High-Tech Governance through Big Data Surveillance ... - SSRN papers

High-Tech Governance through Big Data Surveillance: Tracing the Global Deployment of Mass Surveillance Infrastructures, 1995 to Present*

Nadiya Kostyuk4,5, Wei Chen2, Vishnupriya Das3, Fan Liang3 & Muzammil M. Hussain1,3 ISR Center for Political Studies1, UM China Data Center2, LSA Department of Communication Studies3, LSA Department of Political Science4, Ford School of Public Policy5 The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Abstract: State powers and high technology industries have historically and symbiotically implemented new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to advance their operational goals. However, much of the scholarship and policy discourse studying such practices is limited to well-known mass surveillance revelations in advanced-industrialized Western democratic contexts. We present the first event-catalogued case-history analysis of 306 cases of mass surveillance systems that currently exist across 139 nation-states in the world system. Identifying the ‘known universe’ of these population-wide data infrastructures that shape the evolving relationships between citizens and state powers, this study pays particular attention to and fills an existing void in the contemporary study and understanding of mass surveillance practices by examining how population surveillance systems have diffused across the international system. By closely investigating cases of state-backed cross-sector surveillance collaborations, we address the following questions: What is the recent, global history of state-sanctioned mass surveillance systems deployment? Which stakeholders have most prominently expressed support for, benefited from, or opposed these systems, and why? What have been the comparative societal responses to the normalization of these systems in recent decades? Addressing these questions provides valuable traction for understanding how comparative contexts shape the way governance technologies unfold and spread, potentially in ways that re-enforce state powers’ interests and dominance over their citizens.

* CITATION & CONTACT INFORMATION: Nadiya Kostyuk, Wei Chen, Vishnupriya Das, Fan Liang, and Muzammil M. Hussain. “High-Tech Governance through Big Data Surveillance: Tracing the Global Deployment of Mass Surveillance Infrastructure, 1995 to Present.” Project on Big Data Innovation and Governance (www.Big-DIG.net) White Paper 2017.1 (pp. 1-38). Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, 2017. Direct correspondence to Muzammil M. Hussain ([email protected]), Department of Communication Studies & Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan, 105 S. State St., 5377 North Quad. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1285.

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3030347

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Introduction In October 2016, 1.5 million government officials across China watched live as billionaire technology executive Jack Ma spoke on applying his firms’ big data capabilities to improve governance over the world’s largest population in the disputably key contender for superpower status in the 21st Century: “In the age of big data, we need to remember that our legal and security system with millions of members will also face change.” Across China’s competitive high-tech industry sectors servicing the technical needs of the hyper-modernizing Chinese state, Zhejiang Dahua Tech Chairman Fu Liquan and his wife, Chen Ailing, together topped Forbes’ latest China Rich List in 2016, having amassed their fortune of $2.9 billion by providing government agencies at home, and abroad, with high-end-camera and video-product lines now routinely deployed for automated surveillance and behavioral tracking around the world. Ma, Fu and Chen represent the modern technocrats, from Internet startups to surveillance firms, increasingly tasked with realizing the visions of emerging state powers of the world system with the technical capacities to leverage the ‘Internet of Things’ towards states’ desires to better manage their financial, political, and security sectors. Moreover, Zhang Zhongcan, head of the organization department for the Communist Party of China has propelled Zhejiang’s technological imaginaries towards a material reality by successfully applying ‘big data’ capabilities to manage his 37,000 grassroots-level Party branches: “By turning the code of conduct, rules and requirements into performance indicators, we can have a closed [automated] system to supervise members' performance through monitoring and analyzing their data.” The head researchers constructing Zhang’s high-tech statecraft also report that, “We have sorted [over 661,000] Party members’ assessment criteria into 136 categories. Through updating and analyzing the data, scientific intra-Party management can be achieved. [...]

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3030347

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The system is so powerful. It keeps a record of everybody’s work evaluation and attendance. All app users can check their ranking based on the system’s monthly updates.” State powers and high technology industries have historically and symbiotically implemented new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to advance their operational goals—primarily to improve their managerial power over their publics. The industrial revolution of the early to mid-20th Century has been described as a period when public and private institutions learned to ‘automate’ their operations by designing technologies that completed work previously done by human agents. The information revolution of the mid- to late-20th Century was a period when a new generation of ICT infrastructures enabled widespread lateral connectivity of individuals and publics, fundamentally displacing mass societies and their supporting ensembles of mass communication systems. In turn, the data revolution of the nascent 21st Century can be understood as having introduced deeper relational opportunities for marrying device data with user networks—powered in large part by the expansion of mobiles, wearables, and the ‘Internet of Things.’ With recent cross-sector efforts, China is now slated to extend its state-sponsored ‘big data’-enabled governance systems to deploy the worlds’ first ever, and largest, national “social credit system” covering all 1.36 billion Chinese citizens—not simply its Party elites—by 2020. This citizen management system will cover each Chinese national’s financial history, online comments about government, and even traffic violations to rank their ‘trustworthiness.’ These social credit rankings will reward and punish citizens for their behavioral allegiance with the Chinese regime’s goals, scientifically allowing the state to materially realize the vision of a “harmonious socialist society.” Pilot projects and industry testing has already commenced with

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major contracts being offered to Executive Chairman Jack Ma’s Alibaba—the world’s largest platform receptacle of consumer behavior data. However, the story of state-sponsored surveillance to satisfy the operational demands of governance actors is not limited just to recent developments in China: within the same weeks of September 2016, neighboring India also completed encoding over 1.09 billion Indian citizens into the world’s largest biometric relational data infrastructure project to date. By December 2016, India has established the world’s largest fully deployed biometric infrastructure with concerning governance ambitions similar to China’s social credit system. Again, these recent events from the two most powerful states in the Asia-Pacific region—China and India—are not limited to just the rising authoritarian regimes or emerging developing democracies of the Global South. Moving across the Pacific, in the United States (US)—the world’s current superpower and most advanced democratic regime—AT&T, also in September 2016, was publicly shamed (again) for having been caught profiting over the last decade by developing, marketing, and selling big data surveillance capabilities to law enforcement agencies—to the tune of millions of US taxpayer dollars per year over the ten years since the initial AT&T Room 641A surveillance scandal of 2006. What do these state powers, across advanced and developing democracies to emerging authoritarian state powers, hope to marshal from big data infrastructure projects for their governance interests and goals? Where and when are private high technology sectors being engaged in constructing and instrumentalizing these new technological infrastructures for upgrading states’ governance capabilities? How might deployments from big data innovations sectors restructure the evolving relationships between states and citizens, and consumer society and public culture, especially in varying conditions of democratization and development?

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Provisioning of public goods is a common justification for state’s investments in mass surveillance systems. However, a key concern surrounding this justification is that states surveil citizens for the underlying purpose of securing their own political authority. Recent observations suggest both, that states engage in mass surveillance in the interest of the public (as a public good), and to sustain their political authority (as a form of political intelligence gathering). Often viewed as two opposing sides of the same coin, these two state functions are difficult to separate and assess meaningfully. Such a link between public development and political security is not a recent phenomenon. It has been an important element of the state policies of colonial and postcolonial regimes throughout the Cold War and seems to prosper in new configurations under the present wave of democratic transformations and technological advancements (Buur 2007, Caplan 2001). Used for the purpose of peacekeeping interventions, community policing, nation- and statebuilding, this development-security nexus has taken a new, more intruding, nature post-9/11 (Byrne 2010, Broeders 2011). Besides using ID cards and biometric technologies that have been widely promoted as means of providing security (Wilson 2007), opportunities for engaging in massive data collection and interception of private communications have added interesting and, perhaps, disturbing new features (Lyon 2003). Some argue that the widely-accepted and normalized nature of mass surveillance today is altering the landscape of civic liberty and individual security (Wood 2009). For instance, the extensive and intrusive usage of video surveillance and facial recognition for law enforcement often pushes against the boundaries of the US Constitution’s Fourth Amendment. Many also argue that dragnet surveillance efforts violate individuals’ First Amendment freedoms of speech and association, by having a chilling influence on the publics’ abilities to express and organize independently of the state (Milligan 1999, Simmons 2004). The last decade has seen an

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increasingly growing number of social uprisings and mobilizations that explicitly attempted to combat this trend, in the form of transnational activism for a free and open Internet. These protests were not just demonstrations on the street as they were also able to translate these demands into states’ legal agendas. As a result, specific provisions have been constituted to limit the state its uncontrolled access to one’s personal information. It is questionable whether regime leaders will necessarily follow these provisions but even their mere inclusion in legal frameworks demonstrates a growing trend towards the enactment of comprehensive privacy and data protection acts around the world. Currently over 40 countries and jurisdictions either have or are in the process of enacting such laws with a purpose of curtailing past governmental abuses (Banisar 2012). Despite such significant steps, states have continued to use existing or inventing new and creative ways to track their citizens’ records under the guise of providing public goods. In most cases, state powers do not leave citizens viable options to opt-out, but rather enforce participation unwillingly through coercion or co-optation in mass surveillance initiatives. Within the financial sector bank records and welfare programs have been used by regimes to enroll private citizens into the surveilling gaze of state bureaucracies (Chambon 1999). Sponsored by centrall and provincial agencies, China’s credit score system aims to determine citizens’ standing in society by applying algorithm-driven political judgments determined by their administrative practices, commercial activities, private social behavior, and criminal histories (Xinhuanet News). The ‘Aadhar Project’ discussed previously is the largest biometric database in the world, containing information from over 1.1 billion Indian residents and nearing full coverage of 1.3 billion citizens, and serves a similar aim in spite of sustained and organized resistance from Indian civil society activists. Despite various case-specific differences – across a range of political regimes (authoritarian versus democratic), and types of data collected (socio-behavioral versus bio-metric), both China’s and

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India’s systems operate using similar collaborations and partnerships with private sector technocrats and distribution networks, and have paralleling concerns for individual security and civic agency. Furthermore, electronic and biometric identity card schemes that employ facial and fingerprint recognition methods are a global emerging and growing phenomenon – beyond the unique cases of China and India (Parmar 2014). “Governing by identity,” or more specifically by biometrics, describes the emerging surveillance regimes in a global, digital, and mobile world. Such technical and technocratic systems of governance has been widely criticized for containing racialized and politicized criteria of identity (Lyon 2008) and, as a result, for excluding certain groups from key state institutions and state-provisioned benefits. Across Europe, the Schengen Information System, the Eurodac database, and the Visa Information System are currently reidentifying what it means to be an ‘irregular’ immigrant and are being re-developed into a formidable surveillance tool of such immigrant populations across Europe (Broeders 2007). These systems institutionalize less inclusive notions of citizenship, and facilitate the sorting of ‘desirable’ and ‘undesirable’ mobilities, ‘exceptions’ and ‘normalities,’ ‘inclusion’ or ‘exclusion,’ based on the criteria of ‘identity management’ (Lyon 2007, Wilson 2007, Ajana 2013). Since the 1970s, high-technology actors anchored in the global and multi-national private sector have been playing an important role in developing, selling, and deploying these surveillance technologies. By tracking 528 surveillance companies from the Surveillance Industry Index, Privacy International’s “Global Surveillance Industry” report demonstrates that most of these companies are based in economically advanced, democratic nations, including: France, Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom and the United States (Privacy International 2016). As a result of the 2013 Snowden revelations that exposed the vast level and complex relationships between Silicon

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Valley’s private companies and U.S. intelligence community, citizen publics and civil society stakeholders have been pushing for more regulatory oversight of dragnet mass surveillance systems and practices. However, not only have U.S. policymakers failed to take sufficient efforts to address public concerns about the violation of privacy, instead other states have followed suit and increased their own surveillance efforts. Their efforts range from proclaiming to their populations that it is within their interest to surrender private data, to forcing companies to compromise their intellectual property rights to source codes and users’ meta-data – in the name of safety and security (The Guardian 2015). However, these very state that requisitioned citizen data for security needs struggle to secure the data itself, exemplified by the number of data breaches ever-growing tracking closely with the yearly increases in data collection efforts. For instance, only in 2016, 4,149 breaches took place, exposing 4.2 billion records (Sheridan 2017). Moreover, by 2020, about 1.7 megabytes of new information will be created every second by every human on the planet, and a third of that data will pass through (and most likely be stored on) cloud platforms (Forbes 2017). This point has not fallen on deaf ears in the technology industry: the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) estimates that the US cloud-computing sector can lose between $21.5 billion and $35 billion as a result of the “modest drop in the expected foreign market share” due to the concerns of U.S.-led mass surveillance efforts (Castro & McQuinn 2015).

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Methods and Data To collect representative and comparable evidence on the details of mass surveillance systems worldwide, we constructed an event history catalog (a commonly used comparative method for developing a nuanced understanding of a relatively new social phenomenon) to create a new dataset of ‘known’ cases of surveillance infrastructure systems to date. The process to identify surveillance systems was conducted in two phases. First, using the well-reported cases of the U.S. massive surveillance, China’s credit score, and India’s biometric IDs, we deductively identified and assembled a sample frame of similar cases whose main purpose was to: collect, organize, and instrumentalize population-level data about citizens and consumers to serve states’ interests. Specifically, we trained a team of two advanced doctoral research assistants, who used this conditional definition of a mass surveillance system and gathered all scholarly articles, press coverage, government and civil society reports, blogs, and online forums that identified such cases of surveillance across 170 sovereign states. For each sovereign state, this team of trained researchers identified up to 3 surveillance systems per sovereign state. Second, and separately, we educated a team of seventy-three undergraduate students for 10 weeks on the global issue of state-sanctioned mass surveillance systems, and inductively assigned each undergraduate student to investigate the recent and contemporary history of mass surveillance in a set of 5 sovereign states (of 170) with the task of nominating the 3 most substantive surveillance systems for each state. In our distribution of states, each state was assigned to 2-3 individual undergraduate student researchers, guaranteeing greater coverage, depth, and uniformity in the cases of surveillance identified through this inductive case-identification process. This combined deductive and inductive case-identification process yielded more than 850+ unique cases across 170 countries.

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After an initial population sample frame of all known global surveillance cases (i.e. the known universe of cases) was established, we established an expert 4-person coding team to extract manifest qualitative and quantitative data from each case. The coding research team was managed by a faculty supervisor and an advanced doctoral research assistant who trained and supervised two undergraduate research assistants to double-code all cases. The undergraduate research assistants were trained over a period of 6 weeks, and final coding and disagreements were reconciled over an intensive period of 10 weeks. Of the 850+ known cases of mass surveillance identified through our data collection and coding efforts, this study analyzes 306 of those cases. These 306 unique cases were identified after satisfying three rigorous bounding criteria: timeframe, robustness, and impact. First, only cases between 1995 and present were used because 1995 is the year in which the National Science Foundation effectively privatized the Internet, and mobile telephony and digital data collection efforts have become a consumer and public reality since, but not before this period. Second, only cases that were referenced by at the least three unique and independent sources were used. Many cases in the larger dataset have one or two sources, sometimes with questionable validity or lack of necessary details to comprehend the qualitative and quantitative nature of the system. Therefore, only cases with at least 3 unique and independent sources were used, so that a reliable level of details and valid perspectives could be extracted, unpacked, and coded for. Finally, this set of 306 cases addresses instances where a population greater than 1 million individuals were affected by mass surveillance efforts. Focusing on these cases allows us to unpack the conditions and tensions across the largest and most visible instances where governments have invested substantive efforts technologically, technocratically, and financially to surveil indiscriminate and large numbers of private citizens.


A ‘case’ in our dataset of most timely (since 1995 to present), robust (verified by 3 sources), and impactful (affecting 1 million or more) 306 global surveillance systems is defined as a technical system, technocratic practice, or a set of intentional and coherent activities between a state actors and potential supporting actors that enables state-sponsored mass surveillance to take place. In some instances, such mass surveillance efforts have benign public service intentions, such as in the case of cooperation between the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Royal Thai Government to provide identification of refugees to deliver basic social benefits (Perala 2015), or in the case of the Ivory Coast’s National Health Insurance Fund to use biometric identification to speed up compensation delivery for its members (Mayhem 2015). But even in such cases, civil society observers often express concerns about the potential for the state abusing these data to exert political authority and maintain political power through undemocratic and coercive means secretly and/or in the future. Despite varying competing impetuses, all cases in our selected dataset are distinct instances where government officials or agencies have made intentional decisions to invest in both the labor and technical capacities to surveil their populations. Because the literature on state surveillance tends to distinguish across levels of democracies and autocracies, we include Polity IV regime score (Gurr Et. Al. 2010) and organize our analysis comparing states by sets of regime-types. We also organize our comparative analyses on Polity IV’s definition of a fragile state as regimes recovering from civil war or foreign military interventions, experiencing a high-scale humanitarian disaster, or had failed for other reasons. Since most of these surveillance systems in our dataset have been established over multiple years and decades, and many of them are still ongoing and advancing, we averaged the Polity IV regime score over the studied 20-year period of Polity IV rankings (1995-2014). As a result, out of 306


unique incidents that involved 139 countries, 25 percent of these cases take place in democracies, 47 percent occurred in emerging and hybrid democracies, 21 percent occurred in autocracies, 5 percent occurred in fragile states, and less than 2 percent occurred as a result of multi-country collaborations. Since each case of a mass surveillance system requires some level of technical capacity to be functionally viable, we have also created an index for each country’s level of technical development by using the Information Communication and Technology Development Score, Network Readiness Index, and Global Innovation Index. As a result, 26 percent of the incidents involve high-tech nations, 31 percent of the incidents involve emerging-tech nations, 26 percent of the incidents involve middle-tech nations, and 15 percent of the incidents involve lowtech states. The coding of each case in our dataset involved three broad categories. The first category extracted general information including variables such as the country and region in which it took places, the system’s completion status, the year when the system started and ended, its overall cost and population coverage estimates, and the system’s coverage foci. The second category extracted information about the systems’ process of development, including variables such as the supporting entities responsible for the system’s creation and deployment, and system’s main proponents, opponents, and intended beneficiaries. Finally, the third category identified the societal and stakeholder responses to this system, such as whether the system’s development and deployment was publicly acknowledged, whether it caused any documented public discussion around privacy concerns, the system’s current legality, its impetuses, critiques, and other related controversies.


Mass Surveillance in the World-System, 1995-Present What is the recent, global history of state-sanctioned mass surveillance system deployment? The deployment of mass surveillance systems has been globally increasing throughout the last twenty years. Figure 1 shows that the proportion of surveillance efforts has been rapidly growing across democracies, emerging democracies, autocracies, fragile states, and multi-country collaborations. Of these five state categories, emerging democratic regimes have been leading actors in this realm during the entire studied period, suggesting that transitioning regimes undergoing peaceful or violent protests are motivated to collect and instrumentalize intelligence about their populations to manage their political and social disruptions. More importantly, throughout and after the 20062010 period to present, states across regime-type have uniformly doubled their surveillance investments compared with the previous decade of 1995-2005. It is likely that states have both learned from and mimicked each other’s investments in surveillance as an increasingly central activity in exercising governance over their polities. It is also likely that the technological revolution in online big data and cloud computing platforms as well as the ubiquitous digital wiring of their populations (through mobile telephony and digital communication) have technically enabled states to access and collect population-wide data on their citizens, in ways and at rates not possible in previous eras. FIGURE 1 HERE Despite the wider availability of high-technology platforms for mass surveillance, only a quarter of the nations that surveil citizens have high-tech capabilities – and 72 percent of these high-tech nations are also advanced democracies clustering heavily in the Western democratic world. In comparison, out of 144 emerging democracies (developing or hybrid democratic regimes) across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Asia-Pacific, only 16 have high-tech


level technological capabilities. Yet these emerging democracies account for the largest numbers of state-sponsored surveillance systems to date. In other words, while the unregulated mass surveillance of democratic citizens in Western states have captured the mass media agenda and global publics’ attentions, the largest numbers of affected democratic citizens are in the emerging democratic states, like Brazil, India, and Indonesia. This also suggests that these middle- to lowtech emerging democracies are both building home-grown surveillance capabilities or importing surveillance technologies and technocratic labor and expertise to develop and deploy their surveillance systems with cooperation and partnerships with more advanced nations or intergovernmental organizations (IGO). Autocracies and fragile regimes also engage in substantive mass surveillance of their populations, where 40 and 87 percent of them, respectively, have the lowest level of technological development to create and deploy their own surveillance infrastructures. The question of how middle- to low-tech states across the global system are deploying sophisticated surveillance systems remains important and uninterrogated in this study, but our case qualitative case observations suggest that inter-governmental collaborations and cross-sector partnerships with the multi-national private firms in the surveillance industry are important for explaining these trends. One of the less sophisticated means by which governments track and surveil citizens is to make compliance with surveillance efforts functionally necessary in order to derive other benefits or opportunities. For instance, the scope and impact level of the China’s compulsory social credit system which assigns so-called reputation scores to each citizen is rather robust in scale. By 2020, China’s citizen reputation-management system will determine whether each Chinese national can do some trivial things, such as secure a table at a fancy restaurant, to more substantive activities like securing exit visas to travel abroad. More critically, this system will also determine their most


important opportunities, such as the schools that their children might attend or whether they can secure a loan from the banking sector. In sum, the recent progressions of surveillance-enabled practices into core functions of governance and socio-economic life require Chinese nationals to participate in their surveillance, or lose superficial to substantive benefits in participating in China’s economic and social institutions. Similarly, by implementing new biometric IDs that use facial recognition and fingerprints as the only acceptable identification document, many African countries do not give their citizens any choice but to comply with the system to derive state benefits. Of all 306 cases in our dataset, 46 percent of them use this approach (incentivizing compliance with a surveillance system), 15 percent encourage citizens to comply (encouraging compliance with a surveillance system), and 46 percent use secret data collection (surveilling their citizens without their knowledge). Incentivized surveillance is the most common tactic for surveillance among fragile or failed states (73 percent of cases), followed by developing or hybrid democracies (42 percent of cases), stable or hybrid autocracies (23 percent of cases), and advanced democracies (20 percent of cases). Secretly surveilling citizens is the most common among advanced democracies (70 percent of cases), followed by developing or hybrid democracies (41 percent of cases), stable or hybrid autocracies (41 percent of cases), and fragile or failed states (27 percent of cases). In sum, while we might expect advanced democracies to offer their citizens greater transparency and agency when participating in mass surveillance, and non-democratic regimes to do so secretly and without consent, the relationship is reversed: advanced democracies are the most active in secret surveillance, and emerging democracies are most active in coercing their populations to partake in surveillance.


Beyond the range of tactics used by regimes to deploy mass surveillance on their populations, the scope of who these systems are intended to observe vary: 35 percent of cases target specific sub-groups in the nation’s population, while more than 50 percent aim to surveil the population in general. In advanced democracies, and stable or hybrid autocracies as well as fragile states, regimes operate their systems similarly: approximately half of their systems target specific groups within the population, and the remaining half of their systems target the mass population in general. In contrast, emerging and hybrid democracies overwhelmingly aim to surveil their entire populations (in 70 percent of cases). These patterns suggest that advanced democratic and autocratic regimes treat their populations in surprisingly similar ways, while emerging democratic with burgeoning populations are ambitiously and indiscriminately surveilling their populations in general. TABLE 1 HERE A lack of technical competence and limited financial resources may explain these similarities and differences between advanced democracies and wealthy autocracies, versus developing states in emerging democracies. While nations worldwide have spent at least $27.1 billion USD (or $7 per individual) to surveil 4.138 billion individuals (i.e., 73 percent of the world population), stable autocracies are the champions in this respect. In total, authoritarian regimes have spent $10.967 billion USD to surveil 81 percent of their populations (0.1 billion individuals), and that is notable considering most of them have the lowest levels of technological development. However, stable autocracies have invested 11-fold more than any other regime-type, by spending $110 USD per individual surveilled, followed by advanced democracies who have invested $8.909 billion USD in total ($11 USD per individual) covering 0.812 billion individuals (74 percent of their population). In contrast, emerging and hybrid democracies have invested $4.784 billion USD


(or $1-2 per individual) for the purpose of tracking 2.875 billion people (72 percent of their population). Finally, in cases where state power is not consolidated coherently or effectively, as in fragile states and multi-country collaborations, there is still substantive investment in population surveillance efforts. For example, the Five Eyes program, an alliance among Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, is one of the oldest joint cooperation programs born in the Cold War Era to share signals intelligence, military intelligence, and human intelligence, to serve the security needs of Anglo-Saxon Western democratic states.


Proponents, Opponents, and Beneficiaries of Mass Surveillance Systems Which stakeholders have most prominently expressed support for, benefited from, or opposed these systems, and why? Across global instances of known population surveillance systems, we identified four broad categories of stakeholders that are involved in systems’ creation and deployment. Various government bureaucracies, across government-managed financial, transportation, population, security, and communication services compose the first group. International governance agencies whose main purposes are security, law enforcement, and surveillance are in the second group. High-tech and financial branches of the for-profit private sectors compose the third group. Lastly, we also identified the expressed (or purported) role of civil society in the form of citizens, activists, and non-governmental organizations in supporting or opposing mass surveillance systems. Depending on the role these four stakeholder sectors played in establishing or resisting mass surveillance systems, we further divided them into proponents, opponents, or beneficiaries of surveillance efforts. For example, the Jamaican government proposed to create a national identification system that enables collecting citizens’ demographic and biometric details with purpose of providing them with basic benefits, such as health care, and protecting them from cybercrimes. However, even though citizens’ intended benefits from this system are obvious as stated, Jamaican civil society representatives and international observers have expressed their concerns about government having complete access to its citizens’ private information and compared such a unified approach to ‘big brother’ (Cunningham 2011). In the case of Macedonia, the internal government bureaucracies have expressed both support and opposition to the states surveillance efforts. Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski, with the secret police chief, has abused national laws to spy on his political opposition. While the maximal duration of any court-


sanctioned eavesdropping is fourteen months, Macedonian opposition leader Zoran Zaev has accused Prime Minister Grueyski of surveilling him for at least five years (Moon 2015). In related instances, IGOs have actually been vocal advocates of creating massive identification infrastructures to respond more effectively to humanitarian crises. For instance, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) along with the Thai government has finished implementing an identification system to manage the flow of thousands of refugees, incoming from Myanmar (Perala 2015). Because of these sometimes expected, at times surprising positions of national and international government agencies, private sector actors, and civil society groups supporting, opposition, or benefiting from surveillance systems, we also analyze their global patterns and relationships to discern where and in which circumstances these sectors elicit varying complicity in the diffusion of mass surveillance. All four sectors – governments, private sector, IGOs, and civil society – are present as system opponents. For example, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) has been vocal in criticizing the surveillance campaign by the South African government. Specifically, the UNHRC expressed its concerns over the Regulation of Interception of Communications and Provision of Communication-related Information Act (RICA) that allow law enforcement agencies to intercept communications with warrants issued by a judge. The UNHCR claimed that the grounds for this warrant were too vague, leaving state’s surveillance capacity unbounded and prone to systemic abuse (Right2Know 2016). Similarly, even though the private sector surveillance industry generally benefits from the implementation of surveillance infrastructures (by providing its technical knowledge and expertise for profit), our dataset identifies cases when competing firms and businesses have actively vouched against systems, particularly in cases where governmentallysanctioned surveillance has led to breaches of valuable consumer data and resulted in loss of


valuable intellectual property. Business organizations in Ecuador, for instance, expressed their dissatisfaction with a new government regulation requiring the former to place surveillance cameras in public places. Not only do such measures incur high costs for local businesses’ operations, protecting their customers’ privacy and securing their trust was another reason for such negative reaction by private sector actors (Morla 2015). The above tensions exemplify that often all four sectors have become more or less involved in surveillance processes, depending on what they stand to risk, gain, and lose. These incidents also show that all actors at times stand to benefit from these systems to various degrees. Governments, for instance, are able to provide goods to its citizens and maintain political stability. Citizens are goods recipients when surveillance investments ensure security from belligerent nonstate actors engaging in crime, violence, and terrorism. Private companies tend to gain financially by closely working with governments and providing their technical expertise for profit. Lastly, IGOs also at times use these systems as venues to deliver their services more quickly and efficiently to global populations experiencing humanitarian crises. Because all these stakeholders tend to interact with each other during the process, we also coded for and analyzed these tensions and collaborations relationally through network analysis. In all cases where actors from these sectors were present, we coded for their sector and for their manifest positioning as proponents, opponents, and/or beneficiaries of the surveillance system in each of the 306 instances. Visualized through network analysis, these relationships convey important patterns that vary meaningfully by regime-type. The edge thickness displays the number of times a case had a tension or relationship between two nodes (i.e., the thicker the edge, the more often the actors within those nodes had something to gain or lose through the advancement of a surveillance infrastructure). The node size displays betweenness centrality, a concept that


illustrates the number of times a node acts as a bridge along the shortest path between two other nodes (i.e., the larger the node size, the higher its betweenness centrality, implying that importance/centrality of the sector in the mass surveillance government-industrial complex). Similarly, the node color illustrates closeness centrality, ranging from red (very far from other actors in the network) to blue (very close to other actors in the network), a similar computation to betweenness centrality useful for more reliably imputing which sectors are most central in the implementation of mass surveillance systems. FIGURE 2 HERE Out of all 306 cases, 50 percent of all relationships (edges) between sectors originate from a governmental entity, which 48 percent of the time are either proponents or beneficiaries of a surveillance system, and 2 percent of the time are opponents of a surveillance system. As expected, government bureaucracies are overwhelmingly the main proponents and beneficiaries of statesanctioned mass surveillance systems. However, 34 percent of all relationships between sectors originate from citizens or civil society groups, who 22 percent of the time are opponents of surveillance, and 12 percent of the time are either proponents and/or beneficiaries of surveillance. In contrast to government bureaucracies overwhelmingly supporting state-sanctioned surveillance as proponents and beneficiaries, citizens and civil society groups are the most vocal opponents to being surveilled, but this is certainly not unanimous (in 1 out of 3 cases, it is citizens and civil society groups who support the need for general surveillance and data collection). Finally, 11 percent of all relationships between nodes originate from private sector entities (who are almost always proponents and/or beneficiaries of surveillance alongside government bureaucracies), and only 3 percent of all relationship are accounted for by IGOs (who are twice as likely to be proponents of a surveillance system, and half as likely to be opponents – IGOs are rarely system


beneficiaries). The remaining 2 percent of relationships between nodes emerge from research and development organizations originating from higher education or public health organizations. By observing the overall presence of these four sectors, and their central roles in supporting, opposing, or benefiting from surveillance systems, we find that the strongest relationships in global surveillance activities are between governments as proponents and beneficiaries, and citizens and civil society groups opposing governments. While this may be expected, such assumptions often omit an important complexity to the story: governments proposing and benefitting from mass surveillance systems frequently rely on support or acquiescence from citizens to do so. The described situation is typical for the countries where systems are legal, provide public benefits, and, as a result, and thus cause limited public contention or demonstrations against mass surveillance efforts. In cases where public contention is palpable, we observe that civil society groups mobilize and act as the system’s primary opponents – not general public opinion, which is generally lacking on esoteric concerns of mass surveillance (Figure 3). However, in all scenarios governments often rely on the private sector primarily for their technical expertise, and on international governance agencies secondarily to implement mass surveillance systems. FIGURE 3 HERE Figure 3 further illustrates how these sectors interact and vary across advanced democracies, emerging democracies, and autocratic regimes. In advanced democracies, citizens and civil society groups are locked in tension against governments supporting and benefitting from surveillance systems. In emerging democracies, citizens and civil society groups are purportedly more likely to benefit from surveillance for security reasons, and in those cases, governments themselves sometimes oppose surveillance systems due to internal disputes across government


agencies and political leaders. The case discussed previously of the Macedonian government and its internal conflict in unregulated political surveillance exhibits such an example where sometimes there is public acquiescence for mass surveillance, but political opposition groups within government express opposition to surveillance efforts. In Macedonia, while the regime in power was using the system under the guise of fighting terrorism, the leader of the opposition coalition protested the ways in which the surveillance system was abused for personal political gain by his opponents. Unsurprisingly, in repressive authoritarian regimes, citizens and civil society groups are centrally but weakly positioned in tension against government agencies, private sector actors, and citizen groups who support surveillance for political intelligence gathering, financial profiting, and security concerns, respectively.


Comparative Societal Responses to Mass Surveillance What have been the comparative societal responses to the normalization of these surveillance systems in recent decades? The public concern surrounding unregulated mass surveillance galvanized by Edward Snowden’s revelations since 2013 may have created an understanding that government-sponsored mass surveillance activities are primarily shrouded in regulatory opacity and bureaucratic secrecy. Our dataset demonstrates that it is quite the opposite – there are hundreds of instances where public observers, including investigative journalists, civil society activists, and the general public are aware and interlocked in complex debates and conflicts about the need and purposes for increasing mass surveillance. This public knowledge has generated public debate about the efficacies and ethics of these systems. Using these two broad dimensions (levels of public knowledge and public debate), we compare how much publics know about the system’s existence across our known cases. Specifically, we compare whether known surveillance systems within countries have generated 1) substantive knowledge and discussion about them; 2) some knowledge and discussion about them; and 3) very limited knowledge and discussion about them. The latter subcategory also includes cases where information is publicly available but there is no discussion about this system either because the citizens perceive the system as part of the public good provision, such as ePassports in Taiwan and Hong Kong or the DNA1 profile information system in Switzerland, or because they are afraid to criticize it due to the fear of being prosecuted, as in the case of rampant political selfcensorship in Tunisia. Several countries also exhibit instances where more than one system is in place, so Figure 4 displays countries’ cumulative score of these two indicators. For instance, the U.S. has deployed twenty-two systems over the last twenty years. Even though the U.S. public at

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large has very limited knowledge about the true scope of country’s post 9/11 surveillance efforts (as the Snowden revelations illustrated), in general, the US security agencies have been comparatively transparent about their surveil initiatives for security needs. FIGURE 4 HERE Out of 306 cases, publics across countries have very limited knowledge and discussion about the surveillance system only in seventeen instances that across the entire spectrum of the Polity IV regime score, ranging from Cuba’s stable autocracy to Sweden’s advanced democracy. The level of repression in authoritarian regimes may explain the lack of public knowledge and debate, and the relative lack of public oversight of secret surveillance systems in democracies may do the same for democracies. For instance, there is relatively limited public knowledge or concern in Paraguay that officials requested the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency to provide surveillance equipment to spy on their mobile phones, even though this system was used for surveillance activities beyond supporting joint counter-narcotics efforts. Similarly, Bulgaria’s Interior Ministry and State Agency for National Security had been eavesdropping on its anti-government protesters for 300 days in 2013, and little was known until investigative journalists brought these esoteric practices to attention. FIGURE 5 HERE Looking across 306 incidents, we have also identified broad categories for why proponents and beneficiaries support surveillance systems: as a public good (to provide government services to citizens) and political surveillance (to secure their political authority) (see Figure 5). When surveillance systems are provided as a public good, proponents frame the need for surveillance prevent crime, monitor borders, and maintain social stability. Here, providing social stability was a broad category that included everything from providing health care, assisting during


humanitarian assistance, to registering voters. In most cases regimes identified two or three reasons for why they proposed or needed a surveillance system, and we have organized these categories as a scale, where a system is primarily intended for provisioning: 1) public goods and services; 2) mixed impact (public good and political surveillance); and 3) mostly political surveillance efforts. In our dataset, 56 percent of all systems claim to provide public goods, 9 percent of them have a mixed aim, and 30 percent of them aim to serve the goals of political surveillance primarily. While more than half of cases in our dataset attempt to provide public goods through mass surveillance, this rate varies meaningfully across regime-type: democracies surveil citizens for political intelligence as often as autocracies. FIGURE 6 HERE As political surveillance motivates many states to invest in mass surveillance, regimes also attempt to justify the often-disputed nature of surveillance systems by legalizing their usage. Figure 6 illustrates that mass surveillance systems’ deployments comply with domestic laws in 139 cases; while in 94 cases, their legality is disputed; and in 45 cases, the systems are illegal by the regime’s own statutes. For a complex illustration, consider the highly sophisticated spying technology sold by the Italian firm ‘Hacking Team.’ While some regimes buying and using this technology are doing so legally to provide security, in many cases it is unacceptable to use the software to violate citizens’ privacy. In the case of the Hacking Team products, only the United Kingdom has raised its legal concerns about “lawful interception” when it considered buying these products to be used by London Metropolitan Police Service. Yet, many other governments have been already actively using the firm’s products, by bypassing the question of its legality (Adam 2015).


Conclusion Nation-states in the global system are widely recognized to be engaging in the designing of new policy norms and curating the organizational conditions to collect data about their populations en masse. But it is no longer enough, or accurate, to say that private technology providers are sometimes coerced by states to do data infrastructure development work for their surveillance and security needs. As the decade-long case of AT&T in the US illustrates, technology providers have mutually-beneficial incentives for playing an active and collaborative role in the construction of this process. Why, and how are these sometimes collaborative, often competing, state powers designing unique population data infrastructures with comparable magnitude and scope? What have been the broader transformations in the world system in how states increasingly imagine and strategize to govern and manage their populations with the adoption of high-tech surveillance capabilities? What is already known about the US mass surveillance infrastructure is due to the whistleblowing efforts and data breaches provided by unwelcome dissidents like Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning. While much public policy attention has since narrowed to critiquing the unregulated and unsanctioned data-sharing practices between established Western industrialized democratic regimes in establishing mass relational surveillance data aggregation infrastructures with both the participation and sometimes deception of high technology industries, policy experts and technology activists have largely ignored the national infrastructure projects being constructed in plain sight in the world’s most impactful emerging democracies and established authoritarian powers in the global system. Further work is required to move beyond global and comparative observations, in order to unpack the processes by which states establish and instrumentalize population-level data to serve their governance needs and political interests.


Work Cited Adam, Christopher. “Hungary’s Orbán government invests in spying technology for use abroad.” Hungarian Free Press. 9 July 2015. Web. 15 May 2017. Ajana, B. “Asylum, Identity Management and Biometric Control.” (2013). Atia, M. “In Whose Interest? Financial Surveillance and the Circuits of Exception in the War on Terror.” (2007). Avaro, Dante. “Citizen Traceability: Surveillance à la Argentina.” (2014). "Big Data: 20 Mind-Boggling Facts Everyone Must Read." Forbes. 2017. Web. 22 May 2017. Breckenridge, Keith. “The Biometric State: The Promise and Peril of Digital Government in the New South Africa.” (2006). Broeders, D. “The New Digital Borders of Europe: EU Databases and the Surveillance of Irregular Migrants.” (2007). Broeders, D. (2011) “Breaking Down Anonymity. Digital surveillance of irregular migrants in Germany and the Netherlands.” Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press Buur, L.; Jensen, S.; Stepputat, F. “The Security-Development Nexus: Expressions of Sovereignty and Securitization in Southern Africa.” (2007). Byrne, S. “Framing Post-9/11 Security: Tales of State Securitization and of the Experiences of Muslim Communities.” (2010). Pgs 171-172 Caplan, J. & Torpey, J. “Documenting Individual Identity: The Development of State Practices in the Modern World.” (2001). Castro, Daniel, and Alan McQuinn. "Beyond the USA Freedom Act: How US Surveillance Still Subverts US Competitiveness." Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (2015).


Chambon, A. “Reading Foucault for Social Work” (1999). "China outlines its first social credit system." Xinhuanet News, 27 June 2014. Web. 13 May 2017. “China puts cybersecurity squeeze on US technology companies,” The Guardian, January 29, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/29/china-puts-cybersecuritysqueeze-on-ustechnology-companies. Cover, Rob. Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self. Academic Press, 2015. Cunningham, Anastasia. “What's Your Number? - Jamaica To Get National Identification System.” The Gleaner, 4 April 2011. Web. 13 May 2017. Gurr, Ted R., Monty G. Marshall, and Keith Jaggers. "Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2009." Center for International Development and Conflict Management at the University of Maryland College Park (2010). Handel, Ariel. "13 Exclusionary surveillance and spatial uncertainty in the occupied Palestinian territories." Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (2010): 259. Higgs, Edward. "The rise of the information state: the development of central state surveillance of the citizen in England, 1500–2000." Journal of Historical Sociology 14.2 (2001): 175197. Humphreys, Lee. "Who's watching whom? A study of interactive technology and surveillance." Journal of Communication 61.4 (2011): 575-595. Kanashiro, Marta Mourao. “Surveillance Cameras in Brazil: exclusion, mobility regulation, and the new meanings of security.” (2008).


Lyon, David. Identifying citizens: ID cards as surveillance. Polity, 2009. Lyon, David. "National ID cards: Crime-control, citizenship and social sorting." Policing 1.1 (2007): 111-118. Mayhem, Stephen. “SNEDAI partners with Zetes for biometric ID card registration and production.” Biometric Update. 27 Feb 2015. “Memorandum: Demands to Stand Against Surveillance and Fix RICA!” Right2Know, 26 April 2016. Web. 15 May 2017. Milligan, Christopher S. "Facial Recognition Technology, Video Surveillance, and Privacy." S. Cal. Interdisc. LJ 9 (1999): 295. Moon, Maerilla. “Macedonia accused of spying on 20,000 citizens over four years.” Engadget, 9 February 2015. Web. 13 May 2017. Moore, Adam D. "Employee monitoring and computer technology: Evaluative surveillance v. privacy." Business Ethics Quarterly 10.03 (2000): 697-709. Morla, Rebeca. “Big Brother Cameras Mandated for Ecuador’s Motels, Brothels.” Panam Post, 9 March 2015. Web. 15 May 2017. Østergaard-Nielsen, Eva. "Codevelopment and citizenship: the nexus between policies on local migrant incorporation and migrant transnational practices in Spain." Ethnic and Racial Studies 34.1 (2011): 20-39. Perala, Alex. “UN’s Biometric Refugee ID Rollout Starts in Thailand.” Find Biometrics: Global Identity Management, 02 July 2015. Rose, Sonya O. “Which people's war?: National identity and citizenship in wartime Britain 19391945.” OUP Oxford, 2003.


Sheridan, Kelly. "Data Breaches Exposed 4.2 Billion Records In 2016." Dark Reading. Dark Reading, 01 May 2017. Web. 22 May 2017. Simmons, Ric. "Technology-Enhanced Surveillance by Law Enforcement Officials." NYU Ann. Surv. Am. L. 60 (2004): 711. Sullivan, P. “Latin America: Terrorism Issues.” (2011). The Global Surveillance Industry. Technical Report, Privacy International. 2016. Web. 13 May 2017. https://privacyinternational.org/sites/default/files/global_surveillance.pdf Wood, D. & Webster, C. “Living in Surveillance Societies: Normalisation of Surveillance in Europe and the Threat of Britain’s Bad Example.” (2009). Wilson, D. “Australian Biometrics and Global Surveillance.” (2007).


Figure 1: Mass Surveillance Systems in the World-System, 1995-Present Main findings: Out of all five state categories, emerging democratic regimes have been leading actors in creating surveillance systems.


Table 2: Comparative Data on Mass Surveillance Systems by Regime Type Advanced Democracy

Developing Democracy

Hybrid Democracy

Hybrid Authoritarian

Stable Authoritarian

Fragile/Failed States

Multi-Country Collaborations

World-System (Total)

78

92

52

40

24

15

5

306

~ High-Tech State

58

13

3

2

5

--

--

81

~ Emerging-Tech State

20

46

12

8

8

--

--

94

~ Middle-Tech State

--

22

31

23

2

2

--

80

~ Low-Tech State

--

11

6

7

9

13

--

46

~ Compliance Irrelevant

70%

50%

31%

43%

39%

27%

--

46%

~ Compliance Required

20%

36%

48%

38%

17%

73%

--

32%

~ Compliance Encouraged

9%

14%

21%

19%

43%

--

--

15%

~ Unknown

5%

5%

--

8%

4%

36%

--

7%

~ General Population

45%

60%

77%

45%

54%

53%

--

55%

~ Targeted Groups

40%

33%

15%

50%

46%

47%

--

35%

~ Unknown

15%

8%

8%

5%

--

--

--

10%

0.812 billion

1.688 billion

1.187 billion

0.188 billion

0.100 billion

0.083 billion

0.080 billion

4.138 billion

74%

75%

69%

77%

81%

64%

--

73%

$8.909 billion

$3.691 billion

$1.083 billion

$0.800 billion

$10.967 billion

$1.628 billion

$0.022 billion

$27.100 billion

$11

$2

$1

$4

$110

$20

--

$7

Total Surveillance Systems: Technological Advancement

Surveillance Strategy

Surveillance Focus

Surveillance Scope ~ Surveilled Population Size ~ Population Percentage Surveillance Expenditures ~ Total Surveillance Funding ~ Average Cost/Individual

Main findings: While nations worldwide have spent at least $27.1 billion US (or $7 per individual) to surveil 4.138 billion individuals (i.e., 73 percent of world population), stable autocracies are the campions in this respect by investing $110 USD per individual surveilled.


Figure 2: Global Stakeholder Ties

Main findings: 50 percent of all relationships (edges) between nodes originate from a governmental entity, which 48 percent of the time is either proponents or beneficiaries of surveillance, and 2 percent of the time is opponents of surveillance.


Figure 3: Global Stakeholder Ties by Regime Type

In advanced democracies, citizens and civil society groups are locked in tension against governments supporting and benefitting from surveillance systems.

In emerging democracies, citizens and civil society groups are more likely to benefit from surveillance for security reasons, and in those cases, governments themselves sometimes oppose surveillance systems.

In repressive authoritarian regimes, citizens and civil society groups are centrally but weakly positioned in tension against government agencies, private sector actors, and citizen groups who support surveillance for the regime survival, gaining profits, and attaining public goods and personal benefits reasons.


Figure 4: Public Knowledge and Discussion

Main findings: Out of 306 cases, publics across countries have very limited knowledge and discussion about the surveillance system only in seventeen instances that lie on the entire spectrum of the Polity IV regime score, ranging from Cuba’s stable autocracy to Sweden’s advanced democracy. The nature of authoritarian regimes explains the lack of public knowledge and debate and the secrecy of infrastructure systems can potentially serve such an explanation for democracies.


Figure 5: System Impetus

Main findings: 56 percent of all systems attempt to provide public goods, 9 percent of them have a mixed impact, and 30 percent of them include political surveillance efforts only. While more than a half of cases in our dataset attempt to provide public goods through mass surveillance, this rate varies meaningfully across regime-type: democracies surveil citizens as often as autocracies.


Figure 6: System Legality

Main findings: Surveillance systems comply with domestic laws in 139 cases; in 94 cases, it their legality is disputed; and in 45 cases, these systems are not legal by the regimes’ own statutes.