Over a year before the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority overturned Roe v. Wade, the Texas legislature passed SB 8, which banned all abortions after six weeks. At the time, fetal heartbeat laws like SB 8 were invalid because Roe and its progeny prohibited the use of state power to prohibit access to abortion services pre-viability. So Republicans in the Texas legislature, supported by the work of anti-abortion movement lawyers, came up with a workaround. SB 8 deputized private citizens to surveil on the state’s behalf and authorized them to bring private civil lawsuits against anyone who provided or facilitated an abortion after six weeks. SB 8 is a perfect and heinous example of what Sarah Brayne, Sarah Lageson, and Karen Levy call “surveillance deputies.”
In Surveillance Deputies: When Ordinary People Surveil for the State, Brayne, Lageson, and Levy define surveillance deputies as “ordinary people us[ing] their labor and economic resources to engage in surveillance activities on behalf of the state.” From one perspective, surveillance deputies are paradigmatic of the engaged citizen: “If you see something, say something” is not, in this understanding, a McCarthyite or totalitarian slogan encouraging tattling and ratting on neighbors. Instead, it’s a message about what constitutes good citizenship. Good citizens speak up and keep everyone safe. From another perspective, however, surveillance deputies are decidedly sinister. The connection between speaking up and keeping everyone safe implies that those listening to surveillance deputies have the best interests of citizens in mind. That is far from a sure thing. Surveillance deputies expand the power of the state and sometimes do so for the mere sociopathic reward of seeing someone else harmed.
At a minimum, surveillance deputies are a conundrum. How are we to understand the people who surveil and the institutional alliance between state power, the surveillance-industrial complex, and ordinary citizens? Brayne, Lageson, and Levy, who contributed equally to this outstanding and insightful article, propose four hypotheses for describing the functions and implications of surveillance deputization: interest convergence, legal institutionalization, technological mediation, and social stratification. Let’s break those down.
By interest convergence, the authors mean that surveillance deputization works best when states and citizens have aligned interests and benefits. For instance, under SB 8, someone could report an abortion provider in Texas for the chance to win $10,000 per incident, or because they hate abortion, or because they have a grudge against a doctor. For private deputies and the state, which wanted to end abortion in Texas, it was a win-win (a lose-lose for just about everyone else, but that’s a different JOT).
Surveillance deputization can also be catalyzed by law and its loopholes. Fourth Amendment case law holds that deputizing an individual to do surveillance work means that the state can avoid many of the constraints typically imposed on state surveillance. Given the access we have to vast amounts of surveillance content, this kind of exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement may soon make the provision practically meaningless.
In addition to aligned interests and legal loopholes, profit lies at the foundation of much surveillance deputization. Big tech companies like Amazon and myriad small startups develop and market surveillance technologies to capitalize on people’s fears: fears about the “other”, about what will happen to their children, about anything. The information industry has pushed the notion that ordinary citizens should be monitoring everything, keeping an eye on what’s going on outside their door, by creating the very tools that give people those capabilities. Then they can sell advertisements on their surveillance apps. Having molded citizens into both consumers and avid spies, industry takes the resulting massive treasure trove of data and enters into lucrative contracts with state bureaucracies of violence to provide that data for the state’s use. As one former employee of the company that makes the Citizen App admitted, “The whole idea behind [the Citizen app subscription service] is that you could convince people to pay for the product once you’ve gotten them to the highest point of anxiety you can possibly get them to.” Create surveillance, stoke fear, cash in.
Finally, surveillance deputization may increase or disrupt social inequalities. The former is typified by the Victims of Immigrant Crime Engagement (VOICE) hotline. VOICE was set up by Donald Trump to let people call in and report what they thought were crimes being committed by immigrants. Since no one knows anyone else’s immigration status from afar, this hotline was basically an opportunity to report people of color to ICE. At the same time, technologically mediated surveillance allows citizens to surveil the state and its agents when they engage in racist or discriminatory behavior. In fact, the deputization of surveillance in a technologically driven world opens up a natural path for resistance: mess with the tech. Instead of leaving SB 8’s reporting website to anti-abortion fanatics, someone created a bot that submitted false reports every 10 seconds, overloading the platform and undermining the entire reporting structure. A similar thing happened to VOICE.
Surveillance Deputies highlights underappreciated aspects of the deeply symbiotic relationships between technology and state power. The authors give many examples—some good, some bad, and some ugly—of surveillance deputization beyond SB 8. AMBER alerts engage communities to assist in searching for missing children. The Amazon Ring doorbell camera may be user-installed, and the associated Neighbors app gives individual customers the chance to upload videos of what they see as “suspicious” activity, but the state regularly accesses Neighbor app data. And, of course, there’s VOICE, a way to turn every person who doesn’t look like you, you’re scared of, or you don’t like into an alleged criminal.
But the litany of examples raises one lingering question: When are we as citizens not surveillance deputies? Our labor and economic resources power almost every tool that is data driven: Google Maps, social media, targeted advertisements, and more. As it functions today, much digital infrastructure would collapse if users stopped contributing their own labor (for free) to multibillion dollar technology companies. Perhaps it is time for our own brand of resistance.
