Arguments for Surveillance

What is surveillance? Generally, it is the fact or the possibility (Beu & Buckley, 2001) of being observed by someone else. While this may suffice as a rough indication of the area, it is also simplistic. What does it mean to be observed ? Who can be the observer? Is every observation a case of surveillance? These and other questions make it hard to define the term clearly. This need not worry us, however, as for all practical purposes, most of us have an idea of what surveillance is and, in most cases, these ideas converge sufficiently to facilitate communication. Furthermore, there can be little doubt that surveillance is a central, maybe even necessary, feature of today s advanced societies (Lyon, 2002). It is hard to put exact numbers on the phenomenon of surveillance, but where numbers exist, they tend to be impressive. There are, for example, 2.8 million CCTV cameras in the UK (Ball, 2003). However, there seem to be local differences, and surveillance is even stronger in the USA (Stanton & Stam, 2003), where already in 1988, 10 million workers were the subject of some form of surveillance (Bowie, 1999). A majority of American companies are controlling their employees e-mail (Schulman, 2000), and almost everyone who has access to a computer is subject to some sort of data collection (Hartman, 2001). If it has become such a widespread phenomenon, the question must be why? Why do individuals, societies, and, most importantly, companies go to the trouble of surveilling individuals?

The original motive of surveillance on an everyday level is probably a kind of natural curiosity of what others do (Gumpert & Drucker, 2000). In order to institute sophisticated means of technological surveillance, one needs more than just curiosity . There needs to be a social framework that renders surveillance acceptable and legal. Society has an interest in surveillance when it promotes its goals, which in democratic societies usually means maintenance of social order and the prevention of crime (van den Hoeven, 1997; Taylor, 2002).

More important for our subject of interest, employee surveillance in organisations, is the interest that companies have in surveilling, which is usually expressed in economic terms. Companies use surveillance to cut costs or improve earnings. The most serious problem that companies seem to face is that of economic loss because of a misuse of resources. Non-work- related Web use, for example, is supposed to cost US corporations alone more that $54 billion a year, not including productivity loss and bandwidth wasted (Boncella, 2001). This abuse of company resources includes accessing irrelevant Web sites, chatting, gaming, downloading mp3 files, etc. (Siau, et al., 2002). This problem is sufficiently serious to warrant the invention of new terms to denote it, terms such as cyber-slacking (Block, 2001) or cyberslouching (Urbaczewski & Jessup, 2002). It is usually argued that management has a right to defend itself against such misuse (Velasquez, 1998), and that it can best do so by surveillance. Surveillance is supposed to force employees to be accountable for their actions (Marx, 2002). It is assumed that forcing people to be accountable is acceptable, since they have no rights to hide facts about them that are relevant to the labour contract they signed (Posner, 1995).

Another economically motivated argument for surveillance is that of security. Surveillance is supposed to secure access, avoid misuse, prevent theft, etc. This is the main argument for the use of biometrics, a group of technologies that tries to identify humans through their biological characteristics, which is increasingly used for the purposes of surveillance (Tolo & Steinke, 2002).

Related to the question of security is that of legal problems. Companies fear that their employees use of technology can have negative legal results. In today s litigious culture, ICT use can lead to all sorts of legal issues. Frequently named are problems of harassment (Koehn, 2001; Panko & Beh, 2002), negligent hiring, retention, supervision (Brown, 2000), or external liabilities (Spinello, 2000). A legal issue of special sensitivity is the consumption of pornography, particularly child pornography, on company resources (Adam, 2002; Catudal, 2001). Having established that there are numerous reasons for surveillance, we can now start to think about the reasons why it might not be a good thing. In order to understand this, it is useful to take a look at the presumed opposite of surveillance ” namely, privacy. The next section will thus discuss the concept of privacy in order to provide a foundation for the arguments against surveillance.