We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measured, tracked, predicted, and regulated. We can grasp how threat is being racialized, how and why institutions are flailing, and how social media might be fueling social divisions. There is, in other words, a lot that our scholarly community could add to the conversation. In this rapid-response editorial, we provide an introduction to the framing devices of disease surveillance and discuss how a surveillance studies orientation could help us think critically about the present crisis and its possible aftermath.
{"title":"Dis-ease Surveillance: How Might Surveillance Studies Address COVID-19?","authors":"Martin French, T. Monahan","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i1.13985","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i1.13985","url":null,"abstract":"We are currently in the midst of a global pandemic with the spread of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). While we do not know how this situation will unfold or resolve, we do have insight into how it fits within existing patterns and relations, particularly those pertaining to sociocultural constructions of (in)security, vulnerability, and risk. We can see evidence of surveillance dynamics at play with how bodies and pathogens are being measured, tracked, predicted, and regulated. We can grasp how threat is being racialized, how and why institutions are flailing, and how social media might be fueling social divisions. There is, in other words, a lot that our scholarly community could add to the conversation. In this rapid-response editorial, we provide an introduction to the framing devices of disease surveillance and discuss how a surveillance studies orientation could help us think critically about the present crisis and its possible aftermath.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.24908/ss.v18i1.13985","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47768606","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The trade-off between security and liberty has been a leading frame for understanding public opinion about domestic surveillance policies. Most of the empirical work explicitly examining whether individuals meet the trade-off framework’s core attitudinal assumptions comes from European studies. This study uses a survey of US residents to assess the veracity of the assumptions embedded in the trade-off framework, namely whether domestic counterterrorism policies are simultaneously viewed as improving security and decreasing liberty. We find that the vast majority of US respondents do not meet the basic attitudinal assumptions of the trade-off frame. Next, we evaluate the source of these attitudes with a focus on whether attitudes toward surveillance policies merely relate to core political values or whether they also depend on the messages from political leaders. We find that both political values and opinion leadership shape these attitudes. Finally, because general attitudes towards surveillance and privacy often fail to have practical implications, we assess whether these attitudes matter for understanding the structure of policy support. Our results show that heightened terrorism threat positively associates with increased support for counterterrorism policies only when people believe these policies are effective security tools.
{"title":"Assessing Dimensions of the Security-Liberty Trade-off in the United States","authors":"Brian S. Krueger, Samuel J. Best, Kristin Johnson","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i1.10419","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i1.10419","url":null,"abstract":"The trade-off between security and liberty has been a leading frame for understanding public opinion about domestic surveillance policies. Most of the empirical work explicitly examining whether individuals meet the trade-off framework’s core attitudinal assumptions comes from European studies. This study uses a survey of US residents to assess the veracity of the assumptions embedded in the trade-off framework, namely whether domestic counterterrorism policies are simultaneously viewed as improving security and decreasing liberty. We find that the vast majority of US respondents do not meet the basic attitudinal assumptions of the trade-off frame. Next, we evaluate the source of these attitudes with a focus on whether attitudes toward surveillance policies merely relate to core political values or whether they also depend on the messages from political leaders. We find that both political values and opinion leadership shape these attitudes. Finally, because general attitudes towards surveillance and privacy often fail to have practical implications, we assess whether these attitudes matter for understanding the structure of policy support. Our results show that heightened terrorism threat positively associates with increased support for counterterrorism policies only when people believe these policies are effective security tools.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47976928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In the twenty-first century, Americans have put more of their lives online while the US government has expanded its mass surveillance apparatus. Interest in anonymity-granting technologies like The Onion Router (Tor) has grown substantially as citizens seek to protect their privacy. However, this same technology can be used to engage in illegal activity on the dark web. This study examines how interest in the dark web, public attention to the 2013 Snowden revelations, and metro-area political ideology are associated with public interest in Tor. We link data from multiple sources including Google Trends, the American Community Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study for the forty-nine largest US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 2006–2015 (n=490). Broadly, we find that metro areas with liberal citizen ideology and greater interest in the dark web were more likely to search for Tor. When controlling for the level of interest in the dark web, the Snowden revelations of 2013 had no significant impact on interest in Tor. These findings suggest that the lure of the dark web and left-leaning ideological contexts offer stronger explanations for interest in anonymity-granting technology than the public attention brought to mass surveillance by the Snowden revelations.
{"title":"Tor and the City: MSA-Level Correlates of Interest in Anonymous Web Browsing","authors":"A. Lindner, Jamie Elsner, Gina Pryciak","doi":"10.31235/osf.io/3e2vq","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/3e2vq","url":null,"abstract":"In the twenty-first century, Americans have put more of their lives online while the US government has expanded its mass surveillance apparatus. Interest in anonymity-granting technologies like The Onion Router (Tor) has grown substantially as citizens seek to protect their privacy. However, this same technology can be used to engage in illegal activity on the dark web. This study examines how interest in the dark web, public attention to the 2013 Snowden revelations, and metro-area political ideology are associated with public interest in Tor. We link data from multiple sources including Google Trends, the American Community Survey, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Cooperative Congressional Election Study for the forty-nine largest US Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) from 2006–2015 (n=490). Broadly, we find that metro areas with liberal citizen ideology and greater interest in the dark web were more likely to search for Tor. When controlling for the level of interest in the dark web, the Snowden revelations of 2013 had no significant impact on interest in Tor. These findings suggest that the lure of the dark web and left-leaning ideological contexts offer stronger explanations for interest in anonymity-granting technology than the public attention brought to mass surveillance by the Snowden revelations.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-02-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43240966","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper asks the question whether current data regulations designed to curb digital surveillance are enabling for Global South activists seeking to create systemic social change in today’s data-driven societies. This text proposes five measures to answer this question and devise a decolonial pathway to improve the human condition, namely: a) Recognize the long legacy of distrust of the law among activists; b) Channel our energies more on local governance and less on (trans)national regulation; c) Shift focus from the individual to the collective rights approach; d) Attend to motivations for publicity over privacy; e) Re-frame activism from grand movements to everyday creative insurgencies. This paper starts with the premise that laws and regulations have deep political interests often rooted in neocolonial ideologies and are not necessarily designed and executed for the protection of all citizens. Laws may evoke different meanings among the world’s marginalized communities, far from the sacrosanct position they hold among many in the West. This work argues for a decolonial approach—to go beyond the data-centric and individual consent framework to genuinely understand the complex relationship between surveillance, privacy, activism, and law at the peripheries in the Global South and to foster dignity for all.
{"title":"General Data Protection Regulation—A Global Standard? Privacy Futures, Digital Activism, and Surveillance Cultures in the Global South","authors":"P. Arora","doi":"10.24908/ss.v17i5.13307","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i5.13307","url":null,"abstract":"This paper asks the question whether current data regulations designed to curb digital surveillance are enabling for Global South activists seeking to create systemic social change in today’s data-driven societies. This text proposes five measures to answer this question and devise a decolonial pathway to improve the human condition, namely: a) Recognize the long legacy of distrust of the law among activists; b) Channel our energies more on local governance and less on (trans)national regulation; c) Shift focus from the individual to the collective rights approach; d) Attend to motivations for publicity over privacy; e) Re-frame activism from grand movements to everyday creative insurgencies. This paper starts with the premise that laws and regulations have deep political interests often rooted in neocolonial ideologies and are not necessarily designed and executed for the protection of all citizens. Laws may evoke different meanings among the world’s marginalized communities, far from the sacrosanct position they hold among many in the West. This work argues for a decolonial approach—to go beyond the data-centric and individual consent framework to genuinely understand the complex relationship between surveillance, privacy, activism, and law at the peripheries in the Global South and to foster dignity for all.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44889348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-07DOI: 10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.8661
Susan Cahill
This paper is about the racial and colonial inequalities of visibility within surveillance structures that seek to monitor and regulate bodies within the contemporary Canadian context. Specifically, it addresses what and how creative projects can contribute to this discussion by focusing on a particular artwork, Thomas Kneubühler’s Access Denied (2007). This work engages surveillance through the personification of the security apparatus by centralizing the bodies of those who are positioned to enforce the policies of this structure. Using Kneubühler’s artwork as the central case study, this paper thinks through what questions this project can ask of visibilities, corporeal economies, and the racialized politics of Canadian surveillance in the context of the War on Terror.
{"title":"Visual Art, Corporeal Economies, and the “New Normal” of Surveillant Policing in the War on Terror","authors":"Susan Cahill","doi":"10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.8661","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.8661","url":null,"abstract":"This paper is about the racial and colonial inequalities of visibility within surveillance structures that seek to monitor and regulate bodies within the contemporary Canadian context. Specifically, it addresses what and how creative projects can contribute to this discussion by focusing on a particular artwork, Thomas Kneubühler’s Access Denied (2007). This work engages surveillance through the personification of the security apparatus by centralizing the bodies of those who are positioned to enforce the policies of this structure. Using Kneubühler’s artwork as the central case study, this paper thinks through what questions this project can ask of visibilities, corporeal economies, and the racialized politics of Canadian surveillance in the context of the War on Terror.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42639120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-07DOI: 10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13393
Ermus St. Louis
{"title":"Review of Taylor's Fight the Power: African Americans and the Long History of Police Brutality in New York City","authors":"Ermus St. Louis","doi":"10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13393","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13393","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45747888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-07DOI: 10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.7077
A. Bevan
Contemporary political discourse around security, immigration, and terrorist threat manifests in two trends in educational architectural: the fortress school and surveilled flow. The fortress grows out of the urban-renewal movement of the post-World War II era, particularly on American university campuses. This architecture pre-empts threat by clamping down and fortifying its peripheral walls while controlling, surveilling, and limiting the number of entrances. Lockdown procedures, encouraging surveillance among citizens, metal detectors, increased police presences, and data-mining are all tactics at the fortress’ disposal. The alternative, much newer approach pre-empts threat by surveilling flow; that is, inviting people inside the structure and encouraging traffic while relying on more remote and less obvious tactics for detecting undesirables, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), data-mining, and, like the fortress model, encouraging peer surveillance. Surveilled flow maintains the gesture of openness; however, this is mainly aesthetic, as other methods of intrusive policing take place at less-visible levels. At the heart of both of these articulations of pre-emptive threat culture is the digital-age anxiety about the alignment and possible misalignment between visual and information-based citizen profiles: Does the student or visitor appear to be a threat? Does his or her online behavior indicate potential threat? The profusion of information in the digital age meets this more primal desire to commensurate the appearance of risk with other forms of information-based evidence of threat. Digital-era concerns about how to interpret a wealth of information at various institutional and cultural levels pervade the riskscape in the developed world, and educational architecture is but one manifestation.
{"title":"Designed for Threat: Surveillance, Mass Shootings, and Pre-emptive Design in School Architecture","authors":"A. Bevan","doi":"10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.7077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.7077","url":null,"abstract":"Contemporary political discourse around security, immigration, and terrorist threat manifests in two trends in educational architectural: the fortress school and surveilled flow. The fortress grows out of the urban-renewal movement of the post-World War II era, particularly on American university campuses. This architecture pre-empts threat by clamping down and fortifying its peripheral walls while controlling, surveilling, and limiting the number of entrances. Lockdown procedures, encouraging surveillance among citizens, metal detectors, increased police presences, and data-mining are all tactics at the fortress’ disposal. The alternative, much newer approach pre-empts threat by surveilling flow; that is, inviting people inside the structure and encouraging traffic while relying on more remote and less obvious tactics for detecting undesirables, such as closed-circuit television (CCTV), data-mining, and, like the fortress model, encouraging peer surveillance. Surveilled flow maintains the gesture of openness; however, this is mainly aesthetic, as other methods of intrusive policing take place at less-visible levels. At the heart of both of these articulations of pre-emptive threat culture is the digital-age anxiety about the alignment and possible misalignment between visual and information-based citizen profiles: Does the student or visitor appear to be a threat? Does his or her online behavior indicate potential threat? The profusion of information in the digital age meets this more primal desire to commensurate the appearance of risk with other forms of information-based evidence of threat. Digital-era concerns about how to interpret a wealth of information at various institutional and cultural levels pervade the riskscape in the developed world, and educational architecture is but one manifestation.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49511229","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-07DOI: 10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13135
Justin Gobeil
{"title":"Review of McCulloch and Wilson's Pre-Crime: Pre-Emption, Precaution, and the Future","authors":"Justin Gobeil","doi":"10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13135","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48178488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-07DOI: 10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.10877
Shaul A. Duke
This article offers a definition and explores the dynamics of database-driven empowering surveillance. That is, it focuses on surveillance from below that is directed at powerful institutions or groups for the benefit of the marginalized, using a database as its main facilitator. By examining six Israeli NGOs working for the protection of Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I am able to break down the database-driven empowering surveillance process of amassing and disseminating information, to identify its mechanism of action, and to highlight its limiting and enabling factors. This scrutiny in turn helps shed light on the capacity of NGOs to effectively monitor powerful institutions: to surveil from below in spaces with pervasive top-down surveillance; to surveil in territories under the control of the surveillance subjects; to impact policy on polarized issues; and to enforce human rights. Empowering surveillance emerges from this article as a process that requires those carrying it out to maintain a delicate balance between using a forceful mechanism against those monitored and being highly dependent on third parties with coercive power—often from the same organizations being monitored—to exact the desired deterring effect.
{"title":"Database-Driven Empowering Surveillance: Definition and Assessment of Effectiveness","authors":"Shaul A. Duke","doi":"10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.10877","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.10877","url":null,"abstract":"This article offers a definition and explores the dynamics of database-driven empowering surveillance. That is, it focuses on surveillance from below that is directed at powerful institutions or groups for the benefit of the marginalized, using a database as its main facilitator. By examining six Israeli NGOs working for the protection of Palestinian human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, I am able to break down the database-driven empowering surveillance process of amassing and disseminating information, to identify its mechanism of action, and to highlight its limiting and enabling factors. This scrutiny in turn helps shed light on the capacity of NGOs to effectively monitor powerful institutions: to surveil from below in spaces with pervasive top-down surveillance; to surveil in territories under the control of the surveillance subjects; to impact policy on polarized issues; and to enforce human rights. Empowering surveillance emerges from this article as a process that requires those carrying it out to maintain a delicate balance between using a forceful mechanism against those monitored and being highly dependent on third parties with coercive power—often from the same organizations being monitored—to exact the desired deterring effect.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43530379","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-09-07DOI: 10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13305
J. Shantz
{"title":"Review of Choudry's Activists and the Surveillance State: Learning from Repression","authors":"J. Shantz","doi":"10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.24908/ss.v17i3/4.13305","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48961605","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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