One team of researchers, publishing their findings in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, presented their subjects with morally questionable actions, such as keeping a sizeable amount of money found in a wallet on the street or knowing that a friend had added false information to his résumé. The subjects were asked to assess the degree of wrongdoing. The study noted that subjects who were shown images hinting at surveillance, such as a large pair of staring eyes, rated the actions as more “reprehensible” than those who were shown a neutral image. The researchers concluded that surveillance encourages those who are being watched to “affirm their endorsement of prevailing social norms” as they attempt to “actively manage their reputations.”
A comprehensive experiment conducted in 1975 by Stanford University psychologists Gregory White and Philip Zimbardo, entitled “The Chilling Effects of Surveillance,” sought to assess whether being watched had an impact on the expression of controversial political opinions. The impetus for the study was Americans’ concerns about surveillance by the government:
The Watergate scandal, revelations of White House bugging, and Congressional investigations of domestic spying by the Central Intelligence Agency have served to underscore the developing paranoid theme of American life: Big Brother may be watching you! Proposals for national data banks, uses of surveillance helicopters by urban police forces, the presence of observation cameras in banks and supermarkets, and airport security searches of person and property are but some of the signs that our private lives are under such increasing scrutiny.
The participants were placed under varying levels of surveillance and asked to give their views on the legalization of marijuana.
It turned out that “threatened” subjects—those who were told that their statements would be shared with the police “for training purposes”—were more likely to condemn marijuana usage and to use second- and third-person pronouns (“you,” “they,” “people”) in their language. Only 44 percent of subjects under surveillance advocated for legalization, compared to 77 percent of those not so “threatened.” Tellingly, 31 percent of the participants being monitored spontaneously sought approval from the researchers (asking, for example, “Is that all right?”), whereas only 7 percent of the other group did so. Participants who were “threatened” also scored significantly higher on feelings of anxiety and inhibition.
White and Zimbardo noted in their conclusion that the “threat or actuality of government surveillance may psychologically inhibit freedom of speech.” They added that while their “research design did not allow for the possibility of ‘avoiding assembly,’” they expected that “the anxiety generated by the threat of surveillance would cause many people to totally avoid situations” in which they might be monitored. “Since such assumptions are limited only by one’s imagination and are encouraged daily by revelations of government and institutional invasion of privacy,” they wrote, “the boundaries between paranoid delusions and justified cautions indeed become tenuous.”
It is true that surveillance can at times promote what some may consider desirable behavior. One study found that rowdiness in Swedish soccer stadiums—fans throwing bottles and lighters onto the field—declined by 65 percent after the introduction of security cameras. And public health literature on hand washing has repeatedly confirmed that the way to increase the likelihood of someone washing his or her hands is to put someone nearby.
But overwhelmingly, the effect of being watched is to severely constrain individual choice. Even in the most intimate of settings, within the family, for example, surveillance turns insignificant actions into a source of self-judgment and anxiety, just by virtue of being observed. In one UK experiment, researchers provided subjects with tracking devices to keep tabs on family members. Any member’s precise location was accessible at any time, and if someone’s location had been viewed, he would receive a message. Each time one member tracked another, he was also sent a questionnaire asking why he had done so and whether the information received had matched expectations.
In the debriefing, participants said that while they sometimes found the tracking comforting, they also felt anxious that if they were in an unexpected place, family members would “jump to conclusions” about their behavior. And the option of “going invisible”—blocking the location-sharing mechanism—did not resolve the anxiety: many participants said that the act of avoiding surveillance in and of itself would generate suspicion. The researchers concluded:
There are trails in our daily life that we cannot explain and that may be completely insignificant. However, their representation via a tracking device … gives them significance, seemingly calling for an extraordinary degree of accountability. This generates anxieties, especially within close relationships, in which people may feel under greater pressure to account for things they simply cannot account for.
For a Finnish experiment that carried out one of the most radical simulations of surveillance, cameras were placed in subjects’ homes—bathrooms and bedrooms excluded—and all of their electronic communications were tracked. Although the advertisement for the study went viral on social media, the researchers had difficulty getting even ten households to participate.
Among those who signed up, complaints about the project focused on the invasion of ordinary parts of their daily lives. One person felt uncomfortable being naked in her home; another felt conscious of the cameras while fixing her hair after a shower; someone else thought of the surveillance while injecting medicine. Innocuous actions gained layers of significance when surveilled.
Subjects initially described the surveillance as annoying; however, they soon “got used to it.” What began as deeply invasive became normalized, transformed into the usual state of affairs and no longer noticed.
As the experiments showed, there are all sorts of things people do that they are eager to keep private, even though these sorts of things do not constitute doing “something wrong.” Privacy is indispensable to a wide range of human activities. If someone calls a suicide hotline or visits an abortion provider or frequents an online sex website or makes an appointment with a rehabilitation clinic or is treated for a disease, or if a whistle-blower calls a reporter, there are many reasons for keeping such acts private that have no connection to illegality or wrongdoing.
In sum, everyone has something to hide. Reporter Barton Gellman made the point this way:
Privacy is relational. It depends on your audience. You don’t want your employer to know you’re job hunting. You don’t spill all about your love life to your mom, or your kids. You don’t tell trade secrets to your rivals. We don’t expose ourselves indiscriminately and we care enough about exposure to lie as a matter of course. Among upstanding citizens, researchers have consistently found that lying is “an everyday social interaction” (twice a day among college students, once a day in the Real World).… Comprehensive transparency is a nightmare.… Everyone has something to hide.
A prime justification for surveillance—that it’s for the benefit of the population—relies on projecting a view of the world that divides citizens into categories of good people and bad people. In that view, the authorities use their surveillance powers only against bad people, those who are “doing something wrong,” and only they have anything to fear from the invasion of their privacy. This is an old tactic. In a 1969 Time magazine article about Americans’ growing concerns over the US government’s surveillance powers, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, assured readers that “any citizen of the United States who is not involved in some illegal activity has nothing to fear whatsoever.”
The point was made again by a White House spokesman, responding to the 2005 controversy over Bush’s illegal eavesdropping program: “This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner. These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people.” And when President Obama appeared on The Tonight Show in August 2013 and was asked by Jay Leno abo
ut NSA revelations, he said: “We don’t have a domestic spying program. What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack.”
For many, the argument works. The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalized and deserving group of those “doing wrong”—the bad people—ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on.
But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong,” in the eyes of such institutions, encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behavior, and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.
The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism—Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, antiwar activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.
Nobody understood better than Hoover the power of surveillance to crush political dissent, confronted as he was with the challenge of how to prevent the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association when the state is barred from arresting people for expressing unpopular views. The 1960s ushered in a slew of Supreme Court cases that established rigorous protections for free speech, culminating in the unanimous 1969 decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio, which overturned the criminal conviction of a Ku Klux Klan leader who had threatened violence against political officials in a speech. The Court said that the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and free press are so strong that they “do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force.”
Given those guarantees, Hoover instituted a system to prevent dissent from developing in the first place.
The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence program, COINTELPRO, was first exposed by a group of antiwar activists who had become convinced that the antiwar movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance, and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.
Files related to COINTELPRO showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and Communist organizations, antiwar protesters, and various right-wing groups. The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.
The FBI succeeded in convincing the New York Times to suppress the documents and even return them, but the Washington Post published a series of articles based on them. Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded:
[Over the course of fifteen years] the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilate operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.
Many of the techniques used woud be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that. The unexpressed major premise of the programs was that a law enforcement agency has the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order.
One key COINTELPRO memo explained that “paranoia” could be sown among antiwar activists by letting them believe there was “an F.B.I. agent behind every mailbox.” In this way, dissidents, always convinced that they were being watched, would drown in fear and refrain from activism.
Unsurprisingly, the tactic worked. In a 2013 documentary entitled 1971, several of the activists described how Hoover’s FBI was “all over” the civil rights movement with infiltrators and surveillance, people who came to meetings and reported back. The monitoring impeded the movement’s ability to organize and grow.
At the time, even the most entrenched institutions in Washington understood that the mere existence of government surveillance, no matter how it is used, stifles the ability to dissent. The Washington Post, in a March 1975 editorial on the break-in, warned about precisely this oppressive dynamic:
The FBI has never shown much sensitivity to the poisonous effect which its surveillance, and especially its reliance on faceless informers, has upon the democratic process and upon the practice of free speech. But it must be self-evident that discussion and controversy respecting governmental policies and programs are bound to be inhibited if it is known that Big Brother, under disguise, is listening to them and reporting them.
COINTELPRO was far from the only surveillance abuse found by the Church Committee. Its final report declared that “millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the United States were obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret arrangement with three United States telegraph companies.” Moreover, “some 300,000 individuals were indexed in a CIA computer system and separate files were created on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups” during one CIA operation, CHAOS (1967–1973).
Additionally, “an estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army intelligence files created between the mid-1960’s and 1971” as well as some 11,000 individuals and groups who were investigated by the Internal Revenue Service “on the basis of political rather than tax criteria.” The bureau also used wiretapping to discover vulnerabilities, such as sexual activity, which were then deployed to “neutralize” their targets.
These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the ACLU revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups.” The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protestors by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database.” The ACLU noted that one document, “labeled ‘potential terrorist activity,’ lists events such as a ‘Stop the War NOW!’ rally in Akron, Ohio.”
The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.
* * *
The opportunity those in power have to characterize political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the last decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of antigovernment right-wing groups, antiwar activists, and associations organized around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.
Indeed, after British authorities detained my partner, David Miranda, at Heathrow airport under an antiterrorism statute, the UK government expressly equated my surveillance reporting with terrorism on the ground that the release of the Snowden documents “is designed to influence a government and is made for the purposes of promoting a political or ideological cause. This therefore falls within the definition of terrorism.” This is the clearest possible statement of linking a threat to the interests of power to terrorism.
None of this would come as any surprise to the American Muslim community, where the fear of surveillance on the grounds of terrorism is intense and pervasive,
and for good reason. In 2012, Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo of the Associated Press exposed a joint CIA/New York Police Department scheme of subjecting entire Muslim communities in the United States to physical and electronic surveillance without the slightest whiff of any suggestion of wrongdoing. American Muslims routinely describe the effect of spying on their lives: each new person who shows up at a mosque is regarded with suspicion as an FBI informant; friends and family stifle their conversations for fear of being monitored and out of awareness that any expressed view deemed hostile to America can be used as a pretext for investigation or even prosecution.
One document from the Snowden files, dated October 3, 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalizing” influence on others. The memo discusses six individuals in particular, all Muslims, though it stresses that they are merely “exemplars.”
The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organization or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical,” a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities.”
Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “U.S. person,” are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity”—the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.
As the ACLU’s deputy legal director, Jameel Jaffer, observed, the NSA databases “store information about your political views, your medical history, your intimate relationships and your activities online.” The agency claims this personal information won’t be abused, “but these documents show that the NSA probably defines ‘abuse’ very narrowly.” As Jaffer pointed out, the NSA has historically, at a president’s request, “used the fruits of surveillance to discredit a political opponent, journalist, or human rights activist.” It would be “naive,” he said, to think the agency couldn’t still “use its power that way.”
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