The Neccessity of Government Surveillance in Everyday Life

What if we lived in a world where we are being monitored almost every second of the day? Every day we willingly participate in many different types of surveillance and tracking – the EZ-tag on your car, data collection on Facebook and the GPS locator on phones, to name a few. Generally, we are led to believe increased government surveillance is beneficial for overall safety and quality of life, however it will eventually lead to the loss of privacy, civil liberties and the formation of a police state.

What is government surveillance? Surveillance is used by most governments globally for intelligence gathering, prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. It is the monitoring of behavior, activities, or information for the purpose of influencing, managing or directing - including observation from a distance by means of electronic equipment, such as closed-circuit television, interception of electronically transmitted information, such as Internet traffic. It can also include simple technical methods, such as human intelligence gathering and postal interception.

Initially we will look at the ways the US government currently surveils its citizens, both positive and negative. Some of the positive points include increased safety and general order in society. However, the negative points greatly outweigh these, as illustrated in the following case study countries - China, Singapore and Bahrain. In these instances we can see how quality of life is negatively impacted over time with the loss of privacy, increased interference and manipulation of our daily lives, eventually leading to the loss of civil liberties and the formation of the police state (a totalitarian state controlled by a political police force that secretly supervises the citizens' activities) .

In 2014, China’s national government revealed a massive policy plan for building a “social credit system” in China. In designing this system, the Chinese government project using tactics to create and track a “reputation score”, this can be utilized to try and reduce the amount of crime in society – this can range from plagiarism in school, white collar crime, defaulting on credit card payments, fraud and corruption to name a few. According to the Chinese government, this will be achieved is by tracking and combining the following - financial records, school records, crime records, internet data, even reliable reporting by neighbors & concerned citizens, which in itself. Governments in the West have also explored using reputation technologies and systems in governance and social control contexts. However, China’s system, as an all-encompassing policy project, knows no equal elsewhere in the globe, and so offers a unique case for studying a rise of the reputation state as a broader trend. Another aspect of control and censorship of citizens in China can be seen through the so-called Great Fire Wall of China – in 2017 China began blocking Facebook's WhatsApp messaging service and even extended a clampdown on virtual private networks, President Xi Jinping has vowed to secure China’s “cyber sovereignty,” protecting the country’s internet from undue foreign influence. Some of the measures implemented to restrict online freedoms include squashing a rising tide of #MeToo accusations; moves that all but eliminate the ability to post social media or even play online games anonymously.

In the modern and first world city-state of Singapore, the ruling party popularly known as the PAP (Peoples’ Action Party), has been in power since 1959. Soon after the British colonial forces exit, Singapore became a republic with Lee Kuan Yew as its first Prime Minister. Many credit him with the birth of the cosmopolitan nation that we presently know. He was a fastidious and fussy person and perhaps one can glean that he modeled the exemplary Singaporean after himself.

In her 1971 book about the People's Action Party, Singapore: The Politics of Survival, 1965-1967, former diplomat and political scientist Chan Heng Chee wrote: 'The most striking feature of PAP thinking after Separation... is the party's unshaken belief that the survival of Singapore will depend on the willingness and ability of the Singapore citizen to adopt a new set of attitudes, a new set of values, and new set of perspectives: in short, on the creation of a new man.'

Mr. Lee and his government thrived to create model citizens out of every citizen through mass campaigns, legislation, government subsidies for “good behavior” and very harsh punishments for crimes. The government has wide discretionary powers to conduct searches without warrants, as is normally required, if it determined that national security, public safety, order, or the public interest are at issue. The common outlook is that Singapore is a nation in existential peril, being small and liable to be wiped out at any second.

The island city of Singapore is well-known as a politically censorious and highly regulated society. Some may even go so far to say a soft dictatorship, which has been subjected to frequent and fierce criticisms by many hailing from liberal democratic traditions. Indeed, much has been said about how the Singapore republic resonates with a climate of fear, which gives rise to the prevalent practice of self-censorship. A curious mix of democracy and authoritarianism, the government ensures people's basic needs including housing, education, and security, in return for almost reverential deference. It is a law-and-order society, and the definition of order is all-encompassing. The Internet in Singapore is a highly debated space where the art of governmentality, in the forms of information controls and modes of regulation, is tried, tested, and subsequently perfected. The SARS outbreak in recent years has really been the impetus for the escalation of citizen and immigrant surveillance in Singapore under the guise of public health care. Commonly, internet traffic is monitored primarily for two sources of prohibited content: pornographic and racist material. Most of the well-known pornography sites like Playboy or Pornhub are banned but all other sites, including foreign media, social networks, and blogs, are open to Singaporeans. If one were to post a comment or an article that the law deems racially offensive or inflammatory, the police may come to your door.

Many Singaporeans have been charged under the Sedition Act for making racist statements online, but government officials are quick to point out that they don't consider this censorship. It is insisted that hateful speech threatens to tear apart the country’s multiethnic society and is therefore a national security threat. In 2012, two Chinese teenage boys where arrest after police alleged they had made racist comments on Facebook and Twitter concerning ethnic Malays. A senior police official explained to reporters, 'The right to free speech does not extend to making remarks that incite racial and religious friction and conflict. The Internet may be an accessible medium to express one's opinions, but members of the public should bear in mind that they are no less accountable for their actions online.'

Singaporean officials commonly insist that citizens are free to criticize the government. In fact, one of the country's most popular books this year has been an aggravating rebuttal to the decades-old official dogma concerning the country's existential peril. Hard Choices: Challenging the Singapore Consensus, by Donald Low and Sudhir Thomas Vadaketh, argues that the ruling People's Action Party, may have invented the notion that Singapore is one step away from ruin in a bid to subdue the masses and cement the government's hold on power.

Commentary that is deemed negative about an individual's character or motives, is off-limits because, like racial diatribe, it is seen as a threat to the nation's delicate balance. Journalists have frequently been charged under the country's strict libel laws. In 2010, the New York Times Co. settled a lawsuit over a column in the International Herald Tribune which implied that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, owed his job to nepotism. Lee's father is Lee Kuan Yew. The company paid $114,000, and the Herald Tribune published an apology.

Now not only does the government keep a close eye on what its citizens write and say publicly, but it also has the legal authority to monitor all manner of electronic communications including phone calls and blocking the printing of antisocial material. This surveillance extends to visitors as well. Mobile-phone SIM cards are an easy way for tourists to make cheap calls and are available at nearly any store – as common as chewing gum in America. Criminals like disposable SIM cards because they can be hard to trace but to purchase a card in Singapore, a customer has to provide a passport number, which is linked to the card, meaning the phone company and also the government, has a record of every call made on a so-called anonymous device. Privacy International reported that Singaporeans who want to obtain an Internet account must show their national identification card and that Internet service providers must make this information accessible to the government on a regular basis. The Ministry of Home Affairs also has the full authority to make local businesses hand over information about threats against their computer networks in order to defend the country's computer systems from malicious software and hackers.

No form of surveillance is as prevalent in Singapore as its network of security cameras, installed in more than 150 areas across the country acting as digital filters of government speech-minders. Typically, most Singaporeans are aware and do not care that they live in a surveillance society. Singaporeans presume that the cameras deter criminals and accepted that in a densely populated country, there are simply things you shouldn't say or do. In Singapore, the general feeling is that if you're not a criminal or an opponent of the government, you don't have anything to worry about. The more time Singaporeans spend online, the more they read, the more they share their thoughts with each other and their government, the more they've come to realize that Singapore's repression and citizen complacence is not entirely normal compared to other developed, democratic countries – as a Singaporean I can personally attest to this.

The Arab world is generally known as slow in adopting and implementing new technologies, and the Internet was no exception. Tunisia was the first Arab country to connect to the Internet (1991) followed by the first network connection by Egypt then subsequently several Arab states started joining as well. However, the pace of Internet dispersion in Arab states was slow for various reasons. To many Arab States, the Internet is seen as the new arm of colonization. To others there are still questions of morality and culture hindered, fear of the Internet’s enriching effects on their controlling regimes.

Political unrest in Bahrain is nothing new, but the persecution of journalists through tracking in the media is. The dominant forces there have utilized social media to subjugate both dissent and dissenters. This can be seen with the backlash from the polarizing event on 14 February 2011 (also known as the Day of Rage) where thousands of pro-democracy activists took to the streets of Bahrain to demand political and social reform. Many of the 55 peaceful demonstrations on the day were met with violence from police and soldiers, leaving more than 30 protesters injured and one dead. Eight years on, the Bahraini government has fostered an atmosphere of fear and repression, through the detention and torture of opposition leaders and supporters. After that fateful event, King Hamad bin ‘Issa Al Khalifa declared a three-month State of National Safety, and a renewed crackdown on protesters took an increasingly violent and repressive turn. Abduljalil al-Singace and Ali Abdulemam were two well known bloggers and vocal opposers of the regime and were sentence to life in absentia. Multiple journalists have been held indefinitely and have also died while being questioned and held in government custody. Reem Khalifa, a journalist for the independent newspaper Al-Wasat, was charged with verbally abusing and physically assaulting a government supporter, even though she was the subject of abuse herself. Her case is a good example of the harassment faced by independent journalists and writers who have spoken out against the violent tactics of the government.

Conclusion

Basic surveillance is needed to be employed by governments to maintain peace and order but should be kept to a minimum as to not infringe on individual privacy and civil liberties. Citizens have a right to know how and when they are being monitored and by whom. Ultimately, pervasive government surveillance is more detrimental than just dealing with our security issues in alternative ways.