Surveillance Publics After Edward Snowden

Abstract

In May 2013, Edward Snowden leaked to The Guardian commodification of personal details of global digital surveillance programs orchestrated by intelligence agencies in the USA and United Kingdom. By making public the existence of PRISM, XKeyScore, Boundless Informant, and other programs, Snowden did more than prove the breadth and pervasiveness of intelligence operations. His act gave radically distinct form to social bodies known, defined, and constituted by their very monitoring: surveillance publics. To date, surveillance studies has tended to focus analysis on the technical aspects of surveillances, its effects at a societal level, or the operation of complex, multi-layered “surveillant assemblages” (Haggerty and Ericson, British Journal of Sociology 51(4): 605–622, 2000) formed by the practices state and non-state actors. Taking up threads from each of these approaches, this chapter maps the vectors of state surveillance and traces their complex fields of relations to everyday life. Manuel DeLanda’s (A new philosophy of society: Assemblage theory and social complexity. London: Continuum, 2006) social assemblage theory provides the framework for understanding state surveillance and its relationship to individuals, while Brian Massumi’s (2012) work on the ontology of events offers an understanding of Snowden’s making public as not simply a discursive act but the assembling of new relations, affects, and forces. Linking everyday practices of individuals and collectives to the processes of leaked surveillance programs, this essay asks how publics might be understood once the secrets of their near-ubiquitous surveillance are made known.