The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, from Slave Passes to the Patriot Act (review)

While there is a growing literature on surveillance, relatively little has been written on the history of surveillance. Christian Parenti's work, however imperfect, is therefore welcome. But that imperfection is apparent from the start, as Parenti chooses to begin his historical exposition in antebellum America, without so much as a reference to the available work on surveillance practices in colonial days. This oversight becomes a bit more understandable upon realization that the book is arranged topically rather than chronologically, contrary to initial impression. In the absence of a more sophisticated analytical framework (references to Foucault and the panopticon notwithstanding), though, this lends the book a bit of a scattershot quality.

The discussion of slave documents leads into coverage of techniques adapted to or explicitly designed for identification—photography, Bertillonage (a system of body measurement), and dactyloscopy (fingerprinting)—and their application to law enforcement and immigration control, including early efforts at universal fingerprinting. This is followed by discussions of surveillance in support of commerce, electronic and otherwise, with a particularly interesting description of nineteenth-century credit reporting and rating services. Next come reviews of the expansion of video surveillance and travel-related surveillance technologies, including electronic toll-payment systems and automobile data recorders. The following chapter examines workplace surveillance through the lens of Taylorism, after which comes an interesting discussion of surveillance as an integral facet of social welfare. Modern law enforcement is treated in the next chapter, followed by observations on voyeurism and home surveillance, with particular (and somewhat entertaining) invective expended on the topic of "reality television."

The concept invoked to interpret all this is social control, both of the population generally and of suspect subpopulations in particular—ethnic and racial minorities, the underprivileged, labor. However, while social control is frequently either a direct or indirect goal of surveillance, it is not by definition an illegitimate one, nor is it the only possible goal. While he hints at these complexities, Parenti avoids seriously grappling with them.

Assuming one agrees that the United States, or any other country for that matter, has the right and need to exercise some control over its borders, how much personal information is or should be required for such purposes? How can we guard against abuse? How much organizational intrusiveness is justifiable before the rights and well-being of employees take precedence? How much invasiveness should be tolerated from the "helping professions" in order to genuinely assist people, as even Parenti's sources admit those professions occasionally manage to do? How and where does one draw the line? Here lies the real issue, yet it remains largely unaddressed. The Soft Cage is also marred by numerous textual errors, including apparently missing words. There is at least one substantive error as well, Parenti's implication that Web browser cookies themselves actively and surreptitiously gather information, when in fact they simply store information.

Excessive surveillance, and thus excessive social control, Parenti concludes, is bad because it strangles the ability of both individuals and society to resist immoral laws and other attempts at repression. Fair enough. But again, one comes away feeling dissatisfied less by what has been said than by what has been left unsaid. Personal dignity, the formation of independent opinion, smoothed social relations—these are just some of a range of things that excessive, misguided, and misused surveillance puts at risk. By the same token, surveillance can serve legitimate functions related to security, efficiency, and well-being—up to a point. How we define and maintain that point is one of the most pressing public policy questions of our day. While The Soft Cage does little to directly assist us in answering it, it does provide some useful and necessary historical context for the discussion.