When Neighborhood Watch volunteer George Zimmerman was acquitted for the murder of Trayvon Martin, public discourse was flooded with reflections on what the verdict said about America in the twenty-first century. Millions of Americans traced Martin’s death—and then, Zimmerman’s acquittal—to the nation’s enduring legacy of racist violence. Anthea Butler, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, stirred up controversy by remarking, “When George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that it was God’s will that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, he was diving right into what most good conservative Christians in America think right now. Whatever makes them protected, safe, and secure is worth it at the expense of the black and brown people they fear.”1 For Butler and many other Americans,2 the Trayvon affair was an explosive symptom of structural racism in the United States. From their point of view, Zimmerman’s appeals to self-defense and neighborhood security simply rationalized interracial suspicion and increased the likelihood of further violence against marginalized groups.
Many Americans, however, had a different take on the Trayvon tragedy. For instance, rightwing activist and southern rock icon Ted Nugent praised the verdict, arguing that Zimmerman simply displayed “the fundamental responsibility of a neighbor who cares.”3 According to Nugent, Zimmerman’s brand of neighborhood surveillance and inter-citizen vigilance is as American as apple pie. Offering his own version of the events that led to Trayvon’s death, Nugent placed Zimmerman’s actions within a context of rising local crime and neighborhood anxiety: “So this guy’s neighborhood has been burglarized off and on and the residents are very concerned for their safety and well-being. Neighbors agree to upkick their vigilance and overall level of awareness to watch out for each other and keep an eye out for suspicious individuals and behavior. It could be considered by an official designation such as ‘Neighborhood Watch,’ but officially labeled or not, it is the purest form of Americans watching out for each other and being good neighbors.”4 For Nugent and other champions of Zimmerman’s brand of vigilant citizenship, Trayvon Martin’s death was a simple malfunction of the American dream.
This book is grounded in the assumption that Ted Nugent’s appraisal of America is basically right. When Nugent identifies George Zimmerman’s actions as “the purest form” of American sociality, he hints at a fundamental tension in the myth of the United States.5 While American society has long nurtured an ethos of rugged, liberal individualism, at the same time it has continuously fostered cultures of vigilance, suspicion, meddling, snooping, and snitching. From its early displays in the witch hysterias and Puritan moral panics of colonial New England; to the vigilante posses of the Wild West and the Ku Klux Klan; to its Brown Scares, Green Scares, and Red Scares; and to the U.S.’s recurrent anxieties about immigrants, political dissidents, rebellious youth, criminals, and religious minorities, vigilance toward neighbors has long been aligned with American ideals of patriotic and moral duty. America’s liberal individualism, therefore, has taken a curiously extroverted form, as its citizens have been constantly mobilized against a diverse barrage of enemies within.6 In this environment, civic responsibility has often devolved into expressions of fear and mutual suspicion, with moral entrepreneurs treating their communities as a proving ground on which they should enact their loyalty to the state or to their personal moral codes. So while Ted Nugent might argue that George Zimmerman was simply acting like a “good neighbor” the night he killed Trayvon Martin, it is obvious that Zimmerman’s conception of neighborly conduct was tied up with a volatile mix of suspicion and hostility. Needless to say, this reaction hardly indicates an affirmative sense of community among neighbors. Instead, it points to a potentially explosive sociocultural milieu in which civic duty is affirmed through local rituals of mutual suspicion and surveillance.
Focusing on developments during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this book sifts through the American experience in order to develop a genealogy of Neighborhood Watch and other citizen-surveillance programs. In building this account, the book examines how various public and private institutions have worked together to regulate the conduct of American citizens by activating their capacities for surveillance and communication—that is, by cultivating engaged citizens, like George Zimmerman, who feel it is their civic duty to scour their surroundings in order to see something and say something. I find that we can piece together a provocative portrait of American culture by analyzing how citizen surveillance has been practiced between neighbors; understood by the police, experts, and bureaucrats; promoted by pamphlets, speeches, social media, television, and other cultural programming; facilitated by an evolving participatory media landscape; and rejected or manipulated by everyday citizens, criminal subcultures, and resistance groups. As such, this book will look at how American citizens have been imagined and deployed as crucial—yet unpredictable and potentially dangerous—resources for policing the American experiment.
As the Trayvon Martin affair illustrates quite tragically, violence occasionally threatens to disrupt the liberal dream of peaceful citizen responsibility and self-government. This has been a matter of great concern for institutions like Neighborhood Watch, which takes great care to instruct its volunteers (often unsuccessfully) in the arts of nonviolent citizenship. As a Neighborhood Watch manual distributed by the Bureau of Justice Assistance warns, “Community members only serve as the extra ‘eyes and ears’ of law enforcement. They should report their observations of suspicious activities to law enforcement; however, citizens should never try to take action on those observations. Trained law enforcement should be the only ones ever to take action based on observations of suspicious activities.”7 Undergirding this policy is the belief that seeing (using carefully trained “eyes and ears”) and saying (reporting suspicious activities to law enforcement) provide the practical foundation for citizens to police one another’s conduct while still respecting what Max Weber long ago recognized as the state’s defining privilege: its monopoly over legitimate violence.8
These efforts to cultivate seeing/saying responsibility have had a decisive impact on notions of civic responsibility in the United States. During the Nixon administration, as violent crime levels rose and American cities became increasingly restless, the White House commissioned a report to examine how to best reassert a sense of law and order in urban America. Prepared by politicians, police officials, judges, and prominent clergy, the report declared that one of the best ways to fight crime was to activate the seeing/saying responsibilities of the everyday citizen: according to the report, “the stereotype of the unconcerned, depersonalized Homo urbanis blandly watching the misfortunes of others [has] proved inaccurate. Instead, we find a bystander to an emergency is an anguished individual in genuine doubt, concerned to do the right thing but compelled to make complex decisions under pressure of stress and fear. His reactions are shaped by the actions of others—and all too frequently by their inaction.”9 According to the president’s commission, the apathy and atomization of American citizens had been overestimated: with proper training and guidance, good Americans would happily fight together to reassert law and order in their communities.
The commission’s thesis has proven remarkably accurate: while many Americans still resist the state’s call to see something and say something, the law-and-order style of policing that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s has led to the development of a robust range of programs that cultivate seeing/saying citizenship. To take some examples from this book, we might consider National Neighborhood Watch (1972), the development of a nationwide 911 crime-reporting technology apparatus (1968), and Drug Abuse Resistance Education (or D.A.R.E., 1981). These concerted demands on citizens’ civic responsibility have been part and parcel of the great liberal policing project, and Americans’ cultivated propensity for seeing and saying is at the core of America’s participatory political culture. So despite whatever preconceptions we have about Americans’ inaction and apathy vis-à-vis their neighbors, these programs and their antecedents have played a vital role in the formation of American social and civic responsibility.
In order to tease out the cultural and political significance of these developments, among the questions addressed in this book are: how have the police and their allies attempted to turn citizens into their “eyes and ears”?10 How have police authorities attempted to regulate what these citizens see and say? How have media technologies provided citizens with unique opportunities to use surveillance and communication—in all their diversity—to police the conduct of their peers? Because of these demands to see something and say something, in what ways has our civic responsibility been reduced to a sum of policing protocols? How have citizens resisted these pressures to monitor their peers? And finally, to what political effect have certain citizens turned their own capacities for seeing and saying against state authorities, reporting police abuses and political corruption? Ultimately, I hope these concerns prompt my readers to reconsider popular notions about citizen surveillance, civic empowerment, the relationship between communication and social change, and the promise and pitfalls of social responsibility in the digital era.
This book, therefore, isn’t just about surveillance. It’s a book about seeing and saying, about the political and cultural relationship between surveillance and communication. As an entryway to this problem, I would like to discuss one of the most obvious ways in which today’s Americans are being asked to police the conduct of their peers: the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign, which is an antiterrorism initiative that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched in 2010. Working with sports stadiums, malls, hotels, local transportation departments, airports, and Wal-Mart, the DHS began using telescreens to repeatedly broadcast a sixty-second video of then DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, encouraging citizens to look out for suspicious activity. As shoppers paid for their goods at Wal-Mart’s automated checkout stands, many of them were greeted by Secretary Napolitano urging them to do their part in the fight against terror: “Homeland security begins with hometown security. . . . If you see something suspicious in the parking lot or in the store, say something immediately. Report suspicious activity to your local police or sheriff. If you need help, ask a Wal-Mart manager for assistance. Thank you for doing your part to help keep our hometowns safe.”11 The initiative’s video public service announcement campaign warned Americans to be on the lookout for ostensibly “suspicious” activities, such as someone leaving a backpack unattended at a train station, talking on a cell phone, using cash, or frequently checking a wristwatch.
This nationwide campaign, which was first tested after September 11, 2001, by the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has encountered a few setbacks: although the “see something” part of the campaign is gaining technical and cultural momentum—that is, as surveillance has become an increasingly dominant element of our political landscape—the “say something” part ran into a legal roadblock. Under ordinary circumstances, if your neighbor saw you having an angry cell phone conversation and falsely accused you of terrorism, s/he would be vulnerable to libel action. But in the state of legal and cultural exception that has characterized the United States since the September 11 attacks, the civic duty to “say something” has been recognized as an essential weapon in the War on Terror. Republican congressman Peter King made this clear when he introduced the See Something, Say Something Act of 2011, which aimed to protect citizens from libel action if they falsely accused their peers of terrorism. Responding to the controversy caused by this legislation, one of the bill’s corporate sponsors explained that it would simply encourage a “vigilant mindset” among citizens.12 Since September 11, 2001, the sponsor remarked, “elected leaders have repeatedly called on everyday people to be the eyes and ears looking out for the next potential terrorist act. By this Act, Congress will give weight to that request by providing common-sense protections to citizens who do just that.”13 Indeed, with the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign and its abundant counterparts in the present cultural scene, the Department of Homeland Security and allied authorities are promoting this “vigilant mindset” among citizens, encouraging them to be the “eyes and ears” that surveil their neighbors, family members, and fellow shoppers, travelers, and sports fans.
What is curiously absent from this public discourse, however, is that citizens are not only being asked to use their “eyes and ears,” but to use their mouths, as well. As Richard Ericson and Kevin Haggerty have recognized, we now find ourselves in “a knowledge society in which informing is promoted not only as legitimate but also as an act of good citizenship.”14 To promote informing as an act of good citizenship, the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign—which was revived in the early days of 2015 by Napolitano’s successor, DHS secretary Jeh Johnson15—treats surveillance and communication as two sides of the same coin of responsible citizenship. As Americans are increasingly called on to police themselves and their neighbors, carrying out surveillance is only half the battle. They must also respond to the call of citizenship by dialing the cops, reporting suspicions, filing reports, or resorting to other communicative action in order to prevent or report acts of crime and terrorism.
This oversight in public discourse, in fact, is also present in scholarly discussions of surveillance studies. While academic interest in surveillance is exploding, very little has been said about the political complementarity of communication and surveillance. In 2007, Kelly Gates and Shoshana Magnet introduced a special issue of The Communication Review dealing with the relationship between communication and surveillance. Their introduction, which would later be extended in the pair’s edited volume The New Media of Surveillance,16 argues: “the relationship between surveillance and communication—especially the media of communication—is an established and growing object of interdisciplinary concern.”17 Gates and Magnet go on to propose a number of potential sites of analysis for studying where surveillance and communication research might intersect. Yet with their focus on the relationships between surveillance and technologies of information and communication—e.g., surveillance cameras, computerized data collection, and mediated representations of surveillance—they have (as they admit) only scratched the surface of this relationship. While increasing numbers of media and communication scholars are taking up research in surveillance, this work, too, tends toward discussions of how media technologies play an indispensable role in the evolving surveillance landscape.
Just as important as this focus on media technologies, however, is an analysis of how public and private institutions work together to cultivate human subjects that enact their civic duty by carrying out regulated acts of speaking citizenship. This book, therefore, gives an answer to Ronald Greene’s challenge18 to theorize the conditions that give rise to diverse modalities of the speaking subject. To better understand the cultural production of this subject, Greene has argued that “we should pay closer attention to the emergence of a more concrete rhetorical subject, a subject that speaks and is spoken to, and the different techniques and technologies organized to transform individuals into a communicating subject.”19 Describing this provocative new path for the study of communication, rhetoric, and culture, Greene takes cues from Michel Foucault, arguing: “The first point to emphasize about a Foucaultian approach to subjectification is a shift from the semiotic to the technological dimensions of rhetoric. . . . Thus, rhetoric can move from its ‘typical’ location within the terrain of meaning to appear as a technology of the self, using communication and other techniques, to help individuals develop relationships with themselves, as rhetorical subjects.”20 As this book is concerned, Greene’s shift from semiotic analysis to subjectification allows us to analyze the cultural processes by which citizenship captures communication power and puts it to work for the state.21 By learning to carry out regulated acts of communication—that is, by speaking to the right authorities, and by making the right kinds of statements at the appropriate times—subjects can embody ideals of conduct that are associated with moral responsibility and good citizenship. As Greene has argued with his colleague Daryl Hicks, this approach “reveals how power works productively by augmenting the human capacity for speech/communication. . . . [An] under-appreciated aspect of the productive power of cultural governance resides in the generation of subjects who come to understand themselves as speaking subjects willing to regulate and transform their communicative behaviors for the purpose of improving their political, economic, cultural, and affective relationships.”22 While Greene confines his analysis to traditional speaking subjects like orators and debaters, the present book argues that we should broaden our attention to include the processes by which subjects are coaxed into performing more mundane expressions of speaking citizenship—for example, how Americans are convinced to fulfill their civic duty by snitching, witnessing, calling the cops, and carrying out other regulated forms of communicative action that aid in policing their peers. By expanding the focus of critical communication and rhetorical studies to include these mundane, microphysical acts of communication, we can better observe how diverse forms of speaking citizenship are crucial to the ethical self-production of liberal citizens.
“If you see something, say something,” therefore, will serve as this book’s key thematic and conceptual backbone. Through five case studies, the book illustrates a number of different ways in which seeing and saying have functioned as essential and inextricable tools in the self-regulation of the American people, particularly during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Following this line of argument, I suggest that while most surveillance scholars are turning their attention to the surveillance potential of various sensors, cameras, and related technologies, the surveilling human subject serves as a crucial yet overlooked cultural phenomenon. In fact, one of the most compelling and provocative claims of recent surveillance research is that, because of the advent of digital technologies, the human subject is being gradually removed from the labor of surveillance.23 To take a few basic examples, consider that video cameras on street corners and in private buildings capture vast amounts of data—far more than mere humans could store, process, and retrieve. Likewise, web merchants and search engines do not employ swaths of humans to monitor users’ web browsing habits or shopping bills in order to customize their advertisements and coupons: these data, on the contrary, are being processed by increasingly complex and autonomous computing systems. Computers, functioning on algorithmic intelligence, sift instantly through that data while they analyze and classify individual and aggregate consumer tendencies.
It is undeniable that in many cases digital surveillance technologies are rendering the observing human subject all but superfluous. Yet there are also good reasons to focus on the human as a subject of surveillance—the most important of which, perhaps, is that we should keep within our analytical purview the full assortment of practices that characterize our current “surveillance society.”24 Ultimately, a purely technical view of surveillance limits what constitutes surveillance as an object of political critique and thus restricts what we as citizens can evaluate, expose, and attempt to resist and change. After all, in our everyday lives we are increasingly called on to carry out surveillance on our peers. While digital technologies might dominate the surveillance landscape, the continuous development of these human-based programs brings up important questions about the current and future state of American culture. Those works that have focused on the surveilling human subject—such as Alexandra Natapoff’s Snitching: Criminal Informants and the Erosion of American Justice, Jim Redden’s Snitch Culture: How Citizens Are Turned into the Eyes and Ears of the State, and Steve Hewitt’s Snitch: A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer—tend to analyze how citizens are coerced or paid to snitch on their fellow citizens. By contrast, this book focuses on how citizen surveillance has been promoted as a civic duty, as well as how that civic duty has been regulated through discourses, technologies, and laws that promote appropriate forms of seeing/saying citizenship.
This turn to the human leads us back to our question: if computers make far better surveillance machines than humans, why are we witnessing a rise in the popularity of citizen-surveillance campaigns such as the “If You See Something, Say Something” program? In the following pages, I would like to focus on the two answers that I think are most important. First, the seeing/saying human subject is endowed with unique intelligence-gathering potential that allows it to complement and enrich purely technical forms of data collection and analysis. And second, empowering citizens to police their own geographic, professional, political, and moral communities serves an essential political demand of late liberal government. As to the first point, citizens can serve as mobile, versatile surveillance “technologies” because of their capacities to see something and say something—that is, because of their ability to gather, process, and transmit intelligence, much of which cannot be adequately gathered or interpreted by computers and other media technologies.25 For example, we might consider that expensive, cutting-edge, and intrusive federal programs like Total Information Awareness and sophisticated technology hubs like the Echelon data-processing center failed to prevent the September 11 attacks. As Armand Mattelart has recognized, such a spectacular failure points out that “the exclusively technological approach to intelligence, at the expense of human intelligence, thus revealed its limitations.”26 Even Michael Hayden, former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, emphasizes that human-gathered intelligence still outweighs the value of technical surveillance in the international arena. According to Hayden, “the top twenty percent of American intelligence—that exquisite insight into an enemy’s intentions—is generally provided by human sources.”27 So while in many ways we have seen a shift toward technical surveillance in the homeland security and commercial sectors, the limitations of these methods are readily acknowledged by important figures in our political class. Thus as the continued relevance of human-based programs like “If You See Something, Say Something” attests, citizens are still highly valued for their abilities to gather and transmit intelligence.
Due to the citizen’s raw epistemological utility, in fact, we are witnessing more comprehensive moves to deploy the seeing/saying human body in the domestic sphere. To the extent that seeing and speaking serve as basic data-processing competencies, they provide an important common ground for the activation of citizen responsibility. While it is readily acknowledged among scholars28 that “the population” became an object of “biopolitical” knowledge and intervention during the nineteenth century—a process that allowed authorities to treat the entire citizenry as a whole biological specimen with collective disease rates, birth and death rates, etc.—the individual human body has likewise become an important subject and tool of governmental intervention. We should keep in mind, then, that these human biological capacities serve in many instances as both the target and the technology of government. In the words of Barbara Cruikshank, “Democratic citizens . . . are both the effects and the instruments of liberal governance.”29 As I illustrate throughout the book, government is carried out not just on the body of individual citizens—for example, via various programs meant to promote general health and welfare, such as vaccination campaigns and food provisions for the poor—government is also carried out through these citizens’ bodies, particularly through their capacities for surveillance and communication. When the DHS or local authorities ask us to function as the “eyes and ears” of the security apparatus, we are reminded that not only are we the objects of the state’s protection, our seeing/saying bodies are also among the essential tools that provide for that protection. Citizens’ sight and speech are thus given a technological character, in that they are transformed from basic organic faculties into the technical means for scrutinizing and policing the conduct of other citizens. Under various forms of cultural pedagogy—from “If You See Something, Say Something” video promos to Neighborhood Watch training seminars, and from children’s D.A.R.E. coloring books to episodes of America’s Most Wanted—our sight is trained to become surveillance, and our communication is trained to become snitching, witnessing, and reporting.
In addition to this cooptation of citizens’ sight and speech, citizen-surveillance programs provide for a central function of liberal government: they actively mobilize citizens within their communities, empowering them to provide for crucial aspects of government that the state cannot or will not provide. Following in the footsteps of Michel Foucault,30 Toby Miller has characterized this form of liberal “governmentality” as the “means of managing the public by having it manage itself.”31 Born from a rejection of raw, coercive state power, liberal governmentality can be characterized by two primary principles: first, a critique of state intervention into the social and economic spheres, and hence an emphasis on citizens’ individual freedom and personal responsibility; and second, an investment in active, entrepreneurial models of citizen engagement. These complementary principles help establish the population as a more or less immanent domain of government, so that citizens not only govern their own behavior but also that of their peers. To get to the bottom of liberal power, then, we cannot think of it in merely negative terms (as simply civic freedom and the lack of state intervention); instead, we must consider the ways in which diverse authorities—both public and private, often acting in concert—govern citizens in such a way that they are led to carry out their “freedoms” in very specific ways.
Cultural theorist Tony Bennett has provided an influential expansion on this theme, arguing that liberal governmentality has “aimed to inveigle the general populace into complicity with power by placing them on this side of a power which it represented to it as its own.”32 An essential element of this productive style of social regulation is the promotion of voluntary forms of personal and mutual responsibility, so that citizens will choose to improve and protect themselves—and, by extension, often their communities—in the name of security, safety, morality, health, or the common good. This process of “responsibilization,”33 as Foucault called it, is characterized by two primary types of responsibility: an individualistic self-reliance, and a morally driven (and often moralistic) community engagement. On the one hand, various public and private authorities encourage citizens to make an active effort to improve their hygiene, physical and mental health, and overall productivity. For example, citizens might be provided with moral encouragement and various financial incentives to make basic improvements to their physical well-being: employers might offer to pay for their employees’ health club membership fees, and local governments might develop outreach programs that encourage citizens to exercise and to adopt more balanced diets. These programs function by striving to make citizens an object of consistent self-scrutiny and self-improvement, so that they will more or less voluntarily adopt lifestyles that allow them to be more productive members of society without the coercive threat of state punishment. Yet on the other hand, this responsibilization has a centrifugal valence—these citizens learn to care for themselves by caring for a limited set of others to whom they are connected: e.g., their families, their neighborhood blocks, their churches, their political comrades, and so forth. In the words of Nikolas Rose, civic responsibilization entails “the obligation to continuously and repeatedly evidence one’s citizenship credentials as one recurrently links oneself into the circuits of civility.”34 As seeing and saying have formed a cornerstone of our civic obligations, active, responsibilized citizens assert their civic value by policing the lives of others in order to promote certain ideals of security, safety, health, cleanliness, and morality.35 To take some of the examples from this book, these civic entrepreneurs join Neighborhood Watch programs, call the police to report suspicious activities, and otherwise take care to say something when they see something. In doing so, these citizens identify with the rationalities and conduct of the police, forming pockets of inter-citizen vigilance within their geographical, professional, and moral communities.
A crucial element of liberal government, then, is the production of a structured civic environment in which citizens choose to exercise their freedoms in appropriate ways. This is accomplished, in part, by the development of discourses, technologies, and institutions that mediate the ways in which citizens interact with the world around them. To cop the vocabulary of criminologist Les Johnston, this mediating process channels citizens’ conduct toward practices of “responsible citizenship” while discouraging them from indulging in acts of unregulated, unapproved, “autonomous citizenship.”36 For Johnston, responsible citizenship is “a form of citizenship that is both sanctioned and sponsored by the state.”37 Today’s official Neighborhood Watch, for example, functions as a mediating institution that attempts to channel its volunteers’ behavior toward norms of “responsible,” legally sanctioned behavior. Through seminars, rules, regulations, slogans, and a hierarchical supervisory structure, Neighborhood Watch trains its citizens in responsible forms of seeing/saying conduct while condemning violent action, concealed weaponry, and other things that threaten the state’s monopoly over violence. Seeing and saying are thus promoted as the height of responsible citizenship, while violence and physical engagement are condemned as dangerous forms of “autonomous citizenship.” Although autonomous citizens like George Zimmerman will occasionally (and inevitably) break these rules of responsible citizenship, that is simply an accidental hiccup in liberalism’s machinery of regulated freedom. To minimize these hiccups, authorities invest considerable resources in diverse forms of institutional, technological, and cultural mediation that promote responsible citizenship while discouraging its autonomous counterparts.
By emphasizing the importance of mediation to this process, therefore, I am emphasizing that citizens are not just asked to see anything and say anything—rather, they are urged to see the right things and say the right things. An important part of this book, therefore, will center on how this mediation between responsible and autonomous citizenship is carried out, as well as how resistance groups and lawbreakers sidestep these attempts to regulate their conduct by seeing and saying things that they shouldn’t (or, in some cases, by rejecting seeing/saying dogma altogether). It is thus important to recognize that these attempts to promote seeing/saying citizenship are at different times ignored and even manipulated by members of the public. Surveillance and communication serve as contested sites for citizen engagement, and this book provides a historical look at how programs promoting seeing/saying citizenship have been regulated, rationalized, and oftentimes rejected.
Ultimately, by focusing on how citizens serve as intelligence resources for various authorities, how they play an indispensable role in liberal government by policing the conduct of their peers, and how some of them turn this surveillance power back against authorities, this book re-centers attention upon human subjects as agents of surveillance. As the work of Mark Andrejevic38 has most clearly demonstrated, these forms of “lateral surveillance,” which signals the ways in which citizens carry out surveillance on one another, have become defining social practices in the digital era. However, while Andrejevic acknowledges that lateral surveillance is not a new phenomenon,39 he largely confines his analysis of lateral surveillance to developments of the past two decades. The historical diversity of American lateral surveillance initiatives, therefore, is a story that still needs to be told. By providing a number of case studies of lateral surveillance I hope not only to fill this gap in the historical record, but also to illustrate the importance of contextualizing surveillance alongside its predominant co-conspirator, communication. Through an analysis of how surveillance and communication have been articulated together in various historical moments of governmental reason and practice, this book reveals new possibilities for rethinking the past, present, and future of liberal government. I present “See Something, Say Something,” therefore, as more than simply a catchy slogan for a domestic security campaign. While of course it serves as a trope for American citizens’ overactive insecurities about criminality and terrorism, “See Something, Say Something” is, just as much, a clear assertion of how two basic biosocial competencies have provided essential resources for the self-regulation of the American public.
This book’s chapters each offer a different illustration of how surveillance and communication have been central to citizen-policing projects. While many other important developments in lateral surveillance could be described here—to take just a few examples, American citizens’ long history of immigrant surveillance,40 anticommunist suspicion campaigns during the Cold War,41 and lateral surveillance initiatives aimed at African Americans,42 gays and lesbians,43 the sick and contagious,44 and other targeted groups throughout the twentieth century—these crucial developments have been described elsewhere in great detail. The case studies in this book, therefore, focus on less-examined lateral surveillance practices that grant unique insight into the rise of what Jack Bratich calls our “democratized spy and snitch culture.”45 While this book does not claim to provide a comprehensive history of American lateral surveillance campaigns, it does aim to illustrate the political versatility of lateral surveillance and communication as they have been practiced together in recent U.S. history.
Chapter One describes how police authorities have used crowdsourcing technologies to distribute seeing/saying responsibilities to the public. From the days of the trumpet in the Middle Ages to the rise of police-affiliated social media accounts, widely scattered police authorities have attempted to extend their surveillance power by using media technologies to tap into the sensory resources of the population. This chapter illustrates how communities are not only the targets of governmental interventions, they are also a means of governing citizens’ conduct.46 From this point of view, “community” is a network of interpersonal relationships that can be nurtured and cultivated in the service of the police apparatus. As surveillance theorist David Lyon has pointed out, “there is evidence that small-scale communities know fairly intimately about each other’s lives and that such knowledge may be turned to regulatory purpose.”47 By crowdsourcing community responsibility in this way, police authorities capitalize on civilians’ surveillance power by encouraging citizens to be on the lookout for suspects and potential criminality during their everyday lives. Popular shows like America’s Most Wanted translated these efforts from print and radio to television, and social media like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter are rapidly becoming the new frontiers of police crowdsourcing campaigns. Through a historical analysis of these technologies and the rationalities that guide their use—and with close attention to how citizens have used these technologies to crowdsource outrage at police brutality—I describe how crowdsourcing has become an important site of struggle for those wishing to guide others’ civic responsibility.
Chapter Two focuses on a different level of responsibilization, describing how 911 technologies have mediated citizens’ interactions with the police. Ultimately, this chapter examines how 911 Emergency has helped transform our social responsibility into civic responsibility: by encouraging citizens to call 911 rather than take direct local action, 911 Emergency has rechanneled a number of basic social functions through the police station. Analyzing the different media infrastructures that have empowered citizens to contact the police—from the earliest telegraphic “private boxes” of the 1870s, to the development of 911 Emergency, and to the smartphone crime-reporting apps of today—I show how authorities have used technical and communicative protocols to govern what citizens see and say. In this regard, little has changed since the nineteenth century, when a brute standardization of citizen-police telecommunications became standard operating procedure in jurisdictions across the United States. Following this history through to the present day, I analyze the controversial new “See-Hear-Report” program that encourages students at a rural Kentucky high school to use anonymous text messages to report their peers’ petty infractions to school and police authorities. Asked to function as anonymized data collection devices for the police apparatus, many citizens prove eager to turn against their peers for the promise of cheap rewards and civic gratification. Yet pranksters have used these anonymizing technologies to their advantage, as “Swatting” and other illegal crime reporting practices have become more prominent in the last decade. While this has given rise to increased police surveillance over 911 and allied crime-reporting technologies, it has also fostered an interesting mix of pranks and other acts of resistance.
This story dovetails with a problem that I describe in further detail in Chapter Three. Although American Neighborhood Watch programs have their roots in the colonial town watch system, I suggest that the crucial developmental moment in community watch history was the taming of vigilante, “autonomous” citizen-policing movements into groups that practiced responsible citizenship. As the U.S. federal government strove to impose centralized sovereign control over its vast territory, it enforced its monopoly on violence by cracking down on autonomous, “Wild West” justice and vigilante movements (particularly in the South and on the western frontier). Local police departments, however, still relied heavily on citizens to provide intelligence and carry out coordinated lateral surveillance. In order to cultivate these civic responsibilities while nevertheless maintaining the state’s monopoly on violence, Neighborhood Watch and similar programs emphasized their volunteers’ role as the “eyes and ears” of the police force. We might consider this as the gradual and uneven process by which “Wanted Dead or Alive” was transformed into “Dangerous: Do Not Approach—Contact Authorities Immediately.” Through this lens, I analyze a wide range of rituals and texts that police departments and allied cultural authorities use to cultivate practices of responsible citizenship among Watch volunteers, including seminars, television commentaries, newspaper editorials, and Neighborhood Watch training materials. While these texts help mediate citizens’ social engagement by channeling their conduct toward approved forms of responsible citizenship, I also discuss how laws and police interventions regulate the conduct of citizens’ patrols like Cop Block, Copwatch, and the Huey P. Newton Gun Club. These groups, which monitor for police brutality, encounter different challenges than the bourgeois, state-approved groups that watch for the crimes of their fellow citizens.
While previous chapters focus on the adult neoliberal subject, Chapter Four turns its attention to the seeing/saying youth in American history. From the Boy Police and Junior Coppettes in the early years of the twentieth century to Officer Oliver Cowan’s Junior Police Corps in the 1940s, American kids have long been trained to exercise their citizenship through responsible practices of seeing and saying. While this tradition has many contemporary counterparts, perhaps its most important legacy lies in D.A.R.E. America (originally Drug Abuse Resistance Education, or simply D.A.R.E.). Emerging in the early years of America’s War on Drugs, D.A.R.E. America has used diverse forms of outreach—including seminars, coloring books, school programs, television shows, books, and social media—to train students to police the conduct of their peers and parents. This element of D.A.R.E.’s program—that it encourages kids to spy on their parents—has made it an especially controversial element of the American cultural landscape. Many young D.A.R.E. Kids have told trusted program officers about their parents’ casual drug use, only to have their families destroyed and their lives turned upside down when local cops use that information to raid their homes and arrest their parents. Countering this trend in seeing/saying youth culture, however, is a “Stop Snitching” ethos prominent in many urban communities. While the police urge kids and teens to see something and say something, some of their peers remind them that “snitches get stitches.” A fight over the speaking subjectivity of these youths is thus waged, as cops launch “Keep Talking” campaigns to counter the rising influence of trends in Stop Snitching youth culture. In this chapter, therefore, “D.A.R.E. America” is analyzed not strictly as a state-sponsored institution, but as an analogy for this social milieu in which youth are beset by these competing claims on their seeing/speaking subjectivities.
Finally, Chapter Five reflects on the lessons of the previous chapters in order to evaluate the controversial lateral surveillance programs that have arisen in the domestic War on Terror. Similar developments, I argue, have repeatedly appeared during times of war. While a number of observers have emphasized the uniqueness of the Department of Homeland Security’s domestic programs, this chapter illustrates the genealogical continuity between these initiatives and earlier domestic counterespionage efforts that emphasized citizens’ duties to see something and say something. An important element of this continuity is the mobilization of citizens against shadowy, unidentifiable enemies that are potentially lurking around every corner. In fact, the DHS assures us that anyone could be a terrorist, that terrorist attacks could occur anywhere and at anytime, and that the best defense against terrorism is a generalized vigilance in which citizens remain constantly watchful of their neighbors, coworkers, and any other potential homegrown militants. After reviewing precedents during World War One, World War Two, and the Cold War, this chapter analyzes the rise and fall of numerous antiterrorist lateral surveillance initiatives that emerged after September 11, 2001. While the George W. Bush administration never quite developed an energetic, nationwide lateral surveillance initiative, the Obama administration has placed considerable emphasis on seeing, saying, and civic responsibility. While numerous observers have pointed out that this citizen intelligence is of dubious utility in the War on Terror, it is perhaps just as important that the sheer mobilization of citizens within policing roles aids in their identification with the state and its domestic security objectives.
Based upon these observations, in the Conclusion I reflect on the political potential of lateral surveillance in the United States. As with most programs of the liberal present, we could point to a number of more or less positive attributes of current lateral surveillance initiatives. We can be grateful, of course, that some methods of police crowdsourcing have brought violent criminals to justice, and that 911 Emergency allows people to summon help when they are under the threat of attack. Yet as it becomes abundantly clear by my discussion of Neighborhood Watch (Chapter Three), these trends in lateral surveillance have political implications that reverberate far beyond their immediate crime-fighting utility. While it is easy to be critical of the DHS’s obtrusive and even “Orwellian” security apparatus48 (Chapter Five), these diverse efforts simply seem to be individual symptoms of an ongoing tendency to establish civic responsibility as a set of policing procedures. It is unfortunate that, while we could use our eyes and mouths to build solidarity—or even to bring accountability to capital, the police, and a corrupt ruling class—we far too often direct that scrutiny against our friends, families, and neighbors for apparently failing to live up to ideal standards of moral or legal conduct. So while assorted figures from the left and right call on us to discover and police difference among our peers, I urge my readers to recapture their eyes, ears, and mouths from this growing citizen-police apparatus. By learning to see, hear, and speak to one another in new ways, perhaps we can discover creative forms of security that are framed on solidarity, not vigilance, suspicion, and terror.