Neo-Imperialism and the nature of power: surveillance, Edward Snowden and democracy

The author recently wrote an article documenting the rise of surveillance in modern society, and how this coincided with the rise of the internet and the widespread use of CCTV. When the Edward Snowden revelations were revealed to the world two years ago, the extent to which the USA (and its Anglophone partners, especially the UK) were gathering masses of information across the globe was astounding. In the article mentioned above I alluded to the "public" rationale for this level of surveillance (The War On Terror etc.), but also to the - more likely - "private" reason: they do it because they can.

This is not to say that these people in government are "evil". It is more down to the simple human nature of those with their hands on the levers of power. The capability exists to know almost everything there is to know about people; therefore, not to use it would seem almost like a abrogation of government's instinct to do what it can to control events.

The modern nation-state is a creation of law. It took centuries for autocratic societies to be transformed into nation-states where those in power were held in check by an objective set of laws. Britain was one of the first nations to achieve this basic principle. The USA took this principle to (for the 18th century) its logical conclusion, by creating a state based "on laws, not men". Since then, other nations have improved this concept further. It is no surprise that the nations with the most stringent application of rule of law are also the most stable and the least corrupt. Therefore, any government that follows these principles consistently (i.e. is not a corrupt dictatorship) is bound by the law of the land in its actions. But where does surveillance fit into this?

"Spycraft" has been a feature of governments for centuries, and more sophisticated  - and intrusive - techniques were developed as the technology became available. Fast forward to the end of the Second World War. The USA and the British Empire had won the war, but now faced the threat of Soviet Russia. Thanks to a quirk of geography, many of the world's telecommunications cross the Atlantic between the USA and the UK. This meant they also had the capability to intercept a large volume of the world's telecommunications. Faced with the threat of Soviet Russia, the USA and it's English-speaking partners (The UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) created the "Five Eyes": a secret surveillance network. While those within the "Five Eyes" network worked together, all other countries' communications were effectively declared "fair game" - which included other NATO allies. All this was kept secret from the outside world, until it was cracked open by Edward Snowden.

As the adage goes "information is power". While these governments are bound by their own laws. we also have seen those laws easily modified in times of crisis and war. Freedom (of expression and privacy) and the rule of law is not permanent or set in stone once it has been created. These things can be rolled back. The 9/11 attacks and the War On Terror saw the US government and its Anglophone allies grant sweeping powers of surveillance over their own citizens, as well as others all across the globe. The "rule of law" that was meant to be there to check the excesses of government, was being bent to the breaking point. It would take a great deal of legal trickery to demonstrate that what the US government was doing did not break its own constitution. In the UK, where the "rule of law" was a more flexible construct given the lack of a written constitution, the government were able to do even more.
While terrorism was the official justification to their respective parliaments, in reality the surveillance covered everything from hoovering up the browsing habits of Europeans, to bugging the phones of European leaders. Again, for what possible purpose could this serve to the "War On Terror"?

The meaning of Neo-Imperialism

In reality, these techniques and the widespread use of spycraft on allies and enemies alike showed that the Anglophone spy agencies were really using the technology in whatever way they could, within the (hazy) constraints of the law. Governments are as fallible and as hard-wired to over-reach as the rest of us; the same can be said for companies. Like any ordinary person, given the chance the government will do whatever it thinks it can get away with.

This is the meaning of what we call "Neo-Imperialism". In the 21st century, the world is a place of a number of different centres of power, with alliances here and there, each vying for control. In such a setting, where things seem so uncertain, "information" truly is key. The irony is that the two most significant geo-political events of the last five years - the Arab Spring and its aftermath, (with the subsequent Civil War in Syria and the rise of ISIS) and the crisis in Ukraine and Russia's schism with the West - happened without the west (and the "Anglophone alliance) having a clue about what was about to happen.

An intervention in Libya is called a "failure of Neo-Imperialism", while a non-intervention in Syria and the rise of ISIS is likewise called a "failure of Neo-Imperialism". Neo-Imperialism is about using the modern instruments at the disposal of the world's most powerful governments to try and control events.
We talk about "soft power" and "hard power". The USA uses both. Under George W. Bush, "hard power" was the instrument of preference, supported by "soft power". Under Barack Obama, the emphasis seems to be reversed. The UK was recently shown to be at the top of the world table in its successful use of "soft power". Given its lack of a serious military budget, it is no surprise that the UK uses more indirect methods to get what it wants. It charms and cajoles; it submits and threatens where necessary.

The British Empire may well be a thing of the past, but Britain is still an "empire" in all but name, at least in terms of the way carries out its world affairs, as well as many of its affairs at home. While we are in the 21st century, many nations are still run in a pseudo-feudalistic way. Neo-Imperialism is really just a variation on the world politics of the late 19th and early 20th century, but with modern technology allowing for other techniques to be used for the same ends.

The first half of the 20th century saw the rise of totalitarian states in Russia and Germany. Today, the idea of such a nightmare returning seems thankfully remote. However, while few would see the use of surveillance as "authoritarianism" in the classic sense, the insidious nature of this power is what makes it so easy to ignore. Comparatively few people are truly concerned; they are not aware of it happening, as they would have been in the times of the Nazis or the Soviet Union.
Again, this demonstrates the changed nature of the state: whereas before the state wanted you to know that you were being watched, these days it is done (or was, until Edward Snowden) without public awareness.

As said before, it is easy to understand why governments do it; with the technological capability there, the temptation is too strong to resist, so excuses are created for its use. This technology may seem benign to many but, as with rule of law, these things are prone to change. Governments are masters of "threat management". With the rise of the symbiosis between government and business, accountability and oversight can quickly become lost.
This is the neo-liberal orthodoxy that has ruled the roost in the Anglosphere for the last thirty-five years.

Big Brother Is Watching You: Accepting Surveillance In Modern Society

Almost exactly two years ago, the author wrote an article discussing the strange death of privacy in the 21st century. One of the key changes to society in the last twenty years, coinciding with the rise of the "internet age", is the "surveillance society".

The UK is the most highly-watched country on the planet, according to the experts. While the USA may be seen as having a longer history in this field (thanks to the long history of conspiracy theorists), the UK is the real home of "Big Brother", in both the fictitious, and real, sense of the term.
The birth of CCTV around twenty-five years ago quickly exploded across the UK, so that the nineties were the decade that saw the "surveillance society" and cameras become ubiquitous on every street corner, private and public spaces. Improved technology made it possible; political will made it happen.

A Camera In Every Corner

The original reason for the the sudden rise of CCTV was crime prevention. Of this still is the main reason for them, and why they exist in every retail space and public area that is watchable. The ethical issues were never really discussed at a serious level; it was simply assumed by everyone to be "a good thing".
Looking at it from a rational perspective, CCTV, by definition, is a very poor form of conventional "crime prevention". For anyone with an understanding of criminology (the author has a criminology background), CCTV can never be a true resource of crime prevention; only another method of securing criminal prosecution.

The simple explanation is this: cameras record events; they do not prevent events (and crimes) from happening. They are a useful police tool because, of course, it allows the authorities to know which individuals are responsible. Indirectly, yes, they may discourage people from committing crimes if they see an increased likelihood of being caught from CCTV footage, but there is little real evidence of this being actually the case. The would-be perpetrators simply wear "hoodies", thus solving this "problem". This explains why the "hoodie" is the clothing of choice of gangs and low-level criminality over the past twenty years.

So if cameras are not, in reality effective measures of crime prevention, what are they for?

Here we come to the crux of the issue, which will be fully explained once we've looked at the other, more insidious, arm of the "surveillance society" - the internet.

Full-Spectrum Dominance and "mastering" the Internet

The birth and rise of the internet coincided with the proliferation of CCTV across the world. Originally, the internet was seen as a great liberator, allowing masses of information free at the click of a button. Of course, this fact is still true; what has changed is the governments' perception of it.

The internet is essentially an "online mirror" for human nature. You can find the very best and most enlightening aspects of human knowledge; similarly, you can find the very darkest and basest elements so of the human mind also, if you are so inclined. Governments quickly realised this, and saw how criminal networks used the internet for all manner of illegal operations. In other words, it gave criminal organisations a place to carry out their operations beyond the reach of government.

In places like the USA, the internet in the nineties started to be used by right-wing extremist groups; the type of groups that Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was involved with. Doubtless, this must have terrified the life out of the FBI, as they saw how exposed they could be if the internet was left more-or-less unchecked. By 1998, with the East Africa bombings by Islamic radicals, the US government must have been even more acutely-aware of how some of these extremist organisations around the world were using the internet to better co-ordinate their activities. The internet's dark underbelly wasn't just about porn and a venue for criminal activity; it was a place full of terror.

Then 9/11 happened.

Up to this point governments in the USA and UK must have felt they were always playing the game "one step behind". Now they knew that the danger was from an unanticipated, and vastly underestimated, source. The PATRIOT act in the USA, and similar legislation in the UK, gave government the authority to more effectively "master" the internet, which it has been doing with greater and greater efficiency ever since. Year on year, as revealed by the Edward Snowden revelations, more and more data was being stored and evaluated by government.
While governments protest that the vast majority of this data - essentially the internet activity of millions of people -  is ignored even if it is automatically intercepted, the basic point is that privacy no longer really exists.

"The purpose of power is power"

Here we arrive at the crux of the issue. The purpose of government is "to govern" i.e. to control its citizens. This is the fundamental principle of why people willingly allow themselves to be governed: for the sake of collective security. Because, when it comes down to it, we're all scared.

In the modern age, in the 21st century, the common perception is that we are living in a time of unparalleled freedom. At a superficial level this may well be true: more and more people are being granted "rights" that they have never had before (e.g. the legalisation of gay marriage; the effective decriminalisation of soft drugs). People are free to express themselves in ways that were unthinkable forty years ago. Conversely, racism and base prejudice, while certainly still in existence, are no longer accepted as the norm as they were decades ago.
But a better way of understanding what's happened is this: government is happy to cede control over issues it is indifferent to. The examples raised above are all issues that government generally has little interest in directly controlling over anyway, or are issues that are too much hassle to control (the prevalence of soft drugs being a good example).

While it is willingly cedes control on what might be called "social issues", it conversely has doubled-down on security issues. This is the essence of modern, 21st century government: where government does less, but what it does do, it does with even greater, ruthless efficiency.

The 9/11 attacks and "terrorism" in general since then demonstrate that government most fears what it can't control. Unlike social issues, it cannot remain "indifferent" to terrorism and the loss of government "security", because these issues, to government, are integral to government's functioning. This explains why government can take such a hard line on "mastering" the internet and controlling its own (and others') resources, even beyond the point of rationalism. When the meaning of government is security, people in government can quickly lose a sense of perspective.

The Edward Snowden scandal was a good example of this. When these revelations exploded onto the world scene two years ago, courtesy of "The Guardian" newspaper, the US government realised it had few legal pathways to prevent publication, so instead worked with the newspaper best it could to limit the damage. The Guardian worked carefully to make sure that it complied with US law, while still publishing everything that it could.
By contrast, the UK government was in a much more knee-jerk in its reaction, encouraged by the fact that UK law gave the government far greater power to do what it liked. So after some deliberation, they came down on The Guardian like a ton of bricks, compelling the newspaper to destroy the computers holding the secret information (with government officials watching to make sure!). The irony of this act was that it was entirely futile; The Guardian had copies of the secret information in New York, which the US government had no legal powers (or the willingness) to retrieve. The UK government was seemingly making a point: we can do what we like, even if it's pointless.

So what is the purpose of the "surveillance society"?
As said earlier, governments exist because people are, at heart, scared. This then gives governments a "raison d'etre": to exist for the sake of existing. Information is power, and as the UK government's reaction to the Edward Snowden revelations showed, power is power. In the 21st century, governments have the power to "master" the internet; therefore, there is no reason not to do it. To fail to use this power would be seen (in their eyes) as an abrogation of their duty as government. Government's job is therefore also "threat management"; any act of terrorism becomes seen as an "existential" threat to those in government because they see any threat as potentially lethal to their authority. It is down this pathway that leads logically to authoritarianism.

Meanwhile, society is largely indifferent. The proliferation of the internet and advances in media technology have coincided with a change in individual perception. Some argue that the modern generation are more narcissistic than ever. As a result, they would almost welcome the technological "opportunities" that their own version of "full-spectrum dominance" gives them over the internet: they can be everywhere, all the time - while the government knows what they are doing everywhere, all the time.

This appears to be the future: citizens of the "surveillance state",  the "me generation", gleefully enjoying the superficial limelight of Big Brother. After all, if they've done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear, right?