Sunday, July 28, 2013

Surveillance: Why There is No Escape from Particularized Suspicion

From the very start, George Orwell's Thought Police seemed far-fetched to me.  The obvious question is, just how large is the organization?  How can there possibly be an organization large enough to monitor the entire population at all times, to detect what they are doing even when off-screen, and even to study them in detail, like a specimen under a microscope.  Such a level of scrutiny, to say nothing of apparent infallibility, is an extremely labor-intense undertaking.  Just how many people would it take?

Orwell starts off by limiting it somewhat. Such intensive surveillance is practiced on only Party members, making up about 15% of the population.  The common people (Proles) are much more loosely controlled. Informants circulate among them, rooting out obvious trouble makes, but otherwise they are allowed to live as they wish.  Even Party members can hope to escape the scrutiny of the Thought Police by wandering into Prole parts of town.  Still, just how many people would it take to semi-continuously monitor 15% of the population? Well, we can start with some basics.  Although Winston Smith, the protagonist, lives alone, most people live in families.  Let us assume your typical household have to have four members.  Assuming one agent monitoring each family (we will assume that each family either lives in a one-room apartment or that the agent is looking at all their telescreens at the same time), that would require one-fourth of 15% of the population to do the monitoring, or about 3.75% of the population, or about one person out of 27.  Since the parents are at work and the children in school much of the time (we will assume no stay-at-home housewives), we can assume only one shift is needed to monitor families at home.  On the other hand, someone will have to monitor people at work and school.  Granted, much of this will be time spent in common areas, where only one monitor may be needed for a large group of people.  Still, Winston seems to be alone in his cubicle much of his time at work.  Granted, one spy might watch more than one cubicle at a time.  One spy might even watch more than one apartment at a time.  But there will be a loss of efficiency.  And presumably there is a hierarchy in the Thought Police, with higher-ups deciding what to do with any bad reports coming in from the telescreens.  And presumably the grunts watching the screens are not the same as the agents who sneak into Winston's apartment when he is not there, read his diary, and put the speck back on his page so he will not be aware of it.

On the other hand, maybe the Thought Police don't watch everyone.  It is made clear that children are taught to inform against their parents.  Winston's ex-wife would not hesitate to inform against her husband.  So maybe they only monitor people if they do not have an informant in the household (or, of course, if the informant sees something suspicious).  Still, someone will have to process all the reports coming in from all those informants, and once the Thought Police see something suspicious, it will take a team of at least several members to monitor the suspected dissident in the sort of detail that Orwell describes.

But all of this simply goes to an important point.  Even in a society as totalitarian as 1984, there will have to be some level of particularized suspicion to trigger the level of surveillance Orwell describes.  This is simply inevitable given manpower limitations.  It is my calculation that in order to maintain the level of surveillance Orwell describes, it would be necessary to have at least one member of the Thought Police for ever 27 citizens.  This is a completely unrealistic ratio.  In the free and democratic U.S., cities over 250,000 population average 2.5 police per 1,000 population, or one for every 400 people.  Smaller communities typically have fewer. World ratios are here, ranging from Brunei, with 1,076 police per 100,000 people (or one per 92 people) to Mali with 48 police per 100,000 population, or less than one for every 2000 people.*  Secret police are normally an elite unit, smaller than the regular police.  Thus the KGB had one agent per 5,830 people and the Gestapo had one agent per 2,000 people.  The East German Stasi, the finest-toothed secret police of all, had one agent per 166 people.  In short, the police-population ratio needed to carry off Orwell's level of scrutiny simply is not achievable.

Three possible objections present themselves.  First, one might say, why does it have to be so labor intensive?  Why not have computers do the screening?  Certainly, I have little doubt that computers have now or will have soon, capacity to record every phone call, e-mail, and so forth.  Doubtless the time will soon come if it has not already when it will be technically possible to bug every person's home and record every conversation taking place.   But how does one process such an enormous mass of data?  The NSA has apparently looked for patterns in the meta-data or for suspicious words in international phone calls.  Maybe in 1984, computers could screen images for suspicious words or body language and alert human agents if they saw anything.  Indeed, maybe some day computers will get so good at such things that in-depth surveillance will no longer be labor intensive.  But we are nowhere near that point yet and neither (so far as we can tell) was 1984.  As of today, computers have proven very poor at detecting grounds for particularized suspicion and have produced mostly false alarms and subjected innocent people to senseless scrutiny.  Granted, in a totalitarian country this may be a feature not a bug.  Random harassment of the innocent based on groundless suspicion should, after all, be quite effective in quelling dissent.  But having a lot of investigations of false leads also wastes time and manpower, which are limited resources, and raises the risk of missing the real dissidents.

This, in turn, raises the second point.  Why bother with thorough surveillance and particularized suspicion at all?  Why not just seize anyone who seems even remotely suspicious and skip the time-consuming and labor-intensive process of investigating whether the suspicions had any sort of validity.  A sufficiently widespread random terror should be quite enough to frighten any potential dissenters into passivity.  This is essentially what Stalin did during the Great Purges.  Mere rumor or a tip for a personal rival were enough to have anyone carted off to Siberia and never seen again.  The answer, I suppose, is that the Stalins of the world are fortunately not very common.  Furthermore, the Great Purges proved to be unsustainable. The system was threatening to break down under the sheer scale of the arrests.  Even basically random arrests proved to be more labor intensive than the secret police had the resources for.  In short, episodes like the Great Purges are best seen as an aberration.  Most dictatorships ultimately want to get their real opponents and, although they may tolerate or even welcome a certain amount of collateral damage, but complete randomness is going too far.

Finally, the source of most arrests during the great purges -- a denunciation -- raises the final and most important objection.  What about the use of informants?  The statistics are fascinating.  Stasi had one agent per 166 citizens.  Including their regular informants, however, the ratio was closer to one out of 66 citizens.  And county occasional informants, the ratio was closer to one out of every six to seven citizens.  In other words, at any dinner party of 10 to 12 people, it was reasonable to assume that one or two might inform the police if anyone made a subversive remark.  One can well imagine the effect this would have in stifling free speech.  Yet going by informants, East Germany was not the finest-tuned surveillance system.  In Cuba under the Castros, fully 8.4 million people out of a population of 11.2 million are members of the Committees in Defense of the Revolution.  There is a committee on each block, which keeps files on each person on the block.  In other words, approximately 80% of the population are informants of some kind!  It should also be noted that the use of informants, besides being low-tech, is also very old, being mentioned even in ancient times.  It can be immensely intrusive.  In 17th Century Spain, the woman who cooked with olive oil might be denounced to the Inquisition as a possible secret Jew or Muslim for not using lard.

In short, there is no doubt that modern techniques make more intensive surveillance possible than ever before.  But intensive surveillance is so labor intensive that the number of people who can be subjected to it is necessarily limited.  The most effective form of extensive surveillance (i.e., surveillance on a large number of people) is the old-fashioned one, surveillance from the bottom up through the use of informants.

There is a fascinating contrast between Orwell's version of surveillance and Tolkien's.  Tolkien's account of surveillance is extremely vague as to Sauron's capacity for surveillance, much less  how it was done.  Orwell, by contrast, describes the Thought Police' techniques in detail.  On the other hand, Sauron's agents (the orcs) are well characterized and act like one might well imagine real secret police might act.  The Thought Police, on the other hand, never have any characterization at all.  They have no human weaknesses of fallibility.  They are simply assumed to be omniscient, and that is all.  I have long yearned to read a version of 1984 written from the perspective of the Thought Police letting us see now they maintain such levels of surveillance -- and how, as is inevitably the case -- they make mistakes.

In my next post, I will get to The Lives of Others and the rule of law.

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*The Vatican is an extreme outlier, with 15,000 police per 100,000 people, or one for every 6 2/3 person.  But the Vatican is not by any measure a normal country.

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