Policed state

First some links that came across a Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility mailing list today:

Secret tracking codes in Xerox printers cracked: Xerox and other printer manufacturers print tracking codes on each document the user prints, ostensibly to thwart counterfeiting

Adobe, others slip anticounterfeiting code into apps: Applications designed to not open certain images, again "to foil counterfeiting"

FBI to get veto power over PC software?: Declan McCullagh reports that according to a recently released FCC document, "to preserve the openness that characterizes today's Internet, 'consumers are entitled to run applications and use services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement.'" To which Declan cautions the reader: "Read the last seven words again."

Wiretap rules for VoIP, broadband coming in 2007: Rules to ease wiretapping.

The rest of this post is excerpted from a discussion that I contributed to on "the police state". The conference took place in 1995. The complete text is no longer available:

The "police state" is not just a state form, but a description of social relations. It includes not just the obvious relationship of the state to the citizen, but also the realms of neighborhood life, social services, production, the reproduction of labor power, and culture. The "police state" describes not just the "state" as the organ of enforcing class rule, but also a "state of existence", which can be roughly described as the absence of legal protection of the property-less classes; or the rule of the propertied class unfettered by a social contract or constitutional law.

...

The contemporary police state is the form which capitalist society assumes on a foundation of electronics technology. We frequently describe this as the form that capitalists must use to preserve their property from the property-less, and to protect their rule from the new class creating itself in the wake of the new technologies. But we can also look at this in other ways.

In order to maintain high tech production, and the circulation of commodities, and hence the realization of value and of profits, the capitalists must turn to more and more sophisticated techniques. In general, all of these techniques involve the spontaneous construction of a "surveillance society", where people are monitored as workers (if they still work), as consumers (to the extent they still consume) or, otherwise, as non-producing non-consumers. This surveillance society is both needed by capital, and is also only feasible because the technology is cheap enough to allow the collection and storage of new types of data. The once-unique purview of the state -- the collection and storage of personal data -- is now possible by private firms willing to pay the minimum wage to have someone key-in data from public records, or pay for tapes from state agencies, or match information from credit bureaus, census reports and on-line telephone directories . To the degree that information commons is enclosed and privatized, communication is subject to censorship -- not by the state, but by the "owner" of the system via which communication takes place (as has happened with the joint IBM-Sears project called Prodigy) .

Contemporary production relies on fewer workers who are expected to devote their attention, creativity and loyalty to the "knowledge-intensive" workplace. The proper "attitude" is a key job requirement. At the point of production, workers are screened before employment via private firms that handle background checks, or in the near future, perhaps, via a national "work eligibility" database, and during employment by keystroke monitoring, drug tests, "smart" badges, videotaping, and computer logs. So workers must submit to the surveillance regime or be blocked from participating in the high-tech capitalist economy.

After the workday, consumer profiles are created via purchases at the grocery store, credit card purchases, loans and mortgages, drivers license information, calls to the "National Psychic Network" -- that is, via any of the expanding list of activities that leave a data trail. Companies, because of increased competition, shrinking markets, the need to be more efficient in marketing, (or as entrepreneurs, creating new commodities in the form of various kinds of mailing lists) are compelled to collect and utilize this data to survive in the contemporary business climate. This "data shadow" can be accessed in turn by employers or the state. For the non-producing non-consumers, their data shadow is different -- it exists in the welfare and police data systems. People are categorized and classified, and some effectively filtered out of the high tech economy, by what Oscar Gandy, Jr. calls "the panoptic sort".[Oscar Gandy Jr., The Panoptic Sort: A Political Economy of Personal Information, 1993; See also, "Consumer Profiles and Panopticism," proceedings of the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Chicago, 1994; Computer Underground Digest, available in the comp.soc.cud newsgroup on the Internet; "Computers and the Poor", CPSR Newsletter, 1993; and "Workplace and Consumer Privacy Under Siege," Macworld, Special Report, 1993.]

Capitalism in the age of electronics means both the end of privacy, and the extension of privatization, as further reaches of human activity are commodified in the search for profit. With the end of privacy, comes the end of legal protections like the right not to self-incriminate (the data shadow does not know how to keep its mouth shut, and laws illegalize such a broad range of human activity). With privatization comes the conflict of civil and human rights with property rights. Compelled by the demands of the high tech economy, capitalism can take no other form that the "police state."

jd