Who's Watching You?
by Jen Anne Becker
Whistleblowers. Drones. Surveillance. These terms float in and out of news headlines with names like Reality Winner, Julian Assange, John Walker Lindh, Chelsea Manning, and Eric Snowden hovering over them. Who and what does surveillance really involve? Is it something the average person – the average college student – needs to be attentive to? These are questions author and UI assistant professor Kerry Howley seeks to explore in her forthcoming book, Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs.
On the evening of November 1, 2019, Kerry Howley opened Witching Hour weekend by reading an excerpt from her book-in-progress, and then holding an open conversation and Q&A with Rachel Yoder, colleague and friend of Howley’s. If you’re like Howley, Yoder, or myself, you know surveillance happens, but gloss over it thinking it doesn’t really concern you. Maybe it really doesn’t, but what if it does? Howley opened with an anecdote about a 25-year-old woman spying on Pakistani families via drone for the US government, the same woman — monitored herself — was required to keep state secrets she felt she had no business keeping. This woman was Reality Winner, who worked as a Crypto-linguist for the NSA’s drone program, and was among the first whistleblowers within the Trump administration. She leaked a vital document to news publication The Intercept that proved Russians interfered with the 2016 presidential election, and Winner is now in prison for releasing information she was supposed to keep secret.
While Howley’s book is not just about Reality Winner, it discusses surveillance and other whistleblowers who, like Reality Winner, live life guided by a similar operating system (OS); they follow a particular moral code and live staunchly according to its internal rules, no matter how crazy, unrealistic, or absurd they may seem to others. To help her audience better visualize this concept, Howley shared a viral video called “Bottoms Up, and the Devil Laughs” from 2014 about a woman who convincingly proclaimed that Monster energy drinks were the work of Satan. Howley explained that the Monster energy drink lady represents the confidence and clarity of vision required for a person to be able to speak out, even if that vision isn’t entirely correct. Howley specified, “It really takes a particular kind of personality to be the one in the NSA, to be Snowden, to be Chelsea Manning, to say I’m going to be the person who doesn’t go along with this.”
Surveillance is such an abstract and invisible force that it’s difficult to define exactly what it is. Yoder, however, asked Howley to provide attendees with a “crash course” in how she defines surveillance. Howley started by saying some of it looks like radio waves, “like invisible pieces of fettuccini that are bouncing off of us all the time.” She explained our cell phones communicate with towers, and from those towers, millions of radio waves are searching for everyone else’s cell phones. In addition to the radio waves, there are hidden underground wires to connect all of the communication networks together.
Massive infrastructures are also being built to collect and store surveillance data. Most recently the NSA built a data center in Utah with a price tag of $2 billion. It includes nine buildings, each the size of a city block, containing numerous racks of limitless servers, a colossal 12 exabytes of space storing love letters and financial documents and health records and everything else the NSA is soaking up. Wrap your mind around this. One exabyte is equivalent to one billion gigabytes. As Howley interpreted, it only takes three exabytes of storage to hold all human knowledge from the beginning of the written word through the year 2003. Yet, these servers are equipped with 12 exabytes of storage space. (For a visual representation of similar massive infrastructures, see Trevor Paglen’s photos, printed in The Intercept, in his attempt to define what surveillance looks like.)
Drones are often used to acquire information stored in these data centers. Howley remarked that she once believed the most troubling thing about drones was how they transformed combat into a video game. They remove the element of danger from the act of killing, introducing space between target and assassin. Drone pilots don’t have to directly see the impact of what they are doing. Crypto-linguists like Reality Winner help make drone attacks possible by translating communications acquired by drone video feeds to aid drone operators in knowing who to target. She would watch feed of the same man in Pakistan leave the same house and return again, becoming intimately familiar with the patterns of his day. But they knew she was watching. People in Pakistan knew they were being surveilled. Data collection of this magnitude, gathering every little detail, leads to the incredible incompetency of our current surveillance system.
Howley related this idea to cloud storage so commonly used today. She referred to a trip she’d taken with friends several years ago, back when typical phone storage was very limited, so taking selfies and storing pictures was also very limited. For every new picture she wanted to take, she’d have to delete three other pictures. Now, phones have much greater storage capacity, and everything gets kept in the Cloud. This, in itself, can create anxiety because that storage space becomes paralyzing. Everything’s up there and it’s not organized, so you take a new picture. “That is essentially the US government’s attitude toward collecting information,” Howley explained. “Everything gets sucked up.” Any potentially useful information is nearly indistinguishable from the flood of data that has to be translated.
Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs does not yet have a publication date, but as Yoder stated, when it does come out, it will provide the public with concrete ways of talking about and understanding surveillance. “I’m always so surprised when I read [Howley’s] perspective on things,” Yoder remarked, “because it forces me out of this really kind of stayed way of looking at the world. All of the narratives that I’ve been lulled into by America, I have to confront when reading Kerry’s work.”