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| Editorial |
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David Wood — People Watching People |
This
editorial considers the issue of personal surveillance via Funder’s
Stasiland, the availability of surveillance services
and technologies, and the culture of voyeurism in Japan, and introduces
the articles in the ‘People Watching People’ issue.
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| Articles |
Mark
Andrejevic — The Work of Watching One Another:
Lateral Surveillance, Risk, and Governance |
This
article explores a range of technologies for ‘lateral surveillance’
or peer monitoring arguing that in a climate of perceived risk
and savvy skepticism individuals are increasingly adopting practices
associated with marketing and law enforcement to gain information
about friends, family members, and prospective love interests.
The article argues that the adoption of such technologies corresponds
with an ideology of ‘responsibilization’ associated
with the risk society: that consumers need training in the consumption
of services and the development of expertise to monitor one another.
Rather than displacing ‘top-down’ forms of monitoring,
such practices emulate and amplify them, fostering the internalization
of government strategies and their deployment in the private sphere.
In an age in which everyone is to be considered potentially suspect,
all are simultaneously urged to become spies. |
| Nils
Zurawski — “I
Know Where You Live!” – Aspects of Watching, Surveillance
and Social Control in a Conflict Zone (Northern Ireland)
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This
article examines the special role of non-technological, everyday
surveillance in Northern Ireland, and its meaning for life in
the conflict laden province. It looks at the dimensions of people
watching other people and how it is that the culture of conflict,
which undoubtedly still exists in Northern Ireland, also produces
a culture of surveillance. This culture then affects the way in
which other forms of surveillance are viewed: with the introduction
of CCTV into Northern Ireland, it becomes clear that many issues
connected to this technology differ in comparison to other locations
and cultural contexts, particularly with regard to issues of trust.
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| Diane
Lister — Controlling Letting
Arrangements? Landlords and surveillance in the private rented sector? |
Research into landlord/tenant
relationships in the private rented housing sector has rarely
focussed upon landlords’ surveillance of tenants as a means
to control behaviour and use of property, despite it often taking
the form, or being on the margins of the legal definition of harassment.
Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews, this article focuses
upon day-to-day relationships between landlords and tenants and
explores landlords’ perceptions of their property and tenants
and the types of surveillance activities they adopt to control
and manage tenants behaviour. The article reveals the personal
and emotional motivations behind landlords’ surveillance
activity and raises questions about the legal and policy contexts
of the private rented sector which enable such conduct to exist.
In the light of the findings, the difficulties in combating extreme
forms of surveillance as a property management technique are discussed
and the article concludes by raising a number of issues about
the ways in which current policy and legislation could be used
to promote a greater understanding of rights and responsibilities
in landlord/tenant relationships. |
| Alison
Wakefield — The Public Surveillance Functions of Private
Security |
This
paper is concerned with arguably the most pervasive body of watchers
in society, private security personnel. Set in the context of
the rapid post-war expansion of both mass private property and
private security, the contention of the paper is that the inter-dependency
between these two industries is key to understanding the significance
of surveillance as a form of governance in privatised urban spaces.
Drawing on an empirical study of private security in three settings:
a cultural centre, a shopping centre and a retail and leisure
complex, it is argued that surveillance practices represented
much more than an approach to policing and crime prevention in
these venues, and were central to broader management strategies
for the three centres. These surveillance practices also became
the basis for collaborative working with the police. In the conclusion,
a number of concerns are raised with respect to the policing aspects
of surveillance, in relation to both commercial and public policing
objectives and the human rights and civil liberties being eroded
along the way. |
| Lynsey
Dubbeld — Protecting Personal Data in Camera Surveillance
Practices |
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paper explores in which ways privacy (in particular, data protection
principles) comes to the fore in the day-to-day operation of a public
video surveillance system. Starting from current European legal
perspectives on data protection, and building on an empirical case
study, the meanings and management of privacy in the practice of
Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) will be discussed in order to identify
the ways in which data protection is addressed in the operation
of a video surveillance system. The case study suggests that views
expressed by actors involved in the use of CCTV and the organisational
and technical measures that have been employed, are related to a
number of data protection issues, in particular principles regarding
data quality. In addition, the case shows that while regulations
(consisting in particular of organisational procedures) pertaining
to the permissibility of data processing can be discerned in the
practice of centralised CCTV, few indications exist that mechanisms
taking into account data subjects’ rights were established.
Therefore, the system of video surveillance discussed in this paper
suggests that different elements of data protection feature in different
ways in the context of CCTV. This finding gives clues as to future
research on privacy and camera surveillance. |
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David Patton — An
Exploration of the External Validity of Self-Report amongst Arrestees |
Self-report
validation surveys in the USA focussing on arrestees’ self-reports
unequivocally demonstrate that they do not validly report their
recent drug consumption despite being a highly drug involved group.
Like their American counterparts, English arrestees display very
high levels of drug consumption. Data used from the NEW-ADAM programme
(1998) is used to explore the external validity of arrestees’
self-reports to drug consumption in the 3 days prior to interview.
Drug consumption in the UK has become a normalized activity among
adolescents, young adults and ‘clubbers’. Arrestees
and young offenders have recently been added to this list. Therefore
the normalization of drug use provides an interesting context
through which to view the present findings amongst arrestees. |
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| Views |
| Adrian
Jones — A Tagging Tale: The Work of the Monitoring Officer,
Electronically Monitoring Offenders in England and Wales |
This
article will describe the work of Field Monitoring Officers (FMOs)
employed by Premier Monitoring Services limited (PMS) one of the
contract companies which provide the service of electronically
monitoring offenders in England and Wales. It will explore the
officer’s work and the difficulties which they face on a
day to day basis. The content will in general be taken from my
own experiences over a three and a half year period whilst employed
as a FMO with PMS working from their Birmingham office, an office
which covers a geographical area which spans the West Midlands,
Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Herefordshire and in the early years
of electronic monitoring (EM) Staffordshire. My own reflection
will be reinforced with the experiences of both male and female,
former and current officers from predominately Birmingham but,
also four of the other areas. |
| Helen
Jones — Visible
Rights: Watching Out for Women |
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short article considers what surveillance and privacy mean to women
experiencing violence and examines the extent to which such concepts
have been overlaid with patriarchal assumptions, acting to mask
the distinction between the private and the public and resulting
in a global politics where only the public sphere is seen as suitable
to political intervention. Using Afghanistan as a case study, the
article demonstrates that while women as a ‘class’ are
surveyed and monitored, individual women are frequently beyond the
gaze of justice and rights. |
| Steve
Mann — People
Watching People Watchers: ‘The Law Enforcement Company’
for watching over those who come to see and be seen on the ‘Urban
Beach’ |
| This
article presents my own personal narrative, in the existemology
of a new but mostly deserted ‘urban beach’ right at
downtown Toronto's epicenter. The new public space called ‘Dundas
Square’, designed as ‘Times Square North’, forms
Toronto's new civic center, around an urban beach theme with waterplay
fountains, that rise and fall continuously, to create a beautiful
and restful atmosphere of pounding surf. The space is policed by
Intelligarde-International, which describes itself as ‘The
Law Enforcement Company’. The use of private security guards
in an allegedly public space creates some unique problems in accountability
and reciprocity in visibility. Unlike the lifeguards of a traditional
beach, who are themselves young, playful, and part of the swimming
community, Intelligarde alienates itself from the community through
an authoritarian desire to be free of accountability. Citizens who
go to the urbeach to see and be seen, can be thought of as ‘people
watching people’. But unlike lifeguards at a traditional beach,
who often help novice swimmers be comfortable in the water, Intelligardes
are ‘people watching people watchers’ from a distance.
The problem of private security in public space is twofold: (1)
a private ‘law enforcement company’ is not subject to
the same checks and balances as public lifeguards; (2) the double
entendre of the words ‘private security’ is fulfilled.
Not only is law enforcement of life in the public square privatized,
but also the security guards enjoy a privacy (i.e. lack of accountability)
that their ‘citizens’ (the surveilled) do not. This
article describes my attempts at using "Times Square North"
for its intended purpose, and the resulting problems that point
to a need for participatory equiveillance. |
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