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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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American Panopticon
Wednesday 07 March @ 15:49:08 |
 by MAX SPARBER
We must be a pretty secure country by now.
I mean, since 9/11, the U.S. has: taken steps to secure its borders (a 2,000 mile fence is now being built on the Mexican border at an estimated cost of $7.6 billion); built secret prisons run by the CIA; suspended Habeas Corpus for anyone declared an "enemy combatant"; and engaged in two separate disastrous wars, all in the name of making the United States safer. Additionally, we now must put up with daily nuisances, such as long waits at the airport and the possibility that our international phone calls and e-mails are being spied on by a government that has decided it no longer requires warrants for such things. All this must be making us safer, mustn't it?
Well, no.
 I've been reading a fair amount of security expert (and former Pulse restaurant critic!) Bruce Schneier lately. Schneier has been a relentless critic of this administration's response to issues of national security, from bomb squads blowing up any package that's accidentally left on the side of the road (he calls it CYA, or "Cover Your Ass," security) to the Real ID proposal for a national identification card ("A reliance on ID cards is based on a dangerous security myth," Schneier writes, "that if only we knew who everyone was, we could pick the bad guys out of the crowd.")
Schneier has been particularly critical of the NSA's massive data mining program, which, in theory, simply grabs massive amounts of information, like e-mails, and then uses sophisticated computers to sift through them to look for patterns that suggest terrorist activity.
Data mining has worked in the past, Schneier reminds us--credit card companies effectively use it to track down stolen credit cards. It works in this instance, Schneier tells us, because people who steal credit cards have very common patterns of purchases: They buy expensive items, and items that be easily fenced. With terrorist attacks, however, there is no clear model for behavior. They happen infrequently, and there is no absolutely-established set of behavior that we can program computers to look for. "The better you can define what you're looking for, the better your results will be," Schneier writes. "Data mining for terrorist plots is going to be sloppy, and it's going to be hard to find anything useful."
Essentially, the problem we're looking at is a problem that electrical engineers call the signal-to-noise ratio, which compares the levels of a desirable signal (music on the radio, for example) against the amount of background noise (static, for example). With data mining, we're not certain exactly what the desirable signal is--we don't know precisely what sort of noises the terrorists are going to make--and so all we're doing is generating more noise. Huge amounts of noise, that we don't have the skills to effectively sift through. A perfect example of this is the attack on the Twin Towers. Much of the intelligence that would have been required to stop the hijacking was in place prior to 9/11, including a memo from the FBI, dated Aug. 6, that was delivered directly to President Bush and was titled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the U.S."
This memo included intelligence that terrorists were considering methods of hijacking airplanes.
Intelligence is useless if you don't know how to use it, and mining more of it just means generating more noise.
Schneier tends to question one function of security, and an obvious one: Does it succeed in making us more secure? I would like to propose that there is a second, more insidious function: In a totalitarian environment, the purpose of observation is observation itself. That is, even if no useful information is ever gathered, the machine of security is nonetheless useful, because it's a reminder that the state is watching.
The model for this was developed in the late 18th century by an English philosopher named Jeremy Bentham, in response to a problem of oversight. In prisons, it was impossible to always observe the behavior of prisoners, and prisoners who knew when they were being watched by guards could take advantage of the moments when they weren't. Bentham suggested designing prisons in a circle, with the cells on the outside of the circle and a prison tower in the center. The cells are open to viewing and always lit, while the guards in the tower would be hidden from the prisoners. In this way, the prisoners could not know if they were being watched or not, and must assume that they are being observed at all times. Bentham described such a structure as providing "a sentiment of an invisible omniscience."
Bentham's panopticon is a seductive model, and it is easy to see that data mining fits that model. Terrorists can never be sure what information is being mined, and so must presume that all information is being mined, and behave accordingly. Never mind that the chances of any useful information might come out of such an activity is minuscule--the point is to let the terrorists know that they are being watched.
But here is where the model breaks down. Unlike in an actual panopticon, where the guards know who the prisoners are, we don't actually know who the terrorists are. If we did, we could just monitor their communications, and probably glean useful information from them. Instead, because we don't know who the terrorists are, we must monitor everybody, just in case. And that's exactly what is happening. The United States is monitoring its own citizens--their e-mails and their phone calls--just in case. And one suspects that this administration doesn't mind doing so--there are many side benefits to observing the population at large if you have a dictatorial sensibility, and Bush's administration has been pretty clear that they would be delighted to assume the role of dictator. "If this were a dictatorship it would be a heck of a lot easier," Bush notoriously joked at a photo op broadcasted on CNN on Dec. 18, 2000. "Just so long as I'm the dictator."
He was being glib, but, at the same time, his administration has not taken the subject of personal liberties seriously enough to worry that they might be threatened by useless, intrusive data mining--a program that has given the United States permission to spy on its own people, regardless of the presumption of innocence. Bush has succeeded in recreating the panopticon, but with the entire U.S. as the prison, and with his administration as our wardens and guards. ||
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