{"title":"Sousveillance Capitalism","authors":"G. Borradaile, Joshua Reeves","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i2.13920","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13920","url":null,"abstract":"The striking commercial success of Shoshana Zuboff’s 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, provides us with an excellent opportunity to reflect on how the present convergence of surveillance/capitalism coincides with popular critical and theoretical themes in surveillance studies, particularly that of sousveillance. Accordingly, this piece will first analyze how surveillance capitalism has molded the political behaviors and imaginations of activists. After acknowledging the theoretically and politically fraught implications of fighting surveillance with even more surveillance—especially given the complexities of digital capitalism’s endless desire to produce data—we conclude by exploring some of the political possibilities that lie at the margins of sousveillance capitalism (in particular, the extra-epistemological political value of sousveillance). ","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41995154","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}
{"title":"Review of Low and Maguire’s Spaces of Security: Ethnographies of Securityscapes, Surveillance, and Control","authors":"J. Coaffee","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i2.13984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13984","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42152599","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}
{"title":"Introduction: The State of Sousveillance","authors":"B. Newell","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i2.14013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.14013","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction to Dialogue section on \"The State of Sousveillance.\"","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48917467","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}
{"title":"Mapping Interfacial Regimes of Control: A Qualitative Analysis of America’s Post-9/11 Security Technology Infrastructure","authors":"Emma J. Knight, A. Gekker","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i2.13268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13268","url":null,"abstract":"Recent technological advancements in surveillance and data analysis software have drastically transformed how the United States manages its immigration and national security systems. In particular, an increased emphasis on information sharing and predictive threat modeling following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has prompted agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security to acquire powerful data analysis software from private sector vendors, including those in Silicon Valley. However, the impacts of these private sector technologies, especially in the context of privacy rights and civil liberties, are not yet fully understood. This article interrogates those potential impacts, particularly on the lives of immigrants, by analyzing the relational database system Investigative Case Management (ICM), which is used extensively by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to track, manage, and enforce federal immigration policy. As a theoretical framework, the we use Benjamin Bratton’s concept of the “interfacial regime,” or the layered assemblages of interfaces that exist in modern networked ICT infrastructures. By conducting a document analysis, we attempt to visually situate ICM within the federal government’s larger interfacial regime that is composed by various intertwined databases both within and outside the government’s realm of management. Furthermore, we question and critique the role ICM plays in surveilling and governing the lives of immigrants and citizens alike.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42081447","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}
{"title":"Making the Body Electric: The Politics of Body-Worn Cameras and Facial Recognition in the United States","authors":"Jacob Hood","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i2.13285","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13285","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the rapid deployment of police body-worn cameras (BWCs) and the subsequent push for the integration of biometric technologies (i.e., facial recognition) into these devices. To understand the political dangers of these technologies, I outline the concept of “making the body electric” to provide a critical language for cultural practices of identifying, augmenting, and fixing the body through technological means. Further, I argue how these practices reinforce normative understandings of the body and its political functionality, specifically with BWCs and facial recognition. I then analyze the rise of BWCs in a cultural moment of high-profile police violence against unarmed people of color in the United States. In addition to examining the ethics of BWCs, I examine the politics of facial recognition and the dangers that this form of biometric surveillance pose for marginalized groups, arguing against the interface of these two technologies. The pairing of BWCs with facial recognition presents a number of sociopolitical dangers that reinforce the privilege of perspective granted to police in visual understandings of law enforcement activity. It is the goal of this paper to advance critical discussion of BWCs and biometric surveillance as mechanisms for leveraging political power and racial marginalization.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13285","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42957312","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}
{"title":"Everyday Surveillance, Goffman, and Unfocused Interaction","authors":"Louise Eley, B. Rampton","doi":"10.24908/SS.V18I2.13346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/SS.V18I2.13346","url":null,"abstract":"It is often said that surveillance has massively transformed our social lives (Lyon, Haggerty, and Ball 2012: 1), but this claim is weakened by the admission that its “effects are difficult to isolate or observe, as they are embedded within many normal aspects of daily life.” Picking up this analytic challenge, this paper investigates the everyday interactional practice and experience of being surveilled. To do so, it draws on Goffman’s account of the interaction order, dwelling closely on unfocused interaction in which people maintain a side-of-the-eye, half-an-ear awareness of the people, objects, and events in the space around them. After introducing key concepts from Goffman, the paper discusses three scenes of surveillance: a woman walking down a city street, two men putting up street stickers (a civil offence), and passengers being scanned at an airport (Pütz 2012). It shows how different senses of potential threat and illegality enter the experience of surveillance, and it builds a rudimentary model. This paper considers only a tiny fraction of contemporary surveillance, but it shows Goffman’s value as an analytic resource that can hold large-scale generalisations about the surveillance society to account, allowing us to see agentive responses to surveillance that are too subtle to be captured by notions like subversion and resistance. Indeed, Goffman corroborates Green and Zurawski’s (2015) suggestion that surveillance is a basic mode of the social, elaborated in different ways in different environments.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.24908/SS.V18I2.13346","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48565942","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}
{"title":"Normative Paradoxes of Privacy: Literacy and Choice in Platform Societies","authors":"P. Helm, Sandra Seubert","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i2.13356","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13356","url":null,"abstract":"Privacy scholars, advocates, and activists repeatedly emphasize the fact that current measures of privacy protection are insufficient to counter the systemic threats presented by datafication and platformization (van Dijck, de Waal, and Poell 2018: 24). These threats include discrimination against underprivileged groups, monopolization of power and knowledge, as well as manipulation. In this paper, we take that analysis one step further, suggesting that the consequences of inappropriate privacy protection online possibly even run counter to the normative principles that underpinned the standard clause for privacy protection in the first place. We discuss the ways in which attempts at protection run the risk of producing results that not only diverge from but, paradoxically, even distort the normative goals they intended to reach: informational self-determination, empowerment, and personal autonomy. Drawing on the framework of “normative paradoxes,” we argue that the ideals of a normatively increasingly one-sided, liberal individualism create complicities with the structural dynamics of platform capitalism, which in turn promote those material-discursive practices of digital usage that are ultimately extremely privacy-invasive.","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.24908/ss.v18i2.13356","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46880300","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}
{"title":"Safe is a Wonderful Feeling: Atmospheres of Surveillance and Contemporary Art","authors":"Karen Louise Grova Søilen","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i2.12756","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i2.12756","url":null,"abstract":"This paper examines how the combined prism of contemporary art and the notion of atmosphere may offer alternative perspectives on our encounters with places and practices of surveillance. Specifically, this article investigates the atmospheres of surveillance surfacing in the video installation Safe Conduct (2016a) by British contemporary artist Ed Atkins. The artwork recreates the well-known situation of going through an airport security check. Through a combination of visual narrative and a soundscape blending the sounds of the conveyor belt and X-ray machines with heavy breathing and Ravel’s Boléro, the work builds up an uncanny anticipation of something awful. Death and violence linger at its edges, and a disquieting atmosphere fills the exhibition space. The objective of the article is twofold: First, it explores the shifting and ambiguous atmospheres produced by contemporary surveillance practices through an immersive reading of the artwork Safe Conduct. Second, and connected to the first, it offers an experimental methodology of written vignettes responding to the embodied, aesthetic experience of atmospheres of surveillance. The article concludes that being more sensitive to the atmospheres of surveillance in our environment can give us a space to think critically about how these atmospheres affect us, how they are absorbed bodily, and how they attune our being: how surveillance is “in the air.”","PeriodicalId":47078,"journal":{"name":"Surveillance & Society","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2020-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.24908/ss.v18i2.12756","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46577483","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}
{"title":"Identifying Suspicious Bodies? Historically Tracing Criminal Identification Technologies in Portugal","authors":"Diana Miranda","doi":"10.24908/ss.v18i1.12543","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v18i1.12543","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores how criminal identification technologies evolved in Portugal since the end of the nineteenth century from anthropometric measurements to descriptive, photographic, dactyloscopic, and genetic methods. The historical trajectory of these identification technologies allows us to reflect on the continuities and discontinuities of past and current practices that aim to inscribe the individual identity as a bureaucratic category. The chronological and geographical contexts are fundamental to understanding the archival uses of different techniques that seek to document (on paper and electronically) the suspicious body. Through the collection of documentary evidence (such as case files, reports, personal records, and legislation), this historical analysis situates the use and implementation of these techniques in the Portuguese context. This article demonstrates that the need to identify the criminal and to follow technological developments has been constantly used as a political argument to legitimise the implementation of these technologies. But it also concludes that these identification procedures tend to be extended to the entire population, widening the political will to identify and monitor not only “suspicious” bodies but also those who are regarded as “respectable” citizens.","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.v18i1.12543","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46509384","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}
{"title":"Lines of Resistance","authors":"R. Butler","doi":"10.24908/SS.V18I1.13529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.24908/SS.V18I1.13529","url":null,"abstract":"Lines of Resistance is filmed at the Berlin Wall Memorial, a preserved and sealed section of the former wall and death strip. The film, informed by the narration of tour guides and visitors comments, explores their interaction with and reactions to the memorial and considers the space as a site of control.","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":"47268488","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}