“Veillant Panoptic Assemblage”: Mutual Watching and Resistance to Mass Surveillance after Snowden

Abstract

The Snowden leaks indicate the extent, nature, and means of contemporary mass digital surveillance of citizens by their intelligence agencies and the role of public oversight mechanisms in holding intelligence agencies to account. As such, they form a rich case study on the interactions of "veillance" (mutual watching) involving citizens, journalists, intelligence agencies and corporations. While Surveillance Studies, Intelligence Studies and Journalism Studies have little to say on surveillance of citizens' data by intelligence agencies (and complicit surveillant corporations), they offer insights into the role of citizens and the press in holding power, and specifically the political-intelligence elite, to account. Attention to such public oversight mechanisms facilitates critical interrogation of issues of surveillant power, resistance and intelligence accountability. It directs attention to the veillant panoptic assemblage (an arrangement of profoundly unequal mutual watching, where citizens' watching of self and others is, through corporate channels of data flow, fed back into state surveillance of citizens). Finally, it enables evaluation of post-Snowden steps taken towards achieving an equiveillant panoptic assemblage (where, alongside state and corporate surveillance of citizens, the intelligence-power elite, to ensure its accountability, faces robust scrutiny and action from wider civil society).

Big Data in Organizations and the Role of Human Resource Management

“…On the one hand, there is always the danger of employees believing that they are watched, much like a post-panopticon (Bauman 2000, Bakir 2015 or the electronic whip (West & Bowman 2014). This causes them to adapt their behavior.…”

Towards data justice? The ambiguity of anti-surveillance resistance in political activism

“…Mann has placed much emphasis on the advent of 'sousveillance' in this regard, where the subject is gazing back at power 'from below', exemplified by technologies such as wearable cameras and other efforts to capture, process, store, recall and transmit human-centred sensory information (Mann, 2005: 636). However, as Bakir (2015) points out, modes of resistance to surveillance also include counterveillance and univeillance that speak more to the sabotaging and blocking of surveillance as well as ways of making intelligence services more accountable.…”

“…In the multiple flows of watching within this 'veillant panoptic assemblage' (Bakir, 2015), resistance to surveillance by citizens and political activists can take several forms. Much onus has been placed on the use of counter-surveillance technologies such as encryption or anonymisation tools, and digital rights groups have been active in advocacy work pertaining to privacy and data protection.…”

Introduction to Special Theme Veillance and transparency: A critical examination of mutual watching in the post-Snowden, Big Data era

“…Arguments were made for greater transparency of regulation concerning intelligence agencies' surveillant powers, and for transluscency rather than transparency to reveal the general shape of the state's secrets rather than their details. These discourses have manifested in multiple sites including investigative journalism (for instance, The Guardian, The Intercept), documentaries (Laura Poitras' (2014) CitizenFour), feature films (Oliver Stone's (2016) Snowden), think tank reports (Simcox, 2015), internet and technology firms' promoting their privacy-enhancing technologies and lobbying for legislative change on bulk data collection and transparency (The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, 2014), public reports and statements by intelligence agencies and their official oversight bodies (Clapper, 2013;Intelligence and Security Committee, 2015), and NGOs' representations as a wide range of civil liberties, human rights, privacy, transparency and press freedom groups were consulted by post-Snowden surveillance review boards (Bakir, 2015). While we have seen an upsurge in veillance and transparency discourses and practices post-Snowden, how do they position the sur/ sous/veillant subject; and are they adequate to the task of educating and engaging people on abstract and secretive surveillance practices, as well as on the possibilities and pitfalls of sousveillance?…”