Surveillance and policing Flashcards
Basis of surveillance in society:
- Surveillance as linked to development of state, power and bureaucracy
Shift from patrimonial/feudal society to ‘ at a distance’ management and control within late modernity
The economic and technological resources
of modern industrial societies provides the means of establishing permanent and rationally disciplined bureaucracies, matched by their surveillance capacities, which they can integrate and administer mass populations across vast spaces
Autocratic societies:
high surveillant, penetration and control - controlling the citizens and watch they view
Liberal democracies:
Transparent, rational/legal basis
Surveillance as ‘ social sorting’
Agencies now track and trace mundane activities for a plethora of purposes. Abstract data, now including video, biometric and genetic as well as computerised administrative files, are manipulated to produce profiles, in a liquid, networked system. The point is to plan, predict and prevent by classifying and assessing profiles and risks
Stretches human relationships - the disappearing body and reappearing ‘virtual body’
Drive by government and commercial sectors to know more about us
Policing issues of:
Privacy - expect the state to invade the privacy of particular groups
Associational surveillance - who you are connect with, what you have looked at on the internet
Ambiguity of surveillance - presume the information is used for a singular purpose, but can be used for many uses, such as using a person’s last shopping trip for a missing person case
CCTV: Policing through watching
- Part of the dispersal of discipline and policing
- Beyond just watching
- Operationalisation of policing authority through every lens
- Separates monitoring and intervention function
- Rise in ‘total surveillance’
- Concept of ‘anticipatory conformity’
The fallacy of ‘ neutral ‘ surveillance/policing
Fixed physical responses that eliminate discretion also eliminate the potential for corruption and discrimination - the video surveillance camera does not differentiate between social classes. Data are gathered democratically from all within their purview
Data mining as policing
More and more of our daily lives involve interactions and transactions that generate electronic records, our lives become fixed in media that can be examined and viewed at will, our behaviour in public plcaes, as well as in the privacy of our own homes, generates records that come to reside in the computers of corporations and government agencies
Post 9/11 growth of exceptionalism underpins data mining
Close link between data held and societies structural inequalities
Closeness of societal rationales for social control and economic structure - credit score
Privacy and policing
What essential claims should any individual be able to make to reserve given domains of his or her life as private - do people have any compelling right to withhold information about themselves that should be override the rights of others who ‘ need’ to access such information
Privacy rights not equal relation with state institutions and commercial bodies, especially when juxtaposed with security and social control
Future of policing & surveillance:
Intimate connection of technology and surveillance
Ever expanding rather than contracting
Potential political change and surveillant inheritance
Sousveillance and the new visibility
Concluding:
De facto rise in use of surevillance as the means of policing in late modernity
Surveillanc3 as inseparable from policing of normal life
Necessary in all levels of public and private life to police behaviours
Expansion intimately linked to development in tech
Assumption somebody is watching you, for something, somwehere
Overall
- Surveillance relationship in modernised state
- Changing nature of crime
- Capability and capacity
- Where surveillance has gone into normal areas of our lives
- Crime, lifestyle has changed - police themselves require new means of doing surveillance - cctv, other forms of tech - live in a digital world
