The New Transparency is associated with The Surveillance Studies Centre.
Identifying Citizens: ID Cards as Surveillance
by David Lyon
Polity Press, 2009
The early twenty-first century has witnessed a drive to establish national ID card systems in many countries. While some ID documents have existed for centuries, and have always been surveillant, new ones depend on electronic databases and, often on biometrics. This rachets-up exponentially their surveillance power, not least because the new systems also offer links with other databases than national registries. But even when these systems are presented as technical upgrades, they are not merely a technical matter. New IDs have a pre-history, are promoted by high-tech corporations and have new consequences for social sorting and for the exclusion of certain groups. Careful analysis of ID cards as surveillance shows how conventional assumptions about state-and-citizen need rethinking if just and fair systems of identification are to be developed.
Lessons from the Identity Trail: Anonymity, Privacy and Identity in a Networked Society
Edited by Ian Kerr, Valerie Steeves and Carole Lucock
Oxford University Press 2009
This book examines key questions about anonymity, privacy, and identity in an environment that increasingly automates the collection of personal information and relies upon surveillance to promote private and public sector goals. This work has been informed by the results of a multi-million dollar research project that has brought together a distinguished array of philosophers, ethicists, feminists, cognitive scientists, lawyers, cryptographers, engineers, policy analysts, government policy makers, and privacy experts. Working collaboratively over a four-year period and participating in an iterative process designed to maximize the potential for interdisciplinary discussion and feedback through a series of workshops and peer review, the authors have integrated crucial public policy themes with the most recent research outcomes.
An online version is available here: On the Id Trail
Playing the Identity Card: Surveillance, Security and Identification in Global Perspective
Edited by David Lyon and Colin Bennett
Routledge, 2008
In some ways a companion to Identifying Citizens, this book pulls together for the first time a number of important and illuminating essays on ID cards in today’s world. Unlike some collections, that focus only on Europe or North America, this one includes work on China, India, Japan, and South Africa, which provide stimulating counterpoints to already existing debates. It becomes clear that how ID cards are “played” depends on local historical, cultural and political conditions. Co-edited with Colin J. Bennett, Playing the Identity Card will also be linked to a web-site where further information and debates over IDs will be available.
The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance
by Colin J. Bennett
MIT Press, 2008
Today, personal information is captured, processed, and disseminated in a bewildering variety of ways, and through increasingly sophisticated, miniaturized, and distributed technologies: identity cards, biometrics, video surveillance, the use of cookies and spyware by Web sites, data mining and profiling, and many others. In The Privacy Advocates, Colin Bennett analyzes the people and groups around the world who have risen to challenge the most intrusive surveillance practices by both government and corporations. Bennett describes a network of self-identified privacy advocates who have emerged from civil society—without official sanction and with few resources, but surprisingly influential.
--The MIT Press
Visit the companion website here: privacyadvocates.ca
Politics at the Airport
Edited by Mark B. Salter
University of Minnesota Press, 2008
Politics at the Airport brings together leading scholars to examine how airports both shape and are shaped by current political, social, and economic conditions. Focusing on the ways that airports have become securitized, the essays address a wide range of practices and technologies—from architecture, biometric identification, and CCTV systems to “no-fly lists” and the privatization of border control—now being deployed to frame the social sorting of safe and potentially dangerous travelers. --Univ of Minnesota Press
Surveillance Studies: An Overview
by David Lyon
Polity Press, 2007 
Rapid surveillance expansion in the past couple of decades has prompted the emergence of an academic field, “Surveillance Studies,” for which this book offers a succinct statement. Intended as a multi-disciplinary text suitable for a broad readership, it introduces new work being done around the world and suggests some constructive ways forward. It also makes a distinctive contribution by insisting for instance on the ambiguities of surveillance and on the need to go beyond “privacy” in considering modes of critique and resistance. The challenge to all is to consider how “those processing personal data do so responsibly, fairly and accountably.” Complete with a guide to further reading, an extensive book list and a glossary of essential terms, the book is also aware of its own involvement in surveillance – hinted at in the ironic title.
Theorizing Surveillance: The Panopticon and Beyond
Edited by David Lyon
Willan Publishing, 2006
Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth century plan for a panopticon prison was picked up by Michel Foucault as the key to understanding modern disciplinary surveillance. But the concept has proved as controversial as it has illuminating. The authors involved in this collection show both how the panopticon may still prove helpful as a metaphor and how surveillance studies can only make progress when, as Haggerty says, the “walls are torn down.” As Zygmunt Bauman notes, “some of the most profound theoretical insights into the impact of surveillance on power relations and the shape of human interaction” are offered here.
The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility
Edited by Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson
University of Toronto Press, 2005
In The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, editors Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson bring together leading experts to analyse how society is organized through surveillance systems, technologies, and practices. They demonstrate how the new political uses of surveillance make visible that which was previously unknown, blur the boundaries between public and private, rewrite the norms of privacy, create new forms of inclusion and exclusion, and alter processes of democratic accountability. This collection challenges conventional wisdom and advances new theoretical approaches through a series of studies of surveillance in policing, the military, commercial enterprises, mass media, and health sciences.--University of Toronto Press
Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, security, identity
Edited by Elia Zureik and Mark B. Salter
Willan Publishing, 2005
Since the 9.11 attacks in North America and the accession of the Schengen Accord in Europe there has been widespread concern with international borders, the passage of people and the flow of information across borders. States have fundamentally changed the ways in which they police and monitor this mobile population and its personal data. This book brings together leading authorities in the field who have been working on the common problem of policing and surveillance at physical and virtual borders at a time of increased perceived threat. It is concerned with both theoretical and empirical aspects of the ways in which the modern state attempts to control its borders and mobile population. --Willan Publishing
The Intensification of Surveillance: Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age
Edited by Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster
Pluto Press, 2003
A tightly themed and edited collection on "surveillance" - as intelligence-gathering, as a component in strategies of social control and as a socio-technical system that is increasingly impacting on every aspect of our lives - through the intrusion of overt and covert surveillance in virtually every public and private sphere, whether criminal or civil. The contributors to this volume ask what this intensification of surveillance means, how we benefit and what we might lose. How do we track suspects, define risks, combat crime without also, possibly, eroding our civil liberties and sacrificing our rights to privacy? What are the issues, the threats and the opportunities? The contributors to this volume seek to map out the dimensions of the problem and to offer a strategy for monitoring future developments.--Pluto Press
Surveillance after September 11
by David Lyon
Polity Press, 2003
If you have nothing to hide, it is often said, you have nothing to fear. This was a false assumption before September 11, 2001, and its falsity has become even more palpable and pernicious ever since. That’s the starting point of this book, which details the dramatic turns taken by surveillance after 9/11, contributing to what are probably long-term consequences. Intensified surveillance became more automated, integrated and globalized. But it was also more aligned with suspicion, secrecy and fear. Some possible signposts are offered for the ethical and political challenges thrown up by post-9/11 surveillance.
Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life
by David Lyon
Open University Press, 2001
The sequel to The Electronic Eye fills out the current picture by focusing on the everyday life dimensions of surveillance and on the quest for data on or from the body. The global picture also appears, with illustrations from North America, Europe and Asia in particular. Again, this book avoids the paranoid and the determinist, indicating some openings for critique and for hope. Lyon concludes that “it is the cultural grammar of today’s technologies that must be explored and contested. But we must look elsewhere for the means of confronting them than within the technologic of surveillance and its person-blind obsession with monitoring everyday life.”
The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society
by David Lyon
University of Minnesota Press, 1994
This book situates surveillance in the modern world. Michel Foucault did this classically, cleverly, but his history remained in a pre-electronic era. This book demonstrates that while surveillance is an ancient practice, it alters shape and significance not only with modernity in general but also in specific ways with new computing and communications technologies. The ambiguities of surveillance are explored in administrative, policing, employment and consumer contexts. But surveillance is neither static nor one-way. Modes of resistance, both philosophical and practical, are examined and alternative ways of embracing and confronting surveillance are assessed.
Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination
Edited by David Lyon
Routledge 2002
Although “social sorting” is discussed in Surveillance Society, this book examines the idea from a number of empirical, theoretical and practical perspectives. The authors, from North America and Europe, demonstrate vividly how surveillance operates by classifying, categorizing and assigning value across a range of social sectors. The chapters expose such sorting in workplaces, at borders, in transit, in administration, in health-care, on the internet and on the street. They also propose means of confronting surveillant sorting in policy and politics.
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