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Return to the Current Issue Index
Editorial Articles Review Interview Opinion Editorial David Lyon: Surveillance Studies: understanding visibility, mobility and the phenetic fix.
Surveillance studies is described as a cross-disciplinary initiative to understand the rapidly increasing ways in which personal details are collected, stored, transmitted, checked, and used as means of influencing and managing people and populations. Surveillance may involve physical watching, but today it is more likely to be automated. Thus it makes personal data visible to organizations, even if persons are in transit, and it also allows for comparing and classifying data. Because this has implications for inequality and for justice, surveillance studies also has a policy and a political dimension.
Editorial Articles Review Interview Opinion Articles Gary T. Marx: What’s New About the “New Surveillance”? Classifying for Change and Continuity. A critique of the dictionary definition of surveillance as “close observation, especially of a suspected person” is offered. Much surveillance is applied categorically and beyond persons to places, spaces, networks and categories of person and the distinction between self and other surveillance can be blurred. Drawing from characteristics of the technology, the data collection process and the nature of the data, this article identifies 28 dimensions that are useful in characterizing means of surveillance. These dimensions highlight the differences between the new and traditional surveillance and offer a way to capture major sources of variation relevant to contemporary social, ethical and policy considerations. There can be little doubt that major changes have occurred. However the normative implications of this are mixed and dependent on the technology in question and evaluative framework. The concept of surveillance slack is introduced. This involves the extent to which a technology is applied, rather than the absolute amount of surveillance. A historical review of the jagged development of telecommunications for Western democratic conceptions of individualism is offered. This suggests the difficulty of reaching simple conclusions about whether the protection of personal information is decreasing or increasing.
Nic Groombridge: Crime Control or Crime Culture TV? In criminological and in popular or media discourse CCTV is seen to be 'working'. Sometimes concern is raised about the civil liberties issues raised by such surveillance - for instance, in its extension from shopping malls to police cells. This paper reviews the criminological contributions to the debate but goes on to cross the borders of criminology into media and cultural studies by examining popular cultural texts which focus on or incorporate CCTV and surveillance as themes. Examples include: Big Brother, The Simpsons, J.G. Ballard's Super Cannes and Ben Elton's Dead Famous. That is, whether CCTV works or not, it has become part of the cultural repertoire. Some thoughts are offered on the efficacy / 'ethicacy' of CCTV but more on the intertwined nature of crime and media and the recognition that CCTV is a medium which has become part of our culture.
Rodney Fopp: Increasing the Potential for Gaze, Surveillance and Normalisation: the transformation of an Australian policy for people who are homeless Michel Foucault analysed the origins and social function served by institutions such as the prison and the clinic, explored the links between knowledge and power, and the body as a location or site of such social power. In this article, Foucault's analysis is applied to an Australian program for people who are homeless. After outlining a theoretical framework which emphases Foucault's theme of increasing surveillance being used for the purposes of greater regulation and control, this article analyses the changes that have occurred in the program. It is argued that initially the program was intended to assist non-government agencies to provide a range of services, including short-term crisis accommodation services, after which clients would move to independent housing. However, due to the lack of affordable and appropriate houses for clients to enter after their stay in agencies, clients have been forced to stay in funded agencies for longer than is otherwise necessary. Among other things, this program has adapted by providing more short-to-medium term accommodation and case management for clients which, in turn, has led to an extension of the time clients remain in agencies and greater intensity of service provision. It is argued that this has resulted in increased potential for surveillance, control and regulation.
Nick Taylor: State Surveillance and the Right to Privacy. The influence of Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights on domestic law has ensured that the state’s use of technical covert surveillance equipment has become legally regulated over the past twenty years, albeit in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. The passage of the Human Rights Act 1998 will see the development of the ‘right to respect for private life’ in UK law. This paper seeks to reflect upon the impact that the European Convention has had on the regulation of covert surveillance, and whether there is a theoretical justification for developing the ‘right to respect for private life’ beyond traditional private spheres and into the public arena. It is argued that overt surveillance in the form of closed circuit television cameras (CCTV) should thus be legally regulated according to the principles established by the European Convention, and that such an extension of the ‘right to respect for private life’ need not be detrimental to the common good.
Editorial Articles Review Interview Opinion Technical Review Jason Ditton: Hair testing: just how accurate is it?
Extensive forensic examination of the hair of 209 “ecstasy” (MDMA) users demonstrated virtually no correlation between self-reported tablet use, and traces of MDMA in the hair of users. Why should this be so? Three answers are possible, and all true. First, self-report is fallible; second, tablet strength varies enormously; and third, forensic analysis is of unknown accuracy. The first two are well known. Forensic analysis, however, typically presents itself as impeccably precise. The article demonstrates that not only is this claim spectacularly untrue, but also that validation of forensic analysis (and, thus, indirectly, self-report) lies in the very blind intra- and inter- laboratory comparisons that are never undertaken.
Editorial Articles Review Interview Opinion Interview Erich W. Schienke and IAA: On the Outside Looking Out: an interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA) This interview with members of the Institute for Applied Autonomyis a discussion of their critically intervening projects and products - projects and products that boldly dip into and out of the socio-technical landscapes that comprise contemporary surveillance systems. Their projects range from constructing robots for activists so as to avoid identification, to building websites for looking up “paths of least surveillance” in Manhattan and London. Threaded throughout the interview is a discussion about the rise of urban surveillance and the rapid transformation of public spaces into privatized places, i.e. “mallification” syndrome.
Editorial Articles Review Interview Opinion Opinion Felix Stalder: Privacy is not the Antidote to Surveillance. The standard reaction to the problem of surveillance is to demand the protection of privacy. This article, however, argues that the conventional notion of privacy, based, as it is, on the separation of the individual from his/her environment, is no longer useful in the context of ubiquitous electronic communication. Rather than defending ever shrinking areas of privacy, we should refocus our efforts and demand accountability from those design and employ the new communication systems.
Editorial Articles Review Interview Opinion
