Capillaries of empire: Colonial pacification and the origins of US global surveillance

Abstract

By inserting the current controversy over global surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) into a deeper historical context, we can trace the origins of U.S. internal security back to America’s emergence as a global power after 1898. While U.S. pacification campaigns in the Philippines circa 1900 or Afghanistan since 2001 have skirted defeat if not disaster, the information infrastructure for the U.S. exercise of global power, as if driven by some inbuilt engineering, has advanced to ever-higher levels of data management and coercive capacity. With costs for conventional military occupations now becoming prohibitive, the U.S. will likely deploy, circa 2020, an evolving robotic information regime-with a triple-canopy aerospace shield, advanced cyberwarfare, and digital surveillance-to envelop the earth in an electronic grid of unprecedented pervasiveness for the exercise of global power. From the first hours of U.S. colonial conquest in August 1898, the Phi-lippines served as the site of a social experiment in the use of police as an instrument of state power. In the decade that followed, the U.S. Army plunged into a crucible of counterinsurgency, forming its first field intelligence unit that combined voracious data gathering with rapid dissemination of tactical intelligence. At this periphery of empire, freed from the constraints of courts, constitution, and civil society, the U.S. imperial regime fused new technologies, the product of America’s first information revolution, to fashion what was arguably the world’s first full surveillance state. A decade later during World War I, these illiberal lessons percolatedhomeward through the invisible capillaries of empire to foster the country’s first domestic security service, organized by a small cadre of Philippine veterans. America’s experimentation with policing at this periphery of its global power was thus seminal in the formation of a U.S. internal security apparatus for extensive domestic surveillance (McCoy, 2009b: 106-115). Over the past century, this same process has recurred, with striking simila-rities, as more recent U.S. pacification campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq have dragged on for a decade or more, skirting defeat if not disaster. During each of these attempts to subjugate a dense Asian rural society, the U.S. military has been pushed to the breaking point and responded by drawing together all extant information resources, fusing them into an infrastructureof unprecedented power, and creating thereby innovative systems for both domestic surveillance and global control. These campaigns have also proved seminal in fostering a distinctive U.S. imperial epistemology that privileges extrinsic, quantifiable data over deep cultural knowledge. Probing the colonial origins of contemporary surveillance adds analyticaldepth to current events, particularly Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA. Indeed, the salience, and significance, of recent surveillance practices explored in this chapter can only be fully understood via an approach that contextualizes their historical unfolding within the changing character of U.S. imperial controls. Thus, understanding the reliance of colonial police on political scandal as a control mechanism circa 1900 offers insight into the logic of current NSA surveillance of allied leaders worldwide.