The origins of mass surveillance

The Life of Ideas : How does mass surveillance actually work in the first XX^e century ?

Sophie Cœuré: The surveillance of populations by state administrations, police or military, is not an invention of XX^e century ; it has existed at least since the XVIII^e century. The establishment of centralized administrations makes it possible to collect and keep written information, thus rationalizing and perpetuating surveillance. At the end of the XIX^e century, under the influence of Alphonse Bertillon in France, a new system was put in place, allowing the identification and monitoring of populations using cards containing photographs and a series of anthropometric measurements (height, eye color) or dactyloscopic (fingerprints).

The Great War was a major turning point in Europe, with the generalization of the obligation to present a document proving identity and, very often, to obtain a visa to travel from one country to another. The hunt for deserters, traitors and spies leads to the extension of surveillance to ever-increasing populations.

But, as the exhibition “ Files ? » from the National Archives in 2011, we should not confuse systematic surveillance by ministries, police or counter-espionage services, and “ filing » temporary, intended not for maintaining order, but for the use of administrations and then businesses, sports and cultural associations, which seek to concentrate data on certain individuals.

The Life of Ideas : By comparing, from this angle, the history ofUSSR and socialist countries with the history of France, what can we say about the differences between dictatorships and democracies ?

Sophie Cœuré: There are two major differences. On the one hand, the objectives. In Republican France, administrations specializing in internal or external intelligence monitor individuals, based on crimes or offenses already committed (from prostitutes to assassins), or because they are identified as potentially dangerous for the public. public order and territorial security. Surveillance can be collective and target, for example in the interwar period, extreme left or extreme right political parties, anti-colonial activists, Italian, German, Spanish refugees, Soviet or Nazi spies, etc.

However, surveillance is never determined by categorization a priori of a group, but by the identification of a specific danger, and it can therefore be abandoned at any time. The only population to be systematically monitored in France is that of “ nomads “. The law of 1912 created a “ anthropometric notebook » obligatory from 13 years old. In 1969, the law was repealed, but the nomads, who had become “ traveling people ”, continued to be subject to a special status: their “ traffic ticket » was not removed until June 2015.

In USSRon the other hand, for reasons which relate both to the project of building a communist society and to more cyclical reasons linked to the civil war and the Stalinist evolution, the surveillance administrations, such as the Cheka created in December 1917, are of a unique type. It is a question of purifying society of the elements “ counter-revolutionaries “. These are defined by their actions (real or fabricated by the accusation), but also – and this is an essential difference – by their a priori belonging to a category: children of nobles or priests, “ kulaks » (rich peasants), « peoples punished » during World War II for their potential complicity with the Axis, such as the Crimean Tatars.

Everyone becomes targets for surveillance which, in fact, ends up targeting everyone and resorting not only to specialized administrations, but also to very extensive networks of agents and informers. The climax will be reached by the Stasi in GDR.

The Life of Ideas : And the second difference ?

Sophie Cœuré: It is about the legal framework and the separation of powers. The essential distinction between administrative decision and judicial decision is not respected in communist states, which establish permanent surveillance systems, escaping justice, as also do the Nazi state and later the Latin American dictatorships.

In democracies, there is control both by the judiciary and by Parliament, which alone can pass laws generalizing surveillance in the event of war or a state of emergency, or even establish exceptional jurisdictions. But the history of Europe between 1940 and 1944 clearly shows how instruments of surveillance “ ordinary “, such as files, can very quickly become tools of identification, exclusion, repression, even genocide. Claire Zalc has shown this in her recent work on denaturalizations under Vichy.

The Life of Ideas : Do these differences prevent us from speaking generally of an increase in surveillance in XX^e century ?

Sophie Cœuré: Without forgetting their differences in nature and scale, we can affirm that the common point between democracies and dictatorships in XX^e century is theinflation of surveillance. At the end of the 1930s, French central administrations had accumulated 7 million records ! All this provides very good archives for historians, provided they are read with caution, because there are many errors in the surveillance files. The archives of the administrations which inherited the Cheka (GPU–NKVD And KGB) being closed, we unfortunately have little basis for comparison between France and the Soviet Union.

Because the knowledge thus produced is also an obvious power issue. Thus, in 1940, in the first days of the Occupation, the Germans seized the central file of the National Security, which brought together around 650,000 individual files and 2 million personal files. It was recovered in 1945-1946 by the Soviet services, who kept it secret until the fall of theUSSR. This “ Moscow funds » is now kept in the National Archives. The interception of intelligence became a key issue of the Second World War and the Cold War. It will remain so thereafter.

The Life of Ideas : Are we the heirs of these societies or are we moving towards radically new surveillance ?

Sophie Cœuré: The evolution of means of communication, such as the appearance of the telephone, is of course causing surveillance to evolve. But the main turning point was that of computerization which, from the 1970s, opened the way to a change of scale in the collection, processing and storage of data.

Since the 1990s, the evolution of technologies (Internet, GPSsurveillance cameras) gives States increased potential and makes them almost instantaneous. As recent cases involving the NSA American, the danger of indiscriminately extending surveillance, without precisely and punctually delimiting its targets, is all the greater as terrorist threats become more global and more complex. This would then be a change in the nature of mass surveillance.

However, it seems to me that we should not fantasize about inflation. safe » (the term appeared in the early 1980s and has flourished since) in democracies, whether in the United States or in Europe: legal and parliamentary safeguards remain indeed present. Knowing the precedent of totalitarianism and identifying their persistent traces, in China or Russia, allows us to usefully put things into perspective. In addition, the 1970s saw the emergence of a new citizen vigilance, which contributed to new regulatory laws (“law Computers and freedoms » in France in 1978) and invented new types of intervention, such as Wikileaks.