surveillance and power

Evil Surveillance or Surveillance of Evil

Week 11 CULT1110

A/Prof Marj Kibby

Discipline & Punishment

Eighteenth-century torture:

• the body as the major target of penal repression,

• punishment as a

public spectacle.

Penal Process

• Punishment becomes abstract. • Its effectiveness results from its inevitability,

not from its visible intensity.• The mechanics of punishment changes its

mechanisms.  • A ‘carceral’ culture where discipline is

invisible and internalised.

Surveillance

Foucault talks of a ‘panoptic modality of power’

• the use of surveillance as a way to manage and control our ‘bodies’ – our behaviour; our understanding of one another; to establish right versus wrong etc.

Self-surveillance

• The model of the Panopticon was proposed by Jeremy Bentham in the 18th Century.

• The aim of this penal architecture was for inmates to control their own behaviour thus creating self-surveillance.

• The logic of the panopticon is that it disposes people to monitor their behaviour.

Surveillance

• Conventional understanding as a hierarchical system of power — snooping, prying and privacy invasion.

• Surveillance — from the French “to watch over”

Surveillance Society

The present, not the future. 24/7.• Loyalty cards• Electronic tags• Metadata• ID and access cards• Biometrics• Mobile phones • CCTV• Email, web access and status updates

Loyalty cards

Electronic tags

Metadata

ID & Access Cards

Assessment via captured data:

• Databases used

• Books borrowed

• Participation in Bb

• Time in student union

• Submission date/time

• Sporting venues used

• Labs and facilities used

Biometrics

Biometrics comprises methods for uniquely recognizing humans based upon one or more intrinsic physical or behavioral traits.

Walt Disney World is the USA's largest single commercial application of biometrics.

Mobile telephony

For mobile social networks, texted location information or mobile phone tracking can enable location-based services to enrich social networking.

Geolocation on web-based social network services can be IP-based or use hotspot trilateration.

Mobile phone tracking tracks the current position of a mobile phone even on the move, by linking the signal strength or weakness to nearby antenna masts.

Surveillance Process

Focus on pre-emptive solutions to social problems has had consequences:

• Social sorting.

• Unintentional control.

• Data meshing.

• Blurring of public/private

Social sorting

Sorting of the population into different categories.

Unintentional control

Efficiency overload:

• Intention to manage efficient and rapid flows of people, goods and information.

• Outcome of reducing

choice.

Data meshing

Partnership arrangements between agencies:

• Boundaries that enhance personal control of information disappear.

Income, lifestyle, life-stage, personal information, combine to give a

complete picture of an individual.

Blurring of Public/Private

• Where state information is available for private use there are concerns about the limits of consent.

• Privatisations of penal system, telecommunications, border

management, and local security.

CCTV:You Are Being Watched

• Closed circuit television came to Britain in 1967, when a small tea house in London introduced a basic black and white camera to see if the patrons were taking too many tea cakes.

• 40 years on and Britain has more public surveillance cameras than any other country on earth. It’s reckoned that some people are caught on camera 375 times a day.

Surveillance

• Benefits in catching criminals acknowledged, though debate over prevention of crime.

• Infringement on civil liberties.

• Potential for misuse;– Inadvertent– Misguided

Who is watched?

• Six hundred and ninety eight people were surveilled as of primary concern.

• 7% were women

• Over-representation of black youth and the ‘scruffy’ or ‘subcultural’

Who is watching?

• Actions based on targets' behaviour or appearance being 'out-of-place' in the operator's 'normative ecology'.

• Thus male on male violence was often reported to police but not violence to women from men they were with.

• So even if surveillance systems are all seeing they are not all knowing.

James Bulger Case

• The CCTV cameras that caught James Bulger being led away became a chilling indication of a world where surveillance is everywhere but disengaged - a world that sees everything but fails to respond.

Is anyone watching?

Visibility/Invisibility: The Failure of Surveillance

Important factors include:

• the visual representation – of the victim,– of the perpetrators – of the crime itself

These factors both fueled a desire to interpret the crime, but also worked to inhibit any interpretation.

Smart Technology

Peer Surveillance

Surveillance as a mutual, horizontal practice.

Not Big Brother but millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters.

• Speed and breadth of access are the best allies of transparency – the Internet provides both.

Privacy Publicity Buzz

Self-surveillance

• Impression of privacy.

• Apparently ephemeral.

• Social and cultural capital.

• Empowering exhibitionism

Empowering Exhibitionism

• By voluntarily revealing very personal details, people claim the right to publish their own lives.

• Visibility becomes a tool of self-empowerment.

Blurring of Boundaries

• Invisible audiences

• Multiple audiences

• Convergence

• Erosion of privacy

Invisible audiences

• A Quebec woman on long term sick-leave after a diagnosis of depression, had her benefits cancelled after posting photos of herself on the beach and at a Chippendales’ show on her Facebook profile.

Multiple audiences

Convergence

Sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Wikipedia, digg, delicious, YouTube, and flickr are used for different purposes.

• Like time-lapse video or photographs through a microscope, these images of social networks offer glimpses of everyday life from an unconventional vantage point.

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

People Sleeping at U of N

Empowering exhibitionism