Saying Something: The Location of Social Movements in the Surveillance Society

Arguing for social movement-based critiques of public surveillance, this article proposes an alternative approach to the established parameters of research on the contemporary surveillance society. As cities become increasingly organized around a logic of insecurity and fear, there has been an eruption of concern and debate about the expansion of urban public surveillance. But most of the research on this subject has paid little attention to the deliberate, collective forms of political critique raised by anti-surveillance activism. Rather, the predominant focus has been on concerns about privacy rights, civil liberties, and the dilemmas of balancing freedom with security. Moreover, the prevailing critical narrative contends that the radical expansion of surveillance has been largely met with consent from the public. Moving beyond such a discourse of consent, this article examines two examples of cultural interventions that seek to contest the growth of public surveillance, not as a problem limited to the violation of privacy rights but as a process that signifies the metastasizing weaponization of everyday life and the authoritarian circulation of fear. I suggest that the significance of contemporary anti-surveillance activism is found in its embeddedness in broader struggles rather than in the opposition to surveillance as an autonomous political aim.     

The privacy paradox: how market privacy facilitates government surveillance

Although most surveillance studies scholars assume privacy is antithetical to surveillance, critics have recently warned that privacy-based criticisms may facilitate surveillance. That being said, we do not yet have data that show whether privacy claims were used in the past to legitimate government surveillance. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing claims made over one of the U.S.’s most controversial surveillance issues: government control over encryption technologies. A review of Congressional hearings and statements on the Congressional Record (n?=?112) reveals that from 1993 to 1999, public debates were dominated by a market liberalization discourse in which participants supported loosening encryption controls as a way to protect privacy from criminal intrusions in market transactions. Also playing a role was a strong skepticism toward government power and a preference for markets as managers of crime prevention. Challenged by these critiques, lawmakers withdrew regulatory proposals and spent the following decade working quietly with private firms to ensure law enforcement surveillance capability. These findings show the expansion of privacy for consumers and entrepreneurs has in fact been used to achieve the contraction of privacy from law enforcement and intelligence agencies.     

Totalitarian Paranoia in the Post-Orwellian Surveillance State

Most commentary on the Edward Snowden affair and other recent accounts of government spying leaked in the media has focused on individual privacy concerns, while overlooking how contemporary neoliberal modernity has created a social order in which new surveillance technologies grant the state a degree of power unthinkable to past generations – exceeding in reach and complexity even the totalitarian state imagined in Orwell's dystopian account, 1984. Any critical analysis of the modern surveillance state must move beyond documenting abuses of state power to address how government repression has been allowed to proceed unchecked, and even to flourish, through its support of an antidemocratic public pedagogy produced and circulated via a depoliticizing machinery of fear and consumption. In the USA, repression works through the homogenizing forces of the market as well as a corresponding loss of public memory and political identity to encourage the widespread embrace of an authoritarian surveillance culture. The state and corporate cultural apparatuses now collude to socialize everyone into a surveillance regime, even as personal information is willingly given over to social media and other corporate-based sites as people move across multiple screens and digital apparatuses. It is no longer possible to address the violations committed by the surveillance state without also analysing this broader regime of security and commodification. The authoritarian nature of the corporate–state surveillance apparatus in the USA can only be fully understood when its ubiquitous tentacles are connected to wider cultures of entertainment, commerce and punishment, and the increasing labelling of democratic dissent as an act of terrorism. If democracy is to have a future in America, then it is imperative to organize social movements capable of recovering public memory and reclaiming dissent as essential features of responsible citizenship.     

“Big Brother’s Bigger Brother”: The Visual Politics of (Counter) Surveillance in Baltimore

In 2016, without the knowledge of its citizens, Baltimore City Police deployed a military aerial surveillance technology called Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI), which can track the movements of every person in public view over the entire city. Though the trial of the “spy plane,” as the program was dubbed, quickly ended in scandal, organizers from Baltimore’s low-income minority neighborhoods successfully rebooted the program in 2020, this time framing WAMI partly as a tool of “sousveillance” (watching “from below”) that can track the movements of police officers. The paper shows how organizers “rebranded” WAMI around two conceptions of sousveillance—“citizen-centered” and “state-centered”—creating an unlikely coalition of supporters from both pro- and anti-policing sides of the criminal justice reform debate. But while the renewed program has vowed to be a “Big Brother” to the state, it will continue to be used for traditional surveillance, raising troubling questions about privacy. The article sheds light on the politics of watching and being watched in the era of technology-driven criminal justice reform.     

Policy Legitimacy,Rhetorical Politics,and the Evaluation of City‐Street Video Surveillance Monitoring Programs in Canada

This article examines the evaluation and legitimization of city‐street video surveillance in Ontario, Canada. We demonstrate how monitoring programs are promoted, designed, and justified based on rhetorical claims about their efficacy. Although program evaluation data do not commonly corroborate or support program objectives, we show how the rhetorical politics of video surveillance evaluation research finds legitimacy by adhering to the Ontario privacy commissioner's best practices guidelines—guidelines that are formulated to minimize rhetoric in system design. The findings raise questions about how city‐street video surveillance remains a viable policy option given the lack of evidence pertaining to its usefulness.     

Privacy encounters in Teledialogue

Privacy is a major concern when new technologies are introduced between public authorities and private citizens. What is meant by privacy, however, is often unclear and contested. Accordingly, this article utilises grounded theory to study privacy empirically in the research and design project Teledialogue aimed at introducing new ways for public case managers and placed children to communicate through IT. The resulting argument is that privacy can be understood as an encounter, that is, as something that arises between implicated actors and entails some degree of friction and negotiation. An argument which is further qualified through the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. The article opens with a review of privacy literature before continuing to present privacy as an encounter with five different foci: what technologies bring into the encounter; who is related to privacy by implication; what is entailed by the spaces of Teledialogue; how privacy relates to projected futures; and how privacy is also an encounter between authority and care. In the end, it is discussed how privacy conceptualised as an encounter is not already there surrounding people or places but rather has to be traced in the specific and situated relations between implicated actors, giving rise to different normative concerns in each case.     

Privacy violations and procedural justice in the United States prisons and jails

Through constitutional amendments and case law, the United States citizens receive privacy protections. These same protections do not exist for individuals incarcerated in prisons and jails. Instead, their privacy rights are regularly replaced by larger institutional concerns for security, safety, and control. Such privacy violation measures may include electronic surveillance, recording of phone calls, opening/reading of mail, and searches of their person, cell, and property. Although it is expected that incarcerated individuals have fewer privacy rights than nonincarcerated citizens, some privacy violations may be perceived as procedurally unjust due to their severity and infringement upon incarcerated individuals' rights to dignity and respect. This has implications for the well-being of incarcerated individuals, the legitimacy of correctional officers, and as a result, the potential safety and security of institutions.     

Caring is not enough: the importance of Internet skills for online privacy protection

This article explains Internet users’ self-help activities in protecting their privacy online using structural equation modeling. Based on a representative survey of Swiss Internet users, it reveals past experiences with privacy breaches as a strong predictor of current protective behavior. Further, in line with the ‘privacy paradox’ argument, caring about privacy (privacy attitudes) alone does not necessarily result in substantial self-protection. Most strikingly, however, general Internet skills are key in explaining users’ privacy behavior. These skills enable users to reduce risks of privacy loss while obtaining the benefits from online activities that increasingly depend on the revelation of personal data. Consequently, Internet skills are an essential starting point for public policies regarding users’ self-help in privacy protection.     

Why privacy keeps dying: the trouble with talk about the end of privacy

It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this ‘privacy endism,’ locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for decades, but there has never been a near consensus about its causes. Second, unlike other endist talk (the end of art or history, etc.), privacy endism appears ongoing and not period specific. Finally, our explanation of the persistence and idiosyncrasy of claims to the end of privacy focuses on Warren and Brandeis’s 1890 negative conception of privacy as ‘the right to be let alone’: namely, modern privacy talk has always been endist because the right to privacy was born out of the conditions for its violation, not its realization. The conclusion comments on implications of that basic proposition.     

Social media,small businesses,and the control of information

Much of the discussion regarding privacy and social media has focused on consumers of social media, but social media is also popular among businesses. This article explores the privacy tensions of small business owners using social media to disseminate and gather information to better engage and serve their customers while maintaining customer trust. Drawing on Communication Privacy Management theory [Petronio, S. (2002). Boundaries of privacy: Dialectics of disclosure. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, Petronio, S. (2007). Translational research endeavors and the practices of communication privacy management. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 35(3), 218–222], we argue that there is a dialectical tension between control and engagement. As information is disclosed via social media, it creates new opportunities for engagement, surveillance, and commodification. Based on group interviews with small business owners, we identify the kinds of information that small businesses must manage as participants on social media platforms and the privacy rules they develop.     

Protecting Children and Young People from Tobacco‐Related Harm: A Review

Tobacco use continues to be a serious public health issue. Although declining in middle‐ to high‐income countries, smoking rates are often higher in disadvantaged communities and vulnerable groups. Knowledge about tobacco‐related harm also tends to be incomplete. To date, legislation has focused on public domains, but the pressure to protect children in the home and other private spaces is fast becoming a focal point for potential legislation and intervention. Negotiating the boundary between privacy and protection is likely to become a matter of professional concern.     

Immunization documentation practices and vaccine-preventable disease surveillance capacity among institutions of higher education in Indiana

Objective: Complete and accurate documentation of immunization records and surveillance of disease transmission are critical to the public health response to outbreaks of communicable disease in institutions of higher education (IHEs). This study aims to describe immunization documentation practices and disease surveillance capacity among IHEs in Indiana in order to inform public health action. Methods: IHEs in Indiana were identified and included in the study if they offered on-campus housing and had a dedicated student health center. Phone surveys were administered in September 2015 to each institution, inquiring about current immunization documentation policies and practices, disease surveillance capacity, and use of statewide electronic reporting systems. Additionally, IHE websites were searched to identify immunization documentation requirements for matriculating students. Results: Surveys were completed for 33 of 38 eligible IHEs. Twenty-three (70%) IHEs reported that student immunization records are entered into an accessible electronic system or database. Matriculating student immunization requirements were identified for 32 institutions. Of these, 22 (69%) required a physician-signed proof of immunization. No IHEs reported documenting historical immunizations in the statewide electronic immunization system and three IHEs (9%) reported utilizing the state electronic disease surveillance program. Conclusions: Immunization documentation practices vary among IHEs in Indiana and use of statewide immunization and disease reporting systems is minimal. Robust utilization of immunization and disease surveillance systems has been shown to improve public health response to communicable disease outbreaks. Improving mutual understanding of policy and practice between health departments and IHEs could improve the ability to respond to public health challenges.     

Negotiating the Digital Closet: Online Pseudonymity and the Politics of Sexual Identity

Online surveillance interferes with the individual's ability to control their expressive identity - to determine the scope of the social context in which their activities are to be seen and interpreted. Entrepreneurs have responded to these concerns by offering pseudonymizers, which employ cryptographic techniques to allow users to create several unlinkable personae and choose among them when engaging in various online interactions. This article investigates the tension between pseudonymity as a design paradigm for privacy technologies and as a lived practice for users. Because coming out - strategic revelation and the claiming of identity - has been at the core of the gay liberation movement, this article posits a politically and sexually active gay professional man as an ideal user of pseudonymity software, and places the design logic of pseudonymity within that particular set of social understandings. It reveals the conflicts, contradictions and trade-offs inherent in that use. Pseudonymity permits a very strong control of identity. It permits the user to segregate his public performances, and to engage in public debate without fear of bodily retribution. However, it is all but useless as a means of controlling the social context of those performances. It requires that decisions about self-presentation in certain contexts be made in ignorance of who is sharing that context, and with what resources or purpose. While it promotes the production of multiple selves, those selves are not easily lent to practices of intimacy or community. Pseudonymity also facilitates profiling practices that define and reify classes of people, even as it protects the individual from some of the repercussions of being defined as part of that class. In short, pseudonymity software is informed by a politics of heroics rather than of community.     

Gender in Political Sex Scandals in Contemporary Turkey: Women’s Agency and the Public Sphere

Sex scandals in politics lead to intense public debates about fundamental issues, such as morality, publicity, and privacy, rendering gender inequalities more visible than ever. This article aims to reveal the complex gendered dynamics of the political culture by looking at sex scandals in contemporary Turkey. The ways in which these scandals have been narrated, negotiated, and resolved among the public and political actors provide grounds for analysis about the nature of patriarchal dynamics regarding women’s agency and public credibility communicated through their sexuality in contemporary Turkey.     

New Media,Web 2.0 and Surveillance

This article outlines some basic foundations and academic controversies about Web 2.0 surveillance. Contemporary web platforms, such as Google or Facebook store, process, analyse, and sell large amounts of personal data and user behaviour data. This phenomenon makes studying Internet surveillance and web 2.0 surveillance important. Surveillance can either be defined in a neutral or a negative way. Depending on which surveillance concept one chooses, Internet/web 2.0 surveillance will be defined in different ways. Web 2.0 surveillance studies are in an early stage of development. The debate thus far suggests that one might distinguish between a cultural studies approach and a critical political economy approach in studying web 2.0 surveillance. Web 2.0 surveillance is a form of surveillance that exerts power and domination by making use specific qualities of the contemporary Internet, such as user‐generated content and permanent dynamic communication flows. It can be characterized as a system of panoptic sorting, mass self‐surveillance and personal mass dataveillance. Facebook is a prototypical example of web 2.0 surveillance that serves economic ends. The problems of Facebook surveillance in particular and web 2.0 surveillance in general include: the complexity of the terms of use and privacy policies, digital inequality, lack of democracy, the commercialization of the Internet, the advancement of market concentration, the attempted manipulation of needs, limitation of the freedom to choose, unpaid value creation of users and intransparency.     

‘Privacy does not interest me’. A comparative analysis of photo sharing on Instagram and Blipfoto

Photo sharing online has become immensely popular and is a central aspect of modern visual culture. Yet it creates a number of privacy issues, both in relation to other individuals and corporate surveillance. The purpose of this study was to investigate users’ understanding of privacy issues in photo sharing, based on a comparative study of two contrasting platforms: Instagram and Blipfoto. The study combined netnography and in-depth interviewing. It was found that Instagram users had a greater awareness of how the platform might use their data, but saw this loss of privacy as inevitable in return for a free service. Blipfoto users were more trusting of what they experienced as a very community minded platform. Any concerns felt by both groups of users were out-weighed by the sense that photo sharing was highly meaningful and their fascination with watching and being watched. Both groups main approach to privacy was through restricting certain types of image of people and not revealing the location of certain personal spaces. Notions of privacy thus remained primarily personal and ignored corporate dataveillance.     

Revisiting the Notion of "Public" in Habermas's Theory—Toward a Theory of Politics of Public Credibility

There exist around the notion of the public three different yet overlapping dichotomies posed on different levels of analysis: public (sphere) versus private (sphere), public versus mass, and publicness versus privacy/secrecy. Habermas's book ([1962]1989) incorporates all the three sets of dichotomy without resolving the contradictory meanings and bridging the gaps among them. As a result, his conception of the public sphere becomes paradoxical in terms, and it undertheorizes the cultural property of publicness. This article proposes an alternative conception of the public that may encompass the structural, institutional, and cultural levels of theorization in a more precise and coherent way. It is argued that the public is an imagined category about citizen membership that is attached to both institutions of state and civil society. In political practices, a symbolic "public" is institutionalized through an open communicative space where it is called upon, constructed, and contested as the central source of cultural references. In this connection, a notion of public credibility is introduced as an attempt to bring forth a richer and more dynamic conception about the role of culture in democratic struggles than that of critical rationality by Habermas.     

I spy with my little eye: the use of CCTV in schools and the impact on privacy

CCTV is widely acknowledged to be ubiquitous in British urban areas. It is therefore not surprising that its use has seeped into institutions such as the school. As such it is important, perhaps more than ever, to be able to attribute an inherent value to privacy and demonstrate that its infringement facilitated by the burgeoning of technological surveillance practices could have potentially serious consequences for society. Drawing upon empirical research conducted in three secondary schools in the United Kingdom, this paper examines the value of privacy as perceived by pupils and the extent to which this is undermined or eradicated by the presence of CCTV cameras.     

Process evaluation of integrated West Nile virus surveillance in northern Italy: an example of a One Health approach in public health policy

West Nile virus (WNV) is endemic in the Po valley area in northern Italy. Regional health authorities have implemented integrated WNV surveillance following a One Health approach, based on collaboration between human, animal and environmental health institutions. We evaluated this integrated WNV surveillance system in Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy and Piedmont regions by means of a process evaluation. We examined the system’s implementation fidelity, dose delivered and received, reach, and we identified strengths and weaknesses in the system. Qualitative and semi-quantitative data were obtained from three regional focus groups. Data were discussed in a follow up focus group, where participants suggested recommendations for improving the surveillance system.Inter-institutional and interdisciplinary integration and the creation of a 'community of practice' were identified as key elements for effective surveillance. We identified differences in the degree of interdisciplinary integration in the three regions, likely due to different epidemiological situations and years of experience in surveillance implementation. Greater collaboration and sharing of information, public engagement and economic assessments of the integrated surveillance approach would facilitate its social recognition and guarantee its sustainability through dedicated funding. We demonstrate that a transdisciplinary research approach based on process evaluation has value for designing and fine-tuning integrated health surveillance systems.     

Nonsocial Transient Behavior: Social Disengagement on the Greyhound Bus

Based on two years of observations and engaging in informal conversations with passengers on Greyhound Line buses, this article describes the long‐distance bus journey and the ways in which people actively disengage from others over the course of the ride. Using the Greyhound buses and stations as a microcosm of other such public spaces, I examine its unspoken rules and behavior. I paint a picture of the buses and stations, the patrons, the employees, and the transactions that take place between them. Using ideas from Goffman's civil inattention theory, Lofland's thoughts on strangers, and symbolic interactionism, I explain what I call “nonsocial transient behavior” and “nonsocial transient space.” The reasons nonsocial transient behavior emerges and thus encourages disengagement are identified as follows: uncertainty about strangers, lack of privacy or absence of a personal space, and exhaustion.