Surveillance and the Tyrant Test

ARTICLES

Surveillance and the Tyrant Test

ANDREW GUTHRIE FERGUSON*

How should society respond to police surveillance technologies? This

question has been at the center of national debates around facial recog-

nition, predictive policing, and digital tracking technologies. It is a

debate that has divided activists, law enforcement off‌icials, and academ-

ics and will be a central question for years to come as police surveillance

technology grows in scale and scope. Do you trust police to use the tech-

nology without regulation? Do you ban surveillance technology as a

manifestation of discriminatory carceral power that cannot be reformed?

Can you regulate police surveillance with a combination of technocratic

rules, policies, audits, and legal reforms? This Article explores the taxon-

omy of past approaches to policing technologies and—f‌inding them all

lacking—offers the “tyrant test” as an alternative.

The tyrant test focuses on power. Because surveillance technology

offers government a new power to monitor and control citizens, the

response must check that power. The question is how, and the answer is

to assume the worst. Power will be abused, and constraints must work

backwards from that cynical starting point. The tyrant test requires insti-

tutional checks that decenter government power into overlapping com-

munity institutions with real authority and enforceable individual rights.

The tyrant test borrows its structure from an existing legal framework

also designed to address the rise of a potentially tyrannical power—the

U.S. Constitution and, more specif‌ically, the Fourth Amendment. Fearful

of a centralized federal government with privacy invading intentions, the

Fourth Amendment—as metaphor and methodology—offers a guide to

approaching surveillance; it allows some technologies but only within a

self-reinforcing system of structural checks and balances with power

centered in opposition to government. The fear of tyrannical power moti-

vated the original Fourth Amendment and still offers lessons for how

society should address the growth of powerful, new surveillance

technologies.

* Professor of Law, American University Washington College of Law. © 2021, Andrew Guthrie

Ferguson. Thank you to the commentators at the 2021 Privacy Law Scholars Conference and to my co-

panelists at the Association of American Law Schools Conference panel on Deep Surveillance. Thank

you to commentators at the inaugural meeting of the Columbia University Sociology of Algorithms

Workshop.

205

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 208

I. THE TRUST LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

A. WHY DEFAULT TO TRUST? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214

1. Tradition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

2. Professionalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216

3. Tactical Secrecy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

4. Capacity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218

5. Political Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

6. Procurement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219

B. RESULTS OF A TRUST-BASED APPROACH TO SURVEILLANCE . . . . . . . 220

1. Los Angeles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221

2. Chicago. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224

C. WHY TRUST IS INADEQUATE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

D. CONCLUSION ON THE TRUST LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

II. THE TRAP LENS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230

A. WHY SURVEILLANCE IS A TRAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231

B. THE RESULTS OF THE TRAP LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

1. Public Mobilization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234

2. Corporate Self-Restraint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

3. Theoretical Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236

C. WHERE THE TRAP TEST FALTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240

D. CONCLUSION ON THE TRAP LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

III. THE TECHNOCRATIC LENS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 246

A. WHY REGULATE?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

1. Democratic Accountability . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247

2. Foreseeable Errors. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249

206 THE GEORGETOWN LAW JOURNAL [Vol. 110:205

B. RESULTS OF A TECHNOCRATIC LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

1. Legislative Responses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 250

2. Community Oversight Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253

3. Independent Audits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

4. Academic Response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258

C. LIMITATIONS ON THE TECHNOCRATIC LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259

D. CONCLUSION ON THE TECHNOCRATIC LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

IV. THE TYRANT LENS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 262

A. WHY A FOURTH AMENDMENT FRAMEWORK? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

1. Tyranny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

2. Surveillance Power . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266

3. Race and Tyranny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268

4. A Tyranny Paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

B. THE TYRANT TEST. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270

1. Structural Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

a. Legislative Checks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272

b. Executive Branch Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

c. Judicial Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273

d. Rights-Based Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

e. Local Participatory Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

f. Equal Protection Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282

g. Systemic Checks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283

2. Substantive Limitations on Surveillance Power . . . . . . . . 283

a. Papers and Tyranny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284

b. Data and Tyranny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287

C. LIMITS ON THE TYRANT TEST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288

2021] SURVEILLANCE AND THE TYRANT TEST 207