Will we tolerate Governments spying on our sexual lives.

Governments are spying on our sexual lives. Will we tolerate it?

The intrusion of the state’s prying eyes into human intimacy and our use of webcams is yet another reason to express the greatest possible civic outrage against ‘dataveillance’

Van Badham

The Guardian recently published yet another disturbing revelation from files supplied by state-surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Co-ordinated by British intelligence service GCHQ as a partner of theFive Eyes alliance of spying nations (which include the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Australia), from 2008 until at least 2012 a surveillance programme named Optic Nerve has been screencapping and storing images of webcam chats from Yahoo’s servers. Snowden’s files reveal the images were harvested in bulk from millions of ordinary Yahoo users who were not suspected of wrongdoing, and were not intelligence targets. In a single six-month period, the agency siphoned webcam images from more than 1.8m global Yahoo user accounts.

Yahoo is apparently furious. They’ve denied any knowledge of the Optic Nerve programme, accusing the agencies of “a whole new level of violation of our users’ privacy”.

But the surprises are not limited to one side. The collected webcam imagery apparently contained “substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications”. With stupendous naiveté, the GCHQ documents declare:

Unfortunately … it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person... (and) it appears sometimes to be used for broadcasting pornography.

If the spooks are genuinely surprised that webcams are being used in sexual conversations, they clearly are spending too much time at the office spying on people rather than talking to their friends, reading Cosmopolitan, or, well, using a webcam.

As the nature of work, travel and education has globalised, so, too, has the structure of intimate personal relationships. Digital communication technologies have provided a means for adult relationships that are denied the tactility of proximity to establish, at least, audio and visual explicitness in an ongoing intimate dialogue.

This is no marginal activity, either; recent pieces in glossy magazines have featured burlesque artists advising women how to “spice up” their webcam conversations with sexy outfits and strip routines. Sexual contact webcam is an unremarkable assumption of long distance relationships. Amidst online dating and internet hookup cultures, webcam conversations can also play a role in facilitating early courtship or exploring anonymous pleasures with maximum safety.

The intrusion of the state’s prying eyes into this particular arena of human intimacy is yet another reason to express the greatest possible civic outrage against “dataveillance”, its agents and sponsors. The Yahoo spying not only compromises each individual whose “intimate parts of their body” that Snowden’s documents reveal have been examined, assessed and collated by government employees, but compromises that powerful and necessary role that privacy – particularly sexual privacy – plays in personal development and individual agency.

Who we are and how we function as adults within society is intersectional with the identity we develop as the result of our intimate experiences, the sexual boundaries we choose, and the personas with which we experiment. We are as socially confident as citizens as we are sexually integrated as individuals – and this is precisely why every authoritarian society in history has policed sexual behaviour, from the enforced celibacy of the Catholic Church, to the neo-Puritanism of the American right, to female genital mutilation in patriarchal communities, the Third Reich’s attempt at exterminating LGBTQ people, and Mao’s Little Red Book recommendation to lie back and think of the People’s Republic (but only once a fortnight).

Our intimate conversations, too, exist as parallel societies. The great boon of the webcam for heterosexual women, in particular, is that sexual performance can be negotiated beyond the paradigm of physical presence, or pressure, or real or imagined threat; a woman commences a webcam session confident in the knowledge that she can safely conclude her encounter at any time. This sense of personal control is no doubt one of the reasons that a broader sexual culture has sprung up around webcam use: using it, the adult performance of sexuality appears both expressive and safe and becomes a powerful means of self-realisation that we carry out with us into the wider world.

The compromise of this agency by the Five Eyes spies – and the creation of a generation of people who, as Yahoo users, now have the explicit performance of their intimate secrets in government possession – neatly attunes to the tradition of authoritarian sexual oppression.

Five Eyes is, of course, perfectly metaphoric for the Panopticon – a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham on the principle that prisoners aware they were constantly under surveillance would eventually just presume surveillance and therefore automatically police themselves. Philosopher Michel Foucault employed the Panopticon in his bookDiscipline and Punish as an analogy of state power: and as we now must consider the potential oversight of the state as we reach for the webcam button to talk to our overseas boyfriends, Foucault’s explanation of “the function of discipline as an apparatus of power” is something that could and should be on our minds.

Governments have explained the violation of their electorate’s privacy as a necessary abrogation of civic rights in the fight against global terrorism. But with Snowden’s revelations proving the Obama administration’s own January 2014 review findings that not “a single instance” in which electronic eavesdropping “made a concrete difference in the outcome of a terrorism investigation”, it is time to remind ourselves that Americans alone are 4,706 times more likely to drink themselves to death than be killed by terrorists.

As citizens of a sexually violated democracy, far more important than the war against terror is the fight against our own governments to turn off the data taps.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/06/governments-are-spying-on-our-sexual-lives-will-we-tolerate-it