbed. On the other hand, some powerful comparisons present themselves in art when we turn our attention to that loose biblical oeuvre concerned with the legend of the Massacre of the Innocents. 

Peter Paul Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents

 Indeed, as Game of Thrones evolves, its writers seem to be reaching more and more for the ancient myths on their bookshelves. Supposedly George R.R. Martin, the architect behind the novels, drew inspiration for the wedding massacre from an infamous Black Dinner in Scottish history. Some critics, however, have seen fit to draw comparisons between drone attacks on weddings in Afghanistan, something which is maliciously lampooned in The Duffel Blog. Others see parallels with modern-day massacres being perpetrated by the Mexican cartels in Guanajuato and elsewhere. To my mind though, the wedding massacre, along with numerous other acts of barbarism and revenge throughout the series – the eunuch’s story, the incestuous siblings, the killing of the unborn heir, et cetera – share more in common with Greek tragedy or Herodotus’ rambling Histories, where it is par for the course for newly installed royals to put to the sword their rival’s children and pregnant women, particularly in Persia (incidentally, all those ‘exotic’ 19^th century stereotypes that litter the ‘oriental’ lands Across The Narrow Sea, where Daenerys and her dragons roam, must have Edward Said turning in his grave). That some of the underlying themes of Game of Thrones/ Fire and Ice are being generated by the archetypes of Greek literature is borne out by Bran Stark’s legend about the Night’s Watch and the cook feeding the visiting king his own son baked in a pie. It is a familiar tale that finds its antecedents in the ancient Greek myths of Pelops being served up as a meal to the Gods and Atreus serving up the flesh of his brother’s sons at another feast (the same myths influenced Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus by way of Senecan revenge tragedies). At that same fireside chat between the crippled Bran Stark and his young companions we get the sacred laws of hospitality. This is an indirect reference to the wedding massacre, which itself was preceded by the Starks being given salt and bread, a guarantee of safety under another lord’s roof. This law of hospitality is directly borrowed from the ancient Greek world. We are reminded of it throughout the Odyssey, for instance; a law which is savagely broken by the Cyclops when he dashes out the brains of Odysseus’s comrades and devours them.

The cannibal’s meal is served up to viewers again in Season 3 in one of those tedious torture scenes involving Theon Greyjoy, where his inexhaustible tormentor is seen eating a pork sausage in the wake of Theon’s emasculation. Eli Roth was lambasted for his 2005 gothic horror gem Hostel and the “torture porn” that it ostensibly promulgated, and yet here we have elements of this same torture porn repackaged within a HBO series and aired weekly on cable television and illegal downloads. At one level, these drawn-out dungeon sessions with a hapless Theon Greyjoy evoke gothic memories of the old Hammer House of Horror films; at another level, the overt sexual connotations of the torturing cannot belie its homosexual sadism, all but laid bare by that pork sausage moment. In any event, this sort of HBO torture porn, together with just about every episode of The Walking Dead, are further examples of the extent to which mainstream television – which is what HBO and AMC are basically becoming – have appropriated the once vilified conceits of the R-rated horror and splatter genres for global mass consumption (yes, even in Afghanistan). 

Another movie that I have heard about but not seen is the French À l’Intérier, which is inspired by one of those real-life nightmares in which one woman is determined to get her hands on the unborn baby of another woman by whatever means necessary. The newspapers and Internet abound with sordid crime stories of pregnant women being killed or even slit open in a grim travesty of a caesarean. Which brings me back to that darker taboo adumbrated by the barbaric stabbing of a pregnant Talisa at the Red Wedding: that of the back-alley abortion. Like so many hypocrisies parodied in Robert Altman’s The Player, the topic of abortion was once strictly off-limits in mainstream Hollywood, with only a handful of studio films being able to get it past the editing table. Even today the subject of backyard abortionism is usually relegated to documentaries and art-house films, such as the winner of the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Independent horror films, on the other hand, never had any such trepidations; indeed, the spectre of abortion is very often extrapolated or demonized through the grisly carnage perpetrated by the slasher or zombies, a macabre device which can be seen at work in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, The Eye 2, Black Christmas, and more recently in AMC’s The Walking Dead, just to name a few. All of these horror movies (and shows) elicit the unconscious terrors of the butchered abortion, an all-too-common reality of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries when male white societies in the West and in the Soviet Bloc illegalized abortion and forced young pregnant women into the hands of sleazy charlatans, nowhere better epitomized than in the harrowing 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Abortion has been around since the beginnings of civilisation and for much of that history it was performed by competent midwives who knew how to use the most effective abortifacients (herbal poisons). Yet there is also a long list of frightening abortion tools that have been used in recent history, the most primitive of all probably being the most modern: the household coat hanger. Without modern hygiene or anaesthesia, the usage of such instruments can result in death for the woman as well as the unborn child. The butchered abortion: an image which finds its most powerful expression in the blade and the swollen womb, whether it be in a Renaissance painting or a fantasy television series.