blog




  • Essay / Visibility and invisibility of 21st century surveillance with reference to Foucault

    Punishment has always been a method of showing the domination of the powerful over the weak. But the punishment is not complete without supervision. A question then automatically arises: what is surveillance? Surveillance is like regulation, a constant power that is exerted over each person, monitoring their every move and trying to assert its power over people. But Foucault would take a different approach, his idea of ​​surveillance takes a perfect form when he connects his idea to Jeremy Bentham's hypothetical prison - The Panopticon. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay But Foucault notices a very interesting shift in perception in the 20th century prison system, aside from the idea of ​​the panopticon. “What is punished is no longer the crime but the criminal”, in other words, unlike pre-modern times, Foucault observes a new practice of direct categorization as criminal, instead of investigating the crime, the person is classified according to the seriousness of the crime and is qualified as a criminal, Foucault describes this as a “normalizing judgment”. And since the person is already considered a criminal, he or she will be under “omnipresent control” from the authorities. But with the concept of surveillance comes the Panopticon. Panopticon is an architectural concept created by Bentham, who proposed the idea of ​​a circular prison with a guard tower in the center of the prison. The problem is that the guards inside the tower could examine each cell, but the prisoners would not be able to see the guards. Now, this method is undoubtedly very economical, but it is also very sadistic, in the sense that prisoners will have a constant anxiety of being watched, which, according to Bentham, would lead to self-surveillance. That is, since prisoners will suffer from constant fear of being watched, they will take care of themselves since they will constantly feel the existence of the higher power, observing their actions. Foucault found this to be a perfect example of “omnipresent control” and a perfect condition for structural and psychological violence that will force the prisoner to undergo “inner change.” In the 21st century, we see the addition of technology in this room. . As more and more information becomes free to the public via the Internet, much of the visibility of surveillance is also lost in this virtual world, composed only of numbers and algorithms. The panopticon is no longer limited to the circular prison and a guard tower in the center, in fact it is now everywhere, on lamp posts, walls, your laptops and even your phone acts as a surveillance device. The problem we face in this recent scenario is the insufficient emphasis on technology as a major factor in this sinister plot of oppression. Foucault places more emphasis on notions of oppression rather than taking into account the technology used at the time. “There is no doubt that digital surveillance sometimes has the same normalizing effects. But there is also no doubt that, in some ways, digital surveillance acts very differently from Foucault's original thinking on this subject. The problem is that surveillance is no longer limited to prison systems alone. In this recent scenario, the disease has spread all over the world like an epidemic. Another problem with Foucault's understanding of the panopticon style of surveillance is that, in a panopticon, prisoners are at least aware that they are being watched,but in the modern panopticon, people don't even understand whether they are being watched or not. and therefore there is no notion of self-surveillance or, in other words, "In Foucault's world, the visible presence of technology, and therefore the constant awareness of potential surveillance, resulted in an internalization of perceived perception.judgment and normalization of behavior. Prisoners and citizens became more docile because they never knew when they were being watched. Digital spaces, on the other hand, actually encourage users to break away from normality, fixed identities, and the ordinary. Meanwhile, this seemingly safe space of anonymous exploration and play is under constant surveillance. Our searches, texts, emails and web histories are archived on proprietary servers for long, potentially incriminating periods. Without the constant presence of surveillance technology, digital surveillance can function more like entrapment; prompting subjects to behave freely, then capturing this free, sometimes fantastical play for others to inspect. This notion is actually true because the head of the NSA (National Security Agency), while having an argument, confirmed that they do not spy on "normal" people but that they monitor "normal" people with a “abnormal” behavior. Which leads to another important development in the world of criminology is the concept of the “potential suspect”. This bears a similarity to normalizing judgment, except that the targeted person is not necessarily even required to commit a crime of any kind. The person may be a distant relative who has no immediate connection to the actual criminal, but they would still be a “potential suspect,” and the person will not even be aware of their conviction. In other words, the person is not judged or categorized according to the parameters of the crime, but according to the parameters of probability that he will commit a crime, which is in fact calculated by the artificial intelligence of the NSA, which is in fact a further step, the notion of "normalizing judgment", if we have to see the worst, then the intelligence services no longer track the person, they track their cell phone or their SIM card, terms which dehumanize everything the scenario, in other words "Foucault's concept of surveillance fails to engage directly with contemporary developments in surveillance technology". 20th century surveillance was undoubtedly far-reaching, but 21st-century surveillance is not only far-reaching, but also deeply rooted through decades of data collection, forcing us to see the concept of Foucualt in a different light. surveillance was introduced shortly after the September 11 attacks, as a security measure. Rather create a database of every person on Earth, living or dead. But to gather information, the NSA, CIA and FBI needed a warrant from the courts, hence the emergence of the FISA court, which is a foreign intelligence surveillance court. The problem is that this is not a public court and so there was no way for anyone to except that the president, intelligence officials, and Congress knew about this program, their argument was that they don't want to alert their suspects, but the question is: what if every person on earth was a suspect? So how ethical is this? To understand how deeply rooted this surveillance problem is, one must review the details of surveillance methodologies and also understand how far it is from Foucualt's original ideas and howextent are the freedom and sovereignty of peoples violated? After Snowden's denunciation, Guardian newspapers were the first to break the Verizon news. Verizon is software that gives the NSA and GCHQ (British Intelligence) full access to a person's personal calls, text messages, numbers and even conversation details, location and IP address . Then there is PRISM. PRISM is a database that gathers its data from uplink transfers, namely emails, social networking sites and even manufacturing companies like Apple. Privacy is just a mistake, because most phone manufacturers have installed a built-in "backdoor" that will allow intelligence services to collect unlimited amounts of data, even without the user's knowledge. Then there is “XKEYSCORE” which is a kind of search engine. Now Google is a search engine too, but it has limitations, 'XKEYSCORE' on the other hand gives you absolute control, where the person can view everything related to phone records, personal emails, Facebook, etc. . presto,” according to the Guardian, if the NSA tracks down a shady Iranian banker who has ties to ISIS, it will look at his family and his connections and, again, look at other connections and in no time be gone from collecting one person's data, they would be able to collect the data of 2.2 million people. On the Indian side, we saw the introduction of Aadhaar, which allowed the government to increase its power to. surveillance using biometric scans, in other words, not only now the government has the details of our lives but also our biometric fingerprints, all stored in a single database. data to private companies Nowadays, Aadhaar has become an important document for everything from SIM card to flight tickets, which actually trivializes our personal information and all such information and therefore. , the person can be tracked based on daily life activities and purchases. Aadhaar is considered a mistake since India does not have strong privacy or data protection laws, making surveillance easier. The internet was created for anonymity and it gives the user a certain level of anonymity with a sense of equality where one wins. Don't worry about their race, skin color and religion. But with the evolution of technology and the introduction of social media, the person began to become less and less anonymous as "family members, neighbors, co-workers and other offline acquaintances also communicate with each other on Internet.” “Panopticism has found fertile ground in Internet and social media studies,” except that it is a reverse panopticism. In the original concept, tower guards could examine cells for surveillance purposes, but now "the person being controlled is alone in the middle of the 'prison' and the controllers are all around them." » in other words, “the controlled – the user – is alone in the middle of the prison – the socio-technical system – and the controllers – the other users – are all around him. » There is no doubt that governments engage in illegal surveillance, but in this cyberspace we often give out our very personal information on social media, perhaps by creating an account on Facebook. Name, age, gender, phone number, email id of a person beforehand. Then, once the account is created, Facebook's AI tells us to "personalize" our account and we therefore publish photos, qualifications, opinions.