the SURVEILLANCE bros

Warning: the train of thought I'm about to go down doesn't have to do with the Panama Papers as much as with the Snowden Leak!!!

Right now a good friend of mine is writing his senior thesis on government surveillance and privacy vs. security. He explored the panopticon that is created through organizations like the NSA. A panopticon is only a concept, but an important one regardless. It's a theoretical prison in which the guard is in the middle, and all the prisoners are in rooms with windows facing the middle. The rooms and the prisoners are watched over all the time by the guards in the middle. This creates an environment where prisoners don't need to be disciplined or regulated, because the chance that they could be watched at any moment creates self regulation. They're always on their best behavior because they don't have a choice.

The concept of a panopticon created through the internet extends to other organizations beyond the government. A good example, actually, is the Panama Papers. They slipped up and raised red flags about the legitimacy of BLANK corporation, and got found out by investors and agencies that furthered the investigation. I don't think the panopticon is always a bad thing, depending on who is the guard in the middle and who is being watched.

I do think the panoptican changes publics drastically.

In the case of the Snowden Leaks, we see the NSA as the guard in the middle, and journalists/members of political activist groups as the prisoners. In poking around ICIJ, I found an article written by a journalist who discovered firsthand.“I don’t want the government to force me to act like a spy. I’m not a spy; I’m a journalist,” said Washington Post reporter Adam Goldman “What are we supposed to do? Use multiple burners? No email? Dead drops? I don’t want to do my job that way. You can’t be a journalist and do your job that way.” Essentially, news media who provide information to the public are being surveilled, and certain publics are also being tracked.

How does that change the way these publics communicate? Well, first and most obviously, they use more subversive, encrypted communication techniques. Beyond that, I'm not quite sure. I couldn't find any academic articles on the matter, but I'll keep poking around. I'd imagine it would make publics more extreme, and less trusting of each other.

The surveillance state we live in creates a norm of whistle blowing, as seen in the Panama Papers and the Snowden Leak. Habermas wrote that "when the exercise of political control is effectively subordinated to the democratic demand that information will be accessible to the public, does the political sphere win an influence over the government" (1). Maybe the public isn't demanding loud enough for information, because it kind of sucks that people who leak have to flee the country. How does the fact that we don't have an influence over the government change the purpose and internal functions of a public? Probably. Can we know exactly how it's changing, despite its newness? Probably not... yet. Dun dun dun.