bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Watching the Watchers and McLuhan's Tetrad: The Limits of Cop-Watching in the Internet Age
Authors: Schaefer Brian P , Steinmetz Kevin F
Published: July 2018

Video-taping police actions as a form of political activism—also known as “cop watching”—has been an activity which has garnered much scrutiny and media attention in recent years. Many hold the idea of cop watching as a realization of the democratic potential promised to us by the Internet. Primarily drawing from the theoretical lens provided by Marshall McLuhan, however, this essay argues that the medium is the message or, rather, the use of video clips shared through the internet may actually neutralize to some extent the political potential of this form of activism in many ways. As such, caution is warranted in over-emphasizing the power that video-activism may bring in halting or at least drawing attention to acts of police brutality and corruption.
“It Depends on Who You Are, What You Are”: ‘Community Safety’ and Sex Workers’ Experience with Surveillance
Authors: Wright Jordana , Heynen Robert , Van der Meulen Emily
Published: July 2018

Community safety has complex connotations for sex workers. This complexity is, in part, a function of the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the positioning of sex workers as both at-risk and risky, victims and criminals. ‘Community’ is simultaneously inclusive of everyone, including sex workers, and that which needs to be defended against the perceived dangers posed by sex work and sex workers. Denied in these contexts is any sense that harm may indeed flow from community to sex workers, not just the reverse. Drawing on data from a study with a diversity of sex working women in Toronto, Canada, this article argues that these contradictions are not the product of confusion, but in fact are constitutive of the ways in which communities are rhetorically and materially formed. They have structured legislative responses to sex work, reflect normative conceptions of community, bodies, and public space, and have actively produced unsafe and insecure conditions for sex workers. Indeed, sex workers themselves consistently identify the contradictory nature of ideas of community and the harm that flows from them. This is strongly evident in one of the key ways in which projects for ‘community safety’ are currently implemented, namely the installation of Closed Circuit Television Cameras (CCTV).
The Snowden Stakes: Challenges for Understanding Surveillance Today
Authors: Lyon David
Published: July 2018

The drip-feed disclosures about state surveillance following Edward Snowden’s dramatic departure from his NSA contractor, Booz Allen, carrying over one million revealing files, have ired some and prompted some serious heart-searching in others.  One of the challenges is to those who engage in surveillance studies. Three kinds of issues present themselves: One, research disregard: responses to the revelations show a surprising lack of understanding of the large-scale multi-faceted panoply of surveillance that has been constructed over the past 40 years or so that includes but is far from exhausted by state surveillance itself. Two, research deficits: we find that a number of crucial areas require much more research. These include the role of physical conduits including fibre-optic cables within circuits or power, of global networks of security and intelligence professionals, and of the minutiae of everyday social media practices. Three, research direction: the kinds of surveillance that have developed over several decades are heavily dependent on the digital – and, increasingly, on so-called big data -- but also extend beyond it. However, if there is a key issue raised by the Snowden revelations, it is the future of the internet. Information and its central conduits have become an unprecedented arena of political struggle, centred on surveillance and privacy. Those concepts themselves require rethinking.
Notes Toward a Meteorology of the Cloud
Authors: Vredenburg Elliot
Published: July 2018

The premise of detailed forecasts is meteorological observation. An ominous cloud has eclipsed the global horizon of neoliberal capitalist realism. Researching cloud formations, I queried Google with the search term “clouds.” However, when using the term “cloud,” I only received results about server-based computing. Thus the cloud is singular, not plural: 100% cloud cover, blanketing the sky with grey. This is not a marketing-friendly cumulus cloud, but rather a dark, sheetlike formation—what meteorologists call a pallium. Whereas curative approaches require consideration and cogitation—care—what the pallium offers instead is palliation; alleviation of symptoms without any real remedy. In accordance with the techno-utopian walled garden, opposing or divergent views are eradicated under the pallium, leaving us with an AstroTurfed landscape that is paralyzing in its uniformity. Luke Howard’s categories of tropospheric clouds parallel the multifarious manifestations of the contemporary cloud: in commercial data collection for targeted marketing, as well as in government surveillance for preemptive law enforcement. A digital meteorology of these formations—the benign cumuliform, appearing in the logos of corporate cloud-computing services; the grey, ominous stratiform; and the striated, interstellar cirriform—must be considered, in order to predict and prepare for the imminent approach of the panoptic pharmakon of the pallium, as it arrives under the guise of a swarm of cutesy cumulus clouds. Drawing from studies of panopticism, contemporary marketing practices, and the effluence tapped by Edward Snowden, this essay deploys hydrous analogies to forecast whether anything but AstroTurf can survive in the current climate.
Criminal Investigation Through the Eye of the Detective: Technological Innovation and Tradition
Authors: Miranda Diana
Published: July 2018

Technological elements and scientific knowledge are steadily transforming both the traditional image of the detective and the nature of contemporary police work. However, despite the potential utility of scientific methods and new technologies in criminal investigations, there are many barriers surrounding their application. We explore these barriers through a qualitative and comprehensive methodology, utilising a set of semi-structured interviews and informal conversations with criminal investigators.We use theoretical contributions from social studies of science and technology, surveillance studies and policing research to analyse how soft and hard forms of surveillance are applied in the practices of the Portuguese Criminal Investigation Police (Polícia Judiciária). The technological artefacts are both shaped by and shape how criminal investigators work. Consequently, it is necessary to explore how the collectives of human and non-human elements are constituted. By analysing the fusion of traditional methods of criminal investigation (hard surveillance) with new technologies of collection and use of information (soft surveillance) we see a hybrid figure of the contemporary detective emerging; a product of both the past and the present. In a context where innovation is sometimes constrained, traditional methods continue to endure. Nevertheless, the expansion of computerisation and police databases has had significant impact on how police information is collected and recorded.
Policing Made Visible: Mobile Technologies and the Importance of Point of View
Authors: Brucato Ben
Published: July 2018

Cameras are ubiquitous and increasingly mobile. While CCTV has captured considerable attention by surveillance researchers, the new visibility of police activities is increasingly produced by incidental sousveillance and wearable on-officer camera systems. This article considers advocacy for policing’s new visibility, contrasting that of police accountability activists who film police with designers and early adopters of on-officer cameras. In both accounts, these devices promise accountability by virtue of their mechanical objectivity. However, to each party, accountability functions rather differently. By attending to the social and legal privileging of police officers’ perspectives, the article provides an explanation for design decisions that produced Taser’s AXON Flex on-officer cameras and for why police are embracing these new technologies. Critics of these cameras cite privacy concerns, officer discretion in operating cameras, and department disclosure of footage. Nonetheless, advocates of police accountability often presume more video documenting police use of force is always helpful. However, the utility of surveillance video is conditioned by point of view. Police agencies in the U.S. are rapidly adopting on-officer camera systems, because they acknowledge ubiquitous surveillance and that these devices aid in nullifying third-party documentation in favor of a perspective that favors officers. As such, these cameras are counter-sousveillance technologies.
Inauthentically Intense: Coveillance and Consumer Culture among Speedsurfers
Authors: Palmås Karl
Published: July 2018

This article presents material from a small-scale ethnographic study of a community of windsurfers that use GPS (Global Positioning System) technology to monitor and share their performance online. Following recent debates within Surveillance Studies, these practices are categorised as a form of coveillance. The argument explores the subjectivity produced by the introduction of GPS technology and social media usage in the context of windsurfers. Suggesting that this form of coveillance is yielding a particular consumer culture among its members, the article explores how the GPS-social-media assemblage boosts the desire to consume.
Camera-friendly Policing: How the Police Respond to Cameras and Photographers
Authors: Sandhu Ajay
Published: July 2018

How do police respond to the presence of cameras and photographers? Many speculative theories have been proposed offering mixed and sometimes contradictory answers to this question. Some theories propose that cameras will deter police misconduct, others suggest that cameras might improve police accountability, others suggest that police might respond to cameras by engaging in a risk-averse style of policing. Unfortunately, little empirical data is available to assess these theories. Drawing on data from a participant-observation research study conducted in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, this paper helps fill this gap in research and argues that police might be learning to adapt to cameras by engaging in what I call camera-friendly policing. This style of policing involves efforts to control how the police are perceived by photographers, and how they will be perceived by viewers of any recorded footage. In this paper, I outline the basic elements of the police’s camera-friendly tactics, and discuss the implications of these tactics for contemporary understandings of police visibility.
Debate Introduction: The Privacy and Surveillance Implications of Police Body Cameras
Authors: Lippert Randy K. , Newell Bryce Clayton
Published: July 2018

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Dreams of Accountability, Guaranteed Surveillance: The Promises and Costs of Body-Worn Cameras
Authors: Mateescu Alexandra , Rosenblat Alex , Boyd Danah
Published: July 2018

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Performing Imperceptibility: Google Street View and the Tableau Vivant
Authors: Ingraham Chris , Rowland Allison
Published: July 2018

When Google introduced its Street View technology in 2007, by taking panoramic photographs of ordinary street scenes around the globe, it brought us one step closer to the dystopian reality of universal surveillance. In response to Google's roving camera, some people have staged street-side performances in hopes of being photographed and uploaded online. We think of these performances as contemporary iterations of the historical performance genre known as the tableau vivant: “living images” that resist biopolitical control by “performing imperceptibility.” Drawing upon Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic ethics and Jon McKenzie’s general theory of performance, we argue that the tableau vivant staged for Street View cameras subvert the dividuation of control societies by affirming, through their affective intensity, the possibility of enduring as a subject.
Wheels in the Head: Ridesharing as Monitored Performance
Authors: Anderson Donald Nathan
Published: July 2018

Ridesharing services offer on-demand rides much like taxicabs, but distinguish themselves from cabs by emphasizing the friendly, social aspect of the in-car interaction. Crucial to the ability of these companies to distinguish themselves from cabs has been the insertion of smartphones as “social interfaces” between drivers and passengers, restructuring social interaction through an allegorithm the productive co-deployment of a socially relevant allegorical script and a software-mediated algorithm). Much of the affective labor of ridesharing drivers consists in maintaining this affective framing and internalizing the logic by which their performances are monitored. In this article the writings of three ridesharing drivers will be drawn on to illustrate the ways drivers develop and evaluate their own performances as ridesharing drivers.Ridesharing services offer on-demand rides much like taxicabs, but distinguish themselves from cabs by emphasizing the friendly, social aspect of the in-car interaction. Crucial to the ability of these companies to distinguish themselves from cabs has been the insertion of smartphones as “social interfaces” between drivers and passengers, restructuring social interaction through an allegorithm the productive co-deployment of a socially relevant allegorical script and a software-mediated algorithm). Much of the affective labor of ridesharing drivers consists in maintaining this affective framing and internalizing the logic by which their performances are monitored. In this article the writings of three ridesharing drivers will be drawn on to illustrate the ways drivers develop and evaluate their own performances as ridesharing drivers.
Sensors, Cameras, and the New ‘Normal’ in Clandestine Migration: How Undocumented Migrants Experience Surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico Border
Authors: Newell Bryce Clayton , Gomez Ricardo , Guajardo Verónica E.
Published: July 2018

This paper presents findings from an exploratory qualitative study of the experiences and perceptions of undocumented (irregular) migrants to the United States with various forms of surveillance in the borderlands between the U.S. and Mexico. Based on fieldwork conducted primarily in a migrant shelter in Nogales, Mexico, we find that migrants generally have a fairly sophisticated understanding about U.S. Border Patrol surveillance and technology use and that they consciously engage in forms of resistance or avoidance. Heightened levels of border surveillance may be deterring a minority of migrants from attempting immediate future crossings, but most interviewees were undeterred in their desire to enter the U.S., preferring to find ways to avoid government surveillance. Furthermore, migrants exhibit a general lack of trust in the “promise” of technology to improve their circumstances and increase their safety during clandestine border-crossing—often due to fears that technology use makes them vulnerable to state surveillance, tracking, and arrest.
Racialization as a Way of Seeing: The Limits of Counter-Surveillance and Police Reform
Authors: Beutin Lyndsey P
Published: July 2018

This paper considers the role of video footage in recent high-profile cases of anti-black police brutality in the United States. I illuminate the limits of the counter-surveillance impetus to film the police by contextualizing this strain of social media utopianism within the larger history of what I call “racialization as a way of seeing.” Racialization as a way of seeing is a historical formation that brings together the history of policing, the development of visual epistemologies, and the history of the naturalization of the criminality of blackness. I then track how the optimism of the counter-surveillance discourse has been recuperated by the state into consent for police worn cameras – reforms which threaten to strengthen a system built on structural racism, rather than ameliorate its injustices. I conclude by suggesting an emergent model for how video evidence may be paradoxically working to re-legitimize the police and the state in the newest era of “21st-century policing.”
Criticising Surveillance and Surveillance Critique: Why privacy and humanism are necessary but insufficient
Authors: Hong Sun-ha
Published: July 2018

The current debate on surveillance, both academic and public, is constantly tempted towards a ‘negative’ criticism of present surveillance systems. In contrast, a ‘positive’ critique would be one which seeks to present alternative ways of thinking, evaluating, and even undertaking surveillance. Surveillance discourse today propagates a host of normative claims about what is admissible as ‘true’, ‘probable’, ‘efficient’ – based upon which it cannot fail to justify itself. A positive critique questions and subverts this epistemological foundation. It believes that surveillance must be held accountable by terms other than those of its own making. The objective is an open debate not only about ‘surveillance or not’, but the possibility of ‘another surveillance’. To demonstrate the necessity of this shift, I first examine two existing frames of criticism. Privacy and humanism (appeal to human rights, freedoms and decency) are necessary but insufficient tools for positive critique. They implicitly accept surveillance’s bargain of trade-offs: the benefit of security ‘measured’ against the cost of rights. To demonstrate paths towards positive critique, I analyse risk and security: two ‘load-bearing’ concepts that ground existing rationalisations of surveillance – and thus are ‘openings’ for reforming those evaluative paradigms and rigged bargains on offer today.
Video Surveillance and the Right of Access: The empirical proof of panoptical asymmetries
Authors: Rothmann Robert
Published: July 2018

The interdisciplinary study presented here is about visual power relations in urban settings under video surveillance and the empirical assessment of one’s right of access to personal data as a central feature of privacy regulation. Referring to Garfinkel’s methodical approach of “breaching experiments”, a series of so-called subject access requests according to Austrian data protection law are carried out, with an overall number of 29 private video operators examined. The empirical focus lies on the immediate reaction of the data controllers and their formal way of handling and responding to such requests. The research shows that the subjective right of access is largely refused and undermined, with a series of strategies of denial to be identified. The legally grounded entitlement to access one’s personal data ultimately appears socially illegitimate and mostly not exercisable. The normative figure of the Panopticon shows up in the monitored routines of everyday life.
Surveillance as Communicating Relational Messages: Advancing Understandings of the Surveilled Subject
Authors: Saulnier Alana
Published: July 2018

Theoretical understandings of how and why surveilled subjects perceive and react to surveillance have rarely been engaged in the field of surveillance studies. This research introduces relational models of procedural justice as a framework through which the attitudes and behaviours of surveilled subjects can be more consistently understood in particular (but not singular) surveillance contexts. Qualitative analysis of encounters with surveillance at Pearson International Airport (Toronto, Canada) demonstrates that participants were attentive to relational concerns during these encounters. The findings are positioned in relation to the procedural justice literature to demonstrate the importance of the process of surveillance alongside, or even apart from, its outcomes in terms of understanding and explaining surveilled subjects’ experiences and formation of subjectivities at airports and perhaps more generally.
Uncertainty and Insecurity in Privacyless India: A Despotic Push towards Digitalisation
Authors: Arun P
Published: July 2018

On November 2016, an unexpected imposition of demonetisation policy in India by Modi’s government changed the role of digital technologies in mundane lives. It was unfolded with the discourse of its potential to generate a trail of long-term benefits. Such as reduced corruption, enhanced governance and greater digitizing of the economy which could eventually lead to development of the nation.

Such a despotic push in one of the world’s largest democracies had consequential effects on individual’s privacy and altered the nature of surveillance. The grand digitalisation project was veiled and fanatically endorsed with a tunnel vision while there was absence of any robust privacy legislation to protect the flow of data. This article intends to investigate the political dimensions and consequences. It will trace the contours of a despotic and authoritarian push by the government to digitise mundane lives. Therefore, it will unravel the nature of governance under the emerging new technologies, emerging legalities, and interlinking policies to understand the persistent uncertainty and perpetual fear of insecurity under this Privacyless India.
Online Monitoring of ‘Localists’ in Hong Kong: A Return to Political Policing?
Authors: Hargreaves Stuart
Published: July 2018

Hong Kong's new 'localist' movement - advocating for total autonomy or even secession - has provoked a crackdown from both the local government and the central authorities in Beijing.  This paper argues that the incoming administration of Carrie Lam is likely to continue to pursuse online surveillance of localist political groups as one part of this crackdown, but that ultimately this may prove to be counterproductive if the goal is reduce support for the movement.
Chilling Developments: Digital Access, Surveillance, and the Authoritarian Dilemma in Ethiopia
Authors: Grinberg Daniel
Published: July 2018

This article examines digital surveillance in Ethiopia under the repressive EPRDF regime. It considers the EPRDF’s responses to the Authoritarian Dilemma, in which repressive leaders must decide between extending digital access to their citizens and further tightening their own grip on power. The consequences of this choice are especially significant in the context of an economically and technologically developing nation like Ethiopia. Thus far, its government has largely chosen to use its control of digital networks to clamp down on freedoms in the face of opposition. However, its desire for robust growth has also prompted it to pursue higher rates of digital adoption. In an effort to both maintain control and promote development opportunities, the government is increasingly drawing on a range of digital surveillance techniques. I outline some of the monitoring and targeting techniques it deploys against both the general population and the critics it views as threats to its unilateral authority. Ultimately, I argue that the intensification of digital surveillance is a reckless approach to addressing the Authoritarian Dilemma. The detrimental impacts of state surveillance cannot help but also chill the possibilities of digital usage and adoption and forestall the full potential of national development.
Far Away, So Close: Transnational Activism, Digital Surveillance and Authoritarian Control in Iran
Authors: Michaelsen Marcus
Published: July 2018

Transnational information flows and advocacy networks are among the challenges of a globalizing world to which contemporary authoritarian rulers need to adapt. Drawing on research into the repressive strategies of the Iranian state against exiled human rights activists and journalists, I show how digital surveillance allows the regime to monitor political activity outside the country and to prepare counter-measures projecting power beyond borders. With the help of digital media, state authorities can expand the scope and scale of potential threats against outside activists and their ties into the country. The repressive practices of the Iranian state are not only a response to the transnationalisation of political activism but also result of a global securitization of online space. The Iranian case thus demonstrates how contemporary authoritarian power is built and sustained in processes no longer bound to a specific state or territory.
Multilayered surveillance in Israel/Palestine: Dialectics of inclusive exclusion
Authors: Handel Ariel , Dayan Hilla
Published: July 2018

The paper examines the surveillance apparatuses in Israel/Palestine as mechanisms aiming to secure support for the Israeli regime, and to preserve its domination over the entire territory in dispute. We analyze three layers of surveillance: "exclusionary surveillance" towards Palestinians; "normalizing surveillance" towards Jewish-Israeli citizens; and finally, “globalizing surveillance” using Zionist constituencies as agents for building a “domain of defense” for Israel in their own countries. Taking into consideration these power and surveillance dispositives we draw insights on the global authoritarian turn and suggest a post-Foucauldian transnational approach to the study of the relations between surveillance, socialization, and subjectification processes.
Myanmar: Surveillance and the Turn from Authoritarianism?
Authors: Dean Karin
Published: July 2018

In Myanmar, one of the longest ruling military regimes in the world (1962—2011) exerting unrestrained coercion and relying on a pervasive security apparatus, has accepted a constitution and competitive elections. The military directed concatenation of developments but especially the Constitution that legalizes a unique power-sharing arrangement between the military and the elected government, contribute to the exceptionalism but also continuing coercion of Myanmar’s military, even under the democratically elected popular government of former democracy icons Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for Democracy. Holding that a key step in a democratic transition must involve the scaling down of state coercive apparatus, the article demonstrates how this has not been the case in Myanmar. The size, expenditure and revenues of the armed forces have been maintained, the surveillance for political and social control continues, while the spread of mobile communication devices, and particularly social media, has opened up more extensive and easier opportunities for monitoring. Subjugating the practices of surveillance to laws is not prioritized in the complex political context of multiple pressing issues.
Metternich 2.0? Surveillance and Panopticism as modes of authoritarian governmentality in Austria
Authors: Binder Clemens
Published: July 2018

This paper follows the question if newly introduced surveillance laws and programmes have led to an authoritarian mode of governmentality in Austria in the light of a higher threat perception. As in other countries, terrorism and crime have undergone a process of securitization in Austria, leading to a higher desire for control in order to tackle those threats. However, while other countries have faced serious attacks on their soil, Austria remains free of substantial threats, still the government has introduced strict surveillance laws. Based on Foucault's concept of governmentality and Dean's assumption that governmentality can contain illiberal techniques and practices in liberal regimes, this paper gives an insight in the rationales behind Austrian surveillance governance.
Increasing the Potential for Gaze, Surveillance and Normalisation: the transformation of an Australian policy for people who are homeless.
Authors: Fopp Rodney
Published: July 2018

Michel Foucault analysed the origins and social function served by institutions such as the prison and the clinic, explored the links between knowledge and power, and the body as a location or site of such social power. In this article, Foucault's analysis is applied to an Australian program for people who are homeless. After outlining a theoretical framework which emphases Foucault's theme of increasing surveillance being used for the purposes of greater regulation and control, this article analyses the changes that have occurred in the program. It is argued that initially the program was intended to assist non-government agencies to provide a range of services, including short-term crisis accommodation services, after which clients would move to independent housing. However, due to the lack of affordable and appropriate houses for clients to enter after their stay in agencies, clients have been forced to stay in funded agencies for longer than is otherwise necessary. Among other things, this program has adapted by providing more short-to-medium term accommodation and case management for clients which, in turn, has led to an extension of the time clients remain in agencies and greater intensity of service provision. It is argued that this has resulted in increased potential for surveillance, control and regulation.
‘Cam Era’ — the contemporary urban Panopticon.
Authors: Koskela Hille
Published: July 2018

Deriving from Foucault’s work, space is understood to be crucial in explaining social power relations. However, not only is space crucial to the exercise of power but power also creates a particular kind of space. Through surveillance cameras the panoptic technology of power is electronically extended. The article examines parallelisms and differences with the Panopticon and contemporary cities: visibility, unverifiability, contextual control, absence of force and internalisation of control. Surveillance is examined as an emotional event, which is often ambivalent or mutable, without sound dynamic of security and insecurity nor power and resistance. Control seems to become dispersed and the ethos of mechanistic discipline replaced by flexible power structures. Surveillance becomes more subtle and intense, fusing material urban space and cyberspace. This makes it impossible to understand the present forms of control via analysing physical space. Rather, space is to be understood as fundamentally social, mutable, fluid and unmappable – ‘like a sparkling water’. The meaning of documentary accumulation changes with the ‘digital turn’ which enables social sorting. The popularity of ‘webcams’ demonstrate that there is also fascination in being seen. The amount of the visual representations expands as they are been circulated globally. Simultaneously the individuals increasingly ‘disappear’ in the ‘televisualisation’ of their lives. The individual urban experience melts to the collective imagination of the urban. It is argued that CCTV is a bias: surveillance systems are presented as ‘closed’ but, eventually, are quite the opposite. We are facing ‘the cam era’ – an era of endless representations.
On the 'Pre-History of The Panoptic Sort': Mobility in Market Research.
Authors: Arvidsson Adam
Published: July 2018

This article reviews the history of market research to argue that that discipline has seen a paradigm shift during the second half of the 20th century. Originally market research developed as an integral element to the society-wide capitalist control revolution. Its aim was to contain the complexity of an increasingly mobile consumer demand in a number of pre-established categories. Since the 1950s however market researchers developed a series of techniques to observe and make use of consumer mobility. The emergence of these new techniques was coupled to a different conception of the role of marketing. Its role was no longer understood primarily as that of disciplining consumer demand, but rather as that of observing and utilizing ideas and innovations that consumer's themselves produced. This paradigm shift from 'containment' to 'control' drove the development the statistical techniques and theoretical conceptions of consumers that are now employed in the commercial surveillance of on and off-line mobility. Through ubiquitous surveillance contemporary capitalism aims at including virtually all of social life into its valorization process. The conclusion considers the possible contradictions that this might produce.
Between 'Devil' and Detournement: Embodied Acts as Methods of Critical Inquiry in Educational Spaces.
Authors: Sweeny Robert Wilson
Published: July 2018

This paper explores the relationship between surveillance technologies and power as exercised in educational spaces. The theories based in the panoptic gaze as theorized by Michel Foucault provide educators with the opportunity to analyze positions of power in school settings. The critical actions of the Surveillance Camera Players represent examples of active embodiment that might inform a form of pedagogy that investigates panopticism within educational spaces.
Should Filtering Software be utilised in the Workplace? Australian Employees’ Attitudes towards Internet usage and Surveillance of the Internet in the Workplace.
Authors: Whitty Monica T.
Published: July 2018

The notion of Internet and email monitoring in the workplace is a debatable issue. Some would argue that surveillance is necessary to prevent ‘cyberslacking’ which can lead to loss of productivity and be a waste of a company’s resources. In contrast, others contend that cyberspace is a private space that employers do not have the right to intercept. There is currently a dearth of available Australian baseline research available on employees’ opinions on Internet and email activity in the workplace. This paper reports the findings from a survey, which asked Australians about their attitudes on appropriate usage of the Internet and email in the workplace, and their opinions on filtering software. This study considers whether gender, working for a company which has implemented a company policy, and number of hours of Internet usage in the workplace are useful predictors of attitudes towards Internet and email behaviour in the workplace. This study concludes that individuals do condemn some Internet and email activities in the workplace, such as downloading material that might offend or harasses others. However, participants did not all agree that filtering software is the only solution to preventing inappropriate Internet and email behaviours. Furthermore, this study found that, at least in the Australian workplace, there is a need to begin seriously questioning what is appropriate Netiquette.
Technologies of Suspicion: Coercion and Compassion in Post-disciplinary Surveillance Regimes.
Authors: Campbell Nancy D.
Published: July 2018

Drug-use surveillance systems appear in this paper as symptomatic “technologies of suspicion” that constitute a set of empirical modes for producing and interpreting “data” or test results in ways that conflate prediction with prescription, acting as technological forms of supervision, monitoring, supposed deterrence, and ultimately control. Technologies of suspicion are predicated upon a framework of trust; they are deployed within a “system of takings-for-granted” that presupposes trust and thus makes distrust possible. Drug-testing provides an excellent example of the institutionalization of distrust through the deployment of technologies of suspicion not only within institutions but beyond their real and virtual walls. The paper considers the also considers the decentralization and deinstitutionalization of distrust, the capillary dispersion of suspicion throughout the carceral society, and the role of distrust in underwriting the development of certain kinds of knowledge systems and technologies, forms of social and cognitive order, and the functional dispersion of police practices to individuals such as parents, teachers, and peers. Studying why bio-surveillance modalities should diffuse despite their unreliability and their contribution to a generalized climate of suspicion enables the characterization of certain features of the post-sovereign subject in a post-disciplinary regime.
Social Aspects of CCTV in France: the Case of the City Centre of Lyons
Authors: Martinals Emmanuel , Betin Christophe
Published: July 2018

Inaugurated a few days after the municipal elections in spring 2001 as a result of a campaign strongly formatted by security issues, the operation of CCTV in the centre of Lyons can be seen today as part and parcel of the security-oriented policies of the new socialist local government. Through responding in part to the concerns and interests of those social groups which are more exposed to the problems posed by crime (particularly shopkeepers and residents), implementing such a policy contributes to the social construction of deviance. It not only acts to consolidate dominant social representations in the field of security, but the ways in which it is used lead to reformulation of the rules and social norms construing everyday practices and deviant behaviour in public space.
Controlling Letting Arrangements? Landlords and surveillance in the private rented sector?
Authors: Lister Diane
Published: July 2018

Research into landlord/tenant relationships in the private rented housing sector has rarely focussed upon landlords' surveillance of tenants as a means to control behaviour and use of property, despite it often taking the form, or being on the margins of the legal definition of harassment. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, this article focuses upon day-to-day relationships between landlords and tenants and explores landlords' perceptions of their property and tenants and the types of surveillance activities they adopt to control and manage tenants behaviour. The article reveals the personal and emotional motivations behind landlords' surveillance activity and raises questions about the legal and policy contexts of the private rented sector which enable such conduct to exist. In the light of the findings, the difficulties in combating extreme forms of surveillance as a property management technique are discussed and the article concludes by raising a number of issues about the ways in which current policy and legislation could be used to promote a greater understanding of rights and responsibilities in landlord/tenant relationships.
The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance
Authors: Simon Bart
Published: July 2018

This article revisits Foucault's concept of panopticism as in pertains to research on the new surveillance. Drawing on the work of neo-Foucauldian authors in surveillance studies the paper shows how the figures of the supervisor and inmate within the Foucauldian diagram suggest different directions for pursuing surveillance theory. On the one hand, there is a concern with processes of subjection and normalization that arise through the internalization of the gaze, while on the other there is a concern with processes of administration, social sorting and simulation that occur independently of embodied subjects. Foucault's model both allows for these twin concerns within the context of the new surveillance while serving as a source of further insight into the empirical nuances of contemporary surveillance relations.
Internet Control and Auto-regulation in Singapore
Authors: Lee Terence
Published: July 2018

This paper sets out to consider the use of new media technologies in the city-state of Singapore, widely acknowledged as one of the most technologically-advanced and networked societies in the world. Singapore is well-known as a politically censorious and highly-regulated society, which has been subjected to frequent and fierce insults and criticisms by those hailing from liberal democratic traditions. Indeed, much has been said about how the Singapore polity resonates with a climate of fear, which gives rise to the prevalent practice of self-censorship. This paper examines how certain groups in Singapore attempt to employ the Internet to find their voice and seek their desired social, cultural and political ends, and how the regulatory devices adopted by the highly pervasive People Action's Party (PAP) government respond to and set limits to these online ventures whilst concomitantly pursuing national technological cum economic development strategies. It concludes that the Internet in Singapore is a highly contested space where the art of governmentality, in the forms of information controls and 'automatic' modes of regulation, is tried, tested, and subsequently perfected.
Institutional Ethnography and Surveillance Studies: An Outline for Inquiry
Authors: Walby Kevin T.
Published: July 2018

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method of inquiry that problematizes social relations at the local site of lived experience, while examining how sequences of texts coordinate consciousness, actions, and ruling. I argue that institutional ethnography is a critical method of inquiry useful for revealing and reshaping the textual organization of surveillance. Central issues regarding institutional ethnography as a method of inquiry, including standpoint(s), texts and institutions, interviewing, and mapping, are discussed. Researchers studying surveillance would benefit from engaging with the method of institutional ethnography during future research because IE has a unique ability to explicate how surveillance subjects are linked to and managed by discursive, managerial, and professional forms of power.
Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies
Authors: Marks Peter
Published: July 2018

This paper considers the role of utopian (and dystopian) visions in the study of surveillance, arguing that the fiction in written or filmic form offers much that is stimulating to surveillance studies. The article focuses on four recent examples of such texts: The Truman Show, Gattaca, Code 46 and The Traveller. It argues that all present differing visions that move far beyond the nightmare of George Orwell (or indeed Michel Foucault) to present a more nuanced view.
The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery, "Battlespace Awareness," and the Structures of the Imperial Gaze
Authors: Harris Chad
Published: July 2018

This paper explores the role of aerial and satellite imagery in the US military's command, control, and intelligence (C4I) systems, with an historical focus on the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Using satellite imagery for military intelligence and warfare is part of an ongoing effort in the US Department of Defense to make all cartographic and topographic space, and the objects in it, totally visible and "transparent," what the US military calls "total battlespace awareness." It is where imagery production is attached to concrete and purposive action in the abstract realm of "battlespace," an example of how the mundane and the monstrously violent intersect around the production of visual data and artefacts. Borrowing a metaphor from Paul Edwards, I suggest that satellite imagery can not only "open up" the world (making it transparent), but can also "close down" geographical space under a regime of surveillance and violent military control. The discursive power of aerial and satellite imagery is derived from its position as an objectifying transcendent gaze, above and beyond subjectivity (Donna Haraway's "God Trick"), and when these images are disseminated in the mass media as testaments to military prowess, they become visual representations of geographical domination (as in Denis Cosgrove's "Apollonian Eye"). In this sense, satellite imagery, photo reconnaissance, and imagery interpretation are rich sites and artefacts for exploring how power and national sovereignty turn on the visual.
An interrupted transmission? Processes of CCTV implementation and the impact of human agency
Authors: Fussey Pete
Published: July 2018

This paper examines the processes that bring about the creation of new public-space CCTV schemes. Through an appraisal of the grounded activities of the practitioners who make decisions over CCTV, the role of agency is identified as a particularly strong, yet relatively neglected, influence on its implementation. Moreover, beyond dichotomised notions of central structures and local agency, an understanding is developed of the complex interaction between the individual actors involved in CCTV dissemination and the political context in which they operate. In doing so, public policy is identified as the vehicle through which camera surveillance systems become installed and disseminated throughout public space. Moreover, these various forces of structure and agency become filtered through identifiable networks of policy-makers, comprising 'responsibilised' actors who oversee the deployment of CCTV. This analysis is used to revisit a range of administrative and theoretical understandings of surveillance, including: citations of CCTV as an evaluated response to crime; the attribution of power- and interest-based agendas to its implementation; and accounts which locate CCTV expansion within various evolving societal processes. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork data gathered during doctoral research, the paper considers the activities of practitioners at a local level and identifies crucial contexts, drivers and negotiations on which expanding surveillance is contingent. Ultimately, it is argued that the process of CCTV installation – from conception to material implementation – is disrupted and mediated by a range of micro-level operations, obligations, processes, managerial concerns (particularly conflict resolution and resource issues), structures and agency, and the indirect influence of central government. These not only arbitrate over whether the CCTV becomes installed, but also generate a range of additional uses for the cameras, many of which are performed before they are even switched on. This emphasises the need to consider the processes that enable and constrain the actions of those making decisions over CCTV and demonstrates how no single interest becomes solely participant in the deployment of surveillance. Finally, because of the centrality and contingency of both human agency and the structural contexts in which it operates in determining the installation of CCTV, questions arise concerning the importance of integrative sociological theories in understanding the deployment of surveillance.
The Security Double Take: The Political, Simulation and the Border
Authors: De Lint Willem
Published: July 2018

This paper conceptualizes the 'security double take' as an expression of the adaptation of longstanding parameters of security to reflexive ordering expectations. I proceed by examining legacy concepts of the modern liberal nation state and by interrogating the rupture between current and previous expectations of the sovereign spectacle. Although launched originally from the realist security discourse of political theory, the diminished priority of 'the real' in current political conditions reframes security as the sum of reviewable production values. The border is a site par excellence for the staging of security performances.
Disappearing Citizenship: surveillance and the state of exception
Authors: Douglas Jeremy
Published: July 2018

Surveillance is an ancient concept and an ancient practice.  As such, we must undertake a theoretical examination of surveillance that looks at the changes in the function of surveillance within a juridical-political model, rather than superficially studying the nature of surveillance mechanisms. What emerges is a surveillance system that is fundamentally biopolitical and is in many ways - as a defining ‘modern’ characteristic - the reason for a permanent state of exception and the loss of rights and citizenship.