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CHAPTER THREE PUBLIC EYES: SATELLITE IMAGERY, THE GLOBALIZATION OF TRANSPARENCY, AND NEW NETWORKS OF SURVEILLANCE KAREN T. LITFIN TECHNOLOGY, POWER, AND WORLD POLITICS The impact of technological change on international politics occurs in two analytically distinct ways. From an instrumental perspective, new technologies can empower or disempower social actors—states, groups, classes, and institutions. On a more fundamental, but perhaps less visible level, technologies can inf luence the self-understandings and identities of social actors and perhaps even the very nature of power itself. Both sorts of arguments, instrumental and constitutive , have been made in a generalized fashion with respect to information technologies. James Rosenau’s Turbulence in World Politics, claiming that the diffusion of information technologies has enhanced the competence of citizens and undercut the authority of states, is perhaps the most articulate example of the former sort of argument. The familiar claim that emerging forms of informationbased power are supplanting material forms of power is an example of the second sort of argument (Poster 1984). In the field of international relations, the second kind of argument is most commonly grafted onto the first. For instance, the allegedly horizontal nature of information-based power has been cited as a driving force that undercut the authority of Soviet Union’s centralized state apparatus (Robinson 1995). In a similar vein, Ronald Deibert (1997) argues that the diffusion of hypermedia, or new digital communications technologies, fosters a social epistemology favoring nonterritorial institutions and fragmented identities over the nation-state. Similarly, Deibert’s essay in this volume demonstrates some of the ways in which the Internet is precipitating a conceptual shift regarding security. 65 This chapter combines both of these approaches in order to make four interrelated arguments with respect to satellite imagery and the globalization of transparency . First, nonstate actors (firms, IOs and NGOs) are increasingly important as both suppliers and users of satellite imagery. This finding is significant in light of the fact that satellite remote sensing technologies are perhaps the most statecentric information technologies, being firmly rooted in the military and space agencies of the former superpowers. Second, the social and political impact of imaging satellites can occur through the operation of disciplinary power. In other words, an awareness that one’s actions can be observed leads to the internalization of the gaze of the other. Third, the circulation of disciplinary power can open up new possibilities for perceptions of common security and even some elements of collective identity formation—the ironic outcome with respect to space espionage during the Cold War. Whether this is a likely consequence of the global diffusion of commercial spy-quality satellite data is explored in the third section of this paper. Finally, when mapped onto the first argument, the second and third arguments suggest that the empowerment of NGOs by information technologies may simultaneously open up new channels for collective identity formation even as it reinforces the circulation of disciplinary power. This line of thinking is explored in the final section of the paper not only with respect to military issues, but also to environmental and humanitarian applications of satellite imagery. Consistent with J. P. Singh’s introduction to this book, the diffusion of remote sensing satellite technologies has generated important shifts in two dimensions of power: instrumental and constitutive (or meta-power, as he calls it). Imaging satellites offer an excellent case for studying some of the sociopolitical dynamics associated with the so-called information revolution. Like a number of other information technologies, most obviously computers and the Internet, imaging satellites were originally developed for military purposes and eventually deployed for civilian purposes by civilian agencies and, more recently, by the private commercial sector. Contemporary applications include the monitoring of such diverse processes as agricultural productivity, refugee migration and settlement , environmental degradation, weapons testing and troop deployments, and the spread of vector-borne diseases. Unlike information technologies which lend themselves to decentralization (i.e., personal computers, fax machines, video cameras , and the Internet), remote-sensing satellites offer a less likely case for testing the proposition that information technologies tend to empower nonstate actors. Not only does it require enormous capital investment to launch and operate an imaging satellite, but those states which have traditionally operated spy satellites have been highly protective of their privileged access to “national technical means.” This chapter argues that the political history of remote-sensing satellites elucidates both of the ways in which technological change can alter international reality: instrumentally and constitutively. 66 INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND GLOBAL POLITICS [52...

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