The Business of Insecurity
On a cold November morning in midtown Manhattan, after passing through a surreal street lined with horse-drawn carriages and stables reeking of manure, I dart across 11th Avenue to the entrance of the ultramodern Javits Center. Gripping my coat shut, I pass under a massive billboard for a strip club that juts from the roof of the convention center, such that naked flesh consumes much of the horizon. Apparently the old stereotype about sex-crazed male conventioneers is alive and well, at least among the people who license the outdoor advertising around here.
Inside the convention center the atmosphere is a little more sober. In the unsexy confines of a vast new structure that looks like a futuristic airplane hanger is the 2013 International Security Conference (ISC), a huge trade show that features the latest breakthroughs in CCTV cameras, burglar alarms, fingerprint and facial recognition, and many other products and services.1 Stepping into Javits on this particular weekend, I’m at ground zero of the new surveillance marketplace in more ways than one. It’s a place that offers an inside glimpse at the booming business of surveillance in which smiling sales teams, slick brochures, expert testimony, and technological imperatives converge on customers hoping to safeguard homes, workplaces, and communities. No, PRUDENCE ÜBER ALLES isn’t carved above the entrance to the convention center this weekend, but it might as well be. Grey, plastic, and eminently corporate in feel, the building is a monument to well-designed impersonality, which is well suited to the chilly abstractions of the new surveillance marketplace that has drawn multinational corporate vendors, smaller companies showing their wares, and thousands of potential customers and curious attendees here today.
Hundreds of middle-aged men in suits and a smattering of women are noshing on bagels in anticipation of the main event: a chance to explore Javits North and the latest in surveillance and security equipment. But for now, in the minutes before the grand opening, we huddle behind a velvet rope like anxious shoppers on Black Friday, making awkward small talk and taking in the enormity of the room where the two-day trade show will be held. Somehow there are enough vendors to fill the cavernous building to its rafters (literally, if one counts the enormous banners representing the big security companies in attendance). I really can’t see to the other end of the hall, at least not without one of the ultra-high-resolution CCTV cameras that is being set up on the other side of the rope.
Clearly, the surveillance industry is in a bull market. As part of its surprisingly in-depth coverage of the surveillance economy, the Wall Street Journal has reported that the “new global market for the off-the-shelf surveillance technology” has exploded since 9/11, with the retail market for surveillance tools increasing from “nearly zero” in 2001 to $5 billion a year by 2011.2 By the end of 2014, the global market for CCTV equipment and support exceeded $20 billion, while in the United States alone, video surveillance is projected to reach $15 billion in sales by 2020.3 Reliable financial details are often elusive, with a single report costing $5,000 a pop and self-interested exaggeration always a risk, but surveillance is undoubtedly at the heart of a multibillion-dollar industry that is feeling quite good about its prospects.4
Looking around the teeming 100,000-square-foot convention hall confirms the massive scale of the business, yet I have to remind myself that this event is only the little brother of the bigger show out west. Even with 200 exhibitors and 8,000 attendees descending on the Javits Center, ISC East is dwarfed by the annual ISC West in Las Vegas. These two events are fundamental to the work of the Security Industry Association (SIA). Founded in 1969 to promote the design, manufacturing, and installation of security systems, SIA describes itself as the “leading trade group for businesses in the field of electronic physical security.” The Washington, D.C.–based organization represents what it now calls a “$186 billion global industry,” for which it hosts major trade shows in New York City, Las Vegas, Mexico City, Mumbai, Paris, London, Sao Paulo, and Abu Dhabi.5 Flipping through one of their many well-designed brochures, I come across their bold slogan: “Keeping Society Safe.” I look across the long expanse of the room and think: if we are at war with insecurity, this is the arsenal.
But something interrupts my reverie. From somewhere behind me, an improbable parade has started—the most sullen teenage marching band in the history of musical pageantry is trudging past the coffee and bagels. If their patriotic anthem connotes “victory,” their tone suggests something darker and more exhausted in spirit, something that feels coerced and vaguely hung over. When the band finishes its ragged anthem to scattered applause, a middle-aged man who is a little too excited jumps on a makeshift stage, grabs a microphone, and welcomes us to the official opening of the show, which he promises will be the best ever. In a crazily upbeat voice that I never hear in faculty meetings, he speaks on behalf of his employer, the Security Industry Association, host of “the world’s largest security trade shows and conferences.”6 After some cheerful razzmatazz about the many wonders of the security industry, he passes the microphone to some other white men in expensive suits who seem much less accustomed to public speaking. Less charismatic but equally reverential about the SIA’s stated mission to serve as “a catalyst for growth within the global security industry through information, insight and influence,” these men talk in a manner that would make an English professor depressed: motivational poster clichés and corporate buzzwords are uttered in the weary tone of someone who’s been calling bingo for too long at a senior center.7 But who needs charisma when you have real power? Based at Microsoft, Samsung, Bosch, Sony, and other major corporations, these SIA board members are described as “industry professionals who represent a broad spectrum of electronic security interests.”8 These are elite executives at the pinnacle of their industry, even if some of the biggest companies are not present this weekend at the ISC. GE, Honeywell, and IBM are marketing “sense making software” for “data-driven city management”—basically, the tools to create an urban command center linked to thousands of CCTV cameras—but I don’t see them on the sales floor. Rather than buying for entire cities, the men and women at the conference are mostly shopping for universities, school districts, hospitals, apartment buildings, hotels, factories, and midsize businesses with expensive security needs. ISC provides one-stop shopping for all sorts of security professionals. Offering “direct access to technical reps from 200+ brands,” the show floor is lined with hundreds of booths for companies from across the United States as well as some international players, each of which has a small store’s worth of inventory on display.9
Some privacy activists in the United Kingdom have cut their hair short, put on pinstriped suits, and created fake business cards for imaginary companies in order to bluff their way into surveillance trade shows like this one, which sometimes are closed to scholars, journalists, and activists who might make a fuss. In a fascinating article headlined “MEET THE PRIVACY ACTIVISTS WHO SPY ON THE SURVEILLANCE INDUSTRY,” I read about a representative of the London-based organization Privacy International: “Once he’s infiltrated the trade show, he’ll pose as an industry insider, chatting up company representatives, swapping business cards, and picking up shiny brochures that advertise the invasive capabilities of bleeding-edge surveillance technology” whose contents are rarely “ever marketed or revealed openly to the general public.”10 As for me, I simply registered and walked in the front door with notebook in hand. They even gave me a small bag of swag.
The proceedings are not unpleasant, as I discover once the SIA board members have stopped talking and opened the gates to the sales floor. Like most sales conventions with endless products vying for customers’ attention, the show strains for liveliness and even a hint of the carnival in some places. Temporary putting greens made of AstroTurf and fully functional basketball hoops compete with dry presentations about high-resolution video monitors. Attendees might be worried about threat detection in their workplaces, but Elton John is blaring happily from the PA system, a reminder that two lucky attendees are going to win tickets to a concert at Madison Square Garden.
As I make my way through this grand bazaar of insecurity, I find myself in the middle of one long sales pitch. Everyone is handing out brochures, gimme caps, key chains, or candy to encourage customers to linger over their wares. Everyone is smiling at me and making that weird sort of eye contact that says I have something to sell. Everyone wants my contact information for a mailing list that promises special offers and incredible discounts, at least until they find out that I’m an academic with no purchasing authority for anything more pricey than a box of pencils, at which point I receive a glazed-over expression in which boredom, exhaustion, and disgust seem to comingle in equal measure, even in the hopeful first hours of the conference. Feeling bad for blocking their revenue stream for even a moment, I shuffle aside and wander down an aisle jammed with prospective customers, eager sales teams, and expensive new products, all coming together with the dull roar of a casino pit.
Banners promise “limitless possibilities for CCTV,” which could serve as the motto for a convention that is crazy for security cameras and related devices. Looking like something that should be mocked on the Internet, one roving vendor is wearing an enormous vest that includes multiple cameras and monitors that simultaneously record and display everything he encounters. Even putting aside the strange postmodern spectacle of a man entombed in electronic media, I’ve never seen so many CCTV cameras and monitors in a single room: everywhere I go, there I am, staring back at myself in unnervingly high resolution. Despite my lack of purchasing power and what must be an evident lack of securitarian fervor, in one sense I fit in—the event is overwhelmingly white, male, and middle-aged. Some women are scoping out the products and making purchasing decisions, but a greater number are working the sales floor as representatives for various companies. Smiling from the booths and handing out brochures, these female workers, often young and attractive, field questions from guys who are geeking out over spec sheets. What’s the FPS on the 3.6mm fixed-lens camera? Can it do progressive scan? Dual stream? H.264 compression format? What about audio inputs? These fellows are in their element, shopping for gadgets like they’re cruising the Best Buy on Christmas Eve, but instead of video-game consoles or laptop computers, they’re looking for deals on thermal imaging cameras and magnetic-field intruder detection systems for small factories in Connecticut or strip malls in Ohio. While I wonder if shopping centers really need all this James Bond stuff to ward off teenage vandals or the occasional shoplifter, everyone else seems hooked. As dozens of men gather around to see their heat signature on an oversized monitor (female customers aren’t falling for this gambit), it all seems like jolly good fun, like we’re at a boat show fiddling with the throttle of a cool new Jet Ski without a care in the world. No second thoughts or reservations are expressed, only enthusiasm for the evident wow factor of the latest gadgets. No one seems uncomfortable with the implications of the securitarian smorgasbord that spills out of hundreds of booths, offering an endless supply of products and services for watching, sorting, sensing, and archiving that exceeds the wildest imaginings of Cold War spies. Now anyone can have the tools of professional spycraft in their own home or office.
Indeed, every tonic to soothe a nervous soul is on display: panic buttons, two-way radios, license-plate readers, forensic spyglasses, e-mapping solutions, 180-degree panoramic ceiling cameras, biometric scanners, long-range identification systems, metal detectors, massive CCTV data storage, RFID tracking tags for “laptops, servers, people” (people!), and even special insurance and accounting companies that focus their business on the surveillance industry. Like military contractors gathered around the trough of federal dollars, all sorts of ancillary businesses are profiting from the new wave of American insecurity. Even little companies that make the banners and stickers that say “THIS AREA UNDER SURVEILLANCE” have a spot in Javits North, next to boring old locksmiths, some with clunky doorknobs on a table, others with high-tech “solutions” that promise “security with style,” which usually means a swipe card and a camera for “enhanced access control.” As the ads for one big security company put it, “Control, monitor and defend your businesses with Access Control.” The word choice seems oddly pugnacious: I’m not sure the language of “defending” a business has been heard since the nineteenth-century American frontier.11
Other booths have more unusual offerings than fancy locks. I rub my hands on the steel of the high-security architectural bollards that can spring from the pavement to block a truck. These thick steel shafts seem more suited to an embassy in a war zone than an office park in the suburbs, but people keep stopping to talk to the two middle-aged salesmen who seem quite jovial for people in the truck bomb deterrence business. Everyone seems keen on the massive fortification of a home or business. In a society in which soccer moms drive Hummers ripped from the dunes of Iraq, I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am taken aback when I feel the military-grade seriousness of the equipment on display. I take a brochure for photoelectric beams designed to detect intruders at “borders, substations, solar fields, residential [buildings], and prisons,” and walk away astonished that security guards and German Shepherds are no longer enough to “secure the perimeter,” to use a bit of the demilitarized jargon that courses through the security industry’s bloodstream like Viagra.12
Not everything is slickly produced or battle-hardened. While major corporations like Samsung and Tyco have expensive booths in which to promote themselves, a few mom-and-pop companies are here, too, elbowing for space in booths that seem much more homemade. One fellow seems right out of This Old House—sparks are flying as he noisily cuts metal for some kind of special lock. Down the aisle is a man with super glue that he’s bonding to anything that will attract a crowd. He has the patter of a nineteenth-century patent-medicine salesman, which is entertaining but a little mystifying. What is the relationship between security and super glue? He doesn’t volunteer an answer.
One small company has gone wild with patriotic imagery, draping its booth with red, white, and blue bunting that evokes a presidential campaign, but otherwise it’s hard to spot an American flag. Wherever I look in the convention center, nationalism is surprisingly muted in favor of a bland corporate internationalism. Aside from the opening ceremony with its tepid national anthem, no one is using overt nationalism to sell his or her products. No one is talking about “defending the nation,” “securing the homeland,” or “stopping al-Qaeda.” No one is talking explicitly about terrorism or mentioning what happened on 9/11 not far from where we stand. I suspect that the presence of multinational security companies, including several based in China, would make flag-waving an awkward enterprise, but even still—no American flag pins? No military insignia? No Ted Nugent books? The Tea Party would be disappointed by what passes for securing the homeland these days.
So what are the keywords? Instead of the nationalistic language of the war on terror, the show is filled with the calm rhetoric of corporate efficiency and technical mastery. Over and over I hear words like scalable, compliant, secure, efficient, intelligent, integration, easy to use, plug and play, and future proof. This flavorless discourse is woven into everything from marketing videos and sales brochures to casual conversations with sales reps, with nothing trumping the magic word that appears everywhere: solutions! It’s uttered like a mantra—solutions, solutions, solutions—that everyone is either selling or seeking on the vast floor of Javits North.
And what needs a solution? Although some security professionals are worried about licenses and regulations, more often the problem is some sort of technical challenge that might undermine their job performance. Many people are fretting about what they call the “weakest link in the chain,” like a high-resolution camera with an underpowered lens that keeps the overall system from optimal performance. Others are worried about data storage: the explosion of high-definition CCTV cameras, each one eating up more gigabytes than a teenager downloading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, is a constant headache for security professionals. But the main problem right now is “integration.” The explosive growth of the surveillance infrastructure in the past decade has resulted in all sorts of gaps and misalignments between its various parts: cameras, cables, software, hardware, personnel, and other elements have to link up seamlessly for systems to reach full capacity. Because systems are not working as well as advertised in previous sales conventions, customers are clamoring for “solutions” that will blend analog and digital aspects of their surveillance feed into a harmonious symphony of information. Ideally, the solution will be “plug and play,” “scalable,” and “future proof,” meaning that it will be simple to install, simple to expand, and simple to use for years to come. Although this might be rare, people seem confident that they’ll find what they need to solve their security challenges. The only anxiety I can sense is the fear of missing out, the fear of having out-of-date software, or the fear of a glitch in a security system that will result in a subpar performance evaluation. If salespeople seem anxious about not making their quotas, attendees are worried about lacking the right tools to perform well in their jobs. Attendees are narrowly focused on one question: “Will this help me do my job with greater proficiency?”
People are so focused on technical issues, in fact, that explicit references to violent crime are surprisingly rare for a conference on security and surveillance. One small company created a clumsy poster for a metal detector that features a Latino prisoner in an orange jumpsuit, while on the other side of the room a presenter talked about the need for “ultra resolution” cameras to get “what we all want,” which is, as he soon explained, “convictable evidence.” One of the hour-long workshops had the scary title “Are You Prepared for a Boston Marathon–Like Event?,” while another featured the chief of police from Newtown, Connecticut, talking about the tragic elementary school shooting in 2012. But these were exceptions to the corporate calm that reigned supreme in various workshops, publications, videos, websites, and verbal interactions. In general, worrisome references to the challenges of the world at large were absent or simply implied.
Because the event is suffused with the calm, rational, and apolitical rhetoric of tech-minded corporations, the mood on the selling floor is neither somber nor tense. Divorcing itself from burning questions of ethics and politics, the new surveillance marketplace trades on cooler feelings of inevitability, obligation, realism, prudence, foresight, duty, and concern. This trade show is not a place for deep passions and emotional intensities about our existential insecurities as a nation, community, or individual, nor is it about the vexing ethical dilemmas that are inherent to the use of most surveillance technologies. Rather, it is simply a place where sober professionals must make necessary preparations for unavoidable circumstances. No one seems interested in root causes or unintended consequences. No one is debating anything beyond technical “solutions” to very specific problems, narrowly defined. No one is challenging, no matter how subtly, the securitarian worldview that is on display at the trade show and in its various publications, signs, and videos. Admittedly, nuance, doubt, and misgivings are unmarketable qualities in most businesses, but the sheer seamlessness of the event is astonishing. Everywhere I look, people seem to have gotten the memo and internalized it: a firm, clear, and calm certainty is the industry’s public face at all times, with its power of assertion overwhelming any second thoughts that might arise. Confused as to whether biometric scanners have a place in your small-town medical facility? Take a look at the article “WHY BIOMETRICS IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE’S HEALTH” in the trade magazine Campus Safety and rest assured. Trade magazines, brochures, and videos, all free for the taking, are filled with such confident assertions, all part of the industry’s rush toward “CREATING THE FUTURE OF SECURITY . . . TODAY,” as one advertisement explains.13
Indeed, education is a big part of the show in more ways than one. In the back of the room are “free education sessions” that promote products and services along with attitudes conducive to the industry. With titles such as “Ultra-Resolution Surveillance: Delivering Precision Detail at Extreme Distances” and “Three Megatrends Affecting the Future of Building Systems,” these hour-long presentations take place in pseudo-classrooms with podiums, PowerPoints, and plenty of seats for an audience of prospective clients and other interested parties. Many attendees listen closely and take notes with free pens from their swag bags; some flip through the brochures and magazines that are free for the taking.
More than simple sales pitches or how-to manuals, the magazines are often quite revealing about the business of surveillance. Bound and printed in a format that resembles an academic journal, SIA’s main trade magazine, Technology Insights, is filled with articles with titles like “MEGAPIXEL CAMERAS GO MAINSTREAM” and “SEEING THE BIG PICTURE: 360-DEGREE CAMERA TECHNOLOGY.” Pressing for changes in “ways of thinking” about security, one writer celebrates the “ever-increasing clip” of innovation in surveillance systems. “Now systems can provide total control,” he boasted, but only if the public embraces new technologies with a “yes, we can” attitude that allows “innovation [to become] exponential.”14 Although the exponential growth in technological change that leads to “total control” might seem like a plot element in a dystopian sci-fi novel, Technology Insights heralds this development with smiling technocratic calm.
Another article in Technology Insights explored the challenge to “total control” under the headline “ACHIEVING IP VIDEO MANAGEMENT SCALABILITY THROUGH AGGREGATION.”15 The article describes new tools for integrating CCTV feeds from multiple locations into a simple package with expanded reach over workplaces, hospitals, schools, and even mobile locations such as employees in their cars. The upshot for business owners, managers, and security professionals who are synchronizing data from previously distinct systems? “More and more, the oversight is extending beyond traditional security considerations and into operational ones,” the author explains calmly, citing the example of a store manager who can remotely scrutinize his employees in various locations rather than driving out in person. In other words, a rapidly increasing amount of data in increasingly integrated systems is bringing the rhetoric of total control closer to reality every year, though the industry presents all of this expansion in the morally and politically neutral tone of technological inevitability: The changes are coming—is your organization prepared to meet the challenge? Are you prepared to say “yes, we can” to “total control”? Are you ready for innovation to become exponential? Are you ready to submit to the will of the machine? Okay, the last one was only implied, but something about the solemn technological determinism of surveillance marketing feels antithetical to the sort of liberties that people used to hold dear. Some lines from Keats pop into my mind as I consider “the inhuman dearth / Of noble natures, of the gloomy days, / Of all the unhealthy and o’er-darkened ways,” which seem to describe what I’m finding inside the Javits Center, though English Romanticism is absurdly out of place in this cool technocratic landscape. Such deeper expressions of our humanity are verboten here, even when the subject is education.
Certainly, education is a pragmatic concern for SIA. More than informing potential consumers about products and services that will fulfill their fantasy of total control, their trade show takes aim at educational consumers who represent a burgeoning market for surveillance products. With a cover photo of a smiling first-grader clutching his lunch in front of his elementary school, Campus Safety is a trade magazine devoted to the educational security market that covers everything from preschool playgrounds to graduate-school seminar rooms. The all-American boy with his lunch is a symbol of what one ad calls “securing your most precious asset,” while another ad explains how “a trusted name in campus surveillance for over 15 years” can provide a camera to watch over wholesome high-school students.16 Of course, a few cameras are not enough to safeguard these precious assets—not when the security industry has dozens of interlocking products to satisfy anyone’s security needs. One article explains how to turn the front of an ordinary high school into an impregnable fortress of learning, thereby hardening a soft educational target into something that resembles a county jail. In addition to installing CCTV cameras, fences, locks, and guards at major access points, schools need to build in “natural surveillance” techniques with the thought that “people are less likely to commit crimes if they feel they are being observed.” This means designing school entrances to “maximize visibility” for the purpose of monitoring visitors, emphasizing “territoriality” to make the ownership of the space self-evident (i.e., sending a message to strangers that you don’t belong here), and even minimizing the use of glass less than 72 inches from ground level in order to present “a more secure image [that] makes forced entry more difficult.”17 None of this is presented as an unfortunate reflection of a populace that feels unable to protect its own children. Rather it is presented as a neutral and somehow inevitable outcome that poses not a philosophical, historical, or sociological challenge but a surmountable technical one.
Another typical article in Campus Safety is “THE ISRAELI APPROACH TO SCHOOL SECURITY,” which continues the emphasis on technical solutions at the expense of historical context or ethical implications. Under a grim photo of confined Israeli schoolchildren “playing soccer inside a fenced-in area under the watchful eyes of teachers and an armed guard just out of the view of this camera,” the article extols the Israelis’ mind-set as much as their firepower as useful models for school security in the United States. Rather than noting the profound differences between a small country subject to rocket attacks versus the average American school district in Ohio, California, or Florida, the article emphasizes the alleged “it can happen here” similarities between America and Israel, while providing tips on how to live efficiently in the crosshairs of insecurity.18 If any of this high-tech freak-out sounds bad for actual learning in an actual classroom, think again: “Smart security makes for smarter students,” one advertisement promises in Campus Safety, reminding us that teachers can do a better job when they are free from the distraction of security issues. Throughout these trade magazines, whether in the text of the articles, editorials, or advertisements, the underlying message is always the same: everything is going to work out fine for those who have armed themselves with the latest in surveillance equipment and training, along with the right mind-set for situational awareness of all potential threats. There is no point in asking questions or entertaining doubts, even on college campuses where professors might be inclined to raise the awkward subjects of ethics, history, and political theory with impressionable students. Such is the shoulder-shrugging technological inevitability of a society entering terminal lockdown.
Friction-Free
Here everything conspires to annihilate even the slightest form of political intensity.
—THE INVISIBLE COMMITEE19
History, politics, ethics, sociology, and other modes of reflection are rarely glimpsed at trade shows for any industry, least of all the surveillance industry—though, as is often the case, these matters have a way of bubbling up and causing discomfort. I was seated in an hour-long workshop on high-resolution CCTV when a presenter dropped a small bomb from the podium. “You know, the Nazis invented CCTV during the Second World War to monitor rocket launches,” he said, without shifting his sleepwalker tone. I was curious to hear more about the subject, but he brushed it off as quickly as he raised it. “Uh . . . it wasn’t necessarily an application [of the technology] that we like,” he explained, seeming remarkably casual about the connection, no matter how distant, between his livelihood and the Third Reich. While I tend to take such connections a little more seriously, I suspect I was alone in expecting even a momentary engagement with history and ethics in the midst of a trade show where companies are trying to meet sales quotas and roll out new products. Not surprisingly for an industry with a problematic historical relationship to state power in both authoritarian and democratic contexts, the modern surveillance industry has to repress its own troubling past in order to expand its markets. No one wants to hear about Nazis—or J. Edgar Hoover’s illegal wiretapping, or the Chinese government’s suppression of the prodemocracy movement—while shopping for surveillance equipment. That much is not surprising. What is surprising—and quite disconcerting—is that no one seems to ask the obvious questions about this vast world of technology on display inside the Javits Center: Does it work? Does it make us safer, freer, happier, or more productive? Is it worth the billions that we lavish on it? Does it have unacknowledged side-effects for the people who live in its midst? Does it reduce the feeling of insecurity or simply mask it behind a wall of technological bluster about “best practices” for “future proof” risk management?
Of course, no one vocalizes such things at a trade show like ISC East, where technological determinism, corporate calm, and the slick repetitions of marketing departments conspire to overwhelm the natural functioning of the questioning mind. Yet this slick calm cannot hide a fundamental exclusion. Something is missing from the sober landscape of risk assessment where SIA has pitched its tent: buried in the blizzard of technical specifications and professional necessities is a strange omission that might unsettle the savvy consumer. While the surveillance industry presents itself with such serene assurance and cool rationality, it fails to provide evidence for its claims in even the most glancing fashion. Not once at the conference did I see empirical data to suggest that particular surveillance technologies were essential to reducing crime on a single campus, increasing productivity in a single company, or creating a sense of well-being in a single community. Instead of the hard facts that corporate America is supposed to prize while professors keep their impractical heads in the sky, I kept hearing blanket assertions about the need for ever-greater degrees of fortification in every human context: nursing homes, outlet malls, lumber mills, solar-panel arrays, high-school football stadiums, kindergarten playgrounds. No one is safe. Everyone needs surveillance. End of story.
Rather than ask hard questions, or even acknowledge the fact that someone else is asking them, the surveillance industry hides its head in the sand whenever questions of efficacy and impact arise. In this sense it suffers from what Leonidis Donskis and Zygmunt Bauman call the “virus” of adiaphorization—“an exemption from the realm of moral evaluation.”20 As they describe in Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, adiaphorization is a process in which we exempt ourselves from the moral calculus that we expect from others.21 For example, we would want someone to think through the moral implications of their actions if they were intending to trample on our privacy, liberty, or autonomy, but we might exempt ourselves from the same kind of scrutiny if we suffered from a certain kind of moral blindness that allows self-interested and hypocritical behavior to flourish. In this sense, adiaphorization allows the security industry to grant itself a waiver, to suggest that politics and ethics are not central to its enterprise. At SIA’s big annual event in New York City, this apolitical stance creates a frictionless marketplace of stainless-steel bollards and metal detectors, thermal sensors and biometric access control, far from the grit and muck of uncertainty and complexity that is inherent to the use of such technologies. What emerges, then, is a kind of moral cynicism that allows the industry to perceive its own behavior as somehow neutral or separate from potential complications. They are merely technicians, merely merchants, merely marketers, nothing more.
This mind-set is a boon to the surveillance industry, which can grant itself an exemption from difficult discussions about the impact of its technologies. In this sense, the fundamental amorality of capitalism is the real ground zero of the surveillance industry. The marketplace encourages this displacement of the moral aspect of selling surveillance, or any other technology with complex and often problematic uses that might, if examined closely, undercut soaring profits. After all, old companies have expanded, new ones have been created, and enormous revenues have been harvested—what fool would argue with such results? The operator of another surveillance conference made this point explicit when pressed about the problem of selling powerful technologies to authoritarian regimes abroad: “We don’t really get into asking, ‘Is this in the public interest?’” he told one reporter.22 Exactly.
Meanwhile, the industry rushes forward into new markets, new technologies, and new contexts, seemingly unimpeded by any countervailing forces. Celebrated Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis has described the way in which technological possibility triumphs over ethical concerns: put simply, if we have the technological means to do something, it will be done. All other considerations are shunted aside by the imperative to achieve what is achievable, technologically and economically, rather than what is just and proper. “We can, therefore, we ought” is the formulation that he laments.23 If we have the opportunity to expand the surveillance infrastructure into suburban elementary schools quaking from “stranger danger,” or to oil-rich emirates that abuse foreign workers, then we must do so. Describing this compulsion at the nexus of culture and capitalism, Donskis writes, “It is obligatory to spy and to leak, though it’s unclear for what reason and to what end. It’s something that has to be done because it’s technologically feasible.”24 As former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg said about the prospect of surveillance drones over his city: “It’s not a question of whether it’s good or bad. I just don’t see how you can stop them.”25 Actually, it is a question of whether it’s good or bad—he just doesn’t want to ask the more meaningful question. The business of surveillance dictates that ethical deliberations—which should be at the heart of democratic politics—be ruled out as irrelevant, impractical, a needless distraction from the serious work that must be done without a moment’s reflection. What emerges, then, is “a moral vacuum” in which a “new evil” thrives. “Two of the manifestations of the new evil,” Donskis suggests, are an “insensitivity to human suffering, and the desire to colonize privacy by taking away a person’s secret, the something that should never be talked about and made public.”26 The relevance to surveillance is profound.
This is why the word privacy is radioactive on the sales floor. If people seem excited to talk to me when they think I’m a business owner, they are clearly uncomfortable when I tell them I’m an academic who might be thinking about the implications of their technological marvels. The first question I got from one salesman was, “Are you one of these people who is against surveillance?” I had said nothing to invite such a question, other than to mention that I was writing a book in the most neutral tones I could muster, yet the salesman went immediately on the defensive. Later in the day, again without me saying anything about my own views on privacy, another security professional told me that privacy zealots “should stay at home,” keeping away from conferences such as SIA East. This strain of defensiveness, if not belligerence, suggests that the mind-set here is not merely one of blissful ignorance but rather conscious repression of anything that might wrinkle the smooth surface of the marketplace. Apparently, asking questions is bad for business.
As these exchanges might suggest, the surveillance industry is adamant about one particular kind of privacy: its own. As one privacy activist has complained about the lack of transparency and ethical slipperiness of the surveillance industry, “The complex network of supply chains and subsidiaries involved in this trade allows one after the other to continually pass the buck and abdicate responsibility.”27 While the sales conferences are promoting technologies that undercut individual attempts at maintaining privacy, the industry remains quite concerned about its own privacy. After noting that security conferences in Dubai and Washington, D.C. were not open to the public, the Wall Street Journal wrote that its own reporters were “prevented from attending sessions or entering the exhibition halls” at these events that were deemed more sensitive in nature than what I witnessed in New York.28 So goes the strange and lucrative business of surveillance, even when the clients are not authoritarian regimes in the Middle East but simply midwestern retail chains worried about shoplifters. “Surveillance companies are developing, marketing, and selling some of the most powerful, invasive, and dangerous technologies in the world, ones that are keeping pace with the capabilities of the NSA and GCHQ,” claims the London-based Privacy International in its report on the industry (referring to the UK Government Communications Headquarters). “What’s more, companies are maintaining relationships to the repressive regimes it sells to, constantly upgrading their systems and making customer service representatives available 24/7 for dictators and their cronies to reach out to should anything go awry with their products.”29 Such is the messiness that exists beneath the slick surface of the new surveillance marketplace.
Surveillance after 9/11
I was born in Brooklyn in the 1960s and thought about New York City a great deal as I grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in unglamorous New Jersey. From there the city appears across the water like the emerald kingdom in Oz, floating above the Hudson like a gritty beacon of cultural possibility. It seemed, and in many ways was, the center of everything. Inspiring extremes of love and loathing in the rest of the country, the city occupied a special place in the American soul—as it still does in ways that were reinforced, I suspect, on September 11, 2001. Would the national response to the destruction of skyscrapers in, say, Houston, Phoenix, or Portland have been fundamentally different? If we put aside the Pentagon attack and the crash of Flight 93 in the Pennsylvania countryside for a moment and imagine if Ground Zero had been in any other American city—would the loss of a building elsewhere have been enough to inspire the epic backlash that included the longest wars in US history, the calamitous erosion of long-cherished privacy rights, and the rapid expansion of government surveillance powers? Perhaps. But the World Trade Center was the nerve center of the American economy, not some second-tier outpost of Sun Belt capitalism. And its destruction so evoked the special effects that Hollywood has implanted in our collective consciousness for decades, with its airborne means of delivery so confounding to our love of technology, that it struck in a uniquely vulnerable place and in a uniquely potent way. Americans were collectively shot through the heart on 9/11, and the emotional impact lingers like that of no other event on US soil in the postwar era. The fiftieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination might suggest a possible point of comparison, but JFK was only one man, and Dealey Plaza has long since succumbed to tourist kitsch and conspiracy-minded circus sideshows. Thus 9/11 triggered a paroxysm of national grief and confusion that endures, making it difficult to this day to know how to respond meaningfully to what happened so quickly that surreal morning.
All of which raises the question: What should a city do when its iconic buildings suddenly vanish?30 It is a question that no city should have to answer, yet it has haunted New York since the first months of its recovery from the attacks. The answer has taken many forms, some hopeful, some depressing. Too often, security bureaucrats and corporate allies, poised to profit off the technologies and techniques on display inside the Javits Center, have been the first to answer: wire it up and lock it down! Yet fortification and permanently heightened surveillance are not the only responses to the wounds of 2001, something I felt strongly on walks through Manhattan’s Ground Zero that served as a kind of emotional counterbalance to the cold and mechanistic world of the security trade show—and the self-righteous securitarian fury that has distorted our foreign and domestic policies since 9/11.
In autumn 2013, when I first visit, the Memorial pools are a newly finished part of what is otherwise a hallowed ground still under construction, complete with chain-link fencing and impromptu gates for its so-called interim operating period. In the parklike contours of the space around the pools, not far from where the 9/11 museum is still taking shape, young swamp white oak trees have been planted everywhere—but so have CCTV cameras. Somewhere along the northeast corner of the pools, I stand under six separate cameras that are clustered just out of arm’s reach. Like crows on a low-slung telephone line, they loom above while I try to make sense of a place I haven’t visited since watching the buildings fall during a TV broadcast while I was in central Oklahoma. It’s not easy to stand here. For someone looking down into the chasms of the black waterfalls where the Twin Towers used to stand, the enormity of the buildings’ footprints is almost unbearable to contemplate. The scale of the event registers in the gut and knocks you back, an emotional testament to the work of memorial architect Michael Arad and landscape architect Peter Walker.
I take a break and walk a city block. A truck-based police observation unit, the first I’ve ever seen, is parked across from the site like a mechanical guardian that can rise 20 feet above the ground for maximum visibility—one more reminder that the NYPD is keen to watch everything that moves. Though I’m hesitant to photograph the blacked-out windows of the truck while officers stand guard, I take a few quick shots before retreating to a nearby café, a touristy place with the worst of Nashville music blaring. Looking out the window at the Freedom Tower rising north of Ground Zero, I feel privileged to watch yellowed leaves raining onto the sidewalk on a quiet afternoon—but I don’t feel particularly free. I’d seen fifty cops and dozens of security cameras while walking a few blocks, and people seem nervous and uncertain around them. A statement of overwhelming force is being made that no one can miss: it is a very blunt instrument that hits the innocent and guilty with equal force, with an indiscriminate quality that I find morally reprehensible in modern surveillance culture. Even worse than the subtle and not-so-subtle abuses of emotional liberty, and the ways that this can make some people feel (rotten and lost), these measures are costly examples of the security theater that serves a function more symbolic than practical. CCTV won’t stop a theocratic psychopath with an exploding backpack, something that politicians, including progressives like former congressman Barney Frank, overlook in their praise for security cameras that provided after-the-fact evidence of, but not a shred of deterrence against, the Boston Marathon bombers.31 In this sense our security theater is absurd, something I say wistfully and even with respect for those who perform rituals in its name—take off the shoes, remove the hat, look at the camera. And when absurdity is absent, irony rushes in: consider the fact that Ground Zero’s next-door neighbor is Zuccotti Park, better known as home to the tents and chants of Occupy Wall Street that popped up around the tenth anniversary of 9/11. I don’t suppose those young activists felt particularly free in the shadow of the Freedom Tower, already eighty-two floors of unfinished construction by the autumn of 2011, in what was so evidently Mayor Bloomberg’s city. Even a year or two after the heyday of Occupy, metal plaques bear warnings to would-be squatters that the park is “public” (but, you know, not really), with cops on round-the-clock duty to reinforce the point. There is a limit to what is allowed in the shadow of the Freedom Tower.
Walking toward the building while it’s still under construction in 2013, and once again when it’s largely finished in 2015, I find myself wondering about the relationship between its exalted architectural rhetoric and the ordinary American reality that the surveillance industry addresses. In other words: What is the nature of the freedom that is heralded by this 1,776-foot glass tower? It must be a glittering beacon to something vital, something that speaks eloquently to the national soul in a moment of post-traumatic recovery. Resilience, hard work, hope? I don’t doubt any of these qualities are present somewhere in its 1,776 symbolic feet of glass and steel. But freedom is a more nuanced proposition than what our politicians are generally able to conceive, a fact that feels obvious to someone who left a paranoia-inducing surveillance convention to roam the streets of a city filled with ubiquitous CCTV and legions of cops, all coordinated by Mayor Bloomberg’s Microsoft-created Domain Awareness System in ways that can be painful and problematic for some citizens.32 (Such civic pain is what interests the artist Josh Begley, whose piece Plain Sight: The Visual Vernacular of NYPD Surveillance was installed at the Open Society Foundation in Midtown Manhattan in 2015. A wall-sized collage of police surveillance photos of Muslims in the New York area, Plain Sight suggests that police mapping of Muslim neighborhoods was more than “systematic racial and religious profiling,” as the artist statement explains—“it created a climate of fear and suspicion that encroached on all aspects of everyday life.”)33
After spending time in a security trade show that heralds the brave new world of “total control” and provides the tools for an invasive culture of monitoring with disturbing racial dimensions, I have to ask another version of the question above: What freedom, exactly, does anyone possess while standing in the shadow of the Freedom Tower? It’s hard to say. I suppose I have the freedom to admire the “Torch of Freedom,” as former New York governor George Pataki dubbed the tower’s 400-foot spire, along with the grit and intelligence of the workers who put up these imposing structures. I have the freedom to publish these words without government permission (although government oversight is another question altogether). But do I have the freedom to say “no” to Mayor Bloomberg’s scrutiny (or that of his successor, Bill de Blasio)? Do I have the freedom to close my eyes and mouth on the subway platforms stenciled with the ominous wartime phrase “See Something, Say Something”? Do I have the freedom to point my own camera at law enforcement agents and gather data about their behavior? Do I have freedom from dataveillance regimes that suck up my web-browsing history and credit-card habits without my knowledge (or only the most vaguely implied consent)? Do I have the freedom to opt out of the generalized panic of the post–9/11 era, to insist on my own privacy as sacrosanct, so long as I don’t harm anyone else? No, I don’t think so.
Maybe US citizens have never enjoyed such freedoms, not even those who enjoy certain privileges within society, but we certainly don’t have it now that securitization has taken command with an analytical depth that exceeds anything that was feasible during the Cold War. What’s happened since 9/11 puts us much closer to an Orwellian condition of constant exposure and monitoring than our self-congratulatory political rhetoric would ever suggest. “The idea that we can know and tell everything about another human being is the worst kind of nightmare as far as the modern world is concerned,” the Lithuanian philosopher Leonidas Donskis writes, in mulling over Orwell’s 1984. “We believed for a long time that choice defines freedom; I would hasten to add that, especially nowadays, so does defense of the idea of the unfathomability of the human being and the idea of the untouchability of their privacy.”34 Nothing about Ground Zero, Zuccotti Park, or the ISC trade show makes me feel untouchable in regard to state power.
Yet I have a faith in people, a faith I do not have in state or multinational corporations. Once again joining the crowds around the memorial site in 2013 and again in 2015, I am heartened to see how gently they move around the Memorial pools. Visitors are sober, quiet, even decorous. By 2015 the temporary cameras have become more discreet in placement, with the new security regime pressing less ominously on the experience of place. Somewhat to my surprise, Ground Zero in its finished state doesn’t have the nationalistic excess that it might have possessed, maybe because the Memorial pools represent such a sublime aesthetic choice, and maybe because the Freedom Tower is a little too much like any other bank tower hanging over any other downtown to inspire patriotic fervor. In spite of the Freedom Tower’s obsessive built-in reference to the American War of Independence, the memorial site below is happily devoid of the dumb bombast and sanctimony that characterizes much of our hypersecuritized culture. Nothing here has the curdled self-righteousness of our reigning political class, nor of its big media counterpart. Instead, the Memorial pools have emerged with reserve and even grace, reflecting a kind of spiritual good health that I wasn’t expecting to find within the tumult of the city. Certain details stick in my mind: The white roses left on engraved names. The kind sharing of camera duties between strangers. The Vietnamese Catholic priest casually picking up litter. The multicultural calm. All in all, it is a wonderfully affecting place, appropriately engineered to invite thoughtful contemplation and sober remembrance. It is one of the few spaces of modern American mourning that makes sense to me.
The same is true, to a somewhat lesser extent, of the museum itself. Opened next to the Memorial pools in summer 2014, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum is not a vindictive place. It is not rooted in fear, vengeance, or anger in the ways that I anticipated. Instead, it reflects our best instincts in responding to a civic wound of unimaginable proportions—even if some observers feel otherwise. Writing in Esquire magazine in January 2015, Scott Raab complained that inside the museum is “a pandemonium of grief, a mausoleum with escalators, complete with human remains, recordings of mass murder, and a gift shop where the commodified fetish of massacre fills the shelves and the cashiers are trained to beg each customer for an extra buck—on top of the twenty-four-dollar entry fee.”35 I don’t share that view. Admittedly, some of the tchotchkes in the gift shop raise questions about decency and taste. And something about displaying the wreckage of steel girders and burned fire trucks is unsettling as well, as if dead things—like the human beings who perished that day—are better off buried in a place where no guided tours, no matter how sensitive, can gawk at them. But otherwise it is a place that resists the worst temptations of surveillance culture: heavy-handed security measures, a rhetoric of inevitability, implied violence, and melodramatic victimhood that veers into a belligerent self-pity that justifies any and all measures.
It’s actually a quiet place filled with ordinary objects and ordinary people whose lives came to a premature end that is described, sometimes in grueling detail, in video and audio recordings from family members that visitors can listen to. Honoring the ordinariness, even banality, of their lives seems appropriate here. “The banality of evil,” to use Hannah Arendt’s formulation, never seemed to fit the tragedy of 9/11, no matter how many times pundits tried to wedge it into their on-air musings. What the hijackers did was the opposite of banal: it was a rare spectacle of mesmerizing, horrifying intensity—just as it was intended to be. It was an attack on good, old-fashioned, American banality, which, reassuringly, can still be found at Ground Zero. The banality of such small pleasures continues for the survivors, perhaps a little guardedly, a little guiltily, on the exact spot where the planes struck the never-quite-loved buildings that now receive so much curatorial respect. We miss these buildings more than we ever anticipated, and we mark this fact with modest gestures of mourning—listening closely, trying to remember, buying a trinket—that I find quite hopeful as a mode of public (and private) feeling.
Not everyone responds this way, of course. “Weird vibe,” complained an uptight white guy to his wife in the gift shop, while he bought a picture book that honored the canine heroes of 9/11; apparently he had just been touring Ground Zero and was venting some discomfort.36 It is a weird vibe indeed for those expecting simple flag-waving and Disneyfied tears.37 Instead, a very human vibe endures at Ground Zero, even in the controversial museum and its gift shop. Its shortcomings may come into view with the passage of time, but for now the site is a triumph of renewal and commemoration, a place of deep and profound sorrow that invites a dignified and appropriate response to the crimes that sent waves of insecurity rippling across this country. If “a nation in fear” sounds maudlin and overdrawn, it was an accurate description for many months after 9/11. Yet neither the museum nor its adjacent memorials exploit that painful fact in the ways that cynics—myself included—might expect.
By contrast, the security-industrial complex offers a response that blends the necessary and practical (yes, we need some degree of surveillance) with the grotesque and self-serving (the church of limitless surveillance). In a very real sense, the industry trades off post–9/11 insecurities, using our frayed nerves as its happy profit center, always selling a fantasy of eternal vigilance in which everyone—everywhere, all the time—keeps watch with the latest in threat detection equipment and the appropriate mind-set for endless combat on an insecure planet. While the 9/11 Memorial offers a space of democratic calm and dignity in the face of terror and uncertainty, it also marks the birthplace of modern surveillance culture and its spirit of rationalized panic. You can draw a straight line from Ground Zero to the packed surveillance convention on the other side of Manhattan—and many other points on the new American map of fear and insecurity. This includes suburbs where police departments use Homeland Security grants to turn themselves into quasi-military commandos. And the Canadian border, where Predator drones look for terrorists slipping into Idaho. And even college campuses that are wiring up for high-grade CCTV—whether they need it or not. Transcontinental lines of insecurity have spread across the country like a web since 9/11, covering a landscape upon which there are relatively few real threats compared to those that the security industry likes to conjure (often with help from the media). In many communities the primary dangers are more likely to be unemployment, domestic violence, racist cops, bad food, and mediocre health care. Yet no camera can protect anyone from the police in South Carolina or New York City. No biometric scanner can protect someone from fast food–induced diabetes. No drone can protect someone from a banker who is bundling securitized mortgages into something that benefits his Wall Street buddies. And no number of steel bollards can keep a psychotic ex-boyfriend from getting the last word in a failed relationship.
This is why ceaseless surveillance is the wrong kind of remembrance for 9/11, the wrong kind of response to such trauma. Yet what I found in the emotional life of the Memorial pools is the exception, not the rule, in a society that has made unprecedented investments in surveillance with little discussion of the implications. In 1998, the New York Civil Liberties Union located sixty-five surveillance cameras in Midtown. Today that number is impossible to tally—many thousands in Midtown alone, not counting tens of thousands of smartphone cameras. By one estimate, New York City had at least 6,000 “public sector surveillance cameras” by 2013, with the number, quality, and interconnectedness of the cameras increasing every year.38 Wondering about these webs of visibility and what’s getting caught up in them, I consulted an online map of security cameras in Manhattan that civil libertarians in the NYC Surveillance Camera Project have prepared.39 A popular website reminded me that the maps were “not intended for use in the commission of any crime or act of war.”40 Really? We can’t even note the location of cameras that are noting our location without worrying about getting in trouble? Because actual terrorists are not dissuaded by legal disclaimers, the sole function of the warning is to afford its authors some legal protection, something they might have learned at the “Reducing Liability” seminar at the ISC trade show. Adding the disclaimer to such a subversive map is a very strange gesture: a paranoid legalism applied to a paranoid geography. This is understandable, I suppose, since I’m in New York City just a year after Mayor Bloomberg announced “a sophisticated city-wide surveillance platform developed with Microsoft that centralizes data from many sources, and displays information in real-time.”41 “Envisioning a future where privacy is a thing of the past,” Bloomberg boasted like a super-villain in a Batman movie, “it will soon be impossible to escape the watchful eyes of surveillance cameras and even drones in the city.”42 Like vendors at the ISC, such politicians present the future of insecurity with calm inevitability, as if no other future were imaginable for the United States. But what happens after we wire ourselves up for maximum security, learn all the passwords, submit to all the scans, and internalize the logic of high security and asymmetrical transparency? Which powerful forces view us through the one-way mirror that we come to expect and quietly accept? How do we live then?
After the trade show at the Javits Center in 2013, I stopped at an Italian restaurant whose small tables were pressed close together, causing me to overhear too much of a nearby conversation for someone fleeing from a surveillance conference. Investment bankers lunching at the next table were passionately arguing that altruism was always dependent on wealth, reminding each other that “all good deeds require vast sums of money”—and even evoking the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s fight against malaria as an implicit justification for whatever transpired on their Bloomberg terminals that morning. No doubt, we all have our justifications, and I’m sure surveillance professionals feel the same way: necessary, logical, defensible, inevitable. But the rest of us shouldn’t be so sure—especially those of us with the ability to ask the questions that the industry and its insider allies are unwilling to consider. If we ask the right questions, we might come to a very different conclusion than the average security professional or US senator: Not everything needs watching, monitoring, sorting, and archiving. Not everything can be solved by fortification of mind and body, home and city, office and nation, in ever greater layers. Some things—probably most things, when you get right down to it—require more nuanced solutions that speak to root causes and dehumanizing systems. Addressing those underlying problems will take us closer to true security than will any high-tech fortress of CCTV and smartlocks, retina scanners and personal drones, even if this isn’t a saleable message for a security industry on the march toward total control.
Although it might seem a strange counterpoint to the trade show inside the Javits Center, the 9/11 Memorial nonetheless reminds me that it is possible to find a measured and dignified response to an act of extreme sadism, whose “success” was attributable more to accident and perverse good fortune than to anything else. In short, we didn’t need to change the way we think and live because of a few homicidal theocrats; we didn’t need to run to gated communities in the suburbs; we didn’t need to retreat inside a high security fortress or its mental equivalent, whether we lived in a small town in Iowa or a city in Oregon or somewhere in between. We didn’t need to feel differently about public life in America, taking on a new skepticism about strangers that was most often applied to people of particular hues and customs. We didn’t need to institutionalize the panic of those first frantic moments on September 11 and the days that followed, except that it proved immensely rewarding to a cynical few in politics, media, and business. To be clear, I don’t necessarily blame the ISC rank-and-file. Most are typical midlevel merchants seizing an opportunity to expand a marketplace that grows every year: Who can fault them for the sins of their industry? No more willing or able to confront the big picture than most Americans, they have internalized the apolitical mandate of their trade and others like it (oil, automotive, chemical, meat) and worked hard to make a living, pay the mortgage, maybe save a little for a college fund. Ethics, wisdom, beauty, truth, justice—these are matters for another place, not the floor of a trade show where deals must be struck and contracts signed. And perhaps not anywhere in an economic system that flaunts its own amorality as a virtue. Corporate apologists often quote the economist Adam Smith to this effect: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” As the writer Jonathon Porritt explains, such a canard distorts Smith’s own belief that “people of conscience” must guide the “invisible hand” of the market with sound moral judgments.43 In this sense, even Adam Smith would frown on the amoral free-for-all that the new surveillance marketplace has become. Naturally, I don’t think he would blame the eager sales teams and grinning marketers that I met at ISC East, who are simply cogs in the big business of American insecurity, not its driving force. Yet as they labor in an industry that artfully excludes questions of ethics and impact at every turn—thereby externalizing the true process of accounting upon which democracy depends—the rest of us are obliged to make sense of their operations in ways that transcend the easy calculus of dollars and cents.