Channels, Fall 2018

Page 132 Warder • Eyes on the Money the work of surveillance policy expert Sun-ha Hong. Sun-ha (2017) addresses human rights, privacy, and the nature of their derivation in the context of government surveillance, and advocates for a “positive” approach to justifying state surveillance by considering alternate forms of surveillance (that are not as morally offensive), as opposed to the “negative” approach of criticizing it for simply existing. The problem that the literature has here discussed at length is summarized succinctly when Sun-ha explains that “The current dynamic, in which citizens are funneled into a rigged bargain while surveillance is justified through secret and indeterminate proofs, risks becoming particularly dangerous in times when government fails to safeguard its own institutional and moral standards” (pg. 199). Stated thusly, this problem is only a problem in the context of a government that has committed to such institutional and moral standards, though the issue of human rights can certainly be extended in some form to include citizens of authoritarian states. Future Outlook While the literature covered thus far has focused on developmental and current implications of the surveillance state, a final and crucial facet of this discussion focuses upon the future outlook for surveillance policy in the world’s leading economic powers. International relations scholar and International Affairs contributor Jinghan Zeng (2016) writes on this subject in regard to the PRC, and discusses the implications of large-scale data gathering as it relates to a more authoritarian governmental style. The work describes how in the PRC, “cutting-edge ‘big data’ technology could be used to construct the most sophisticated electronic police state on the planet” in the near future, with widespread and comprehensive data collection being the norm. It also relates how for an authoritarian state, that level of domestic legibility would seem to be a huge boon to its management practices, but also explains that there are certain risks to this sort of surveillance. Chiefly, Zeng states that “When data is highly concentrated in the hands of a few powerful individuals or agencies, it may be sufficiently destructive to damage the entire authoritarian regime if used in the interests of competing actors in power struggles” (pg. 1444). In other words, the greater the power that a government wields, the more disastrous the fallout when that power is internally or externally abused. Public security policy scholar Brendan McQuade’s (2016) work addresses the future outlook in the USA, calling the existing American surveillance state a “complex interaction among technology, individual agents and institutional actors” (pg. 15). His work is similar to Ball and Wood’s theme that government surveillance practices cannot be examined in a vacuum and posits that the context of a highly bureaucratic system creates a situation in which it is difficult to change, especially prevent, the onset of the incipient surveillance state. He notes that “Technology is designed not only to perform a material function…but also to express and collectively reinforce beliefs about the differential allocation of power, prestige and wealth in a society” (pg. 7). In this case, his work implies that if surveillance technology still commands enough support from related parties to justify its continued existence, then the USA is facing a future of a surveillance state that retains its autonomy by default because of the indirect nature of the bureaucratic authority being exercised upon it. Whatever policy and ideology-related predictions may be tentatively offered, the outlook of the Chinese and American surveillance apparatuses can also be summarized and predicted in a much more quantifiable fashion. The October 2017 PRN report details the projected economic conditions for the CCTV industry throughout the world, and predicts based on existing business projections that the USA will actually be at the forefront of the CCTV camera market over the next several years, and that Eastern Asia as a whole is expected to see a 14.6% growth in the CCTV market, in both cases clearly denotative of an increasing demand for CCTV technology. As such, this report would indicate that the proliferation of CCTV surveillance in those countries will see nothing but net growth, a sign that the prevalence of public surveillance as a national policy will continue to receive support as well.