Aspiring to modernize: Current trends in state surveillance in Portugal

Abstract

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 and biometric data about its citizens. In this chapter we analyse the 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 2020).