The New Transparency is associated with The Surveillance Studies Centre.
Balahur, Doina
Ball, Kirstie
Bamford, Jonathan
Brucato, Ben
Bell, Morag
Budd, Lucy
Clavell, Gemma Galdon
Coleman, Roy
Canhoto, Ana
Daniel, Elizabeth
Desmet, Bart
Dibb, Sally
Dobrescu, Paul
Ellis, Darren
Graham, Stephen
Guelke, John
Hansen, Hans Klause
Harper, David
Hoste, Veronique
Leman-Langlois, Stéphane
Lyon, David
Mazón, Jose-Norberto
Meadows, Maureen
Murakami Wood, David
Molnar, Adam
Murphy, Michael
Nairn, Stephanie
Palmer, Darren
Pap, Andras
Phillips, David J.
Pollock, Karen
Pridmore, Jason
Samatas, Minas
Smith, Gavin
Snider, Laureen
Soghoian, Christopher
Thelwall, Mike
Töpfer, Eric
Trottier, Daniel
Tucker, Ian
Warren, Adam
The ‘unknown unknowns’: risk, surveillance and crime control in late modernity
D. Garland observed sometime ago that the radical changes within crime configuration and control in late modernity had, among other effects, the eroding of one of the ’foundational myths of the modern society: the myth that the sovereign state is capable of delivering ’law and order’ and controlling crime within its territorial boundaries’ (Garland, 1996, 2001).
Starting from this observation the authors question if and what strategies are in place for crime control, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Different models and theories are reviewed: from Beck’s alternatives (surveillance state vs cosmopolitan state), to O’Malley’ insight within “routinised imagination and security imaginaries” (O’Malley, 2008) and the new Hi-tech means of crime control analyzed by the so called “criminology of everyday life”. The authors observe that, most of the times, the theories and the models of crime and risk control, even when they propose the “institutionalization of imagination” are developed within the ‘pure’ modern logic of ‘the known’ (even when it is presented with different degrees of uncertainty and probability).
The main challenging question the authors address to refers to the ‘unknown unknowns’ in the field of risks generated by crime and terrorism.
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Taking The War On Terror To The Private Sector: Exploring Private Sector
Responses To Government Surveillance Regimes
Following the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 and the declaration of the ‘War on Terror’ one of the many new security initiatives introduced included the increased monitoring of transactions. Within this remit private sector organisations are now required to participate in the ‘War on Terror’. We review two industry sectors, the financial services and travel industry, in exploring how responsibility has been transferred from the public sector to the private sector. We focus on two key forms of regulation; in the financial services sector, anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism finance, and in the travel sector, the e-Borders programme. The paper investigates the organisational challenges faced in implementing and executing these security regulations and argues for a more comprehensive review of the tensions that arise from being required to carry out such societal obligations alongside traditional commercial activities than has previously been considered.
Kirstie Ball is Senior Lecturer in Organization Studies at the Open University Business School. Her research interests concern surveillance in and around organizations and she is author of a number of scholarly articles and books in this issue. She is a Co-Investigator on The New Transparency, a collaborator on LiSS, and has recently held grants from the ESRC and The Leverhulme Trust. She co-founded the journal Surveillance and Society and is a director of Surveillance Studies Network.
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Personal information has become essential to the functioning of our modern society. It helps individuals access goods and services, organisations provide services that better meet organisational and individuals needs and it affords opportunities for government and others to better protect individuals. These technological and other advances have opened up greater opportunities for surveillance of individuals as they go about their day to day lives. Data protection laws were developed to ensure that personal information was not used in ways that would have unwarranted consequences for individuals. The march of technological and societal change has been at a pace where data protection laws on their own have struggled to keep up. In the UK as the debate about the unwanted consequences of living in a surveillance society has gained pace there has been increasing unease with the current situation. Politicians have detected this and turned it into an election issue. We have seen a new government put greater transparency, individual control and the rolling back of the database state at the heart of its work programme. Traditional approaches to applying data protection and privacy laws are no longer enough on their own. As there has been a step change in the level of surveillance there needs to be a step change in the methods employed to provide appropriate safeguards. Privacy consequences must be identified, considered and addressed before potentially privacy invasive measures are deployed. Developing more effective systematic and proactive ways of ensuring that this is the case is a challenge that still faces us.
Jonathan Bamford joined the staff of the Data Protection Registrar when the office was first established in early 1985. He has remained through the transition to Information Commissioner with the introduction of the Data Protection Act 1998 and Freedom of Information Act 2000. The Information Commissioner enforces this legislation in the UK. Jonathan is the Head of Strategic Liaison and responsible for managing the ICO’s key relationships across the public, private and third sectors together with civil society and international contacts.
His main duties focus on practical data protection and freedom of information issues. He leads the ICO’s work on ‘surveillance society’ issues and on developments such as e-Borders, electronic health records, and video surveillance. He is involved in the ICO’s international data protection duties and is a member of the joint supervisory authorities for Europol and the Customs Information System. He also represents the UK at the meetings of the Schengen Information System Joint Supervisory Authority and in the Eurodac cooperation arrangements.
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Success or Surveillance: A Case Study of Proximity Scanners at a U.S. State University
Northern Arizona University (NAU), a state university in
Flagstaff, Arizona, falls behind the United States national average for
first-year to second-year student retention, and for students receiving D and F
grades and course withdrawals (D/F/W students). The NAU president and
enrollment administrators believe that boosting attendance will help improve
the school’s performance in these areas, and have turned to a technological
fix: the use of surveillance in an effort to boost student success. The university
will utilize electronic attendance monitoring using RFID (radio-frequency
identification) proximity scanners. Networked scanning devices are being
installed in classrooms to scan student ID cards, with an embedded RFID chip.
When NAU president, Dr. John Haeger, announced his plans to install proximity
scanners campus-wide, many students reacted in opposition.
U.S. Schools at the K-12 level have used a variety of surveillance techniques
to encourage attendance and enforce attendance policy. NAU is the first to
develop an electronic attendance-monitoring program using RFID proximity
scanners at the university level in the U.S.
As a case study, I investigate the initiative to install proximity scanners at
NAU and the critical social response prior to implementation. I investigated
popular sentiment toward and resistance to surveillance using a multi-method
approach. One method used critical discourse and content analysis of public
narratives in press and on the internet. Another involved quantitative surveys
delivered on-line to the entire population of enrolled students and faculty. I
also conducted qualitative interviews with opponents to the initiative.
Each individual site, methodology and analysis informed the other. As an
example, key critical issues addressed in press informed some of the wording
and dimensions measured in the surveys.
The primary level of analysis deals with perceptions of effectiveness,
efficiency, privacy and general impressions of surveillance. This analysis
reveals broad opposition to this program, specifically, and reactions ranging
from caution and skepticism to staunch opposition to surveillance, generally.
Furthermore, the relationship between public discourse, popular sentiment and
motivations for organized resistance are compared. In this case study, I
discovered a high degree of congruity between the three sites of analysis. The
many critical dimensions addressed in the public sphere are reflected in the
popular sentiment of those impacted by the program, students and faculty alike.
My findings suggest that such surveillance programs inspire deep criticisms of
surveillance society and identify key social fissures for movements toward
transparency and countersurveillance.
Ben Brucato is the Coordinator for the Laboratory for Applied Social Research (LASR).
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The political economy of surveillance in the (wannabe) global city
Many authors have highlighted the need to look at the political economy of surveillance in order to provide a comprehensive picture of our increasingly surveilled societies. However, an analysis that stressed only the material interaction between public and private actors, or the formal relationships between markets, technologies, policy and politics would leave out a broader understanding of the motives and expectations that are taking shape alongside the increase of surveillance mechanisms.
Since markets are not perfect mechanisms and policy-makers are not perfectly rational beings, policies are often designed and implemented on the basis of a set of assumptions that are taken for granted by large sections of the population. A thorough understanding of the political economy of surveillance, thus, needs to address the imaginaries that wrap up the political process at the local level: what do public officials expect from surveillance technology when they promote it? What myths about economic progress lay behind the drive to make urban centers feel safe? What imaginaries do corporations use when approaching public officials? How do the media portray the usefulness of surveillance technologies in public space? What are the expectations of the private actors that demand surveillance?
The fact that Barcelona (Spain) has so far only installed CCTV systems in the city center, in areas used intensively by tourists, reveals a picture that takes the political economy of surveillance beyond the corporation-meets-public-official discourse, which highlights private profit and the role of lobbies and lobbyists as a key reason behind the ascendance of surveillance technologies in public spaces, and addresses a more complex setting where the electoral expectations of local politicians meet the economic interest of the private shop owner meet the political aspirations of local media moguls meet the pressure to sell safe cities in the context of a global drive to see security technology and surveillance as the solution to all urban evils (and fast track to winning elections).
By looking at the actual articulation of the actors and interests involved in promoting security policies based on surveillance and monitoring of behavior in Barcelona’s public spaces, this paper aims to present less-explored understandings of the political economy of surveillance, making a case that highlights how global pressures, processes and imaginaries are received and negotiated at the local level (and by the local surveillance industry).
Gemma Galdon Clavell is a PhD candidate at the Institut de Govern i Polítiques Públiques (UAB). She is Head of the Research Group on Security and the City at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
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The Synoptic State: Class, Surveillance and Urban Ordering
Whilst theoretical work on surveillance has had a tendency to emphasize ‘newness’, discontinuity and adopt a ‘beyond the state’ position, this paper seeks to reassert the importance of material and ideological processes in thinking about contemporary urban surveillance practice. Far from seeing surveillance as either ‘public’ or ‘private’/ ‘new’ or ‘old’ , the paper will explore the key overlapping institutional relations and ideological convergences constitutive of contemporary statecraft and urban ‘crime control’ in the UK. A number of core issues will be raised.
Firstly, the paper seeks to explore the dynamics at work in the relationship between surveillance and ‘advanced marginality’ in the urban cores of the UK. For Wacquant (2008: 2), advanced marginality represents a ‘novel regime of socio-spatial relegation and exclusionary closure’. This is examined in relation the role of contemporary surveillance in the disciplining of poor people and their relegation in the production of neoliberal and/or entrepreneurial urban space. In particular, the paper charts recent shifts in urban statecraft and the germination of relatively novel state spaces (the ascendance of developmental and ‘visionary’ business-orientated bodies such as Business Improvement Districts) before arguing for rethinking the state vis-à-vis surveillance and bringing the state ‘back into’ surveillance studies.
Secondly, the impact of these shifts in statehood upon trajectories of urban surveillance and policing will also be outlined. It will be contended that the production and control of space needs fore-grounding in order to ascertain the direction and targeting of surveillance practice and how the latter reflects and reinforces privileged spatial relations. Increasingly, these relations have become governed with reference to a ‘politics of visibility’ characteristic of ‘new primary definers’ within contemporary urban statecraft, and it is their role that the paper will focus upon. Moreover, these processes have involved a recodification of class relations in contemporary cities and present an important context for thinking about surveillance developments - both in terms of panoptic practices and synoptic representations pertaining to the urban ‘working classes’ and their ‘place’ within the urban setting.
Thirdly, and taking these cues, urban surveillance practice will be explored as more than a ‘crime prevention tool. Instead, the urban surveillance endeavour is understood as a relatively coordinated yet contradictory terrain that involves technical and social / normative aspects. This surveillance terrain will be analysed as a form of socio-spatial ordering based around tendentious and powerful class-based notions of ‘risk’ and ‘dangerousness’. The socio-spatial impacts of these shifts in the nature of state surveillance will be considered in relation to existing social divisions and the differential processing of visibility, mobility, and rights to the city, as well as levels of social participation, that these developments are bestowing upon both powerless and powerful groups respectively.
Overall the paper seeks to raise a series of interrelated questions. Do these practices represent both discontinuities and continuities in urban surveillance? Does surveillance contribute to the process of advanced marginality? And what do these practices mean for urban ‘public’ space, ‘safety’ and social control?
Roy Coleman is a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Liverpool. His recent books include Surveillance and Crime (with Mike McCahill, Sage, 2010), State, Power, Crime (with Joe Sim, Steve Tombs and Dave Whyte, Sage 2009). His book Reclaiming the Streets: Surveillance, Social Control and the City (Willan) won the Hart Social and Legal Book Prize in 2005. His research interests are forcused around the relationship betweeen surveillance, state power, urban space and social divisions.
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A critical examination of AML profiling practices in UK retail banking
Financial institutions in the UK are required to observe due diligence with respect to their customers’ account activity, in order to aid in the prevention and detection of money laundering. However, this monitoring activity does not follow the same administrative and economic rationale of other profiling initiatives (e.g., for marketing purposes). Moreover, because it aims to detect secretive and deceptive activity, it faces specific practical and technical barriers. The paper explores these conditioning factors and reflects on the consequences they have on the banks’ ability to detect money laundering.
The paper first investigates the use of customer profiling in the fight against money laundering. Anti money laundering (AML) programmes are key to crime prevention by removing the financial reward of engaging in criminal activity. Given the role of banks as a point of entry of cash in the financial system, and a major facilitator of movements of cash globally, it is not surprising that AML initiatives worldwide focused on ‘curtailing money laundering through the front door’ (Zdanowicz 2004). Yet, AML ultimately runs against the traditional strategic objectives of banks. Additionally, the core banking activities of accepting deposits and granting credit are very different in nature from the monitoring and quasi law enforcement actions required by regulations.
Next, the paper considers the content of the AML profiles. Rules regarding what and how to monitor are formulated by a three level hierarchy of organisations: transnational organisations such as the Financial Actions Task Force (FATF), national organisations such as the regulators, and local organisations such as the banks themselves. It is important to note, however, that the rules dictate what banks have to do, but not how to do it, resulting in a variety of criteria in use by these AML agents. In addition, the general guidance is difficult to translate into practice because of numerous technical difficulties linked with the nature of the phenomenon being profiled. The paper further reviews the technical difficulties of developing profiles of money laundering behaviour, such as the lack of tested profiles or the temporal and spatial dimensions of the behaviour in question. The paper further notes that the fight against financial crime is ever more reliant on predictive profiling, meaning that there is a heightened level of ambiguity and uncertainty surrounding the use of profiles in AML. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to empirically verify the behaviour being modelled and predict the evolving money laundering scheme, or where and how the next terror attack will occur.
Understanding the nature of profiling in AML and identifying the sources of bias is particularly important given that software tends to consolidate and hide away the ‘arguments, decisions, uncertainties and the processual nature of decision making’ surrounding its development (Bowker and Star 1994). Additionally, a clear understanding of the extent to which outcomes may be affected by the process would be of obvious interest to practitioners, in the sense that it could inform potential corrective measures.
Bowker, G. and S. L. Star (1994). Knowledge and infrastructure in international information management - Problems of classification and coding. Information acumen - The understanding and use of knowledge in modern business. L. Bud-Frierman. London, Routledge: 187-213.
Zdanowicz, J. S. (2004). "Detecting money laundering and terrorist financing via data mining." Communications of the ACM 47(5): 53-55
Recent publications by Ana Isabel Canhoto:
"Safeguarding customer information: the role of staff" (2009) Journal of Consumer Marketing, 26 (7), pp.487-495
"Group profiling: an overview of methods and research issues" (2008) in Profiling the European Citizen: Cross-disciplinary perspective (Eds. Hildebrandt, M. and Gutwirth, S.), Springer, with James Backhouse
"Profiles in context: analysis of the development of a customer loyalty program and a risk scoring practice" (2008) in Profiling the European Citizen: Cross-disciplinary perspective (Eds. Hildebrandt, M. and Gutwirth, S.), Springer
"Barriers to segmentation implementation in money laundering detection" (2008) Marketing Review, 8 (2), pp.163-181
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When Life Itself is War: The Urbanisation of Military and Security Doctrine
It is now well established that both the ‘war on terror’ and its descendents have been heavily constituted through highly urban discourses, materialities and practices. This paper -- deliberately transdisciplinary, synthetical and polemical in scope -- seeks to demonstrate that new ideologies of permanent and boundless war are radically intensifying the militarization of urban life in the contemporary period. The paper delineates the ways in which contemporary processes of militarisation -- which surround what I label the ‘new military urbanism’ -- raise fundamental questions for critical urban scholarship because of the ways in which they work to normalise the permanent targeting of everyday urban sites, circulations, and populations.
Focusing primarily on US military security and military doctrine, culture and technology, this paper explores the new military urbanism’s five inter-related foundations in detail. These are: the urbanisation of military and security doctrine; the links between militarised control technologies and digitised urban life; the cultural performances of militarised media consumption; the emerging urban political economies of the ‘security’ industries; and the new state spaces of violence. Following the elaboration of each of these themes, the paper concludes by identifying ways forward for critical urban research in exposing and confronting the normalization of the new military urbanism.
Stephen Graham is Professor of Cities and Society at the Global Urban Research Unit in Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. His research addresses intersections between urban places, mobilities, technology, war, militarization, surveillance and geopolitics. He has authored, co-authored and edited a range of books, including Telecommunications and the City (1996), Splintering Urbanism (2001) (both with Simon Marvin), The Cybercities Reader (2004), Cities, War and Terrorism (2004), Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail (2009), and Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (2010).
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The Use of Surveillance Technology by
State and Private Actors
Surveillance and detection technology carry at least four moral risks. First, it can result in serious violations
of privacy. Second, it can produce error, leading to miscarriages of
justice, unjustified suspicion and discrimination. Third, it can
counterproductively erode needed trust and cooperation with policing
authorities, and discourage legitimate political participation and other
associational activity. Fourth, information
acquired can be abused either for private purposes, of voyeurism or stalking
say, or be abused in (what is claimed to be) ‘the public interest’ as part of
unrestrained pursuit of over militarised counterterrorist strategies – the
paradigm of ‘the war on terror’ - and in the unfair pursuit of competitive economic
advantage.
The paper considers two questions.
First, to what extent do private, non
state uses of surveillance technology avoid or incur each category of moral risk? Second, do advances in technology incur
any additional or distinctive problems for state surveillance? The claim that
modern day countries like the UK and USA are ‘surveillance states’ often makes
reference to advances in technology, but all
four categories of moral risk can be seen to be incurred by a range of policing
tactics, particularly preventive policing characteristic of counterterrorism.
Without surveillance technology police would still intrusively make use of
moles and other forms of human intelligence. They would still be forced
to rely on thin, error prone evidence due to the inherent difficulty of
predicting when serious crimes such as terrorism are likely to occur. The
temptation to use surveillance techniques for non policing purposes would still
be strong. And it would still be the case that disproportionate policing
tactics could alienate communities and that political participation could be
‘chilled’. Given that these would
continue regardless, the objection to uses of surveillance technology, as opposed to objections to state surveillance as it
has otherwise taken place, must make the case that the use of technology itself
makes a moral difference.
The paper argues that non state actors are subject to stronger restrictions on
when the moral risks of detection technology may be permissibly taken.
Non state actors can hardly ever claim to legitimately take such risks in the
public good. Advances in detection technology are morally relevant only
insofar as they make new possibilities accessible and convenient in ways they
were not before.
John Guelke received his PhD from Manchester University in 2009. He is currently working as a research fellow on a three-year EU-funded project called 'DETECTER' on the ethical and legal norms of detection technology use in counter-terrorism.
Recent publications include:
“Privacy and the Defence of Democracy” in The RUSI Monitor 13th August 2009.
“The Political Morality of the Neoconservatives: An Analysis” in International Politics Vol. 42, No. 1, March 2005
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Ethical Recoding through Surveillance: The case of business in the anti-corruption industry
Global business is characterized by a growing concern with moral values. This is evidenced by the expansion of corporate activity framed in the language of business ethics. It also finds expression in the efforts by international organizations, governments and activists at instilling a mentality of social responsibility in the private sector through critique, inspection, and punishment of its practices. Likewise, the spread of research, consultancy and business school education in matters of corporate social responsibility, and the measurement and dissemination of best practices, confirms the salient attempts to link business and ethics in contemporary market economies (Roberts, 2003; Shamir, 2008).
Andrew Barry (2004) has proposed the concept of ‘ethical capitalism’ to understand this phenomenon. Ethical capitalism refers to ‘a set of ways of acting on the conduct of business activity’, ‘a cluster of techniques that have been developed to make the ethical or unethical conduct of business explicit’ (Barry, 2004:196). Historically, ethical problems in market societies were considered to be external to the market and tackled by national non-market institutions, specifically the political system (Fourcade and Healy, 2007). What is new is the growing expectation that corporations address moral and ethical matters themselves. The notion of ethical capitalism – or the ethicalization of business - does not imply that capitalism has become more moral than in the past. What it does imply, though, is an increasing focus on visibility and surveillance technologies and the commodification of them (Ericson, 2007).
In this paper I adapt and elaborate on the concept of ethical capitalism to investigate the growing corporate engagement in the international fight against corruption, with a specific view to analyzing the development and deployment of visibility and surveillance technologies in the governance of corporate bribery. Drawing on interviews, documentary research and observations in the emerging anti-corruption industry (Sampson, 2005; Hansen, forthcoming), I show how corporate participation in anti-corruption efforts has come to constitute and rely on a market for surveillance technologies, particularly business intelligence, due diligence systems, reporting and disclosure mechanisms, ranking metrics, organized whistle-blower systems, and so on (e.g., Tabuena and Mondini, 2006).
While corporate participation in the anti-corruption industry might be seen as reflecting a fundamental ethicalization of the business actors involved by potentially restraining the drive for illegal corporate gains, it also represents an important ambiguity by inserting the ethical into the economic rationality of the anti-corruption industry, recoding in this way ethical practices as ‘business opportunity’ (Power, 2007).
Works Cited
Barry, A. (2004) ’Ethical Capitalism’ in W. Larner and W. Walters (2004) Global Governmentality. Governing International Spaces, London: Routledge.
Cockcroft, L. (2008) Corporate Corruption. Challenges in a Changing World, ICC Commercial Crime Services, http://www.icc-ccs.org/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=4&Itemid=19 (accessed 20 October 2008).
Ericson, R.V. (2007) Crime in an Insecure World, Cambridge: Polity Press
Fourcade, M. and K. Healy (2007) ‘Moral Views of Market Society’, Annual Review of Sociology’, 33:285-111
Hansen, H.K (forthcoming) ‘Managing Corruption Risk’, Review of International Political Economy (accepted for publication).
Roberts, J. (2003) ‘The Manufacture of Corporate Social Responsibility: Constructing Corporate Sensibiility’, Organization 10(2):249-265
Power, M. (2007) Organized Uncertainty. Designing a World of Risk Management. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Sampson, S. (2005) ‘Integrity Warriors: Global Morality and the Anti-corruption movement in the Balkans’, in D. Haller and C. Shore (eds.): Corruption. Anthropological Perspectives, London and Ann Arbor: Pluto Press
Shamir, R. (2008) ‘The age of responsibilization: on market-embedded morality’, Economy and Society 37(1):1-19
Tabuena, J. A and Mondini, C. (2006) ’Internal reporting and whistle-blowing’, in The Global Compact: Business against corruption. Case stories and examples. New York: United Nations Global Compact Office, www.unglobalcompact.org (accessed November 2007)
Hans Krause Hansen is an associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School. His research interests revolve around the practices and roles of private authority in global governance. His current research analyzes anti-corruption practices undertaken by international business, including the surveillance infrastructures of international anti-corruption regimes, and the imageries of transparency and visibility. Recent publications include the anthologies 'Digital Governance//: Networked Societies' (2006, Samfundslitteratur/NORDICOM, co-edited with Jens Hoff)and 'Critical Perspectives on Private Authority in Global Politics' (2008, Palgrave Macmillan, co-edited with Dorte Salskov-Iversen)as well as articles in Citizenship Studies, Alternatives and International Studies Review. Forthcoming articles in Review of International Political Economy and Journal of International Relation and Development Studies deal with international anti-corruption from risk and surveillance perspectives.
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Sentiment detection for suicide prevention
The SubTLe project (Subjectivity Tagging and Learning) was conceived in cooperation with the Belgian Suicide Prevention Center (CPZ). The Flemish gouvernement wants to reduce the number of suicides in 2010 by eight percent compared to the year 2000. Until now, however, only a small reduction of this number was realized. Crucial for this type of efforts, is to be able to detect risk groups fast and accurately. De recent rise of Web2.0, has led to a proliferation of social network sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Netlog. Netlog, for example, is primarily used by girls between 12 to 15 years old, the largest risk group for suicidical attempts. In order to accurately react to risk bloggers (e.g. by placing banners, etc.), the enormous amount of blogmaterial forces us to develop automatic techniques for the automatic screening of blog content. We will report on how the SubTLe project will perform this screening starting from state-of-the-art NLP techniques.
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In a previous paper (Leman-Langlois, 2003), I pointed to the important role of higher education and university research in the development of new technologies of surveillance. In general, universities do not actively promote surveillance as a social, political or commercial necessity, but tackle it as a technical, engineering matter, removed from its practicalities but interesting because it lays at the meeting point of many technologies that have to be refined and, more importantly, adapted and made to work together. From an engineering standpoint, this type of problem is at once a powerful method for discovering new ways of applying scientific knowledge and an effective teaching strategy. In today’s difficult financial context, it is also a way to generate revenue by marketing or licencing intellectual property.
Over the past three decades, crime and deviance problems have become “under-surveillance” problems in the mind of politicians, public officials and ordinary citizens. Replacing the identification and tackling of social, industrial, political and organisational sources of deviance and risk, the return of the modern, “rational man” discourse has imposed a conceptualization of all forms of misconduct as the seizure of opportunities created by the lack of efficient surveillance. In this cultural context, the augmentation, amelioration and multiplication of forms and technologies of surveillance have become concerns for many university research entities.
In this paper I explore the rather complex relationships that have emerged between commercial research enterprises and universities (mainly through their computer/electrical engineering departments) in the creation of new technologies of surveillance. Universities, of course, train the engineers who develop technologies in the private sector, often from research stemming from their MSc or PhD work. Some of this work is also often directly licenced or sold to private enterprises. Yet, paradoxically, private sector engineers tend to look down upon universities as insufficiently practical, slow on the development of new technologies and isolated from the work and the needs of private developers. At the same time, both universities and industrial entities regularly enter into partnerships in order to benefit from government funding, which has greatly expanding in the post-911 security universe. This creates a very complex, dynamic network of agents with varying, often competing, agendas, ethics, work habits and economic/financial stakes.
Research presented in this paper is based on interviews with teachers and students at engineering departments of major universities as well as with cutting-edge surveillance technology developers. We also reviewed government, as well as industrial and university official literature.
Partial list of references:
Haggerty, Kevin and Richard Ericson (2000), “The Surveillant Assemblage,”, British Journal of Criminology, 51 (4) 605-622.
Hier, Sean (2003), “Probing the Surveillant Assemblage: on the dialectics of surveillance practices as processes of social control,” Surveillance and Society, 1 (3) 399-411.
Oram, Andy and John Viega (eds. 2009), Beautiful Security: Leading Security Experts Explain How They Think, Sebastopol (CA), O’Reilly.
Viega, John (2009), The Myths of Security: What the Computer Security Industry Doesn’t Want You to Know, Sebastopol (CA), O’Reilly
Recent publications include:
Leman-Langlois Stéphane and Clifford D. Shearing (2010) "Human Rights Implications of New Developments in Policing". Report for the International Council on Human Rights.
Leman-Langlois, Stéphane and Jean-Paul Brodeur (2009), Terrorisme et Antiterrorisme au Canada. Montréal, Presses de l'Université de Montréal.
Leman-Langlois, Stéphane (2008), Technocrime : Technology, Crime and Social Control. London, Willan
Leman-Langlois, Stéphane and Marc Ouimet (2006), Numéro spécial de la revue Criminologie, Le cybercrime, 39 (1).
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Promoting Global Identification: Corporations, IGOs and ID card systems
The international growth of schemes for national registration and identification systems has been very rapid and touches rich and poor countries alike. Where such systems are established their use of multiple sources of personal data contributes to a major expansion of surveillance capacities, whatever their specific functionalities. The speed and spread of ID card proposals and schemes suggests that other factors are involved than endogenous governmental aspirations to streamline administrative arrangements. In this paper the role of transnational corporations (such as Sagem, Oracle, SmartMatic), government representatives (such as ambassadors, trade missions) and intergovernmental organizations (such as the IMF and the UN Development Programme) in promoting the deployment of ID systems is traced in case-studies from Latin America, Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. Such schemes employ various rationales, often in combination, including national security, voting, banking, e-government and travel, in which once again both commercial and governmental interests are plain. The idea and implications of such ‘card cartels’ (involving government departments, corporations and technologies) for surveillance and governance are explained and explored. The international phenomena described do not amount to a conspiracy and the effects of establishing ID systems may be to foster as well as to threaten civil liberties. However, the current political climate in many countries and the relative lack of experience with systems using biometrics, RFID and the like does raise critical concerns about power, freedom and dignity.
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Business Intelligence at the reach of SMEs
Over the last decade we have been witnessing an increasing use of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions in order to query, understand, and analyze business data in order to make better decisions. Traditionally, BI applications allowed business people to acquire useful knowledge from the data of their companies by means of a variety of technologies, such as OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing), dashboards, data mining, and so on. Importantly, in the very recent years, a new trend has emerged: BI applications no longer limit their analysis to the data inside one company, but they are increasingly obtaining their data from the outside, i.e., from the Web (e.g., retail prices of products sold by competitors). Hence, companies must smoothly integrate these new sources with their available internal data. To do so, the first step should be to structure internal data sources in a data warehouse system, which is a costly and non-trivial task suited mostly for large companies. Bearing these considerations in mind, our focus is on providing new methodologies that will save money in the development of BI applications from internal data sources, before complementing them with value-adding information from the Web. In this way, not only large companies, but also SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) would gain richer insights into the dynamics of today's business.
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The Private Sector, National Security and Personal Data: An assessment of private sector involvement in airport and border security in Canada
National Security, always a central task of government, has become a matter of intensified concern in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on the United States and the following invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. National security has been used as a rationale for new laws and initiatives that call in question the future of key democratic social values and legal rights, such as privacy and equal treatment under the law However there is a further significant dimension emerging. Although a public interest, national security is increasingly provided either through government and private sector partnerships, or by private sector organizations operating on behalf of the state, part of an expanding ‘security economy’. Security is being outsourced to both indigenous and foreign companies and this has been a specific goal of national security strategies in several countries (Morabito and Greenberg, 2005). Emerging research has examined the private sector’s role in shaping national security initiatives in other countries (e.g.: Michaels, 2008; Lahav, 2008). However, no such research has been undertaken on Canada. This paper reports on preliminary findings of a project on uncover privatization and partnerships in the Canadian national security context and the associated regulatory and privacy frameworks with these, in particular an inventory of the nature and extent of private sector involvement in Canadian state national border and airport security initiatives. The extent of private sector involvement in Canadian national security initiatives opens a number of questions and concerns about the social and privacy implications of new security measures, not just for Canadian citizens and residents, but also for those vulnerable populations which are subject to the most scrutiny at borders, in particular asylum-seekers, migrants and ethnic and religious minorities.
Works cited:
International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG) (2010) Report of the Information Clearing House on Border Controls and Infringements to Travelers’ Rights. Ottawa: ICLMG.
Lahav, G. (2008) ‘Mobility and Border Security: The US Aviation System, the State and the Rise of Public-Private Partnerships’, in M.B. Salter (ed.) Politics at the Airport, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Michaels, J. D. (2008) ‘All the President’s Spies: Private-Public Intelligence Partnership in the War on Terror’, California Law Review, 96.
Morabito, A. and S. Greenberg (2005) Engaging the Private Sector to Promote Homeland Security, US Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance. http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/bja/210678.pdf
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The pursuit of exclusion and the capacity to banish: executive authority, judicial extension and surveillance technologies
Within the shifting sands of contemporary crime prevention and social ordering a renewed emphasis is being placed on the capacity of the state, in partnership with the private sector, to ban and exclude citizens from certain geographical and temporal spaces. This article locates these developments within a broader account of the emergent surveillant assemblage and the linkage between the changing administrative/legal police power and the technological surveillance capacity emerging across state and non-state entities. It is argued that the ‘failure’ or incapacity of the state to order the night time economy leads to ever-more inventive, intrusive and exclusionary processes, in this case the executive power to banish a person from a particular precinct. This executive authority is supplemented by the judicial power to extend executive authority over time and place and seemingly little concern about the undercutting of key legal principles (for instance reasonable cause as the basis for stop and search powers) or the post hoc reviewability of police discretion. However, such powers confront significant limits to the enforceability of the exclusions and bans. It is at this point that the related contribution of surveillance technologies to the ‘enforcement’ capacity of state and non-state entities becomes vital. In recent years, ID scanners have been introduced as a means of filtering and sorting consumers of night time entertainment. In Australia at least, ID scanners are on the cusp of a dramatic extension in their deployment (numbers in use) and in their role (from controlling underage entry to licensed premises to hosting data on the ‘troublesome’ and the excluded). ID scanners are quickly becoming both the symbolic and material representation of these developments as well as the practical tool to enable such policies and practices. More broadly, these developments fit within and extend the broader penal populism that has been evident across western developed countries over the past two decades, shaped by and re-casting broader neo-liberal mentalities of rule. Whether the ‘branding’ of the banished might reach the limits of penal populism and a ‘revolt against the machine’ is a matter of understanding the capacity of administrative authority to operate underneath the costly penal apparatus of the prison and corrective system, banning and excluding so many and emphasising individual responsibility while avoiding the limits of penal populism.
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Access to judicial proceedings in the internet age – a democratic requirement or a constitutional black hole?
Juxtaposing the American legal practice with continental approaches to accessing judicial proceedings by (i) the public in the courtroom, (ii) the print and (iii) electronic media, and (iv) web-based digital archives open for data mining, the paper and the presentation investigates the question of how the appearance of new technologies (and subsequent political and corporate interests) transform the constitutional status and morphology of a classic rule of law requirement: open courts.
The following questions will be discussed: Where should public access to judicial proceedings stop? Can (newly emerged) privacy interests limit this classic rule of law requirement? Or, has the digital era altered our expectation of privacy – a sociolegal concept that has a vastly different understanding in old and new Members States? How should the constitutional standards be adjusted? If even the intricate details of judicial proceedings, such as arguments or witness testimonies may be accessible on the internet (remaining there for eternity and open for data miners), does this loss of practical obscurity and the serious potential for violating privacy change the long held constitutional value of open courts? Can we make constitutionally relevant and sound distinctions among the various levels of publicity?
Declining to provide straightforward answers, the paper and presentation will aim at raising questions that pertain to the ambiguity of the political and legal approaches when privacy interests clash with the need of open access to data that have public elements, and which serve an essential tool and fuel for democracy.
András Pap is Senior Research Fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include constitutional law, minority rights and law enforcement issues.
Recent publications:
Law Enforcement Ethno-Racial Profiling: Concepts and Recommendations. In: Wolfgang Benedek et al. (eds.) European Yearbook on Human Rights 2009, Wien: Neuer Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2009.
Ethnicity- and race-based profiling in counter-terrorism, law enforcement and border control, Ad-hoc briefing paper, Directorate-General Internal Policies, Policy Department C, European Parliament, Brussels, November 2008.
Human Rights and Ethnic Data Collection in Hungary, Human Rights Review, Vol. 9, Issue 1, March 2008.
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Surveillance and the Political Economy of the Cloud
This paper asks how surveillance is implicated in the political economy of a particular industrial segment – mobile telephone and data services. Specifically, it asks how Google is integrating its core surveillance business within the emergent political economic configuration of “cloud” computing.
The technical paradigm of cloud computing consists of relatively dumb terminals connected through high-speed data lines to enormously powerful remote data processing and storage facilities. Typically, the terminals are “smart phones”, the data lines are operated by mobile phone networks, and the processing facilities are operated by behemoths like Google.
Cloud computing is potentially a classically panoptic system, with myriad sensor-laden smart phones reporting back continually to a centralized data processing center. The degree to which that potential, or other possibilities, are realized depends on the legal, technical, and industrial organization – the socio-technical infrastructure - of cloud computing.
Corporate players in each of the sectors comprising the “cloud” - end-user hardware, data networks, and data processing – are jockeying to stabilize that infrastructure to their own advantage. Using classic strategies of industrial capitalism, they are attempting to use their dominance in one sector to advantageously bind players in other sectors.
Most obviously, Apple has been able to parlay consumer demand for iPods and iPhones to extract advantageous system designs, licensing agreements, and marketing arrangements from software developers, network operators, and content providers, thus regulating the cloud to their own advantage, and excluding players who present a threat to that advantage.
Google’s core competence and the engine of its enormous wealth is surveillance – the collection, analysis, reconfiguration, and distribution of data. To maintain its position as the world’s dominant commercial data service, it must be centrally integrated into the infrastructure of the cloud. It perceives Apple’s attempts to dominate that infrastructure as a threat to that integration.
Google has countered that threat by entering the markets both for network services and for handsets. In both cases, this entry was framed in the rhetoric of “openness.” By entering the auction process in the US, Google was able to ensure that certain wireless spectrum remain unrestricted to any device, application, or service. Google has also entered the handset market with the Nexus One, a smart phone running Android, an open-source, unlicensed operating system. Moreover, the Nexus One is sold “unlocked;” Google does not restrict its usage to any particular network provider. The Nexus One thus attempts to counter and undermine Apple’s closing of the cloud.
At the same time, though, the Nexus One binds itself to Google’s surveillance operations. Google apps and services like gmail and maps are pre-installed. Google operates Android Market, the dominant distribution service for third-party Android apps. Yet to fully access the Market, users are required to have and use a Google account.
This paper further explores these issues in two sections. The first section theorizes the surveillance potential of various socio-technical configurations of “cloud” computing. The second section empirically investigates the strategies, tactics, and resources that Google is able to deploy in order to integrate its own surveillance paradigm into the nascent cloud. Generally, this second section asks “Why do I need a Google account to download a free Android app?” More particularly, it looks at the legal, technical, economic, and cultural considerations that would entice an developer to distribute apps exclusively through Google’s Android Market.
Recent publications:
“Ubiquitous Computing, Spatiality, and the Construction of Identity: Directions for Policy Response,” in Kerr, Steeves and Lucock (eds.), Privacy, Identity and Anonymity in a Network World: Lessons from the ID Trail. New York: Oxford University Press. (2009)
“Queering Surveillance Research,” in O’Riordan and Phillips (eds.) Queer Online: Media Technology and Sexuality (pp. 31-43). New York: Peter Lang. (2007; with Cunningham, C.)
“Texas 9-1-1: Emergency Telecommunications, Deregulation, and the Genesis of Surveillance Infrastructure.” Telecommunication Policy 29(11): 843–856. (2005)
“Negotiating the Digital Closet: Online Pseudonyms and the Politics of Sexual Identity.” Information, Communication, and Society 5(3): 406-424. (2002)
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Collaborative Surveillance: The configuration of surveillance subjects
Surveillance practices are increasingly collaborative in nature. CCTV cameras are being placed in locations that have active neighbourhood watch programs, often with their consultation and cooperation. Medical surveillance practices occur with the active participation of patients who willingly reveal their daily activities and medical histories. Travellers voluntarily allow access to details about their lives in order to expedite the crossing of international borders. Employees participate in performance measures and review these in an effort to improve their productivity. The collaborative nature of surveillance practices is readily apparent in the use of social networking sites as well. While the contexts of this surveillance collaboration differ, as does the ‘desire’ to collaborate with surveillance practices, the shift toward an active engagement with the surveilled allows for a dynamic, nuanced and contingent form of monitoring.
This paper explores the nature of such collaboration using the exemplar of contemporary marketing practices, specifically evidence from loyalty and relationship marketing. Marketers are increasingly reliant on personal information and an analysis of this data to know and understand their customers, and use this data in knowledge management and customer relationship management systems to improve marketing practice. The collection and analysis of this data has become increasingly innovative, complex, and precise and relies on mechanisms of consumer feedback and engagement. This paper argues these practices of collaborative surveillance serve to reframe conceptions of power between the surveilled subject and in this case corporations, reinforcing particular modes of consumption by systematically ‘revealing’ and ‘guiding’ the needs and desires of consumers. While to some degree this collaboration may be seen as occurring in forms of ‘exposure’ (see Ball 2009) in which the interiority of the surveilled subject is revealed to marketers, the argument here is that these sets of techniques for collaboration serve to ‘configure’ consumers in certain ways (Andersson et. al. 2008). That is, by inscribing certain relational practices into a ‘calculated’ ‘relationship’, the connection between the corporation and the consumer is strengthened in ways that benefit the former over the later (see Beckett and Nayak 2008).
This paper is indicative of the performative role of surveillance, demonstrating how this collaborative surveillance helps to create the phenomena that it describes/defines/monitors. While marketing practice is problematic in its reinforcement of power dynamics, these same practices and techniques, and in some cases the same data, have not simply remained in the service of private corporations. This paper concludes by indicating how some of the techniques of collaborative surveillance are being reconstituted as tactics and methods for all sorts of other enterprises in ways in which likewise serve to redefine the subject position of the surveilled.
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The SAIC-SIEMENS Olympic Surveillance project in Greece vis a vis the ‘Big Sisters’ Global Surveillance Business
This paper is based on the fiasco of SAIC –SIEMENS multi-million surveillance C4I system for the security of the Athens 2004 Olympic Games , b. the SIEMENS huge kick backs to Greek officials for this and other Olympic contracts, and c. the ensuing phone-tapping scandal against the Greek government during and long after the Games, we trace the “untold story” of both SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation), the largest US government contractor and '' homeland'' security company, and SIEMENS, the German electronic giant corporation.
Both SAIC and SIEMENS as distinctive firms of the so-called “industrial surveillance system” with close ties and work for the US and German intelligence, supply surveillance and wiretap technology to countries all over the world, regardless their political regime and the overall impact.
Hence, these and many other ‘Big Sisters’ global surveillance business, with bribery and spying promote a neo-liberal, authoritarian “global surveillance society” against civil liberties and democracy.
Minas Samatas has a Ph.D in Sociology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, NYC, and is currently Associate Professor of political sociology at the University of Crete, Greece. He is author of Surveillance in Greece: From anticommunist to consumer surveillance, NY.: Pella, 2004, and co-editor with Kevin Haggerty (2010) Surveillance and Democracy, London: Routledge.
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The Visibility and Trivialisation of the Trojan Horse?: Surveillance Representation in Advertising and Popular Culture
This paper critically analyses contemporary representations and articulations of surveillance within and across a variety of cultural and economic domains. In particular, the authors are interested in conveying how meanings of surveillance are being both starkly and subtly constructed and reconstructed in particular ways by an array of advertising/marketing institutions and other diverse entrepreneurial actors. Reflecting a holistic ontological view of the social world, which locates culture industries/creators (producers), text (object) and audience (consumers) in mutually constitutive configurations of connective interactivity, the authors then go on to theorise potential psycho-social effects of audience exposure to such diverse somantic and semiotic imagery. A key argument formulated is that whilst surveillance has been conventionally and traditionally conceived as a facilitator and indicator of intertwined commodification and securitisation processes (ala Coleman, 2004; Norris and Armstrong, 1999), empirial evidence would suggest that it has itself become the object of manipulative and creative marketisation forces, becoming a fetisihised commodity of immense political, social, economic worth and cultural significance.
Such developments have led surveillance as a socially constituting, transformative force to become more visible in both popular consciousness and imagination, but in an interesting diversity of representational and hermeneutical forms. In particular, irony has become a key strategy of marketers and culture industry producers, who artfully depict surveillance as a utility and object routinely embedded within a range of contemporary, everyday social activities and spatial spheres. One effect of such changes has been the simultaneous association of surveillance with traditional grand narratives of authoritarian power, capital and control as well as with a series of postmodern transgressive mid-range narratives, which appear to accentuate playfulness, struggle, trivialisation, ineffectiveness, resistance and mockery. Taken together, the argument formulated is that such depictions are transforming established and ‘classic’ symbolic meanings associated with surveillance, enabling pluralised and diverse audiences, each possessing differing situated knowledge scopes, to ‘remotely’ access surveillance (often from the comfort of domestic settings, through new media mediums such as film, television, the Internet and magazine discourse etc.) and ‘brand’ it in particular ways. Entry portals channel and influence actors’ everyday attempts to construct and make inferences about the role and function of surveillance processes, with some intriguing socio-political effects e.g. normalisation, contestation, expression(s) of ambivalence and indifference etc.
It has been recently suggested that surveillance and the meanings attributed to particular surveillance technologies are constantly negotiated and fought over by active and reflective subjects and groups. ‘Micro’ and embodied articulations of surveillance and their influence on the practice of surveillance, while seemingly neglected in the breadth of surveillance research, are becoming more apparent or visible via new media and information ‘channels’ (i.e. retail displays, television shows, blogs, etc.) and representations in popular culture. This has meant that expert and industry defintions of surveillance – which have been integral to the selling of surveillance at the macro politico-economic level – now regularly compete with definitions at mid and micro levels. Typically, justificatory narratives highlighting functionality, worth and purpose are the preserve of ‘macro politico-economic’ actors while the same communicational channels offer diverse groups and audiences the opportunity to articulate and construct alternative narratives which can function to challenge dominant represenatations, and the aesthetics and meaning of surveillance. This paper is discursively situated such that it highlights epistemological struggle(s), contestations and/or lack thereof as a result of, for example, the trivialization of surveillance in popular culture.
In order to explore the above issues, the authors will present a plethora of empirical case studies, including footage from The Simpsons cartoon, discursive material from webblogs and news sites, programming from a range of reality TV shows, discourse extracted from media and advertising documents and consumer goods. Material from qualitative interviews conducted with a range of cultural industry producers/representors and entrepreneurial activists will also be included in the discussion.
Gavin J.D. Smith is a lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney and visiting fellow at The Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism, City University London. Educated at the University of Aberdeen, UK and previously lecturing in Sociology and Criminology at City University London, UK, Gavin's main research interests include the mid-range interactivity between systems and subjects of surveillance, with particular focus on the meanings both actors place upon surveillance encounters/exchanges and resultant social dynamics. He is currently working on projects examining the relationship between political economy and surveillance normalisation, the application of surveillance apparatuses in diverse cultural fields (at local and global levels) and the role of the scientific imagination in the creation, design, manufacture and legitimation of surveillance devices. Gavin established and coordinated for two years the world's first MA Surveillance Studies degree programme at City University London. He is currently writing a monograph - Opening the Black Box: The Everyday Life of Surveillance (Routledge, 2011) - based on his doctoral research on the cultural practices and subjectivities of surveillance workers, and is co-author (with Martin French) on a general surveillance text, Key Concepts in Surveillance Cultures (Sage, 2012). He has several articles published and a number under construction.
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The “Great Unwatched” and the “Lightly Touched”: Surveillance and Stock Market Fraud
This paper examines financial corporate crime, specifically the discontinuities and asymmetries that produce the under-use of surveillance and surveillance technologies in the governance of stock market fraud. Case studies are used to understand state and non-state control (“rule at a distance”) (Rose, 1990; Rose and Miller, 1992; Rose, 1999) of the powerful economic actors who make up national and international equity trading markets, with an empirical focus on new and established surveillance discourses and practices employed by those regulatory agencies charged with preventing, regulating and enforcing laws to counter stock market crime. At a theoretical level the study probes the claims of surveillance literatures that technologically mediated surveillance, “the new transparency”, renders all social fields visible, and therefore knowable, manageable and governable (Ericson and Haggerty, 2000). This paper argues that to understand the dominant uses of surveillance technologies, particularly its “light touch” gaze at the institutions and actors of high finance, we must look at these legacies. Section I of this paper does just that, interrogating their original designs, purposes and deployment. Section II examines surveillance of the powerful today, using case studies of stock market crime and regulation in the nation-states of Canada, Australia and the United States. Theoretical and policy implications are examined in the Conclusion.
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Today, when consumers evaluate potential telecommunications, Internet service or application providers – they are likely to consider several differentiating factors: The cost of service, the features offered as well as the providers’ reputation for network quality and customer service. The firms’ divergent approaches to privacy, and in particular, their policies regarding government access to their customers’ private data are not considered during the purchasing process – perhaps because it is practically impossible for consumers to discover this information.
A naïve reader might simply assume that the law gives companies very little wiggle room – when they are required to provide data, they must do so. This is true. However, companies have a huge amount of flexibility in the way they design their networks, in the amount of data they retain by default, the exigent circumstances in which they share data without a court order, and the degree to which they fight unreasonable requests. As such, the differences in the privacy practices of the major players in the telecommunications and Internet applications market are significant: Some firms retain identifying data for years, while others retain no data at all; some voluntarily provide the government access to user data - one carrier even argued in court that it has a 1st amendment right to do so, while other companies refuse to voluntarily disclose data without a court order; some companies charge the government when it requests user data, while others disclose it for free. For an individual later investigated by the government, the privacy policies employed by their phone company or email provider can significantly impact their freedom.
Unfortunately, although many companies claim to care about end-user privacy, and some even that they compete on their privacy features, none seem to be willing to compete on the extent to which they assist or resist the government in its surveillance activities. Because information about each firm’s practices is not publicly known, consumers cannot vote with their dollars, and pick service providers that best protect their privacy.
In this article, I focus on this lack of information and on the policy changes necessary to create market pressure for companies to put customer privacy first. I outline the numerous ways in which companies currently assist the government, going out of their way to provide easy access to their customers’ private communications and documents. I also highlight several ways in which some companies have opted to protect user privacy, and the specific product design decisions that firms can make that either protect their customers’ private data by default, or make it trivial for the government to engage in large scale surveillance. Finally, I make specific policy recommendations, for federal legislators, regulators, states, and corporations that will lead to the full public disclosure of this information, and hopefully, create further market incentives for privacy enhancing services.
Recent publications:
Caught in the Cloud: Privacy, Encryption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 Era, Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2010.
Manipulation and Abuse of the Consumer Credit Reporting Agencies, First Monday, Volume 14, Number 8, August 2009.
Insecure Flight: Broken Boarding Passes and Ineffective Terrorist Watch Lists, First IFIP WG 11.6 working conference on Policies & Research in Identity Management (IDMAN 07), October 2007.
The Problem of Anonymous Vanity Searches, I/S: A Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society, Volume 3, Issue 2, 2007.
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Detecting and analysing emotion in social network sites
Social network sites like Facebook and MySpace are key environments for informal textual communication between friends, and the expression of sentiment is a common and important component of such communication. Typical data mining approaches for automatically identifying sentiment are unsuitable for much of the communication that occurs, however, because of the wide variety of non-standard language and linguistic devices used. This paper describes methods to detect positive and negative sentiment in short informal text messages with case study of MySpace comments between friends, which are known to convey a high degree of positive sentiment. The methods use common word meanings (e.g., love, hate) and also exploit non-standard spelling that has connotations of energy or sentiment (e.g., Heyyyyy!!!). Overall, the proposed approach has moderate success but better results than a range of standard machine learning algorithms with a variety of different feature sets. The results of analyses of messages in MySpace reveal that there is a strong gender factor with females sending and receiving more positive messages than males.
Professor of Information Science, Webometrics and cybermetrics researcher: Developing quantitative methods for Internet phenomena, including hyperlinks and Web 2.0 social networks.
Books:
Thelwall, M. (2009). Introduction to webometrics: Quantitative web research for the social sciences. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool.
Thelwall, M. (2004). Link analysis: An information science approach. San Diego: Academic Press.
Web site:
http://www.scit.wlv.ac.uk/~cm1993/mycv.html
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Metamorphis and symbioses of German Wehrtechnik: Genesis and Practice of the Federal Government’s “Civil Security Research Programme”
In January 2007 Germany’s federal government launched, as part of its “high-tech strategy”, a national programme for “civil security research” worth €123 million until 2010. Under the programme, complementing the €1.4 billion European Security Research Programme, projects are funded to develop “scenario-based solutions” and “technology platforms”. Among others these projects encompass the development of snake-like search robots and large-scale RFID-networks for locating victims and rescue personnel in disaster zones, of an intelligent public transport CCTV system tailored to the needs of the Federal Police’ duties in the national railway system, or of sophisticated Terahertz technology aka “body scanners”.
Drawing on concepts of “nodal governance” and “securitization” the paper will explore how a coalition of German arms industry lobbyists, Fraunhofer Institutes suffering from cuts in the R&D budgets for military technology, and high-ranking internal security officials have invaded national innovation policy and created a research community being instrument to a top-down security approach but also reversing the meaning of “dual use”.
Eric Toepfer is a political scientist and senior researcher at the Center for Technology and Society of the Technical University Berlin. His research interests focus on glocalised police surveillance, and the politics of internal security in Germany and Europe in general. Recent articles on urban CCTV surveillance, European police cooperation and the security-industrial complex have been published in the European Journal for Criminology, Kriminologisches Journal, Statewatch Bulletin, Bürgerrechte & Polizei/CILIP, Gen-ethischer Informationsdienst GID.
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'Grow Bigger Ears': The Political Economy of Visibility on Social Media
This paper considers the emergence of a political economy of personal
information through social media. It does so by exploring key developments in a
variety of sectors that are adopting social media services like Facebook and
Twitter as part of their business platform. It draws from literature on
audience labour (Smythe 1977), political economic concerns in the age of new
media (Dyer-Witherford 1999), as well as social media in particular (Andrejevic
2007; Fuchs 2010).
Popular literature highlights the revolutionary potential of new media
ecologies, notably the possibility of ‘organizing without organizations’
(Shirky 2008). Yet instead of redundancy, organizations face new opportunities
by taking advantage of social media platforms. The rise of social media means
an exponential increase in visibility for both individuals and organizations.
Disgruntled clients and co-workers may broadcast compromising information on
Facebook and Twitter, yet their own personal lives are also made transparent
through their prolonged engagement with these sites. The risks and
opportunities associated with social media cannot be decoupled, and
organizations are taking proactive measures to ensure a beneficial engagement
with these sites.
This paper offers a rich description of a new kind of visibility that is made
available to organizations through social media platforms. A broad set of
organizational tasks – including market research, recruitment, and customer
service – are augmented through a growing body of searchable personal
information. Sites like Facebook have undergone a tremendous diffusion into the
business world, the effects of which are only now becoming apparent.
By mapping key sites through which a social media surveillance economy emerges,
this paper illustrates how organizations utilize new relations of information
exchange. It offers findings from a series of fourteen semi-structured
interviews with professionals who use Facebook as a business tool, including
marketers, brand managers, community builders, and communications officers.
Relevant themes include the emergence of social media as a surveillance
technology for businesses, measures taken by organizations to cultivate client
transparency, attempts to extract value from information on social media sites,
the growing focus on ‘conversations’ between organizations and clients as a key
model for information exchange, and attempts to regulate the social media
surveillance economy through the creation of best practices and official
policies.
Works Cited
Andrejevic, Mark. 2007. iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era.
Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansasa
Dyer-Witherford, Nick. 1999. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in
High-Technology Capitalism. Chicago: University of Illinois Press
Fuchs, Christian. 2010. Class, knowledge and new media. Media, Culture&
Society 32(1): 141-150
Shirky, Clay. 2008. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without
Organizations. New York: The Penguin Press
Smythe, Dallas W. 1977. Communications: Blindspot of Western Marxism. Canadian
Journal of Political and Society Theory 1(3): 1–28
Daniel Trottier is completing his PhD in the department of sociology at Queen's University. His doctoral research focuses on the emergence of new surveillance practices through social media. Under Dr. David Lyon's supervision, he has conducted a series of semi-structured interviews to assess the impact of sites like Facebook on relations between individuals, institutions, and corporations. He begins a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Alberta (with Dr. Kevin Haggerty) in September 2010.
Forthcoming publication:
Trottier, D., and D. Lyon (2010) "Key Features of a Social Media Surveillance", in The Internet and Surveillance. C Fuchs, K. Boersma, A. Albrechtslund, and M. Sandoval (eds.), Routledge
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The organisation of life: Everyday experiences of surveillance and dataveillance technologies
The landscape of surveillance studies has been broadly occupied by panoptican theories to date. More recently, post-panoptic approaches have emerged that attempt to capture some of the fluid, fractured and multiple nature of surveillance technologies. For instance, the ‘surveillant assemblage’ concept in the work of Haggerty and Erikson (2000). In this paper we have two aims. Firstly, to follow on from the aforementioned approaches through considering how surveillant technologies create particular ways of ‘capturing’ bodies, and yet face challenges in terms of ‘keeping up’ with the movement of bodies in modern societies. And secondly, to ground such theoretical expositions in everyday life experiences. We are keen to avoid homogenising surveillant technologies, and consequently approach them as individual entities with their own pattern of recording information, and yet, often individual technologies merge and combine with each other in unpredictable ways. We are interested in both technologies of surveillance, as well as ‘dataveillance’, the mass and multiple recordings of data information (e.g. shopping loyalty cards, Social Networking Sites). Such technologies form ‘multiple bodies’ produced through processes of increasingly diverse and abundant technological recording of aspects of everyday life. We approach surveillant technologies and practices from the position of everyday life experience, which provides an empirical grounding to the burgeoning conceptual field. Drawing on data taken from interviews with city dwellers (Londoners) we focus on how the perceived legitimacy of forms of surveillance is contradictory and contextualised. This variation, often represented as the result of a variety of trade-offs (e.g. privacy versus convenience or security), illuminates the shifting and fluid movement of legitimation. In doing so we are analysing the relationships between technologies, political discourses and individual affective experiences.
Dr Dave Harper is Reader in Clinical Psychology at the University of East London (UEL). His research interests are in critical psychology and social constructionist approaches in mental health, particularly in relation to psychosis and he was a co-author of Deconstructing Psychopathology (Parker et al., 1995). More recently he has examined the relationship between conceptualisations of paranoia in mental health settings and wider culture (e.g. the ‘politics of paranoia’, Surveillance & Society, 2008). With Ian Tucker and Darren Ellis (both at UEL), he has recently begun a collaborative qualitative research project investigating public perceptions of surveillance.
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Predicting pandemics: using event-based surveillance to identify public health risk
Over the last decade, event-based surveillance systems (such as GPHIN, HealthMap and EpiSPIDER) have played an increasingly important role in shaping the governance of infectious disease. In early April 2009, GPHIN and HealthMap provided early intelligence of an outbreak of acute respiratory illness in the Mexican state of Veracruz, offering - in the words of WHO Director-General Margaret Chan - the opportunity to ‘watch a pandemic unfold […] in real time’. Moreover, their activity enabled the international community to anticipate major infectious disease outbreaks.
A number of scholars have discussed event-based surveillance networks in relation to wider geopolitical debates concerning the expansion of sovereign state power (Braun, 2007), the defence and military requirements of an ‘oligarchic’ global North (Weir and Mykhalovskiy, 2006) and the search for greater global health equity (Ingram, 2008). However, there has been little investigation into the actual operation of the surveillance networks, in particular the processes that lead to the initiation of pandemic preparedness interventions. This is surprising as, increasingly, public health authorities have come to rely on the unstructured information they collect – such as internet news and online discussion sites – to safeguard against potential disease outbreaks. Indeed, according to the WHO, these networks have proven to be particularly well-suited to the detection of rare but high-impact outbreaks (such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and H5N1 (‘Avian’) influenza). The ways in which the WHO and its member states utilise the reports gathered by these systems in order to make judgements concerning the spread and severity of global disease outbreaks are therefore issues of global, and national, public policy relevance.
In this paper, we place the activity of networks such as GPHIN in the context of the current H1N1 pandemic, considering how disease risk is represented in the international community. Our analysis draws on original, empirical, data supplied by GPHIN and interrogates the biosecurity practices outlined in national pandemic influenza preparedness plans. Using Margaret Chan’s 2007 call for ‘new’ international health diplomacy, we uncover the spaces captured by complex information networks that contribute to triggering pandemic preparations. In particular, we draw attention to the importance of localities, often situated in countries of the global South, in providing the source material that initiates global pandemic preparedness procedures. Finally, we conclude with considerations for global public health governance resulting from increased reliance on event-based surveillance systems.
