bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Race, Gender and "Difference": Representations of "Third World Women" in International Development
Authors: Abraham Christiana
Published: July 2018

AbstractThis paper analyses images of international development through a study of the ways in which development representations produce and circulate “difference” with respect to women and the developing world. Through both overt and subtle narratives, representations of women as “different,” “distant” and “other” construct both the object and subject of development. The paper discusses the process by which racialization operates in development through gender as a signifying practice. Based on a doctoral study of communication materials of Women in Development (WID) images produced by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the paper analyses images of women of the developing world in communication materials attached to major campaigns during the Women in Development (WID) period. WID represents an important legacy of today’s prevalent images of women in development. The paper situates this legacy within the colonial roots of development and its representations, which include historical constructions of the "third world woman" that intricately reproduce a range of colonial images and practices. Images of "third world women" have become development’s most eminent symbol, yet many continue to communicate static and predictable views about the developing world.
The paradox of caught-in-the-act surveillance scenes: dilemmas of police video surveillance in Rio de Janeiro
Authors: Cardoso Bruno de Vasconcelos
Published: July 2018

This paper reports some of the issues raised by field research conducted in the official video surveillance system in public spaces that is operated by the Military Police on behalf of the Rio de Janeiro State Department of Public Security. The research was conducted at the Command and Control Center (CCC), where the images from all the cameras in the police battalions are brought together and at the police batallion at Copacabana (19thBPM), the first area at the city where surveillance cameras were installed. This system is treated as a sociotechnical network, formed by the interaction of individuals and technological elements, further increasing the importance of an observation from two different levels of this network. Special attention is drawed on what I called “the paradox of the caught in-the-act surveillance scenes”, dilemma emerged around the conflict between the work of surveillance and the aesthetics of surveillance, and also on a main videosurveillance problem: (human and/or technical) overdetermination.
Surveillance Studies and Violence Against Women
Authors: Mason Corinne Lysandra , Magnet Shoshana
Published: July 2018

Surveillance, privacy and security are of paramount concern to technology users. One of the implications of these new forms of technologized surveillance that has received little attention is their implications for women fleeing violent situations. This article seeks to place questions of surveillance technologies into a theoretical framework that foregrounds the challenges that new surveillance technologies pose to anti-violence movements. Specifically we address the impact of surveillance technologies in the practice of violence and some proposed solutions, and consider the ways that surveillance technologies are used disproportionately in the criminalization marginalized groups. By placing violence against women at the center of our analysis we aim to complicate concerns related to surveillance technologies.
Mobile cameras as new technologies of surveillance? How citizens experience the use of mobile cameras in public nightscapes
Authors: Timan Tjerk , Oudshoorn Nelly
Published: July 2018

In surveillance studies the terms “sousveillance” and “inverse surveillance” describe forms of surveillance that have a bottom-up and democratic character. However, in this paper this democratic notion is questioned by looking into practices and experiences with both Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) and mobile cameras by Dutch citizens. By intervening in the nightlife district of the Rotterdami city centre, data has been gathered on both mobile- and CCTV camera confrontations. From this, an exploration is made into how mobile cameras are experienced in the Nightlife landscape. Comparing these experiences with CCTV provides insight into new surveillance issues that emerge due to the mobile camera. The perspective of analyzing surveillance technologies as hybrid collectives that may take different shapes in different places, allows for a contribution that attempts to improve our understanding of the current changes in the surveillance technology landscape.i Rotterdam is the second largest city in the Netherlands.
New Media and the power politics of sousveillance in a surveillance-dominated world.
Authors: Mann Steve , Ferenbok Joseph
Published: July 2018

In this paper we address the increasingly complex constructs between power, and the practices of looking, in a mediated, mobile and networked culture.  We develop and explore a nuanced understanding and ontology that examines veillance in both directions:  surveillance and oversight, as well as sousveillance and “undersight”.  In particular, we unpack the new relationships of power and democracy facilitated by mobile and pervasive computing.  We differentiate between the power relationships in the generalized practices of looking or gazing, which we place under the broad term “veillance”.  Then we address the more subtle distinctions between different forms of veillance that we classify as surveillance and sousveillance, as well as McVeillance (the ratio of surveillance to sousveillance).  We start by unpacking this understanding to develop a more specialized vocabulary to talk not just about oversight but also to talk about the implications of mobile technologies on “who watches the watchers”.   We argue that the time for sousveillance, as a social tool for political action, is reaching a critical mass facilitated by a convergence of transmission, mobility and media channels for content distribution and engagement. Mobile ubiquitous computing, image capture and processing, and seamless connectivity of every iPad, iPhone,  Android Device, wearable computer, etc., allows for unprecedented ‘on the ground’ watching of everyday life.  The critical mass of ‘sousveillant’ capable devices in everyday life may make the practice of sousveillance a potentially effective political force that.  Sousveillance can now challenge and balances the possibility for corruption that is inherent in a surveillance-only society (i.e. one that has only oversight without undersight).
Liquid London: Sporting Spectacle, Britishness & Ban-optic Surveillance
Authors: Manley Andrew , Silk Michael
Published: July 2018

Under the rubrics of recent ‘terror’ attacks—especially 9/11 and 7/7—the discourses of security and surveillance, and the subsequent heightened awareness of risk and insecurity, have been framed within an increasingly global context. Through an appropriation of the Ban-opticon dispositif (Bigo 2006, 2011), this article analyses the changing urban transformations of civic space and mediated messages perpetuated within, and through, the London 2012 Olympic Games. In so doing, we deconstruct London 2012 through a post-panoptic lens, identifying how processes of social control are reiterated and (re)configured through the establishment of a clearly delineated “other”, that which is deemed ‘unwelcome’ and situated as posing a threat to the safety of the normalised, and accepted, majority. Thus, through a reading of the cultural politics of class, race and gender that are embedded within sporting spectacle, we argue that London 2012 capitalised on the institutionalised culture of fear to convey, and thus contain, an accepted vision of multiculturalism, legitimising surveillance practices and security measures that became ingrained within the urban landscape and social fabric of the nation’s capital. In so doing, we point towards a troubling yet all too tangible true London Olympic legacy, one that identifies and subjects specific yet significant ‘others’ to forms of social control and corporeal governance.
Pandemics of the future: Disease surveillance in real time
Authors: Thomas Lindsay
Published: July 2018

This paper explores disease surveillance systems in relation to preparedness, a security paradigm that strives to make future catastrophic events available for “real time” intervention in the present. I examine three different disease surveillance systems — the Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, which is composed of physical laboratories and online information dissemination tools; Flu Trends, an algorithmic syndromic surveillance system; and EpiSimS and EpiCast, agent-based epidemiological modeling platforms—in relation to three different temporal logics of preparedness—tracking, anticipating, and projecting. These logical modulations all reflect different temporalities of preparedness, or different ways of making the future present, and there are two important implications of my attention to these logics. First, I argue these disease surveillance systems extend surveillance from the present into the future, constructing the very catastrophic threats for which they seek to prepare. Second, I argue the concept of “real time” on which preparedness depends arises from the technologies that construct this particular understanding of temporality. What’s more, the “real time” these systems construct is never the instantaneous erasure of the present; instead, I emphasize real time as multiple, as the proliferation of the present. At stake is an understanding of the ways in which preparedness establishes its own authority to make the future present by creating the very condition of unpreparedness it works to remedy.
Getting Played: Gamification and the Rise of Algorithmic Surveillance
Authors: O'Donnell Casey
Published: July 2018

Gamification, the idea that game mechanics can be integrated into assumed "non-game" circumstances has gained ascendance amongst champions of marketing, behavior change and efficiency. Ironically, some of the most heated critique to gamification has been the broader community of "traditional" videogame developers. Connecting broadly to projects surrounding "big data" and algorithmic surveillance, the project of gamification continues to expand and intensify. This paper examines the complex relationship between game designers and the rise of arguments in support of gamification. The essay presents an analysis of the various actors and interests mobilizing arguments, deconstructing their underlying assumptions about the relationship between games and social phenomena. Turning to an analytic framework rooted in Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 1999) and work in Game Studies on the Assemblage of Play (Taylor, 2009) and emergent forms of (played) control (Taylor, 2006) the essay critiques assumptions on either side of the debate on the role of games and play. The strained connections between debates on gamification and broader interest in serious games offers an important moment to explore algorithmic surveillance.
Surveillance and student dissent: the case of the Franco dictatorship.
Authors: Rodriguez Tejada Sergio
Published: July 2018

The rising of a powerful democratic student movement in Spain in the sixties represented a substantial stimulus to the repressive modernization of the Franco dictatorship. New containment strategies were adopted in the context of the counter-subversion and intelligence policies that the USA administration and their allies were also implementing. From this assumption, this paper analyzes the specific dynamics of surveillance on student protest, exploring the previous situation at university,the challenges introduced by the youth upheaval, the diverse responses of the establishment, the role of the American aid, and finally the consequences both for the dissidents and for the dictatorship itself.
‘The footage is decisive’: Applying the thinking of Marshall McLuhan to CCTV and police misconduct
Authors: Evans Richard William
Published: July 2018

This article adapts Marshall McLuhan’s writings on mass media to ubiquitous and universal surveillance systems, looking at surveillance as media. The term ‘broadcast media’ is derived from an agricultural metaphor, a technique of planting. I argue that CCTV systems are an inversion of broadcasting: ‘harvest media’. Drawing on three case studies in which CCTV has been relevant to allegations of police misconduct, I explore how harvest media impacts on cultural and legal perceptions of evidence, truth and deniability.
Drone Vision
Authors: Greene Daniel
Published: July 2018

What does the drone want? What does the drone need? Such questions, posed explicitly and implicitly by anthropomorphized drones in contemporary popular culture, may seem like distractions from more pressing political and empirical projects addressing the Global War on Terror (GWOT). But the artifacts posing these questions offer a different way of viewing contemporary surveillance and violence that helps decouple the work of drones from justifications for drone warfare, and reveals the broader technological and political network of which drones are the most immediate manifestation. This article explores ‘drone vision’ a globally distributed apparatus for finding, researching, fixing and killing targets of the GWOT, and situates dramatizations of it within recent new materialist theoretical debates in surveillance and security studies. I model the tactic of ‘seeing like a drone’ in order to map the networks that support it. This tactic reveals a disconnect between the materials and discourses of drone vision, a disconnect I historicize within a new, imperial visual culture of war distinct from its modernist, disciplinary predecessor. I then explore two specific attempts to see like a drone: the drone art of London designer James Bridle and the Tumblr satire Texts from Drone. I conclude by returning to drone anthropomorphism as a technique for mapping the apparatus of drone vision, arguing that drone meme arises precisely in response to these new subjects of war, as a method to call their diverse, often hidden, materials to a public accounting.
Hyperlegality and Heightened Surveillance: The Case of Threatened Species Lists
Authors: Braverman Irus
Published: July 2018

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Acceptable Surveillance-Orientated Security Technologies: Insights from the SurPRISE Project
Authors: Degli Esposti Sara , Santiago-Gomez Elvira
Published: July 2018

Pre-emptive security emphasizes the necessity of envisioning and designing technologies enabling the anticipation and management of emergent risks threatening human and public security. Surveillance functionalities are embedded in the design of these technologies to allow constant monitoring, preparedness and prevention. Yet surveillance-orientated security technologies, such as smart CCTVs or Deep Packet Inspection, bring along with their implementation other risks, such as risks of privacy infringement, discrimination, misuse, abuse, or errors, which have often triggered public outrage and resistance. The same measures meant to foster human security, can potentially make people feel insecure, vulnerable, and exposed. This outcome is the result of a narrow approach toward problem solving that does not take into account those same people the technology is supposed to protect. Drawing from both the socio-cultural and psychometric approaches to risk analysis and from the literature on public engagement in science and technology, this article presents a new methodological tool, which combines traditional citizen summit method with an innovative mixed-method research design. The objective of this new form of participatory exercise is to engage the public and gather socially robust and in context knowledge about the public acceptability of these technologies. The method has been developed as part of the SurPRISE project, funded by the European Commission under the SeventhFramework Program. The article presents the theoretical framework and preliminary results of citizen summits organized across Europe.
Police and the Post-9/11 Surveillance Surge: “Technological Dramas” in “the Bureaucratic Field”
Authors: McQuade Brendan Innis
Published: July 2018

In the last decade, the United States has invested considerable resources into an expanded intelligence apparatus that extends from the hyper-secretive federal intelligence community down to the more mundane world of municipal police. This paper investigates the effects of the post-9/11 surveillance surge on state and local policing. It presents original research on interagency intelligence centers New York and New Jersey and deploys Pfaffenberger’s “technological drama” as a process animating the neoliberal constitution of what Bourdieu calls the “bureaucratic field.” Despite seemingly dramatic changes, there exists powerful continuity in the profession of policing. Before or after Snowden, the day-to-day reality of criminal intelligence remains shaped by the immediate demands of investigations and the small politics of interagency rivalries, insulating policing from dramatic reforms and swift change. What reformers see as dysfunction is better understood as a technological drama in the bureaucratic field that paradoxically provides a degree of autonomy and slows the pace of change.  This paper builds on and contributes to the tendency within surveillance studies that emphasizes the ways in which human agents and organizational cultures mediate surveillance.
New ‘Foucauldian Boomerangs’: Drones and Urban Surveillance
Authors: Jensen Ole B.
Published: July 2018

This paper uses the metaphor of ‘boomerangs’ articulated by Michel Foucault to discuss the potential for drones to become the ‘next layer’ of urban surveillance in our cities. Like earlier Western technologies and techniques of government that were ‘tested out’ in foreign warzones and then ‘brought back’ to urban centres (the helicopter and its utilization in Vietnam and its return to urban police forces is a clear illustration hereof), contemporary unmanned aerial vehicles hold the potential to act as proverbial ‘Foucauldian boomerangs’ and return from warzones in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan to Western cities. The paper explores how a nexus of Surveillance Studies and mobilities research may be a fruitful way into comprehending this new phenomenon. En route the practical applications of drones as well as the historical importance of aerial power are connected to a situational understanding of mobilities. The paper points at a number of challenges for the future and should be understood as a first tentative attempt to set this on the research agenda.
Informants, Provocateurs, and Entrapment: Examining the Histories of the FBI’s PATCON and the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program
Authors: Kamali Sara
Published: July 2018

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government and police departments across the United States, most notably the New York City Police Department, have been collecting intelligence targeting Muslim American communities. The controversial surveillance practices include the use of confidential informants, undercover operations, and entrapment, and infringing upon civil rights and civil liberties in the name of national security. A decade before 9/11, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted the same practices against a completely different demographic – Christian Right militants, through a program called PATCON, short for Patriot Conspiracy. Building upon the concept of surveillance as social sorting (Lyon 2013) and surveillance and terrorism (Monahan 2013), This article will compare the history of surveillance tactics used by the FBI against Christian Right militants and those used by the NYPD against non-militant Muslim Americans, and assess their implications in the context of civil rights, leaving a legacy of mistrust between these respective groups and the federal government that further undermines the national security interests of the United States.
A First Line of Defence? Vigilant surveillance, participatory policing and the reporting of ‘suspicious’ activity
Authors: Larsson Sebastian
Published: July 2018

What is at stake when citizens are encouraged to deploy vigilant surveillance and report what they consider to be unusual and “suspicious” activity? This article explores the current role of vigilance in contemporary Western security practices aimed at battling terrorist acts and major crime. It does so by critically analysing official constructions of suspiciousness, the responsibilisation process of participatory policing, and the assignments of prejudiced amateur detectives. It concludes, firstly, that the agency offered by political campaigns such as “If You See Something, Say Something” is highly illusive since the act of reporting simply demarcates where participation ends, and where fear and paranoia are turned into legitimate intelligence, enabling the state to exercise authoritative action and preemptive violence. Secondly, these kinds of vigilance initiatives also nurture a normalisation of suspicion towards strangers since the encouragements to be aware of anything-and-anyone deemed “out of the ordinary”, as well as the tools for reporting such suspicions, increasingly creep into the mundane realms of everyday life.
Towards Cities of Informers? Community-Based Surveillance in France and Canada
Authors: Purenne Anaïk , Palierse Grégoire
Published: July 2018

What are the effects of citizen-based surveillance? Examining contrasted programs in France and Canada, this article shows that citizen involvement in surveillance actions can have ambivalent, multifaceted effects. Participatory surveillance can help to strengthen the community's sense of belonging, while paradoxically contributing to instil fear. However, these initiatives do not inevitably lead to a culture of generalized suspicion. Depending on the ability of residents to open up controversial subjects for debate, such programs can also leave the way open to a democratization of public action.
"Living in the File": Kinship & Political Surveillance in Post-Civil War Greece
Authors: Pendakis Katherine
Published: July 2018

Little attention has been paid to the ways in which political surveillance practices have historically intersected with a cultural logic of kinship or actual kin relationships, despite the fact that intergenerational effects of state surveillance have been observed. This article aims to open up this important avenue of research through a reflection on the relationship between kinship, political surveillance and state persecution in post-civil war Greece. Drawing on narrative interviews and borrowing from the emerging ethnographic work on the agentic qualities of state documents, this article analyzes the unexpected ways in which the citizen file (fakelos) created a form of political inheritance for the children of leftists. I argue that a cultural logic of kinship was central to anticommunist surveillance practices after the civil war and that these practices ultimately rendered political identity a matter of lineage, something transacted through patrilines, fixing fathers and sons (and sometimes uncles and nephews) in a shared political genealogy.
The Value of Transparency: Bulk Data and Authoritarianism
Authors: Robbins Scott , Henschke Adam
Published: July 2018

Given recognition of widespread state sponsored surveillance programs, are liberal democracies descending into an Orwellian authoritarian nightmare? The realities of the modern surveillance state instead suggest our worries ought to be about Kafkaesque bureaucratic black holes. In this paper we suggest that authoritarianism can be avoided by liberal democracies if they adhere to processes of ensurance and assurance. Moreover,  we argue that both of these attributes are instrumentally enabled by transparency.
Online Surveillance in Turkey: Legislation, Technology and Citizen Involvement
Authors: Yesil Bilge , Sozeri Efe Kerem
Published: July 2018

The AKP government has constructed an online surveillance regime (not to mention censorship) via various legal and technical means. This article analyzes the emergence and expansion of online surveillance within the context of the AKP’s authoritarian practices that are interwoven with its nationalist and populist politics.

It begins with an overview of legal and technical initiatives aimed at enhancing online surveillance, data collection and retention. It then focuses on the AKP’s recent strategies designed to bolster this online surveillance regime such as the institutionalization of online “snitching” via a newly-introduced social media app that enables citizen-informants to “report terrorists” to the authorities.  

The article argues that the AKP’s recent strategies and rationalities to regulate the conduct of online users are aligned with principles of “governing at a distance” and are informed by both its authoritarianism (exemplified by the repression of all forms of dissent in the broader media ecosystem) and its right-wing nationalism and populism (as seen in the stigmatizing of critical voices and/or certain groups as sources of threat, labelling them as “being against the nation” and as “terrorists”).
Surveilling Social Difference: Black Women’s "Alley Work" in Industrializing Minneapolis
Authors: Fair Freda L.
Published: July 2018

This article examines the arrest records of black women who worked as sex workers in downtown Minneapolis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who were referred to as “alley workers.” I demonstrate the ways in which black women’s alley work documents the coming together of photography and surveillance as constitutive of the broader project of the modernization of police work through the procedures of standardization offered by the Bertillon System of Criminal Identification. I draw on women of color feminism, visual cultural studies, and critical race studies to analyze the alley work historical archive as a representational account of black women’s sexual regulation. My argument is that the Bertillon system’s attempts to categorize alley work functions as a strategy of surveillance that regulates black women’s economic and social difference. The police’s efforts to identify alley work as economically transgressive positions black sexual labor as an unruly site of social management in the context of industrializing Minneapolis.
Algorithmic Fetishism
Authors: Monahan Torin
Published: July 2018

Surveillance-infused forms of algorithmic discrimination are beginning to capture public and scholarly attention. While this is an encouraging development, this editorial questions the parameters of this emerging discussion and cautions against algorithmic fetishism. I characterize algorithmic fetishism as the pleasurable pursuit of opening the black box, discovering the code hidden inside, exploring its beauty and flaws, and explicating its intricacies. It is a technophilic desire for arcane knowledge that can never be grasped completely, so it continually lures one forward into technical realms while deferring the point of intervention. The editorial concludes with a review of the articles in this open issue.
The Eyes of Law Enforcement in the New Panopticon: Police-Community Racial Asymmetry and the Use of Surveillance Technology
Authors: Hendrix Josh A. , Taniguchi Travis A. , Strom Kevin J. , Barrick Kelle A. , Johnson Nicole J.
Published: July 2018

This study examines the relationship between police-community racial asymmetry and the use of surveillance technology by local law enforcement. The data come from a nationally representative survey of law enforcement agencies, with supplementary information provided by the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics Survey, the Census, and the Uniform Crime Reports. Results indicate that police departments that underrepresent African Americans in the community are more likely to use or plan to implement surveillance technology, controlling for a range of agency-and contextual-level factors. One potential explanation for these findings is that surveillance technology operates as a form of social control that is differentially applied to racial minorities to manage what is perceived to be a greater proclivity toward criminal behavior. The implications of these findings are discussed.
Coming to Terms with Shame: Exploring Mediated Visibility against Transgressions
Authors: Trottier Daniel
Published: July 2018

Shaming in a social context is necessarily assembled, as it depends on a loosely and often spontaneously arranged network of actors to convey denunciation. Digital tools further the expansion of such networks, a development that is of particular concern for surveillance scholars. This paper seeks to advance an account of user-led surveillance of peers that is centred on the enactment and experience of shame, notably as such practices can mobilise and be mobilised by press and state-led initiatives. Drawing on literature that considers shaming in criminological, journalistic, and digital media contexts, it considers tensions and other developments among a range of social actors who perform shaming. Recent examples in the Dutch context support an understanding of shaming as a process that enrols a set of social actors to stigmatise and exclude (categories of) individuals under scrutiny.
What's New About the "New Surveillance"? Classifying for Change and Continuity.
Authors: Marx Gary T.
Published: July 2018

A critique of the dictionary definition of surveillance as 'close observation, especially of a suspected person'; is offered. Much surveillance is applied categorically and beyond persons to places, spaces, networks and categories of person and the distinction between self and other surveillance can be blurred. Drawing from characteristics of the technology, the data collection process and the nature of the data, this article identifies 28 dimensions that are useful in characterizing means of surveillance. These dimensions highlight the differences between the new and traditional surveillance and offer a way to capture major sources of variation relevant to contemporary social, ethical and policy considerations. There can be little doubt that major changes have occurred. However the normative implications of this are mixed and dependent on the technology in question and evaluative framework. The concept of surveillance slack is introduced. This involves the extent to which a technology is applied, rather than the absolute amount of surveillance. A historical review of the jagged development of telecommunications for Western democratic conceptions of individualism is offered. This suggests the difficulty of reaching simple conclusions about whether the protection of personal information is decreasing or increasing.
Panoptic Power and the Pathologisation of Vision: Critical Reflections on the Foucauldian Thesis.
Authors: Yar Majid
Published: July 2018

This article attempts to evaluate theoretically the applicability of Foucault’s Panopticon to the practices of public surveillance utilising CCTV technology. The first part maps out three “strands” in the reception of panopticism in surveillance studies, suggesting that it tends to fall into one of three broad kinds: its wholesale appropriation and application; its wholesale rejection as inadequate with respect to a supposedly “post-disciplinary” society; and its qualified acceptance subject to some empirically-dependent limitations. I then attempt in a preliminary way to supplement these three positions. In particular, I question the logical adequacy of equating visual surveillance with effective subjectification and self-discipline by drawing upon a range of philosophical and sociological perspectives. Philosophically, it is suggested that the Foucauldian thesis may well “pathologise” the relationship between subjectivity and visibility, and thereby overlook other dimensions of our experience of vision. Sociologically, it is suggested that the precise relation between surveillance and self-discipline requires us to attend, in ethnomethodological fashion, to the situated sense-making activities of subjects as the go about everyday practical activities in public settings.
Types of Self-Surveillance: from abnormality to individuals ‘at risk’.
Authors: Vaz Paulo , Bruno Fernanda
Published: July 2018

The major objective of this article is to inquire into the kind of subjectivity produced by surveillance practices. The analysis begins by questioning a certain understanding, widespread in the literature of new surveillance technologies, of Foucault’s conceptions of power and surveillance. In brief, this understanding privileges the surveillance of many by few, of ‘us’ by ‘them’. We contend, instead, that Foucault stressed in diverse books and articles the nexus between power relations and practices of the care of the self. Hence, techniques of surveillance are necessarily related to practices of self-surveillance. This theoretical framework constitutes the basis for differentiating two historically distinct types of self-surveillance: the first, proper to disciplinary society, is promoted by normalizing power; the second is associated to the increasing relevance of the epidemiological concept of risk in the problematizing of health-related behaviors. Epidemiology of risk factors, medical testing and genetics are opening up a temporal gap between the diagnostic of illnesses/diseases and their subjective symptoms. This gap is equivalent to a space for individual ‘pre-emptive’ action against possible illnesses/diseases.
Probing the Surveillant Assemblage: on the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control.
Authors: Hier Sean P.
Published: July 2018

Recent dialogue on the contemporary nature of information and data gathering techniques has incorporated the notion of assemblages to denote an increasing convergence of once discrete systems of surveillance. The rhizomatic expansion of late modern ‘surveillant assemblages’ is purported not only to enable important transformations in the purpose and intention of surveillance practices, but to facilitate a partial democratization of surveillance hierarchies. Seeking to account for the forces and desires which give rise to, and sustain, surveillant assemblages, this paper explicates the workings of a dialectic embedded in many surveillance practices to reveal a polarization effect involving the simultaneous leveling and solidification of hierarchies. Empirical data from the intensification of welfare monitoring are presented to illustrate the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control.
Circuits of Surveillance?
Authors: Williams Robin , Johnson Paul
Published: July 2018

This paper examines the increasing police use of DNA profiling and databasing as a developing instrumentality of modern state surveillance. It briefly notes previously published work on a variety of surveillance technologies and their role in the governance of social action and social order. It then argues that there are important differences amongst the ways in which several such technologies construct and use identificatory artefacts, their orientations to human subjectivity, and their role in the governmentality of citizens and others. The paper then describes the novel and powerful form of bio-surveillance offered by DNA profiling and illustrates this by reference to an ongoing empirical study of the police uses of the UK National DNA Database for the investigation of crime. It is argued that DNA profiling and databasing enable the construction of a ‘closed circuit’ of surveillance of a defined population.
Picturing Algorithmic Surveillance: The Politics of Facial Recognition Systems
Authors: Introna Lucas , Wood David
Published: July 2018

This paper opens up for scrutiny the politics of algorithmic surveillance through an examination of Facial Recognition Systems (FRSs) in video surveillance, showing that seemingly mundane design decisions may have important political consequences that ought to be subject to scrutiny. It first focuses on the politics of technology and algorithmic surveillance systems in particular: considering the broad politics of technology; the nature of algorithmic surveillance and biometrics, claiming that software algorithms are a particularly important domain of techno-politics; and finally considering both the growth of algorithmic biometric surveillance and the potential problems with such systems. Secondly, it gives an account of FRS's, the algorithms upon which they are based, and the biases embedded therein. In the third part, the ways in which these biases may manifest itself in real world implementation of FRS's are outlined. Finally, some policy suggestions for the future development of FRS's are made; it is noted that the most common critiques of such systems are based on notions of privacy which seem increasingly at odds with the world of automated systems.
People Watching People
Authors: Wood David
Published: July 2018

This editorial considers the issue of personal surveillance via Funder's Stasiland, the availability of surveillance services and technologies, and the culture of voyeurism in Japan, and introduces the articles in the 'People Watching People' issue.
The Work of Watching One Another: Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance
Authors: Andrejevic Mark
Published: July 2018

This article explores a range of technologies for 'lateral surveillance' or peer monitoring arguing that in a climate of perceived risk and savvy skepticism individuals are increasingly adopting practices associated with marketing and law enforcement to gain information about friends, family members, and prospective love interests. The article argues that the adoption of such technologies corresponds with an ideology of 'responsibilization' associated with the risk society: that consumers need training in the consumption of services and the development of expertise to monitor one another. Rather than displacing 'top-down' forms of monitoring, such practices emulate and amplify them, fostering the internalization of government strategies and their deployment in the private sphere. In an age in which everyone is to be considered potentially suspect, all are simultaneously urged to become spies.
Visible Rights: Watching Out for Women
Authors: Jones Helen
Published: July 2018

This short article considers what surveillance and privacy mean to women experiencing violence and examines the extent to which such concepts have been overlaid with patriarchal assumptions, acting to mask the distinction between the private and the public and resulting in a global politics where only the public sphere is seen as suitable to political intervention. Using Afghanistan as a case study, the article demonstrates that while women as a 'class' are surveyed and monitored, individual women are frequently beyond the gaze of justice and rights.
Escalating U.S. Police Surveillance after 9/11: an Examination of Causes and Effects
Authors: Bloss William
Published: July 2018

In recent years U.S. police have been given greater surveillance powers in response to perceived threats from crime, drugs, and terrorism. Several legal and criminal events have facilitated a reevaluation of the balance between police surveillance authority and civil privacy protection. In the post-9/11 era, changes in federal law, court interpretation of privacy safeguards, and technological advances have expanded the circumstances and methods by which the police may engage in surveillance of civil activities. This paper examines the factors contributing to the escalation in police surveillance and its effects on privacy rights and civil life. The analysis suggests that increasing police surveillance has diminished individual privacy protections and impacted aspects of civil life.
Exploring Relations between Watchers and Watched in Control(led) Systems: Strategies and Tactics
Authors: Smith Gavin J.D.
Published: July 2018

Using ethnographic observation within a number of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) control rooms as evidence, this paper documents the apparently trivial but subjectively meaningful types of technologically mediated interaction taking place between CCTV operators and those watched. It examines the operators' interpretations of the various incidents, individuals and social realities observed. In so doing, the author suggests a number of interesting social-phenomenological processes are occurring. These include: the formation and existence of disembodied relationships between watchers and watched across distanciated CCTV surveillance networks; an operator gaze incorporating care, control and creativity; the existence of hermeneutical narrative constructions among the operators. The latter practice can be empirically demonstrated through the operators' creation of 'celebrity characters', their attribution of pseudo-identities for cameo 'guest stars' and their playful characterisation of the framed action taking place in the spaces under observation. It is argued that such informal tactics, employed to both entertain and relieve pressure, are the unintended outcome of systemic strategies of control designed to induce conformity. They allow the operators to make sense of, bring meaning to and cope with relentless, often disjointed, imagery and with the emotional strain of the CCTV workplace culture. The paper also suggests that tactics are not limited to the watchers. The watched or Stars of CCTV appear to employ methods in a similar bid to manoeuvre themselves around the cameras. By considering the practices of watchers and watched, it is argued more generally that CCTV technology is a social medium, the people, places and objects watched functioning not simply as passive 'objects of information', but also as active 'subjects of communication'.
'Street-level Surveillance': Human Agency and the Electronic Monitoring of Offenders
Authors: Paterson Craig
Published: July 2018

Recent years have witnessed an increase in new 'technologies of control' that decrease reliance upon labour intensive forms of policing. The electronic monitoring of offenders represents just one section of the expanding industry in 'techno-corrections' that incorporates elements of the private security, military and telecommunications industries. The surveillance capacity generated by these industries has diverted attention away from the role of human agency in the implementation of surveillance services. This paper is concerned with the reliance of 'technologies of control' upon 'street-level surveillance' which involves a shift in focus away from the capacity of surveillance technologies and towards the actions of agents of control, offenders and the local community, in ensuring the successful operation of electronic monitoring services.
Technologization of Security: Management of Uncertainty and Risk in the Age of Biometrics
Authors: Ceyhan Ayse
Published: July 2018

Contemporary security policies are characterized by a dramatic focus on high technology like biometrics as a security enabler. The process of the technologization of security, i.e. the making of technology the centerpiece of security systems and its perception as an absolute security provider, started in the US in the Eighties and has since been expanded to the European Union (EU) and to almost all developed countries. In this process, biometrics is accepted as the ultimate technology to identify people with certainty. This article examines this emphasis on biometrics in France and in the US in the context of the transformations of late modernity and analyses the philosophical and ethical issues that the emphasis on the body as the core element of identification systems raises.
The Diffuse Border: Intelligence-Sharing, Control and Confinement along Canada's Smart Border
Authors: Cote-Boucher Karine
Published: July 2018

Taking its cue from Deleuze's reading of Foucault's notion of apparatus (dispositif), this article explores the assemblage of mechanisms, institutions, discourses and practices that came to be conceptualized as a "smart border." Through an examination of Canadian policy documents, this article analyses the smart border as a "diffuse border." Physically extending beyond and inside its geopolitical location through a set of legal, administrative and technological procedures such as refugee containment, counter-terrorism measures and information-sharing, the border thus articulates fluid control measures based on the use of information technologies to more restrictive procedures such as confinement. As a lack of transparency and racialized assessments of dangerousness often characterize its operations, the smart border apparatus calls for an analysis of the ways in which it contributes to the building of an "intelligence paradigm" through which the securitization of the region is undertaken.
Homelessness and Exclusion: Regulating public space in European Cities
Authors: Doherty Joe , Busch-Geertsema Volker , Karpuskiene Vita , Korhonen Jukka , O'Sullivan Eoin , Sahlin Ingrid , Petrillo Agostino , Wygnanska Julia
Published: July 2018

Public space is an essential component of the daily life of homeless people, whether rough sleepers or hostel dwellers or others who are inadequately housed. During 2006 a group of researchers from the European Observatory on Homelessness considered the ways in which the increasing surveillance, regulation and control over public space, evident in all European cities, has impacted on the lives of homeless people. In this paper we chart the background to this latest phase in the 'regulation of urban space' and assemble evidence from across Europe and especially from our case study countries – Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Poland, and Sweden. We attempt an analysis of these trends using concepts of 'border control', 'discipline' and 'deterrence'. We also consider a limited number of examples of resistance by and on behalf of homeless people to the imposition of restrictions on public space access. In the concluding section, we reflect on related wider societal processes associated with urban regulation and surveillance and their impact on the use of public space.
Observing the Others, Watching Over Oneself: Themes of medical surveillance in post-panoptic society
Authors: Bauer Susanne , Olsén Jan Eric
Published: July 2018

This article explores two instances of medical surveillance that illustrate post-panoptic views of the body in biomedicine, from the patient to the population. Techniques of surveillance and monitoring are part of medical diagnostics, epidemiological studies, aetiologic research, health care management; they also co-shape individual engagements with illness. In medicine, surveillance data come as digital anatomies for educational purposes and clinical diagnostics that subject the body to imaging techniques, but also as databases of patient collectives that are established in large-scale, at times nationwide, epidemiological studies. We will show that techniques of medical surveillance now include more bottom-up and less-centralized modes as well: with web 2.0 applications, one encounters endoscopic clips uploaded and made public on the internet and tools to navigate through patterns of sickness in urban space. Surveillance techniques directed at individual patients and at population health reconfigure the constellation of the body, space and the gaze into a post-panoptic distributed mode.