THE AGE OF SURVEILLANCE

TALKING POINTS

The world - and it is a small world indeed - is at your fingertips. Let them do the satellite tracking.

The Age of Surveillance is in full swing, and it is we who are swinging. In contrast to the dystopic visions of yesterday's sci-fi writers, in which the people endure constant surveillance by governments or corporations, today's technologies of surveillance are increasingly decentralized and increasingly publicly available. Mark Crispin Miller's elegant revision of George Orwell -- "Big Brother is you, watching" -- seems strangely apt in a world where it's becoming easier and easier for us to see what our fellow human beings are doing.

The occasion for such ruminating is the advent of Google Earth, a software program that allows the user to view any spot on the globe, from various "altitudes," through the eyes of orbiting satellites. The "streaming" images that Google Earth provides are not quite real-time, but they are three-dimensional, and they include both terrain features and man-made environments. Want to see the Eiffel Tower? Zoom in. Tierra del Fuego or the Sahara? Zoom in.

Since the software is free for public consumption, the technology is not quite what the military enjoys, and the resolution gives out if you zoom in too close. But it is still possible to identify individual cars and individual houses -- or if you choose to "look" at, say, Baghdad, individual bomb craters. The program also supports a kind of bulletin-board system, whereby users can post and read messages regarding various geographic locations and what we might call their incident history. Here is the more stirringly technical version of how Google describes its latest world-conquering innovation:


* Massively scalable architecture publishes terabytes of geo-data to thousands of users from single server cluster

* 3D view provides a complete picture of the area of interest by fusing imagery, elevation data, GIS data, and your own points and annotations

* Fluid and responsive interaction streaming technology enables easy exploration of massive datasets

* Collaboration and sharing are enabled through built in tools to email views, placemarks and annotations using flexible XML format
All this is a natural -- or rather inevitable -- extension, we might suppose, of the inexorable miniaturization and domestication of high-end computer technologies, a process that is making our society seem more like Star Trek every day. And it also seems entirely predictable that, among its other features, Google Earth provides ready information on such geographic features as shopping malls, golf courses, and coffee houses. MapQuest, eat your heart out.

But this goes beyond Google Earth. In part, that's because other companies are getting in on the act. Microsoft, Google's arch-competitor, has released an early version of a program called Virtual Earth, which also combines mapping and searching technologies. And a software company in Palo Alto, A9, is developing a database of "BlockView" images, or street-level photographs of different American cities. Although this project is only available in a beta version, it raises the prospect down the road of somehow combining with satellite viewing programs and making the public presence of just about anyone, just about anywhere, visible to a faceless array of arm-chair watchers.

The broader philosophical and social questions here are not far to seek, but they may be harder to answer than we would expect. How will widely available satellite and photographic imagery change our understanding of public space? The image and the ideal of the agora, from ancient Greece, is one in which public openness enables discourse, commerce, knowledge -- in short, the work of civilization. Can our new image technologies reinvigorate that ideal, or will they pervert it? Who wins and who loses? To what degree will these technologies help to distribute power more broadly, and to what degree will they concentrate power in fewer hands?

One obvious concern is security, with the United States, Australia, and the Netherlands all expressing trepidation over making publicly available imagery of sensitive sites such as nuclear reactors and government buildings. For the time being, at least, these concerns haven't grown to a chorus, but as the technology improves, the move to censor imagery will likely grow.

In the meantime, the more generalized fear is of the loss of privacy we all face, and many people, as Tom Lehrer put it long ago, are "beginning to feel like a Christian Scientist with appendicitis." Indeed, it is even possible to argue that what is at stake is our sense of privacy itself -- in other words, that what we will lose is actually the fear of our loss of privacy, and that we will become reconciled to living under the ever-watchful eye of the global panopticon. This darker perspective will be explored in more depth in the next issue of the Uncommon Denominator.

Here, let's first ask whether there are any positive practical implications to public-use surveillance imagery. Given that this particular genie probably won't go back into the bottle, and that those who can profit from it in different military and corporate bureaucracies will continue to expand its use, is there any way in which this technology can be put to good use? What is its democratic potential, its potential for strengthening ordinary people against the encroachments of the powerful?

The best way to approach this question is to ask, What are we not supposed to see? What visual information about the surface of the earth is meant to be kept from public view, and why?

And the answer to these questions leads us quickly to environmental issues.

The physical transformations of the biosphere that modern industrialism and population growth have entailed can be shocking. That is why business interests, and the governments they collude with, go to great lengths to prevent people from seeing such things as agricultural feed-lots, or strip-mines, or logging sites. We're supposed to believe that such places are the unfortunate but inevitable cost of development, and of our lifestyle, but they are not inevitable, and if people could actually lay eyes on them, the potential exists for a mobilization of public sentiment against business-as-usual.

Out of sight, out of mind. In sight, in mind. Here's what a factory farm really looks like, or an offshore oil well. Here are the mountains 5 years ago; here they are after the coal and logging companies got to them. Hmmm…Greenland, as its ice-pack melts, is not looking quite as large as it used to. And let's not forget the grim human environments that have emerged in such places as the slums around Mexico City, Lagos, or Jakarta. All of these places, all of these images, vividly illustrate the patterns and the consequences of modernity humanity's relationship to the world and its resources. They also illustrate the difference in power between the haves and the have-nots.

The politics of visual evidence has deep roots in the American reform tradition. In nineteenth-century abolitionist and temperance literature, reformist authors wanted their readers to visualize the horrors of the plantation and the saloon. With the rise of photography, and its creative use by Jacob Riis, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and others, the realities of both the city tenement and the country farm could be brought home to the American middle class. During the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam war, television images of violence here and abroad shocked many viewers out of their ethical torpor. Today, satellite technology might possess the same potential for showing us, in literal ways, those goings-on in the world which the forces of greed and conservatism would prefer to conceal from us. At present, the technology may not be sufficiently sophisticated to achieve everything we hope, but if we move in that direction, and if we look beyond its merely commercial potential, democratized satellite imagery could begin to shape the environmental debate.

One of the moments that marked a turning point in modern environmental consciousness was the picture taken, from outer space, in the 1960s, of the Earth. This photograph suggested, at a visceral level, that whatever one's political or theological views might be, all humankind inhabited the same blue-green orb sailing through the vast, cold wastes of the universe. Could we be at a juncture where readily available visual access to every spot on the globe, from our next-door neighbor's patio to the tip of Mt. Everest, has a similarly revelatory impact?




CHECK IT OUT

In the spirit of universal surveillance (see "Talking Points" above), we'd like to recommend three websites that provide nitty-gritty information, not just hot air, about the role of money in American politics.

The most in-depth and serious of these sites is OpenSecrets.org, sponsored by the Center for Responsive Politics. It provides vast amounts of financial data regarding contributions to Congressional and Presidential races, corporate PACs, 527 committees, the FEC, lobbyists and legislation, and on and on. Budget time for this site, and be prepared to learn a lot.

Then there's PoliticalMoneyLine, which is not quite as comprehensive, but easier to use and to read. Of particular interest is the Donor Geography map, which allows you easily to zero in on state, then city, then last name, in tracking down the flow of dollars into the electoral process.

Finally, there's FundRace 2004 Neighbor Search, which markets itself as a means "to find those who live near you that have made presidential campaign contributions," and makes it easy to do so. The site also provides a red/blue detailed map of the United States based not on votes but on financial contributions.

Check 'em out.