Surveillance and Resilience in Theory and Practice

Abstract

Surveillance is often used as a tool in resilience strategies towards the threat posed by terrorist attacks and other serious crime. “Resilience” is a contested term with varying and ambiguous meaning in governmental, business and social discourses, and it is not clear how it relates to other terms that characterise processes or states of being. Resilience is often assumed to have positive connotations, but critics view it with great suspicion, regarding it as a neo-liberal governmental strategy. However, we argue that surveillance, introduced in the name of greater security, may itself erode social freedoms and public goods such as privacy, paradoxically requiring societal resilience, whether precautionary or in mitigation of the harms it causes to the public goods of free societies. This article develops new models and extends existing ones to describe resilience processes unfolding over time and in anticipation of, or in reaction to, adversities of different kinds and severity, and explores resilience both on the plane of abstract analysis and in the context of societal responses to mass surveillance. The article thus focuses upon surveillance as a special field for conceptual analysis and modelling of situations, and for evaluating contemporary developments in “surveillance societies”.

Surveillance and resilience: Relationships, dynamics, and consequences

“…Surveillance itself -paradoxically -may also undesirably erode the very rights, social freedoms and other 'public goods' that are among the values that the state's resilience measures aim to preserve or restore. 7 The reason that this is properly a paradox, as opposed to the common claim that rights and security need to be 'balanced' and exist in a zero-sum game between the two, is that surveillance is often regarded as a tool to preserve democratic values yet at the same time is eroding the very same values (although the latter effect is much less advertised). As we explain further in the next section, we use the term 'public goods' in the sense of 'common good' or 'public interest' rather than in the more familiar economic sense of goods that are non-rivalrous and non-excludable.…”

“…In a previous article we surveyed the underlying conceptual and theoretical groundwork for the general idea and practice of resilience, reaching across to elements of general systems and cybernetic models to highlight important points and concepts that would be useful in the study of resilience, and developed a number of diagrams to explore what happens in the various possible interactions between threats and responses or non-responses and to sketch the phases or stages through which resilience passes. 9 Building upon a diagram of a general model of resilience ( Figure 1), we develop a model of resilience taking into account 'public goods', as is illustrated in two diagrams reproduced below (Figures 2 and 3), respectively illustrating resilience and resistance. Put simply, resilience involves recuperation from, or prevention of, adverse events; resistance involves opposing them when they present themselves.…”

“…Although the similarities, differences and overlaps of resistance and resilience can be conceptually debated, 33 breaking through closed national borders, occupying trains, fighting with the police can be regarded as manifestations of group resistance, and individuals' escaping from refugee camps are an example of individual resistance. However, in the perspective of our research, more interesting are the signs of resilience, both in the economic and cultural sense and in connection with surveillance.…”

“…The point(s) at which those subjected to surveillance perceive the stress/shock and the threat to public goods is a crucial element in shaping their behaviour, whether resilience, resistance, or some other form. 87 In the cases of migration and control of extremist views, precaution or prevention were not options for those under surveillance. In the case of financial communications, terrorists and fraudsters were likely to be able to anticipate the tracking of their transactions, and could attempt to avoid or evade detection of their operations.…”

Resilience and the transformation of sovereign security: a look at policy challenges and interests

“…91-The Concept of Resilience between State Security and Sovereign Security: AP 89 A Look at Policy Challenges and Interests of the UK Jan Pospisil / Barbara Gruber 8 92) assert that the logic of the UK governmental practice after the 2005 terror attacks in London was to simply recast the language of security with that of resilience without changing its focus or purpose (cf. Raab, Jones & Szekely, 2015). This is even interpreted as an attempt to strengthen the responsibility to enact sovereign security: Fjäder (2014, p. 125) sees resilience within current attempts by states '"fighting back" to maintain control over national security'.…”