Surveillance

General Definitions

Lyon (2007) defines surveillance as "the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction" (p.14), and its attention is directed at the individual with information obtained about that individual to include through aggregate data. It is deliberate and controlled through processes and techniques, and it is a display of power where the watchers are privileged (p. 15). Many times social control, governing, and crime control are justifications for surveillance (p. 21).

According to Zureik (2003), there are eight key features of surveillance: 1) it is ubiquitous and found everywhere in places like politics/the public, civil and private spheres; 2) associated with government and management; 3)"endemic to large-scale organizations"; 4) "constitutive of the subjects and has a corporeal aspect to it"; 5) disables and enables ("productive" in Foucault sense); 6) "understood in terms of distanciation"; 7) involved in assemblage; and 8) rhizomatic (p. 42).

Anthony Giddens (1990) describes surveillance as "the supervision of the activities of subject populations in the political sphere - although its importance as a basis of administrative power is by no means confined to that sphere. Supervision may be direct (as in many of the instances discussed by Foucault, such as prisons, schools, or open workplaces), but more characteristically it is indirect and based upon the control of information" (p.58).

Surveillance is fundamentally about "expressivity and control; privacy and publicness; structure and agency", a nexus of technology, self and society, and an issue about seeing and being seen (Jansson and Christensen, 2014: 2).

According to Gilliom (2001), "I will argue that a surveillance system is not just a way of watching the world, it is a way of seeing and knowing the world that shapes both our understandings of reality and our capacities for action. Such systems impose an order upon the world with official declarations about what matters and what does not and, as they do this, they shape important decisions about the distributions of rewards and benefits as well as punishment and costs" (p.9).

In Feminist Surveillance Studies, Andrejevic argues surveillance is information collection plus power (2015, p. x).

Jansson and Christensen (2014) define surveillance as "the systematic gathering and organizing of information about individuals and their activities, opinions and alues in order to exercise various types of control (e.g., political, economic or social) over the subjects and/or a certain social territory (e.g., the nation-state, commercial, spaces or the private home). Surveillance is thus not a condition that emerges at random, or without any underlying social logic or force" (p. 5). In order to understand how processes of power structures, one needs to have perspectives to unpack the social dynamics that shape policies and "culturally taken-for-granted ways" (p. 5) such as the everyday social practices legitimize surveillance (p.5).

Lyon (2007) calls information used for surveillance "coordinates," and he explains that this is not just time and place; it is data from the body such as DNA, fingerprints, iris scans, images, financial information like salary or ID number, emails, telephone conversations, text messages (p. 18).

According to Haggerty & Ericson, the information that people leave behind such as browsing histories and data doubles can be used as a form of surveillance that can be monetized. This ability has been aided by the "computerization of record keeping" (p. 616). This idea relates back to Marx's concept of "surplus value" (which for Marx was how employers profit from employee uncompensated labor), and both corporations and governments profit from the sale of this information. In modernity then, "surplus value" is being understood as "the profile that can be derived from the surplus information that different populations trail behind them in their daily lives" (p. 616).

"Others have leaned on Jean Baudrillard's analysis of simulation to suggest how surveillance is often before the event and intended to predict or to prevent rather than merely to record or to find out about something or someone after the fact" (Lyon, 2007, p. 89).

Ericson and Haggerty (1997) cite Gandy's eleven areas in which a "self is constituted in machine-readable, network-lined data files" (p.95). This list is "personal credentials (birth certificates, driver's licenses); financial activity (ATM cards, credit cards, tax returns); insurance (health, home, and vehicular policies); social service (files relating to social benefits, healthcare, and pensions); utility service (files relating to telephone, cable television, and heating service); real estate (Purchase, sale, and lease agreements); entertainment (travel documents, theater tickets, Nielsen ratings); consumer activity (purchase records, credit accounts, surveys of consumer preferences); employment (applications, examinations, performance assessments); education (applications, records, references); and legal (court records, legal aid files)" (p. 95). Surveillance mechanisms that help gather this information are: "collection and storage of knowledge about people and objects; monitoring of people under supervision; encouragement of people under supervision to use knowledge obtained from surveillance to construct their own self-regulated courses of action; offering instructions to subject populations; imposing direction on subject populations via the design of physical environments; and negotiating and monitory compliance with risk standards" (p. 95).

According to Gandy, surveillance operates through three ongoing processes: 1) identification of danger; 2) risk classification; 3) risk assessment (p. 95-6).

According to Bauman, all instances of surveillance have the same purposeful, functional differentiation: "spotting the targets, location of targets and/or focusing on targets" (p. 91). While not all surveillance is designed to kill, it is designed to take away a social good (p. 92). Gee talks about a reduction of social good in An Introduction to Discourse Analysis, page 7.

Gary T. Marx (2002) describes new surveillance as "the use of technical means to extract or create personal data. This may be taken from individuals or contexts (Fuchs, Boersma, Albrechtslund & Sandoval, 2012, p. 1).

Algorithms

Algorithms may appear objective, but they aren't. They are not transparent or neutral and will continue to be opaque because 1) algorithms use big data which, when analyzed, seems to defy logic anyway, and 2) those who control the database have little interest in letting others see how things are done (Andrejevic, 2015, p. xvii)

"Biometric technologies render the body in binary code, and industry manufactures of these technologies claim this code reveals nothing about race, gender, class, or sexuality, instead representing bodies as anesthetized strands of ones and zeros" (Dubrofsky and Magnet, 2015, p. 15). This is not true, however, and for instance, "since tech is often useful for how it sorts people, "it would be faster to scan the individual against a smaller group of people with like characteristics, rather than against an entire database. For many biometric technologies, 'like characteristics' include race and gender identities."

"Today's surveillance is a peculiarly ambiguous process in which digital technologies and personal data are fundamentally implicated and meet in software coding that classifies yet more groups in different ways" (Lyon, 2007, p.5).

Assemblage

Surveillant assemblage theorized surveillance as a "collection of information that is disaggregated and decentralized" rather than coming from one state actor like Big Brother or centralized notions like the Panopticon (Dubrofsky & Magnet, 2015, p.2).

The idea of assemblage is criticized by those like Jasbir Puar who shows that surveillant assemblages move "toward discounting and dismissing the visual and its capacity to interpellate subjects..this discounting is simply not politically viable given the shifts around formations of race and sex that are under way in response to a new visual category, the 'terrorist look-alike" or those who 'look like terrorists' (2007, p. 229)" (Dubrofsky and Magnet, 2015, p. 9).

Bureaucracy

Surveillance goals and Weber's bureaucracy goals are similar: "Precision, dispatch, clarity, familiarity with the documents, continuity, discretion, uniformity, rigid subordination, savings in friction and in material and personal costs" (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997, p. 96). Technology and dataveillance are allowing this to happen even without human involvement.

Categorical Suspicion

Gary T. Marx talked about those classified as possible threats may not even be threats, but they are under "categorical suspicion" because they are categorized in this way (Lyon, 2007, p. 106). This shifts away from Foucautls's disciplinary society and toward Deleuze's "society of control" (Lyon, 2007, p. 107).

Census and Map

The census, map, and museum put a population into a classification (Anderson, 2006, p. 184). According to Anderson, "The 'wrap' of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied with endless flexibility to anything under the state's real or contemplated control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to say of anything that it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate, and therefore- in principle- countable" (p. 184) with the 'other' designation functioning to gloss over anomalies. (p. 184)...."For the colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this 'visibility' was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number. This style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was the product of the technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, photography and print, to say nothing of a deep driving power of capitalism" (p. 184-5).

Complicity

Often, complicity in surveillance has been explained to have three origins: 1) people accept some surveillance as a price worth paying for what they get in return; 2) surveillance is good for public safety; 3) surveillance (especially when dealing with the online context) is too complicated and not worth worrying about (Jansson and Christensen, p. 149).

People are more accepting of the sale of their information thought because privacy can now be traded for products, services or deals (p. 616), and "people may more readily part with their personal data, for example, when they believe that there is some clear benefit or reward for them (Lyon, 2007, p. 44). This could be detrimental though to laws and regulations because according to Gary T. Marx (2006), the "idea of voluntary compliance and self-help...weakens many social protections and pays less attention to the ways the social order may produce bad choices and collective problems" (as cited in Lyon, 2007, p .116). Additionally, Lyon (2007) states, "If the system is accepted as legitimate and necessary, then it is unlikely that anyone will question it-assuming that so-called 'data-subjects' know exactly what is going on" (p. 164). But this is of note, even if the results only put one into consumer categories. According to Lyon (2007), "The potential consumer, like the potential offender, is singled out for attention by virtue of being identified as part of a group with certain characteristics" (p. 185).

Corporations

According to Evgeny Morozov, the only difference between corporations and the US government's use of data collection online is "that one system learns everything about us to show us more relevant advertisements, while the other learns everything about us to ban us from accessing relevant pages" (qtd in Rainie & Wellman, 2012, p.237). The data is "often commodified and sold to the highest bidder to help business market services and products" (p. 237).

Surveillance Cultures

Lyon (2014) outlines four key issues in emerging surveillance cultures: 1) surveillance today has a history and has emerged from a past; 2) Surveillance is not a distinct part of our lives, so we can understand it to be woven into our daily lives and practices; 3) surveillance is "smart" and is conducted through technologies; 4) positive aspects are overplayed, and negatives are underplayed (In Jansson and Christensen, 2014, p. 78). Shadow surveillance is thus something that needs to be thought about.

Everyday Surveillance

McCahill and Norris (2002) note that everyday surveillance is “one that is acceptable to the public” (Jewkes, 2004, p. 181).

Fitness tracking

Rainie and Wellman (2012) consider technology which allows fitness monitoring to be a "lifelogging tool" which "is a combination of hardware and software that allows experiences to be captured, stored, integrated, remembered, and disseminated to others" (p. 285). This "loss of privacy is an important trade-off for the benefits of Internet and Mobile Revolutions (p. 288).

Surveillance as a Game

Makinen & Koskela say that surveillance is a game for five reasons (metaphors): 1) it is a cat-and-mouse game of catching someone in the act; 2) it relates to the idea of hide-and-seek - monitoring can find something hidden; 3) surveillance forms a labyrinth- monitoring devices follow patterns- how can you avoid those? (i.e. CCTV cameras) (Jansson and Christensen, 2014, p. 190); 4) sleight-of-hand - how can surveillance techniques be thwarted? (i.e., bank robbers in masks, [rerouting IP addresses]); and 5) it is like poker. One only knows the cards they are holding until endgame when all cards are on the table (p. 191).

Hypersurveillance

Hypersurveillance is a situation where societies are monitored thorugh simulation of what bads could happen and policies are used accordingly. For instance, schools act like another Columbine may happen so they operate on worst-case-scenarios (Lewis, 2006).

Internet surveillance

"Surveillance, even without blocking, can have a chilling effect on networked individuals' information access and communication. As the internet becomes more central in everyday life, there are likely to be further attempts by governments to establish their online sovereignty" (Rainie and Wellman, 2012, p. 289).

For the internet to work, people have to share information which includes "who they are, what talents of skills they possess, what they know, and what their needs are" (Rainie and Wellman, 2012, p. 289).

According to Jewkes (2004), in Gidden’s (1985) terms, surveillance can mean two things: “the accumulation of coed information …which can be used to manage the behavior of those about whom it is gathered, and the direct supervision of some individuals by others who are in positions of authority over them” (p. 173).

Jansson and Christensen (2014) state that Giddens (1985) held a social theory perspective and though surveillance was a main element in organizing power in modernity, and the rise of the nation-state (and its bureaucratic, administrative power) was parallel to the rise in surveillance practices.

Suveillance isn't just about snooping for security, it is also about gathering data to use for financial exploitation. I.e., predictive analytics suggests what people are going to buy based on previous purchases (think Amazon).

Identity

Identity in a time of surveillance is often contradictory. According to Jewkes (2004), while some show how it is easy to create an alternative identity on the internet or buy forged documents (p. 183), at the same time, ID cards and other networks of information are fixing our identities with assemblages of biometric, credit, and other data (p. 182). Additionally, not all criminals have spoiled identities (Stalder and Lyon, 2003: 85), so you can’t always predict who will do what (p. 183).

Data Interpretation

According to Jenkins (2012), "[T]he watchers' capacity to interpret surveillance data is likely to be compromised because they (a) lack one of the most important sources of information that we routinely use to identify people, i.e., language and, specifically, conversational inquiry; (b) rely on their individual and cultural prior knowledge, with all of its inadequacies, not least its stereotypical nature, to interpret appearances; and (c) also depend on a different kind of prior knowledge, intelligence, with all of its shortcomings. As a result, their capacity to know "who's how" and consequently "what's what" is likely to be problematic, at best" (p. 164).

Feminism and Surveillance

Feminist scholars want to get away from neutral understandings of surveillance to critique how rules and regulations are influenced by surveillance texts and classifications (Andrejevic, 2015, p. xi). This also includes looking at monitoring techniques and technologies to understand what should be counted as surveillance, even in taken-for-granted practices. More traditional studies also focus on historical criminology underpinnings, but feminist studies want to look beyond this to see what practices are marked as neutral v. what is conducted by the state only. Additionally, it questions the "various interests, pressures, prejudices, and agendas obscured by the technocratic alibi of the algorithm and its analogs" (p. xii). It focuses not only how surveillance can be abused, but how it is used in everyday life (xiii). Additionally, we show see how surveillance is "integral to many of our foundational structural systems" and surveillance and its associated technologies "normalize and maintain whiteness, able-bodiedness, capitalism, and hetrosexuality, practices integral to the foundation of the modern state" (Dubrofsky and Magnet, 2015, p. 7). Feminist surveillance looks at how these practices are normalized and make some bodies relatively invisible while others are hypervisible. Often, such as the case of the airport body scanner, "whiteness is transparent" (p. 8). Overall, "[a] feminist approach to surveillance studies demonstrates how the production of knowledge, when it comes to vulnerable bodies, is always already bound up with gendered and sexualized ways of seeing" (p.9). A critical feminist approach shows "what constitutes surveillance, who is scrutinized, why, and at what cost" (Dubrofsky and Magnet, 2015, p. 15).

Neutral and Natural ideas of Surveillance

According to Fuchs (2011), neutral concepts of surveillance make the following assumptions: 1) surveillance can be positive; 2) surveillance is both enabling and constraining; 3) surveillance in fundamental to society; 4) surveillance is necessary for organization; and 5) any gathering of information systematically is surveillance (from Jansson and Christensen, 2014, p. 53).

Predicting

Surveillance and sorting attempts to predict the future with data mining and patterns, and it passes itself as neutral numbers speaking for themselves, but this is discrimination (Andrejevic, 2015, p. xiii-xvi).

Resistance

Often those who resist are told that if you have something to hide, maybe you shouldn't do it in the first place. But this just often transfers blame to the victim of discrimination. Often we try to convince ourselves that vulnerability is evenly distributed, but often it isn't and we need to ask ourselves what counts for surveillance and what counts as surveillance (Andrejevic, 2015, p. xvii-xviii).

Sites of Surveillance

Heuristics to measure sites of surveillance are rationalization, technology, sorting, knowledgeability, and urgency (Lyon, 2007, p. 26-7), and specific sites of surveillance are the military (p. 27), the state (p. 30), employers (p. 33), law enforcement (p. 36), and marketing and capitalism corporations (p. 40).

Sorting

Surveillance is often used for social sorting (Lyon, 2007, p. 101), and some are classified as potential offenders (p. 105). Gary T. Marx talked about those classified as possible threats may not even be threats, but they are under "categorical suspicion" because they are categorized in this way (Lyon, 2007, p. 106). This shifts away from Foucautls's disciplinary society and toward Deleuze's "society of control" (Lyon, 2007, p. 107).

Sousveillance

Reflexive surveillance is the idea that those being watched can also watch the watchers (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997, p. 94).

Technologies

"[S]urveillance technologies work to discipline certain bodies in particular ways, making some bodies hypervisible and others invisible...Jiwani argues that visibility serves to heighten the focus on particuar bodies by foregrounding their difference" (Dubrofsky and Magnet, 2015, p. 11).

Traditional Surveillance Theories

According to Haggerty and Ericson, for Orwell, surveillance was hierarchical social control from state actors; Foucault thought surveillance was panoptic control of one's soul controlled by self-monitoring; and Bauman (1992) suggests that the panopticon in modern times is just a "mechanism of social integration" where people regulate themselves for capitalist benefits like "preferential credit ratings, computer services, or rapid movement through customs" (p. 615).

While Orwell and Foucault talk about either a state or a person (or at least understood as a limited number of people in control) of surveillance from the top down, the idea of rhizomatic surveillance connotes that the hierarchies of observation are disrupted and now both institutions and the general population can become surveillers (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000, p. 616). Lyon (2007) goes so far to say that "concepts of the Panopticon have been unhelpfully overused" (p.47).

According to Dubrofsky and Magnet (2015), implicit in many definitions of surveillance is that real people are being watched doing real things, and Foucault emphasized surveillance as a production of the state so that docile bodies result. This form of surveillance is often viewed through the metaphor of the Panopticon (p. 2). Additionally, much of the focus of discussion is on associated privacy issues; this is a limited focus though as privacy is not distributed equally to all (p.4).

REFERENCES

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Jenkins, Richard. 2012. “Identity, Surveillance and Modernity: Sorting Out Who’s Who.” In Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies, eds. Kristie Ball, Kevin D. Haggerty, and David Lyon, 159-166. Oxon: Routledge.

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Lyon, D.(2007) Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Malden: Polity Press.

Marx, G. T. (2006). Soft surveillance: The growth of mandatory volunteerism in collecting personal information - "Hey buddy can you spare a DNA? in T. Monahan (ed.) Surveillance and Security: Technological Politics and Power in Everyday Life. New York: Routledge.

Rainie, H. & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked: The new social operating system. Cambridge: MIT.

Zureik, E. (2003). Theorizing surveillance: The case of the workplace. In David Lyon (Ed.) Surveillance as social sorting: Privacy, risk and digital discrimination (-). New York: Routledge.