Back to the Future

By Florian Hermes & Kim Ly Lam

Throughout German history, surveillance practices and technologies have been used as an indicator to measure and examine the democratization of the nation. But governance has radically changed during the past decades: the use of data has transformed the meaning of information, power and identity, reinforcing the paradigm shift from freedom to control. Along with new democratic practices, new ways of oppression have emerged.

As social and political practices are moving to the digital sphere, the results and consequences of this developtment affect us all. Life itself has become thoroughly networked and so far we have not been able to grasp the dimension of it. During the reading of these lines alone the world produced:

Hence, it is no surprise that media have begun to declare information as the currency of this age, the oil of digital regimes. Even though its abundance makes data cheap, one must not be underestimate the significance of their information: after all, there can be no internet without data. This shift, however, makes it difficult to distinguish surveillance from inevitable data practices.

Only recently, several incidents have sharpened the civic society's perception of the challenges in regard to data monitoring. While the leak of NSA files has sparked an international uproar and worldwide discussions about surveillance policies, the US presidential election in 2016 shed light on the increase of cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns on the internet. Meanwhile, the German government keeps pushing policies that intrude the private sphere of its citizens. The “Vorratsdatenspeicherung” (VDS) and the "Quellen-Telekommunikationsüberwachung", for instance, are recent examples that foster the creation of digital records of German citizens and the use of State Trojans as new digital bugging devices.

Regardless of the German promise to not repeat the misdeeds of the 20th century, the measures bear an alarming resemblance to the Stasi monitoring programs between 1949 and 1990. With the secret police of the GDR being considered a prime example of state-run monitoring, digital surveillance is often described as the "Stasi 2.0". And indeed, history has taught us that past mistakes are likely to recur. Monitoring is still en vogue as power never gets out of fashion. The stakes are high.

No matter whether it is the data on what clothes one wants to buy, which political party one is sympathizing with or with whom one has a romantic relationship - there are no longer secrets and anonymous identities in telecommunication. The complete lifestyle of an individual is recognizable through the data stored by the VDS. It is a powerful instrument - and a potential weapon.

The maintenance of a surveillance web is difficult but its legitimization poses an even bigger challenge that not only present politicians struggle with. Whereas today, current fears of terrorism and right-wing populism are often instrumentalized in order to justify monitoring policies, the GDR regime followed a different strategy. The East German state knew that measures had to be taken, in order to appease the public and mitigate resistance. They, however, had to rebuild a country at the same time, which is why negative and fearsome rhetoric alone would not suffice.

Despite the economic crisis, the GDR managed to prolong the regime's existence for decades. Collectivist rhetoric played a major role in solidifying the GDR's relationship with the Soviet Union and helped constructing the notion of “the other”, that is to say, the proclamation of a “we” and a “them”, from which Moscow profited during the Cold War. This dualist perception came in useful every time public enemies were pursued and ultimately legitimized surveillance as a reasonable practice.

Discursive techniques still play a vital political role to date. By using the right discursive techniques, politicians are able to promote certain policies, conceal contradictions and construct visions of political order that reflect their own ideology. It is a strategy that enables governments to turn their ideas into individual intrinsic needs through which citizens can be easily controlled.

As for technologies like Fitbit wristwatches, the notion of self-optimization and productivity is central to the discourse. It shifts the attention from disciplinary control to individual self-realization, encouraging people to participate in the practices of biopolitics and normalization.

As observed in the case of the DDR, state authorities and private companies set new norms and enforce politics by propagating certain needs. Health, fitness and beauty have become currencies within the social networked world as people have turned into their own brands and commodities. Using these desires and manipulating them does not only lead to a higher acceptance of surveillance policies and visions; it also redefines the assumptions on core values like freedom and security.

There are certainly many ways to define freedom as different arguments presuppose different understandings of this entity. Or to put it in the words of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin: "Enough manipulation with the definition of man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes".

Whereas activists and NGOs mostly plead for the negative concept of liberty, the discourse on the enforcement of digital surveillance is biased towards its positive counterpart. Techno-deterministic and cybernetic world views are put forward in order to legitimate control, while politicians like Thomas De Mazière speak of “freedom in security” and therefore testify to this positive notion. It is therefore critical to question the bias in order to fight for the freedom the state claims to protect.

The comparison between the DDR and present politics revealed common strategies of control that were disguised in different manners. We have learnt about the mistakes of the past and found their modern equivalents. But one question remains unanswered: what solutions of the past can we reach for? What can we retrieve to review, rework and resolve today’s challenges?

In the end, the moral of the story is not to demonize technology, but to remain vigilant. Or to put it in Deleuze’s terms: to not fear or hope, but to be aware of the risks as much as the potentials, the latter being overly represented and propagated within the discourse. To reject technology altogether is synonymous to one’s exclusion from the overall discourse. This, however, diminishes all opportunities to negotiate and shape the future.

Technology certainly provides opportunities that still need to be disclosed. It does not take a techno-solutionist perspective to acknowledge that ideas like smart cities or the improvement of disease outbreak controls are worth discussing. What lies at the heart of a society’s willingness to adapt to these innovations is its level of comfort with tech. Hence, it is important that citizens participate in the discourse in order to steer technology into the direction of their values - and to prevent economic actors and states from taking advantage of the silence. After all, surveillance technologies thrive on the secrecy that surrounds them. Many decisions are pushed through behind closed doors only to be legitimized by laws afterwards.

The discourse on surveillance technologies is not only a niche topic, but symptomatic for the challenges of governmental control and civic freedom. Only when the civic society is informed and gets involved, the road to a democratic future can be paved.