IEEE Spectrum October, 2013 - 8

10.13

Rules for the Digital Panopticon
The technologies of persistent surveillance can
protect us only if certain boundaries are respected

Ad hoc surveillance will inevitably proliferate. Dropcam and other cheap surveillance programs, already popular among the
tech-savvy, will spread widely. DIY and vigilante panopticons will complicate matters.
Imagine someone like George Zimmerman,
the Florida neighborhood watchman,
equipped not with a gun but with a digital surveillance net, allowing him to track
pretty much anything-on his smartphone.
With data multiplying exponentially and
technology inexorably advancing, the question is not whether an all-encompassing
surveillance systems will be deployed. The
question is how, when, and how many.
In the absence of settled laws and norms,
the role of engineers looms large. They will
shoulder much of the burden of designing
systems in ways that limit the damage to
innocents while maximizing the pressures
brought to bear on bad guys.
But where do the responsibilities of
engineers begin and end?
It is too early to answer conclusively, but
engineers would do well to keep a few fundamental principles in mind:

or centuries, we humans have lacked the all-knowing, all-seeing
mechanisms to credibly predict and prevent bad actions by others.
Now these very powers of preemption are perhaps within our grasp,
1. Keep humans in the loop, but insist they follow
thanks to a confluence of technologies.
the "rules of the road." Compiling and analyzing
In the foreseeable future, governments, and perhaps some for-profit
data can be done by machines. But it would be
corporations and civil-society groups, will design, construct, and deploy
best to design these surveillance systems so that
surveillance systems that aim to predict and prevent bad actions-and
a human reviews and ponders the data before
to identify, track, and neutralize people who commit them.
any irreversible actions are taken. If citizens
And when contemplating these systems, let's broadly agree that we should
want to spy on one another, as they inevitably
prevent the slaughter of children at school and the abduction, rape, and
will, impose binding rules on how they do so.
imprisonment of women. And let's also agree that we should thwart lethal
2. Design self-correcting systems that eject tainted
attacks against lawful government.
or wrong information fast and inexpensively.
Of late, the U. S. government gets most of the attention in this arena, and
Create a professional ethos and explicit standards
for good reason. The National Security Agency, through its vast capacity to
of behavior for engineers, code writers, and
track virtually every phone call, e-mail, and text message, promises new forms
designers who contribute significantly to the
of preemption through a system security experts call persistent surveillance.
creation of panopticon-like systems.
The Boston Marathon bombing, in April, reinforced the impression that
3. Delete the old stuff routinely. Systems should
guaranteed prevention against unwanted harm is elusive, if not impossible.
mainly contain real-time data. They should not
Yet the mere chance of stopping the next mass shooting or terror attack
become archives tracing the lives of innocents.
persuades many people of the benefits of creating a high-tech version of
the omniscient surveillance construct that, in 1787, the British philosopher
Engineers acting responsibly are no guarantee
Jeremy Bentham conceived as a panopticon: a prison with a central viewing
that panopticons will not come to control us. But
station for watching all the inmates at once.
they can be part of getting this brave new world right.
Some activists complain about the potential of such a system to violate -G. Pascal Zachary
basic freedoms, including the right to privacy. But others will be seduced by
G. Pascal Zachary is the author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush,
the lure of techno fixes. For example, how could anyone object to a digital
Engineer of the American Century (Free Press, 1997). He teaches at
net that protects a school from abusive predators?
Arizona State University.
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OCT 2013

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Spectrum October, 2013