“I’ve got nothing to hide.” That’s the standard and popular apologia for the security state and it’s a declaration heard daily from those still willing to accept yet another small step backward for liberty. For a variety of reasons ranging from advancing technological opportunities to trumped-up colour-coded state agency fears of terrorists nee communists nee anarchists, modern Western post-industrialist states—forever suspicious of their constituencies and always escalating their surveillance of them with bureaucratic perseverance—have lately achieved new depths of vision into our lives. The Canadian Forces last week revealed that Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games security measures will include unmanned aerial drones equipped with high resolution cameras and possibly weapons, and concealed street-level cameras equipped with the latest in facial recognition software. (Think police are taking videos and photos at protests just for souvenirs? They’re stocking the facial recognition software data bank.)

Emails and phone calls throughout the US, the largest telecommunications companies have confirmed, have routinely been scanned, recorded and logged, the data stored on behalf of state surveillance agencies in computers at large buildings in several cities. US-based records management companies, including those involved with BC Medical Services and BC Hydro, are obliged by statutes in the USA Patriot Act (which neither Democratic presidential candidate has vowed to repeal) to turn over to state surveillance agencies any data on any individual requested, without any notification passing to the individual.

Examples of state and corporate—and increasingly state/corporate—intrusion into citizens’ private lives have increased exponentially in lock-step with increasing technological capacities of those agencies to collect, store, compare and build information. It is reasonable to ask, in light of the “I’ve got nothing to hide”-based public tolerance of this intrusion, why state and corporate bodies want to gather all this information in the first place. It seems at first a simple question, until one tries to answer it.

Corporations may only be interested in more effective marketing—not an intrinsically bad thing on the face of it. Certainly knowing more about their customers’ tastes and desires helps corporations better tailor their products and their delivery of them, something customers may benefit from themselves.

With modern social and psychological science, data processing reveals to corporations more about our behaviors and motivations than we ourselves could ever hope to know. It was 50 years ago when budding fast food chain restaurants learned through behavioral science that yellow and red in combination trigger our appetites. Consequently, most fast food restaurants incorporate yellow and red in their advertising, signage and interior and exterior designs. We are powerless to resist.

In the intervening 50 years, much more has been learned about what triggers our instincts to identify with products and to buy. A large proportion of corporate advertising today, for example, portrays us, their customers, as clumsy, stupid and insecure. It is personal behavioral data, gathered in large samples, and processed and studied in light of recent social and psychological science, that has determined that we become susceptible to authoritative commands when we’ve been labeled clumsy, stupid or insecure. Mean parents and teachers have long known it.

This knowledge and technique has hitherto been used only in large scale and general ways because the data on us has only been available on generalized levels and the technology for processing it and delivering its results has also only been available on general levels.

New technology now being deployed allows for far more specific reads of how we behave in particular individual ways to very refined and specific messages. It’s one thing for a corporation to improve sales by manipulating us all to a slight degree with yellow and red signage. It’s quite another when a corporation manipulates a specific individual to an intense degree with a specific stimulus derived from precise data gathered on that particular individual, especially when the stimulus and the involuntary response to it is not known to, or understood by, the individual.

When that same technology and those same methods migrate to political party technicians, bureaucratic state agencies and agents of law enforcement, as surely they have already, a reasonable person would be compelled to ask if there ought to be limits imposed on surveillance and data gathering beyond what one might or might not have to hide.

Take law enforcement agencies’ use of data gathering and surveillance techniques, for example. There is a long-lingering and widespread assumption, contradicted by the historical record in every jurisdiction in every era, that law enforcement agencies, at least in a nominally democratic and free country like Canada, are solely concerned with laws and law breakers, and that those laws are solely concerned with protection of life and property. In fact, like so much else in life, it’s never so clear as that. Property rights, for example, have forever been locked in a wrestling match with individual freedoms, the balance struck between them being a fluid matter determined by the shifting vagaries of history and political powers. Of course, laws against actions like murder will always be clear-cut. But laws determining how close to a political or corporate office may protestors approach who are engaged with policy questions determined by functionaries therein are not clear cut at all. Here, the state, generally more inclined to protect corporate (or its own) property rights than to extend individuals’ freedoms to disrupt the policy formulation processes of the corporate body or the state, may find it counterproductive to deploy the same agents used to capture murderers. Deploying instead the technology and methods long ago developed by marketing arms of corporations to affect individuals’ behaviors has proven more effective in the advance of property rights over individual freedoms. And so, friendly scribes in the media, for example, are encouraged to infantalize protestors in the press and authoritative police spokespeople appear on TV as fathers running out of patience with recalcitrant children, and so on.

These methods correspond to the level of generalized manipulation that marketing arms of corporations developed half a century ago. Today, on the other hand, these same state agents of law enforcement have acquired the new technology and methods of corporations that produce highly refined and specific behavior in specific individuals. One may or may not consider one’s political thoughts regarding the balance between property rights and individual freedoms something to hide. One may also ask, as one might when encountering a yellow and red restaurant and wonder if the hunger is real, if the thought is real.

State agencies beyond law enforcement are routinely engaged in attempts to modify mass behavior for a variety of reasons that include making the mandated delivery of services more effective and cheaper, or to shift demand for services to the private sector. Some of these attempts are benign. It would, for example, save publicly-funded health care services billions if only the state could somehow manipulate everyone into never smoking cigarettes. Driving while drunk, though still a problem, has been vastly reduced by a long-running campaign to instill the act in the minds of upcoming generations as a taboo.

Some of the aims of these state agencies may not be viewed as so benign by everybody. It would be of benefit to the state as well as to a wide range of corporations, for example, to manipulate everyone into seeking only state-licensed doctor-dispensed pharmaceutical products for all adverse conditions of being, including ordinary temporary depression or sadness. Certainly it helps the economy if employee absentee days due to sadness declines, however normal and necessary it might be for humans to feel sad and want to stay home once in a while. Modern drugs offer a cheap remedy to lost work days.

Technologies and methods now available allow state agencies to manipulate individuals directly in specific ways that are unknown to the individual to serve these and a myriad of other purposes favourable to state and corporate power. These technologies and methods rely entirely on the capacity of computers to gather and build information on us as individuals. These methods can no more be resisted than yellow and red can be by visitors to fast food restaurants and not even awareness of these technologies and methods offer any immunity to them.

We cannot help but be slaves to our involuntary responses to stimuli—that’s why they’re called involuntary. Those who gather intimate and detailed knowledge of how these systems work, combined with data describing our individual behavior and our specific responses to specific stimuli, would have—indeed, do have—power far beyond, 50 years beyond, the ability to merely sell us more hamburgers and french fries than we might consider desirable if left alone to willfully choose.

Indeed, one of the political choices we have been acceding to en masse lately through these very processes of state manipulation has been to meekly accept steeply increased levels of state surveillance and data gathering on us as individuals. Against this backdrop, it becomes absurd for anyone to defend these processes with the apologia that he “has nothing to hide,” as though all the state and its various agencies and clients throughout the corporate world are solely and forever interested only in simple crime prevention. The question is not whether one has something to hide or not, it’s whether one has everything to hide or not.