by HUMA YUSUF
The government installs a ‘web management system’. Unidentified men whisk away a YouTuber who posts satirical content. A fashion designer threatens legal action against the director and cast of a TV serial. A legislator objects to a female professional’s outfit and calls for SOPs for women’s attire. These may seem like disconnected matters. But they are signs that a surveillance society is becoming entrenched in Pakistan, an outcome we must resist.
Anxieties about surveillance have been mounting globally and are largely linked to ‘surveillance capitalism’, ie, the commodification of personal data, particularly by Big Tech. There is a growing focus on the extent to which individuals are aware of what personal data they are surrendering, to whom, and why.
Concerns about surveillance capitalism mounted when it became clear that customer data collection was enabling not only targeted advertising and improved user experience but also behavioural manipulation, for example, by skewing voting preferences. The regulation of Big Tech and its use of personal data will soon be a key human rights battle.
In this context, old-fashioned state surveillance — in the sense of the state collecting information about its citizens — seems passé. But it continues to be a major concern globally, and certainly in Pakistan.
In an article for Constitutional Political Economy, Alshamy et al argue that state surveillance can either be protective-productive or predatory. In the former case, the state collects personal information to support citizens and improve welfare service delivery. In the latter, state data collection “reduces citizen welfare by violating the rights of citizens or by extracting resources from citizens to benefit a small group of politically connected elites. This harms individual agency, freedom and self-governing democracy.”
The authors note that predatory data collection is non-transparent, poorly legislated and regulated, and often in the service of nebulous national security considerations that can be interpreted variously by whichever stakeholder has most power. In this scenario, the courts become helpless to challenge surveillance, as they too become subsumed by the state narrative. The plight of missing persons in Pakistan is the perfect illustration of a predatory surveillance state in action.
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