Secrets and Truths: Ethnography in the Archive of Romania's Secret Police

Conclusion: The Radiant Future?

213 The Radiant Future? The top-secret world the [US] government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. —Dana Priest and William M. Arkin, “Hidden World” These chapters have concerned a form of surveillance that spread from the Soviet Union into the East European states and was undermined by the collapse of that socio-political system known as “actually existing socialism.” We might therefore say that this book is “about history”: it deals with a type of society that no longer exists in that part of the world. While this may be so, it does not spell the end of surveillance, which is expanding at a great rate and in multiple forms in societies across the globe, including in Romania by the Securitate’s successor, the Romanian Information Service (SRI).1 These forms have numerous sources. For citizens of the US (but true more widely), an obvious one is Conclusion 214 the surveillance through which corporations seek to learn about our most intimate and detailed habits so as to manipulate us into buying their products. The “cookies” in our internet browsers that track our every move online are only one vehicle for it; “black boxes” in our automobile engines, which record numerous aspects of our driving habits, are another. A young cousin of mine had a job following customers who entered a Walmart department store; he was to take note of their every move.2 He might spend two hours following a single customer, noting when they hesitate, when they look at something and put it back on the shelf, how many seconds or minutes they spend looking at different products and visiting different departments , and so on. My cousin would attach himself to customers when they entered and stick with them until they left. Because in the US we do not imagine that we might be followed in a department store, there seems to be no wisdom about how to shake off such a “shadow,” nor are there procedures for my cousin to disguise himself to keep from being observed, as there are for the secret police officers assigned to shadow a target. My cousin’s notes strongly resemble the shadowing (filaj) reports in my Securitate file, except that what counts as an “observable” event for him is on a much more minute scale than was true for the Securitate. 215 Although most Walmart customers do not realize they are being watched, users of the internet have gradually become aware that their movements are being “mined” as data for more precise commercial targeting . They know they are watched, but they cannot avoid it without renouncing use of the internet altogether ; hence, one can say that they acquiesce in their surveillance semi-voluntarily. Similarly voluntary are the “smart” electronic textbooks (my favorite example ) that report to the professor on whether or not students are doing the reading. “You know it’s watching you,” they comment uneasily.3 To my mind the most remarkable form of surveillance —and the most seemingly different from the Securitate ’s—is the explosion of social networking sites, into which millions of people world-wide have voluntarily inserted themselves since the advent of Facebook in 2004. As of June 2013, Facebook had well over one billion registered users, or one in every seven people on the planet. Many other sites had started up as well. In the US it did not take long for prospective employers to begin making use of the Facebook pages of job applicants, so as to learn more about them. In February 2012 the New York Times reported that 70 percent of recruitment and Human Resources professionals in the US had rejected candidates based on data found online.4 The history department of a well-known US 216 university denied tenure to an assistant professor who had (stupidly) written disparaging comments on his Facebook page concerning his students; similar cases have been appearing with increased frequency.5 The New York Times ran a story about an Austrian citizen who asked for his Facebook file and received 1,222 pages of material he thought he had deleted from his account. He was quoted as saying, “It’s like a...