For the first time the EU-wide moves towards a surveillance society
and a database state are set out in all their appalling glory. A major
report has recently been published, NeoConOpticon. The authors, with Ban Hayes of Statewatch
in the lead, have put together the military and the domestic aspects of
the European Security Research Programme.
Full Spectrum Dominance was originally a term developed in the Pentagon to describe what they needed to ensure Star Wars would work so that they could track and target anything they wished without disruption. For a relatively early mention of full spectrum doninance in 2003 see Paul Rogers here and for his earlier analysis of laser warfare in 2002, here
Now Statewatch and the Transnational Institute,
who have published the well produced colour booklet of 82 pages, have
set out how the domestic, corporate and military aspects are fused into
a single, over-arching security strategy. They say in their conclusion:
Whereas the ideal of democracy holds that governments are accountable
to the people, surveillance-based techniques of governance are
transforming this relationship: making people accountable to
governments while widening the gap (the so-called
‘democratic deficit’) between political elites and those they have been
elected or, in this case, appointed to serve. Instead of enhancing the
EU’s political legitimacy, these types of policies can only fuel the
sense of alienation that many people now feel from law-makers in
Brussels.
Paradoxically,
while the overarching concerns of the likes of George Orwell and Michel
Foucault about all-seeing and all-powerful states are further
entrenching themselves in EU policy with every passing year, their
concerns are increasingly dismissed as paranoid or groundless, and mean
little to new generations. Yet how else can we conceive of a world
characterised by mandatory surveillance and wholesale risk profiling; a
world policed by computer systems, combat robots and drone planes; and
populations, or certain sections of them, subject to full spectrum
dominance.
Open Democracy
The
idea behind the ‘NeoConOpticon’ is to emphasise both the central role
played by the private sector in ‘delivering’ surveillance-based
security policies and the inherently neo-conservative appeal to the
‘defence of the homeland’ against threats to the ‘Western way of life’.
The convergence of these ideologies is accelerating the development of a ‘surveillance
society’ in Europe, enhancing the potential for governments to subject
the lives of their citizens and non-citizens to incredible scrutiny,
transforming the relationship between them and undermining fundamental
principles of democracy.