How power works: day-by-day, state surveillance becomes more intrusive
Why does the state want to control us, and why do we allow it?
Each week I look at one major international event and try to explain the structures of power behind it — the actors, ideologies and assumptions shaping events.
Introduction
The Metropolitan Police of London, Britain’s largest police force, has just announced that it will deploy surveillance drones across the capital. Only a few months ago, the government announced the rollout of face recognition systems across the whole country, after a successful ‘pilot’ in south London.
Why does the state do this? The justification is always the same: these tools are necessary to apprehend child sex offenders (always mentioned), domestic abusers, violent criminals on the run etc etc.. But the data reveal a scant payoff for the permanent destruction of our privacy.
Are deeper psychic motives at play, on both the side of the population (us) and the state?
The Event
Several major new restrictions on personal freedom have been introduced in Britain in just the last few months. These tools are already in widespread use in the US, and other European ‘democracies’:
Airborne surveillance by drones, large and small. Alongside the more familiar quadcopters you can buy in shops, very large, long-range military drones, which can monitor and film huge areas, and capture mobile phone signals, ‘loitering’ for as long as 36 hours, are in use for ‘law enforcement’ in the US. Such Reaper-style drones were used to monitor anti-ICE demonstrations in California (the Department of Homeland Security paraded their use with drone-filmed video of what it called ‘rioters’ on its website, at one point centering the drone’s crosshairs on a man waving a Palestinian flag). While the deployment of military drones for this politically-repressive purpose came with Trump’s administration, such drones were in use long before Trump entered the White House. While not yet deploying military drones, I did not know that the British police are already using large drones with 200km range and night-time capability. In Islington, where I live, the police uses drones for rapid response to incidents, which can only mean they are used to monitor and chase people.
Facial recognition systems: cameras which scan crowds and individual passers-by to identify supposed miscreants. The ‘pilot’ program in Croydon, South London, saw cameras invisibly installed in park benches, there to observe you relaxing in the sun. Illustrating the intimate relationship of state and surveillance, the largest deployment of facial recognition was during King Charles III’s coronation, where spectators doubtless paid little heed to the discreetly-positioned banks of cameras as they cheered the newly-anointed monarch1.
Interception of electronic communications: emails, texting etc. The US government has already granted itself the right to collect the communications of any foreigner, and Americans who may be in touch with them. The UK, as I’ve noted before, requires all tech companies to give it ‘backdoor’ access to users’ messages, on pain of prosecution if they do not. Under new laws, the UK government is permitted to create ‘Personal User Datasets’ of users who have ‘low to no reasonable expectation of privacy’, whatever that means, including images from CCTV and scraped from the internet.
In the UK, the new Online Safety bill requires all companies to allow the government access to user data. Again, the unimpeachable stated reason is the protection of children. But there can be little doubt that the government will, sooner or later, exploit this access for other purposes. As a result of this bill, one of the last redoubts of encrypted privacy, the Signal messaging app, may now be withdrawn from the UK market. Proton Mail, the encrypted email and file storage provider, has also protested the new bill (on which see endnote to this post).
AI-powered scrutiny of public utterances on social media
AI aggregation and analysis of all data, collected by whatever means, concerning any individual. Most infamously, Palantir has been contracted to provide such capability to the Met Police (though the contract is now under review), and is being considered for the management of patient data in the National Health Service (i.e. knowledge of our very bodies). Its software is already used by the Ministry of Defence. Palantir has supplied Israel’s military with its software since 2014. A Palantir executive described the company's technology as a way of "optimizing the kill chain." When confronted by the claim that the company's technology was used to kill Palestinians, CEO Alex Karp responded: "Mostly terrorists, that's true". Though the company denies it, there are good grounds to believe that Palantir’s products have played an an active part in genocide.
Why? Was the introduction of these tools, an invasion of privacy which no doubt shall never be reversed, prompted by an increase in crime, or a fresh bout of terrorism? It was not. They were introduced because the technology became available, the basic rationale for its deployment long since established. We shall get into that.
Today, the state watches you when you’re walking or driving outside your house - or shopping2. It regularly (and no doubt soon, constantly) analyses your face to identify you. It monitors your emails and texts. It collects and aggregates all its data and, in an instant, interrogates that data for ‘patterns’ of behaviour or key words that would trigger greater scrutiny (note that such scrutiny is invoked not by actual crime but by mere broad correlation of your data with earlier criminality by others).
For those who still choose to believe that surveillance should only worry criminals, and who might still believe in the state’s inherent beneficence, consider what might happen when these tools are in the hands of the authoritarian, as the US is now tragically experiencing.
What everyone is getting wrong
Governments claim that such tools ‘reduce crime’. There is scant evidence for this. What evidence there is shows that facial recognition, for instance, only marginally reduces minor crimes like burglary or car theft, but has no effect on violent crime.
There is, meanwhile, no evidence about the effectiveness of any of these tools on terrorism. Instead, we must rely on declarations from MI6 or GCHQ and their ilk that these secret organisations have successfully ‘foiled’ hundreds of ‘terrorist’ plots. Not one of these terms is defined: what do they mean by ‘foiled’ and indeed what or who counts as ‘terrorist’? These vaporous claims could mean anything: that they’ve caught a teenager scrolling through far-right websites or apprehended a minibus of non-violent demonstrators protesting Israel’s conduct in Palestine? Or arrested a cell of bomb-wielding jihadists about to kill crowds of children (as indeed tragically they have)?
Meanwhile, the list of those the government deems ‘terrorist’ is getting longer and longer in the US, UK and beyond. It is well-known that the protest group Palestine Action has been proscribed, meaning that it is a serious crime merely to say that you support it. In the US, the Trump administration has designated ‘antifa’ as a terrorist group. ‘Antifa’ is not in fact an organisation at all but supposed membership of the group has been used by the courts to condemn activists who demonstrated at an ICE facility in Texas to horrendously long sentences (one activist, very stupidly, used violence, thus providing the authorities with very welcome justification; the same happened with Palestine Action). Attorney General Pam Bondi called Antifa "an existential threat to our nation," while DHS Secretary Kristi Noem argued the Antifa ‘network’ is "just as sophisticated as ISIS and Hezbollah."
Less well-known is that the US has also proscribed foreign anarchist groups in Germany and elsewhere, whom they allege are somehow linked with Antifa, an organisation that does not in fact exist. Last November, the State Department designated four European groups as Specially Designated Global Terrorists and announced intent to designate them as Foreign Terrorist Organisations: Antifa Ost (Germany), the Informal Anarchist Federation/International Revolutionary Front (Italy), Armed Proletarian Justice (Greece), and Revolutionary Class Self-Defence (Greece). In designating them as terrorist, the US presented no evidence that these groups had been involved in violent acts.
The US is clearly building a legal and rhetorical architecture to claim that anarchists are terrorists. Those of us who are public about our commitment to anarchism should watch out.
Inside the system
Why does government do this? Why ever more surveillance, ever more monitoring and intrusion? I think there are several reasons.
Firstly, the state is expected to know everything about potential adversaries, which means knowing everything about your own citizens who might be connected to them, which means examining everyone’s data to find out who those individuals might be. It’s a cascade of justifications for an ever widening net. But many people would regard this motive as reasonable.
Secondly, the technology is now available. China has pioneered the use of cctv and AI to monitor its citizens. We should not be surprised that western states are now busily exploiting that technology. The UK has one CCTV camera for every 13 inhabitants, many of them made in China by the sinister state-aligned Hikvision. The companies selling the tech are of course highly invested in persuading governments to purchase their snooping tools. The expanding use of such technology is incremental, so barely noticed, even though each little step takes the state deeper into what once was regarded as ‘private’: our lives.
But there are also more submerged and unadmitted motives that drive those wielding these tools: the officials, one of whom I once was.
Structurally, the state suffers from the syndrome that inevitably afflicts every institution and organisation. Whatever its stated purpose, the state’s real purpose is its own perpetuation and growth.
There is an inevitable tendency in any particular institution to enlarge and indeed aggrandise itself. This drive for growth - and for the institution’s existence itself - becomes the primary motive of the institution’s actions, though they are never admitted. It must continually prove its necessity. Officials do not recommend their own dismissal. They cherish their own status (I know I did), and thus its maintenance.
This is also why the very aesthetics and architecture of government are so imposing and massive (often imitative of ancient Greece, the supposed birthplace of the modern state). This is entirely deliberate. These features assert permanence and immutability, intimidating the public but also flattering the buildings’ inhabitants with their own solidity and significance. In Rojava, in North East Syria, the communal assemblies, where ultimate power resides in the region, have no designated buildings at all. The meetings take place in school halls or village meeting-places. That is now changing as power increasingly resides in the closed offices of Ahmed al-Shara and his Islamist colleagues (I will write further soon on what is going on there now.)
The state’s power to intrude exerts further if subtle force upon the official’s emotions. There is an undeniable eroticism to secretly-obtained information. It is very exciting to have knowledge others are denied. It makes one feel important. The information is denoted with portentous nomenclature: ‘top secret ultra’ or other designations indicating that this report is particularly special, thereby making the reader feel special.
One feature of course distinguishes the state from other institutions. The state asserts its right to monitor and control as incontestable for one major reason - that it alone can provide the citizen with security. This same reasoning is used to justify the state’s monopoly of violence (according to Max Weber, the defining feature of states).
This justification is deeply rooted in the psychology of the state, and combines seamlessly with the inherent motive of self-perpetuation that infects all institutions. It provides an unimpeachable motive for the state’s servants - that they are protecting the safety of their citizens, indeed the world. It’s very nice to think that your work is saving the world.
This reasoning also encourages the state to get very confused about ends and means: that the ends of ‘security’ justify the means of state violence and surveillance. Gandhi correctly argued that the means and ends are in fact the same thing: what you do now is the only outcome that matters (the identity of means and ends is also a cardinal feature of anarchism). In fact, the separation of means and ends (which is always a sign that immoral conduct is being excused) is, like Weber’s monopoly of violence, a very clear ‘tell’ that the state is up to something nefarious.
I think many people intuitively understand these subterranean forces that drive the state to grow, to control and to surveil ever more intrusively. But yet they put up with the proliferating CCTV cameras, monitoring of email and collection of all our - now comprehensive - electronic data.
The Dissidents
Only a tiny minority inside the state ever question the intrusion they are committing, and they are persecuted if they reveal it: Edward Snowden remains in exile in Russia, with certain prosecution and a lengthy sentence awaiting him should he ever dare returning to the US. And since Snowden, there have been no further Snowdens.
That persecution is also wholly necessary for the state. If one whistleblower is not punished, others might be encouraged to do the same. For the same reason, the punishment must be severe to maximise its deterrent effect. I left government service over twenty years ago, but I’m still afraid of revealing some things I know from that time, for instance the identities of those I know to be MI6 members rather than the ‘regular’ diplomats they pretended to be, or the details of how the UK manipulated UN inspections of WMD in Iraq. The Official Secrets Act criminalises any disclosure of official information acquired during your official work that the government (not you, nor an independent authority) deems damaging to ‘national security’, at any time - for the rest of your life.
The loyal official servant is by contrast rewarded for maintaining the secrecy of the state. The reward is also psychic - the self-affirming knowledge that you are protecting the ignorant public, that your life thus has meaning and moral purpose. There are no rewards for speaking out.
The motives of the state are clear enough. But why do the rest of us put up with it?
The Deeper Forces
Here we get into the deeper psychology of our relationship with the state, and why the state is able to sustain such extraordinary intrusion into our lives with almost no resistance. The Met’s citywide introduction of drones attracted a couple of routine press articles, nothing more, and no political opposition whatsoever.
The formal reason for our silence is that we are presumed to have consented to this invasion of privacy, both by our assent as citizens to the so-called ‘social contract’ (the exchange of our liberties for our security) and by our regular votes that legitimise the government of the day. I did not give such approval when I was born (but my parents, like yours, were required to, on pain of punishment) nor by my vote: I have never voted for the government that ended up controlling me. But I am nevertheless included in the surveillance, my permission never sought.
The more pertinent reason is our supposed belief that the state keeps us safe through such necessary means. But why do we believe that when the evidence is so unconvincing? I think there are two reasons.
The first is that the state is so very good at insidiously asserting its necessity that it doesn’t need to assert it overtly at all. We effectively police ourselves. A little state dictator dwells in our heads. If we question any policing, it is insisted that without such authoritarian control, we would merely kill one another, in fact we could only kill one another, and many people seem to believe this even though there is no relevant or credible evidence (the ‘Lord of the Flies’ or ‘The Walking Dead’ are not evidence, neither is the behaviour of the mutineers of The Bounty). They are taught, usually through implication but also through policy and law, that other people are inherently untrustworthy, a permanent corrosive in the heart of human social relations.
Instead, the abundant evidence to the contrary, of humanity’s tendency to cooperation not conflict in the absence of authority3, is never acknowledged for what it actually shows: a compelling case for the removal of the state. In his epic travels across Russia’s vast expanses, Peter Kropotkin found in the deep wilderness of Siberia that the further a village’s location from an administrative centre, the greater the degree of cooperation among its inhabitants.
The second is that the act of self-realisation, of what it’s like to be truly free, is almost wholly unmentioned and unexamined. We are instead beset by and appear to believe the pestering of self-help gurus who pretend that we can be free and fulfil what we really are, ‘live our best lives’ etc within the cage the state has put around us. And by implication that if we are not fully realised, fulfilled etc., it is our fault or, more modishly, a result of our personal trauma (but happily remediable - if you buy the book or hire the therapist).
This is the parallel to the internalised mental control of capitalism: that it is our fault if we are unsuccessful in capitalism’s narrow terms, i.e. if we don’t earn enough, don’t want to be rich etc. The shame of failure is ours alone. Indeed, these two forces combine into an overall mental strait-jacket of self-repression that our very happiness and terms of our existence are solely ours to determine, our individual responsibility, and have nothing whatsoever to do with the system in which we dwell, when in fact all phenomena occur within and as a result of the broader system in which they exist. That we are not truly free is a form of dehumanisation, that we are less than what we could be. This is beyond tragedy; it’s unspeakable.
There is also a reflexive mechanism at play: a vicious circle if you like. The more that we believe that the state constrains us, the more inclined we are to demonstrate not responsibility but its opposite: ‘if you treat us like children, we will behave like children’. This behavioural tendency is amply demonstrated in social science: that when you deny people any agency or responsibility, thus signalling that they are not to be trusted, they behave irresponsibly, thereby of course reinforcing the necessity of authority. For the state, it’s a virtuous circle; for us, a vicious one. Infantilization breeds infantilism breeds further infantilization, and so it goes on. This infantilized condition is precisely what we now find ourselves in. The enormous pile of laws that legislate and thus invisibly constrain our lives gets ever taller, never smaller.
It is terribly, terribly sad that we really have no idea what it is like to be free, just as most don’t seem able to envisage a life centred on cooperation not competition, soul rather than consumption, ineffable human experience rather than mere measurable things. The state relies on that lack of imagination to insert its intrusive, monitoring proboscis deep into our lives and ever closer to our very bodies and, one day I’m sure, inside them (first my cat must carry a chip, next will be us, mark my words!) More tragically, we enforce this personal inhibition upon each other as social prohibition, dismissing those who conjure the possibility of true emancipation as foolish, utopian, even childish, when in fact it is the rest of us who have been reduced to children.
So, we’re left with a question: what would it take for the state’s ever more intrusive surveillance to be stopped even reversed? Is it awareness of how much the state now monitors? Possibly, as I don’t think many are fully aware of quite how much information the state is now hoovering up, quite how much of what we believe is private is in fact monitored.
Perhaps it is examination, both individual and collective, of the existential question, what, exactly, would it be like to be truly free? The imagining of that answer may be the only thing that makes us, at last, resist the dehumanisation inherent in the state’s gross and persistent intrusion into our lives. We should encourage at least that act of imagining. Only then would we be qualified to judge whether the controls and surveillance the state enforces upon us, supposedly for our benefit, are a good thing or bad.
If you enjoyed this post, please pass it on to a friend or colleague, with the encouragement to subscribe to regular posts.
My book was launched a couple of weeks ago in the UK (August in the US). An early review from one reader:
“It’s a brilliantly written book, written with verve and style and deeper levels of honesty than I’ve ever read in a political book. It feels like a gift to the world.”
Several readers have said it made them cry, which I neither intended nor expected. My mother-in-law sweetly told me that it’s the kind of book that will become famous after I’m dead.
So please buy it, write an online review, mention in your social media, recommend to friends etc..
Endnote: Proton and Me
Some relevant personal news: for at least 15 years I have been recommending - for free - the encrypted email service Proton Mail to clients of Independent Diplomat, the diplomatic advisory group I founded, whether democratic states or political groups and liberation movements from Kosovo to Western Sahara and Syria. I have also recommended it to human rights organisations, journalists and others who need to protect their data from state surveillance. Proton has now kindly agreed to sponsor my work, so a regular (if shorter) endorsement will appear in these posts.
Proton is based in Switzerland, where data protection laws are strong, and was founded by scientists from CERN. I find Proton Mail easy to use, and it now offers file storage, calendar, password manager, VPN and meeting functions, a ‘suite’ of services superior to and far more secure than those of Microsoft, Google or Zoom, all of whose data - your data - is not securely encrypted and which, you can be sure, these companies will readily hand over to the US, UK or other governments when requested (which, in turn, may then share it with Israel, Turkey, Gulf states etc. under totally secret ‘intelligence sharing’ agreements). Zoom, which is not remotely secure and can be very easily monitored by more or less anyone, enabled the arrest of UK climate change activists who using Zoom to plan the non-violent blockade of a motorway (NB planning, not enacting), who were later sentenced to as much as five years in prison. Like Google or Microsoft, the company did not itself reveal its collaboration with the state. This only came out during the trial.
Proton’s software, which is mostly open source, has been independently audited for security by thousands of experts around the world. Unlike Meta-owned WhatsApp, which claims to offer ‘end-to-end encryption’, Proton technically cannot decrypt your data. WhatsApp will decrypt and hand over your data when told by the government. Proton is owned by a Swiss foundation which in turn is mostly owned by its employees, a model that will ensure that the company cannot be taken over by profit-seeking investors who might undermine its mission. The basic Proton package is free, with more storage for a regular subscription.
On an irrelevant note, the reader may like to know that when I say ‘anointed’, in fact His Majesty was literally anointed: scented olive oil, blessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, was dribbled (or poured or spurted, we do not know - for his throne was veiled at this intimate moment) onto his bared chest. For the first time in British history, the oil was ‘vegan friendly’, containing no animal products (for instance, the glands of a civit cat traditionally used).
Under ‘Project Pegasus’, stores like M&S and Primark now systematically run their CCTV data via police systems.
Rutger Bregman’s books assemble the evidence on how humans actually behave in the absence of authority, finding pretty convincingly that the ‘natural’ state of human groups is cooperation not violence. Rebecca Solnit is good on this topic too.
Proton do clouds? 🤔 Do you sell your book on Kobo? Or anywhere now amazon
Great to see the sponsorship from Proton! A rare gem among the odious cloud providers.