Research Essay Editorial

Abstract

Modern human life resides at the behest of information. Access to information has been attributed to power and control in societies. Jeremy Bentham, in the late 18th century, used the concept of panopticon to explain the perception of control through constant monitoring. The panopticon prison architecture allows monitoring of all inmates from a central location, and the expectation that monitoring affects their behavior. In the book titled In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (1988), Shoshana Zuboff uses the same lens to explain the notion of information panopticon. She argues that supervision and surveillance are an inevitable consequence of our dependence on information processing machines (including computers and networked devices). As monitoring and analyzing technologies improve, both, intensity and capability of surveillance shall improve too. Since both overt and covert communications do traverse in varied medium (e.g., internet, telephony) and most of these media are also being shared for public communication, the need for monitoring them simultaneously is implied as necessary for public safety. The emergence of multiple communication platforms with different underlying technologies has increased the cost and complexity of surveillance. Collection of surveillance data from several different sources and their co-analysis poses significant demands on existing technological capabilities too. Expeditious analysis of the collected data and its conversion into actionable intelligence is crucial for surveillance and adds another layer of complexity to this use case. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has added capabilities to both monitor and connect citizens with the government. Government-backed intelligence agencies worldwide are introducing self-reporting platforms to allow citizens to notify agencies of anomalies in their vicinity. Adoption of these platforms would make citizens a critical component of the state-run physical surveillance framework. Human intelligence is a crucial link in the whole surveillance architecture, and analyzes and interprets the output from other technology-backed surveillance techniques, thus making surveillance actionable. The first article written by Mugavero, Benolli, and Sabato, in this Research Essay special section of the Journal of Information Privacy and Security (JIPS), projects some of these issues concerning challenges posed due to multiple sources of intelligence data. Consequently, these authors present the extant understanding of intelligence and its identification as a process. They provide an introduction of the different sources of intelligence and then present a model for encompassing all existing intelligence products. This