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Bart Simon — The Return of Panopticism: Supervision, Subjection and the New Surveillance

This article revisits Foucault’s concept of panopticism as in pertains to research on the new surveillance. Drawing on the work of neo-Foucauldian authors in surveillance studies the paper shows how the figures of the supervisor and inmate within the Foucauldian diagram suggest different directions for pursuing surveillance theory. On the one hand, there is a concern with processes of subjection and normalization that arise through the internalization of the gaze, while on the other there is a concern with processes of administration, social sorting and simulation that occur independently of embodied subjects. Foucault’s model both allows for these twin concerns within the context of the new surveillance while serving as a source of further insight into the empirical nuances of contemporary surveillance relations.

Jonathan Finn — Photographing Fingerprints: Data Collection and State Surveillance

This paper examines fingerprint identification as a mode of state surveillance. Drawing on but critiquing the work of Simon Cole, it argues that the technique yielded a greater, more pervasive form of state surveillance by giving rise to new practices of data collection. This paper also highlights the photograph’s role in fingerprint identification to argue for an essential transformation in law enforcement and surveillance practices announced by the intersection of fingerprinting and photography at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to traditional forms of visual surveillance, the collaboration of fingerprint identification and photography extended the surveillance gaze of the state in a manner often attributed to the rise of CCTV, enabling the state to bring all bodies – criminal and non-criminal alike – under surveillance. However, the unique capabilities afforded to the state through the intersection of fingerprint identification and photography remained largely theoretical until the advent of digital technologies in the 1960s and 1970s. At the start of the twenty-first century, advanced visual technologies and new media technologies reflect a restructuring of law enforcement and surveillance practices based on the aggregate collection of identification data. This paper argues that the continued photographing of fingerprints in contemporary law enforcement and state initiatives constitute heightened state surveillance and, as such, demands serious critical attention.

Martin R. Gibbs , Graeme Shanks and Reeva Lederman — Data Quality, Database Fragmentation and Information Privacy

In this paper we use an Information Systems (informatics) perspective to critically examine legislation designed to regulate the way private sector organizations collect, store, use, and disclose personal information. We focus on The Privacy Amendment (Private Sector) Act 2000 (Cth), which has recently been enacted in Australia. We argue that the ability of organizations to respond to the requirements of this legislation is affected by the data quality of the personal information they possess. In particular, this paper examines one problem associated with data quality that erodes an organization’s ability to comply with legislation designed to protect the information privacy of individuals – the fragmentation of customer data across multiple databases owned and maintained by separate functional units within an organization. Given the ubiquity of these kinds of data quality problems we conclude that current legislative regimes to regulate private sector use of personal information in countries such as Australia and European Union member states can lead to contrary outcomes resulting in legislation that is either unenforceable or acts to encourage the development of high-quality, integrated customer databases that have the potential to erode information privacy. We believe that new models able to grapple with management of personal information in distributed, mobile and ubiquitous computing environments need to be developed.

Philip N. Howard, John N. Carr and Tema J. Milstein — Digital Technology and the Market for Political Surveillance

Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public commons and as a tool for surveilling private lives. This paper addresses the manner in which such technological innovations have enabled a dramatically expanded market for public policy opinion data, and explores the potential role of that market in facilitating panoptic regimes of both private and state surveillance. Whereas information about public policy opinion used to be highly reductive, expensive to collect, and restricted to a limited number of powerful political actors, today it is much less expensive, highly nuanced, and widely available. Pollsters now also have the ability to extrapolate political information from our commercial and noncommercial activities. We investigate the work of two organizations, a public policy polling firm named Grapevine Polling, and an advocacy consulting firm named United Campaigns. We find that both the increased sophistication of these firms’ methods and the reduced cost of increasingly personalized data together have the potential to undermine the very public sphere that digital media were hoped to reinvigorate. Moreover, overlapping state and private demand for the products of such pollsters reflects the extent to which politics and the marketplace are increasingly intertwined and inseparable under the current articulation of democracy in the US.

Terence Lee — Internet Control and Auto-regulation in Singapore

This paper sets out to consider the use of new media technologies in the city-state of Singapore, widely acknowledged as one of the most technologically-advanced and networked societies in the world. Singapore is well-known as a politically censorious and highly-regulated society, which has been subjected to frequent and fierce insults and criticisms by those hailing from liberal democratic traditions. Indeed, much has been said about how the Singapore polity resonates with a climate of fear, which gives rise to the prevalent practice of self-censorship. This paper examines how certain groups in Singapore attempt to employ the Internet to find their voice and seek their desired social, cultural and political ends, and how the regulatory devices adopted by the highly pervasive People Action’s Party (PAP) government respond to and set limits to these online ventures whilst concomitantly pursuing national technological cum economic development strategies. It concludes that the Internet in Singapore is a highly contested space where the art of governmentality, in the forms of information controls and ‘automatic’ modes of regulation, is tried, tested, and subsequently perfected.

Jason L. Powell and Margaret Edwards — Surveillance and Morality: Revisiting the Education Reform Act (1988) in the United Kingdom

Recently, there has been an increased interest in British educational provision arising form the consequences of the Education Reform Act (1988). The ERA was pivotal insofar as it precipitated what has been a relentless neo-liberal political campaign to legitimise ‘choice’ for parents and place ‘power’ within Schools. However, the use of school technologies that focus on ‘assessment’ and ‘inspection’, can, in this policy climate, become a means of surveillance and enforcement of morality and educational practice in the United Kingdom. Smart (1985) argues that the work of Michel Foucault (1977) can be characterised as ‘neo-Marxist’ and subsequently offers a set of theoretical strategies for understanding how policy discourses on education construct and control children’s experiences and their identities, as constructed objects/subjects of knowledge.

Stephen Parker and Rodney Fopp - Mutual Obligation? Regulating by Supervision and Surveillance in Australian Income Support Policy

Through an analysis of speeches by government ministers, documents and regulations, this article examines the Australian national government’s surveillance of unemployed people through what is known as Activity Testing, and more specifically as Mutual Obligation. It seeks to merge the social policy analysis of Mutual Obligation with a surveillance perspective in order to delve deeper into the underlying nature of the policy and its implications for people who are unemployed. It does this by 1. outlining the neo-liberal political theory underlying these policies; 2. illustrating the nature and extent of surveillance of people in receipt of income support, and 3. employing Foucault’s concepts of the technologies of domination and the self to highlight the controlling and coercive aspects of Mutual Obligation in achieving certain of the Government’s political and policy objectives. In doing so, the analysis will make visible something of the power exerted over the disadvantaged while subject to such surveillance.

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