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Return to the Current Issue Index
This paper examines the increasing police use of DNA profiling and databasing as a developing instrumentality of modern state surveillance. It briefly notes previously published work on a variety of surveillance technologies and their role in the governance of social action and social order. It then argues that there are important differences amongst the ways in which several such technologies construct and use identificatory artefacts, their orientations to human subjectivity, and their role in the governmentality of citizens and others. The paper then describes the novel and powerful form of bio-surveillance offered by DNA profiling and illustrates this by reference to an ongoing empirical study of the police uses of the UK National DNA Database for the investigation of crime. It is argued that DNA profiling and databasing enable the construction of a ‘closed circuit’ of surveillance of a defined population.
Maria Los — The Technologies of Total Domination. Could revised concepts of Panopticon and bio-power shed some new light on the unique technologies of totalitarian power? This article explores the key mechanisms of total domination constructed as an ideal type. It treats Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany as paragons of modern totalitarianism that is characterized by the explicit use of an obligatory, comprehensive, ‘scientific’ ideology as a political tool of domination. The issues addressed include freedom; the state, law and terror; relations of truth; the self (and the other), and bio-power. Specific strategies of surveillance, dissolution of the self and obliteration of the “social” are highlighted to enable recognition of possible re-emergence of totalitarian practices in the current, technologically and politically transformed global universe.
Monica T. Whitty — Should Filtering Software be utilised in the Workplace? Australian Employees’ Attitudes towards Internet usage and Surveillance of the Internet in the Workplace. The notion of Internet and email monitoring in the workplace is a debatable issue. Some would argue that surveillance is necessary to prevent ‘cyberslacking’ which can lead to loss of productivity and be a waste of a company’s resources. In contrast, others contend that cyberspace is a private space that employers do not have the right to intercept. There is currently a dearth of available Australian baseline research available on employees’ opinions on Internet and email activity in the workplace. This paper reports the findings from a survey, which asked Australians about their attitudes on appropriate usage of the Internet and email in the workplace, and their opinions on filtering software. This study considers whether gender, working for a company which has implemented a company policy, and number of hours of Internet usage in the workplace are useful predictors of attitudes towards Internet and email behaviour in the workplace. This study concludes that individuals do condemn some Internet and email activities in the workplace, such as downloading material that might offend or harasses others. However, participants did not all agree that filtering software is the only solution to preventing inappropriate Internet and email behaviours. Furthermore, this study found that, at least in the Australian workplace, there is a need to begin seriously questioning what is appropriate Netiquette.
Haim Yacobi — In-Between Surveillance and Spatial Protest: the Production of Space of the 'Mixed City' of Lod?
This paper analyses the historical process during which the Israeli territory, including previously Palestinian cities, has been profoundly Judaized. More specifically, Based on Henri Lefebvre's conceptualization of the production of space, the paper focuses on the case of the 'mixed city' of Lod, accentuating the informal mechanisms of housing and infrastructure supply, the "strategic reversibility" of power relations and the struggle for identity evident in the Palestinian community's protest in this city. Theoretically, the paper highlights the ways in which social conflict is expressed through analyzing the conceived space, the perceived space and the lived space. By doing so, it reconceptualizes the act of urban resistance, and to stress the role of spatial protest as an alternative pattern of opposition vis a vis the surveillance mechanisms implemented in the city.
Drug-use surveillance systems appear in this paper as symptomatic “technologies of suspicion” that constitute a set of empirical modes for producing and interpreting “data” or test results in ways that conflate prediction with prescription, acting as technological forms of supervision, monitoring, supposed deterrence, and ultimately control. Technologies of suspicion are predicated upon a framework of trust; they are deployed within a “system of takings-for-granted” that presupposes trust and thus makes distrust possible. Drug-testing provides an excellent example of the institutionalization of distrust through the deployment of technologies of suspicion not only within institutions but beyond their real and virtual walls. The paper considers the also considers the decentralization and deinstitutionalization of distrust, the capillary dispersion of suspicion throughout the carceral society, and the role of distrust in underwriting the development of certain kinds of knowledge systems and technologies, forms of social and cognitive order, and the functional dispersion of police practices to individuals such as parents, teachers, and peers. Studying why bio-surveillance modalities should diffuse despite their unreliability and their contribution to a generalized climate of suspicion enables the characterization of certain features of the post-sovereign subject in a post-disciplinary regime.
Amy Myrick — Escape from the Carceral: Writing by American Prisoners, 1895-1916. In Discipline and Punish Foucault argued that the carceral state is inescapable. But is this true? One answer can be found within the ultimate carceral institution: the American prison at the turn of the 20th century. This paper examines writing by American prisoners from between 1890 and 1915, and argues that prisoners’ self-representations fit uneasily into the parameters of Foucault’s carceral state: prisoners ‘escaped’ through religion, generic writing that defied progressive individuality, and the ‘mirroring’ of their audiences values, fears, and identity. In this way they blurred the distinction between ‘self’ and ‘other,’ ‘delinquent’ and ‘normal’ that Foucault believed arose inevitably in the modern carceral state.
