Abstract
On his first day as President of the United States, Barack Obama issued a memo on “Transparency and Open Government.” 1 The memo stated, “My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.” The promise of Obama’s administration was to make data open so that citizens could see what the government was doing. This would promote “efficiency and effectiveness, drive innovation, economic opportunity and improve the health and welfare of the American public.” The memo emphasized that data constituted a “valuable national resource” that should be “available, discoverable, and usable.” 2 However, at the heart of the effort to establish a system of transparency was not only collaboration and participation. Equally important was commercial exploitation. The project’s objective was to open up a public resource for private appropriation.
On June 6, 2013, newspapers reported that the National Security Agency of the US government operated a secret mass surveillance program for the collection of electronic data. Documents leaked by Edward Snowden showed that security officials used a number of search terms to screen electronic data traveling across the principal routes of the Internet. The secret surveillance program also included the tracking of phone calls and the analysis of metadata. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Robert Mueller told the US House Judiciary Committee that Snowden’s disclosures “caused significant harm to our nation and to our safety” and that Obama’s administration would take all the steps that are necessary against the person responsible for the disclosure of the program.
It’s not surprising to see Obama’s open government concealing the security state that’s operating at its heart. Expanding in the shadow of the system of transparency is a system of secrecy. 3 Each year several million classification actions occur in the United States. In 2015, the estimated costs of America’s state secrets reached a historic high of US$16 billion. 4 The paradoxical expansion of both transparency and secrecy suggests that these terms are not opposed to each other. What officials celebrate as an increase in transparency does not necessarily mean a reduction in secrecy (see Phillips 2011, 160).
Obama’s administration is perhaps one of the most transparent as well as one of the most secretive administrations in American history. Operating in the shadow of the open government is a massive security state. Significantly, the secret programs of the security state thrive on transparency. Mass surveillance efforts depend on citizens and companies and their communications. These communications feed the large data sets that are necessary for mass surveillance programs.
Today’s communication technologies encourage people to make every dimension of their personal and professional existence public through social media channels. The circulation of information enables its exploitation not only by the state but also by corporations and advertisers. These actors have long been aware that electronic information constitutes an important resource. They use every bit they can get for data mining and data profiling purposes.
Transparency is not an enemy of secrecy. On the contrary, transparency facilitates the secretive use of information; it constitutes one of its conditions of possibility. As Brian Rappert reminds us in his essay, transparency is the philosophy underpinning the political project of WikiLeaks. But it’s also the dream of the total information awareness office, which wants you to be transparent to the world—as if such a thing were possible. There’s little tolerance in the world of transparency for the fact that people might not necessarily know what they do or mean what they say.
Governments, corporations, and advertisers promote the use of the latest communication technologies. They track and trace people, assuming that thoughts, actions, and expressions are self-explanatory. They take everything at face value and belief they understand what’s going on. Meanwhile, people are increasingly investing in technologies of electronic evasion in order to escape systems of surveillance (see Brunton and Nissenbaum 2015). In addition to such technologies, concerned citizens have developed sophisticated strategies of deliberate obfuscation. There’s a civil war going on in the digital age, and this war has not only its pirates but also its partisans. 5 These partisans make strategic use of “ambiguous, confusing, or misleading information to interfere with surveillance and data collection projects” (see Brunton and Nissenbaum 2015, 2). They, too, share the fantasy of original transparency, a transparency that needs to be protected.
Or is it the fantasy that needs to be protected? Samuel Weber points out that transparency must be seen as a “response to the anxiety of not being able to occupy a secure, stable, identifiable position in the world. The more uncertain that world becomes, and above all, the more menacing—for various reasons—the more there is a desire for ‘transparency’” (see Phillips 2011, 164). Weber calls transparency a defensive mechanism. It appears as a solution to a problem because it suggests “immediacy of meaning and accessibility of comprehension” (see Phillips 2011, 163). In a world of transparency, it’s impossible to accept that the self is not transparent to itself.
Promoters of open government initiatives often assume that open data are transparent data. But there’s no guarantee—such data might also be obscure. As Sabina Leonelli’s, Nadine Levin’s, and Brian Rappert’s contributions to this special issue demonstrate, open data might not contribute to a better understanding of the world. On the contrary, it might just as well intensify the state of anxiety to which it responds. Who has the ability to understand technical information? Who has the time to study 400,000 documents? The result of publicity is not necessarily transparency.
Lacan taught us that the best way to disguise an object is to put it on display. Here, the visibility of the object operates as a contraption of concealment.
Today, things are hidden in plain sight. The amount of electronic data that are available and accessible increasingly overwhelms the total information awareness office. It’s not the lack but the abundance of information that’s the problem. The response to the threat of data deluge is a distinct modality of action: “targeting.” The aim of targeting is isolation. 6 Once a target has been isolated, the agency can take aim at it and do away with it (see Weber 2005, 105).
Targeting destroys what it discovers. As Weber notes, “the act of targeting is an act of violence even before any shot is fired” (see Weber 2005, 105). The problem is that targets are always enmeshed and entangled in their environments. Targeting is “potentially and tendentially lethal, for by taking aim at its object, it isolates that object from its relation to its surroundings, removing everything that might distract its aim from the place it seeks to secure: that is, to occupy and to appropriate” (see Weber 2005, 105).
The fascination with open data derives from the image of the secret. It’s the pleasure of revelation that’s energizing the effort to create enormous clouds of information. These clouds require targeting: finding the needle in the haystack, isolating the target from its environment, waiting for the opportune moment, hitting the object with full force. Welcome to the civil war of the digital age.