Introduction
Surprising Levels of Surveillance
The idea for this book arose from research that I
conducted
for
Obscene Profits
(Routledge 2000), during which it became clear that online pornography was becoming a serious problem in the workplace. As I researched the issue of pornography at work, it quickly became apparent that
employers
were responding to the problem by installing increasingly sophisticated software to monitor what their
employees
were doing online. It was evident that the software used to monitor online activity was capable of recording far more than employee efforts to download sexually explicit images.
The other thing that quickly became obvious was that computer monitoring was merely the tip of the workplace surveillance iceberg. Every day, employees work under the unblinking gaze of video
cameras
(both hidden and overt), pee into little plastic cups in order to get or keep a job, swipe a card or wear a badge to create a trail of their movements, and/or drive a vehicle equipped with a Global Positioning System that closely
monitors
their out-of-office behavior.
Although the attacks of 9/11 have
altered
our expectations somewhat, the idea of so many Americans working under constant surveillance is still jarring. Personal privacy is a deeply ingrained theme in the mythos of this nation—after all, Daniel Boone picked up stakes and headed west when the smoke of his
nearest
neighbor appeared on the horizon.
The frontier disappeared more than a century ago, and not long afterwards, so did the practical availability of true personal privacy. Nonetheless, even in an era of highly detailed credit
reports
, invasive
telemarketers
, and pizza deliverers who track what we ordered last time, we cling fiercely to the myth of privacy—so fiercely, in fact, that we believe in personal privacy even in the workplace. Time and again, public opinion surveys show that employees do not think that their employers monitor their activities at work, or even have the right to do so.
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That expectation may slowly be changing, at least with respect to computer-
related
activities, as well-publicized cases make it clear that employers
can
conduct computer surveillance, and more and more employers
inform
their employees that they do monitor e-
mails
and Web surfing. But computer-related monitoring is only one small piece of the surveillance that occurs, and few employers disclose all of the surveillance and investigation that actually takes place.
Frankly, our expectation of privacy in the workplace needs to change more quickly. Employer surveillance tools no longer
necessarily
discriminate between work-related and personal activities, and the steady expansion of workplace surveillance is
threatening
the privacy of our
homes
.
Equally important is the growing risk that the information gathered as part of workplace surveillance will be used to support a truly unprecedented level of government surveillance. In an era when
legitimate
concerns about homeland security are being used to rationalize new federal voyeurism, we need to consider more
carefully
than ever before the question of whether workplace surveillance is
exceeding
its legitimate rationalizations.
The Total Information Awareness System
As I was writing the final pages of this book, a flurry of articles revealed that at the beginning of 2002, the Bush administration had put
retired
admiral John Poindexter, President Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, in charge of a newly created "Information Awareness Office." Armed with an initial budget of $200 million, Poindexter was asked to set up an enormously powerful computer system capable of collecting and analyzing data from thousands of federal, state, and commercial databases.
The ostensible purpose of the system, known as "Total Information Awareness" (TIA), is to identify and track the activities of people
hostile
to the United States by looking for suspicious patterns of behavior. With
disturbing
ease, however, the TIA system will allow Poindexter to compile, as columnist William Safire put it, "computer dossiers on 300 million Americans."
[1]
Concern over Poindexter's activities is creating
strange
bedfellows. In my own database of information on this issue, Safire's column wound up side-by-side with a similar piece by
The Village Voice's
Nat Hentoff, who declared that Poindexter's warrantless searches will make "individual privacy as obsolete as the sauropods of the Mesozoic era."
[2]
It's not just their mutual fondness for the word "Orwellian" that binds those two writers. It's also their obvious understanding of the potential
unintended
consequences of a system like TIA—the possibility, if not the
likelihood
, that the collected information will be misused. As noted British scholar Lord Acton
observed
almost exactly one century before Poindexter was convicted of lying to Congress, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely
."
[3]
Overlooked in the growing hubbub over Admiral Poindexter's resurfacing, however, is the fact that to one degree or another, private businesses have been creating and operating their own "information awareness offices" for the last half century. As we'll see throughout this book,
employers
have collected far more information about individuals in this country than the federal government.
A certain amount of information about and supervision of employees is a necessary component of a successful business. A company will fail if it hires people who have lied about their experience and credentials; if it allows employees to steal inventory or trade secrets; or if it allows
employees
to
spend
excessive amounts of time talking on the phone, playing computer
games
, or surfing the Web for personal reasons. The fact that on the first Monday after Thanksgiving this year, Americans rang up $275 million in online purchases during normal working hours may be good news for the nation's economy, but less
promising
for the nation's productivity.
As justified as workplace surveillance may be in limited quantities, the situation is
rapidly
getting out of hand. Advances in technology are making it possible for companies to routinely gather unprecedented
quantities
of information about the people who work for them. Unfortunately, as the power and sophistication of surveillance tools steadily improve, an increasing amount of human intervention is required to sift relevant information from the irrelevant. More often than not, it is simply easier and cheaper for companies to collect information about their employees without regard to whether it is actually relevant to an employee's qualifications or job performance.
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The collection of excessive amounts of private information about employees is troubling enough when the collection, compilation, and analysis is done by a single company. It is far more troubling in an era when the federal government has the capability and increasingly the will to use that information for public policy purposes. It's a trend directly
related
to times of civic stress: The government first
began
collecting information about employee salaries during the Great Depression, and today's search for total information awareness is obviously driven by the threat of terrorism.
No one who watched the horrific events of 9/11 unfold on television and computer screens around the world can legitimately question whether the threat of terrorism is real or worthy of
aggressive
opposition
. But as
numerous
commentators have asked (and not just during the present conflict), if the cost of victory is the freedoms we value, then is it a victory worth having?
By itself, the issue of workplace privacy is worth examining for what it says about the economic and social structure of this nation. But in light of the growing collaboration and data exchange between government and business, workplace surveillance now has the potential to play an important role in undermining our most fundamental freedoms.
[1]
William Safire, "You Are a Suspect,"
The New York Times
(November 14, 2002).
[2]
Nat Hentoff, "We'll All Be Under Surveillance,"
The Village Voice
(December 6, 2002). Sauropods were long-necked, plant-
eating
dinosaurs, the best-known example of which is the Jurassic period's Brachiosaurus. The gargantuan animals (fifty feet tall, up to eighty-five feet long) were one of the species featured in Steven Spielberg's enormously popular movie,
Jurassic Park
.
[3]
Lord Acton, in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887. Poindexter's conviction was entered in 1990, but was later overturned on the grounds that the basis of his
conviction
—his testimony to Congress—was given under a grant of immunity.
