Aspiring to modernization: historical evolution and current trends of state surveillance in Portugal

[Excerpt] Introduction In various countries throughout the world, the bureaucratic development of the modern states has been accompanied by the creation of identification systems whose purpose is to collect, store and manage personal data about its citizens. In this chapter we analyse the relatively long and uninterrupted history of the state’s collection of personal identification data in Portugal in diverse modalities: from the early attempts at the beginning of the twentieth century to identify and classify criminal male population by using anthropometry methods, to the successive attempts to expand fingerprint databases for civil and criminal purposes to all populations, to the more recent establishment of a national DNA database for criminal and civil forensic identification and the intention of implementing CCTV (closed-circuit television) in open areas on a national scale. The comprehensive analysis of these processes in the Portuguese context is especially relevant due mainly to the fact that, on the one hand, we are considering a country with a long history of a political dictatorship in the twentieth century (1928-1974) characterized by political and police repression and censorship and, on the other hand, a newly democratic state divided between the quest for modernization and uniformity by following the paths of surveillance implemented in other European countries (considered to be more advanced) while at the same time struggling with its own cultural and social specificities marked by scarce economic resources and low criminality rates. From our point of view, it is intriguing that Portugal has a long and social history of citizens’ apparently passive compliance with the state’s requirements of collecting diverse sorts of personal identification data and, at the same time, both national and international studies suggest that public confidence in the state, the police and the justice system is weak in European terms (Cabral et al. 2003). In fact, this is one of the countries in which the majority of respondents consider that the institutions that are most affected by corruption in the country are politics, business, the police and the judiciary (Transparency International 2011). We explore possible explanations for this phenomenon of a combination of low confidence in the state and in the criminal justice system with the absence of a public outcry over the state’s mechanism of surveillance of its citizens. To do so, we develop a comprehensive approach to the phenomenon of public distrust of the state in the context of surveillance for civil and criminal purposes based on different methodologies in multi-sited research, such as the analysis of the historical evolution of legal regulation pertaining to identification systems for civil and criminal investigation – databases containing fingerprints, criminal records and DNA profiles, or the use, since 2007, of CCTV in open areas. Our main goal in this chapter is to give an account of the most significant transformations that have occurred in Portugal since about the mid-twentieth century, showing how the indelible mark of an authoritarian legacy of dictatorship continues to produce effects on Portuguese life up until today, particularly in two major spheres: first, at the cultural level of mentalities; and second, at the political level in terms of political party dynamics and institutional relations. Fully understanding the process of developing state surveillance mechanisms in Portugal – from video surveillance, to the mandatory request that all citizens carry an identification card and provide their fingerprints for civil purposes, to plans to develop a forensic genetic database with profiles of the entire population – requires paying close attention to this country’s recent history, particularly the period extending from the mid-1970s up until the present. Besides allowing one to confirm the recurrence of the modernization discourse, this helps to highlight yet another significant aspect that is directly linked to the legacy of nearly four decades of political dictatorship. We begin by describing the early steps in creating a modern criminal identification system that occurred at the beginning of the twentieth century. We then go on to consider a range of issues that have arisen for the understanding of surveillance, not only during the long period of dictatorship – Estado Novo (1933-1974) – but also in the present day. Later, we provide a contemporary overview of state surveillance in Portugal that assumes the relevance of historic events towards understanding current developments. Although it may seem controversial to feed our interpretation of the current situation through past events, the aspiration to provide a clear reading of the country’s recent history must start with recognizing not just that such an aim is ambitious, but also that however objective or circumscribed its conclusions strive to be, they can never attain a character of finality.[...