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As Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests surged in response to the continued murders of black men and women, state surveillance practices, too, have increasingly monitored, tracked, and prosecuted protesters. Among the growing surveillance arsenal are facial recognition technologies (FRT), which authorities use to identify protesters, often leading to the mis/recognition of black and brown people, false arrests, and blacklisting from public spaces. In response to the prevalence of FRT, protesters and photographers are urging and employing anonymizing blurring technologies to evade state and citizen surveillance. I argue that these technologies materially and rhetorically disrupt the racialized surveillant gaze. I employ Simone Browne’s (2015) term “dark sousveillance” as a framework for understanding how blurring technologies enable evasion from state violence and promote ethical photography practices. Such practices challenge the relationship between whiteness and the law enforcement surveillance regime.

EN:

In late 2017 and throughout 2018, surveillance discourse collided with meme culture through the popular “FBI agent” meme. The meme had various iterations but usually depicted ordinary individuals who are aware that they are constantly being surveilled on their personal devices by an assigned government agent. However, far from threatening Orwellian depictions of surveillance, in which a dangerous government is constantly watching, the FBI agent meme characterized the surveillant relationship as positive and caring, where the government agent is answering questions or helping with homework, providing a sympathetic ear for relationship troubles, crying over movies together, and even dropping by to deliver milk. The joke is predicated on the assumption that the government agent is always watching, knows the individual intimately, communicates with them regularly, and sometimes even intervenes through their devices, but only with the individual’s best interests in mind. The FBI agent meme depicts the relationship between the individual and the surveillant apparatus as one of surveillant companionship. Surveillant companionship suggests that surveillance fulfills a social role: partly care and control, and partly a response to widespread alienation. The FBI agent meme’s depiction of surveillant companionship satirizes the normalization of mass surveillance by highlighting the absurdity of sharing every intimate moment with the surveillant gaze. Memes also function as collective interventions in political discourse, in this case mass surveillance. Although the meme depicts the surveillant apparatus as a form of ambivalent companionship, the collective and collaborative nature of memes and the participation in communal humor and critique offers a different kind of companionship, one organized around a recognition of shared grievances and surveillant intrusions.

EN:

This essay stages an encounter between surveillance studies and the sociology of price and price formation. I argue that surveillance is integral to the calculative operations of retail price strategies, especially during periods of high inflation, and that these calculative operations hinge on the human infrastructure of a precarious data-collecting workforce. I present my argument through a case study of competitor price monitoring, a corporate surveillance practice in which commercial actors record, process, and transmit information on competitors’ pricing, inventory, and display strategies. While pricing intelligence services like web-scraping and dynamic pricing algorithms are typically applied in e-commerce settings, I focus here on a firm that specializes in the collection of brick-and-mortar retail price data, with special attention to the labor practices involved in the manual (in-person, device-aided) production of retail price information at the national-industrial scale. Building on auto-ethnographic observations as a price data collector as well as analysis of employee reviews of the firm on sites like Indeed and Glassdoor, I argue that surveillance studies can contribute in significant ways to our understanding of the material practices, and politics, of price and price formation.

EN:

The Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS) was an American naval surveillance network developed over the course of the Cold War. Spanning from the Pacific coast across the Atlantic, SOSUS is remembered for its unprecedented reach and is often figured as a precursor to centralized, networked, and automated surveillance systems today. This article contributes to, and complicates, this history by approaching SOSUS from the perspective of one of its outposts. Iceland was neither an agent nor a target of American surveillance but, as a staging grounds for SOSUS, both shaped and was shaped by this process nevertheless. Theorizing this position as the surveillant surrounds, this article asks after the experience of being interpellated into someone else’s surveillance program, or living where surveillance is a pervasive part of the landscape while occupying neither the position of observer nor observed. In Southern Iceland, I argue, SOSUS both activated and was meaningfully anchored by a local politics of gendered intimacy. Doing so, I shed fresh light on the legacy of SOSUS and make a broader case for attending to the particular place-based dynamics that shape and situate “global” surveillance networks then and today.

EN:

The relations of production in Deep South regions like the Mississippi Delta require a high degree of control over race and class configurations. While the overt, de jure White supremacy that marked the post-Reconstruction era allowed for effective repression of dissent, the promise of federal intervention and grassroots organizing during the years of the civil rights movement required White elites to recalibrate methods of control. By integrating theories of racialization of space, internal colonialism, and Althusser’s (2006) notion of the ideological state apparatus, I suggest that this transition from overt to implicit control was accomplished by creating a culture of neighborly surveillance in which everyday Whites were deputized to surveil and report on civil rights organizing at the grassroots level. By neighborly surveillance, I refer to surveillance between and amongst private citizens enacted outside the purview of the formal state but in the interest of the powerful elite who control the state. I document this process through analysis of the archives of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, an official state agency tasked with spying on and counteracting civil rights activity. These records demonstrate the extent to which non-state actors assumed the roles originally exercised by the de jure Jim Crow regime. Beyond augmenting understandings of the civil rights movement-era US South, this article contributes analytical insights to social and ideological transitions in other post-colonial, post-authoritarian spatial contexts.

EN:

The advent of predictive policing systems demonstrates an increased interest in more novel forms of data processing for the purpose of crime control. This paper draws on interviews with police practitioners in the Netherlands and the UK to deconstruct the rationalities that are embedded within the turn to predictive identification. Debates on predictive policing have predominantly centred data in the analysis of the institutional and societal implication of prediction, linking its use to the premise of efficiency and accuracy and foregrounding issues around bias and discrimination. Yet, little is known about its actual practice. In policing, I find that studying data as practice surfaces new insights into the relationship between risk and the ways in which crime priorities are operationalised and the security mandate of the state is negotiated. Drawing on Harcourt’s (2008) observation that the desire to predict crime says more about the police than it does about a potential offender, I argue that predictive identification is not about prediction, nor about efficiency, but rather it is about optimisation. Here, datafication serves to overcome self-defined organisational challenges within the police.

EN:

Smart Home Technologies (SHTs) have recently become popular for a variety of purposes, including healthcare, entertainment, and convenience, among others. While SHT manufacturers promise to provide a range of services relating to home security, health and wellness, automated domestic tasks, entertainment, and beyond, user perceptions vary widely in terms of benefits and drawbacks. Moreover, surveillance studies researchers have warned against normalizing technologies that may exacerbate uneven power dynamics between users and household members, marketing companies, insurance brokers, law enforcement, and others. Through an analysis of the interdisciplinary literature stemming from computer science and engineering, gerontology, the social sciences, and related fields, we explore the extent to which these potential risks and related concerns are reflected upon by smart home users. This scoping review aims to explore SHT user perceptions of privacy attitudes, the purposes of smart home surveillance, risks and benefits, and impacts on home safety. Through our review of sixty-eight relevant studies, we found that many smart home users reported satisfaction over perceived benefits such as an increased sense of safety and home security. Many others displayed limited understandings of data collection practices or expressed privacy concerns. Nonetheless, SHT usage prevailed among these users. Others report a perceived trade-off between privacy and other factors, such as convenience, and some may have resorted to privacy cynicism, a coping mechanism for dealing with ubiquitous surveillance. In order to better understand SHT adoption trends despite concerns, exploring the conflict between user perceptions of privacy, understanding of SHT data collection purposes, risks and benefits, and home safety, is essential.

EN:

While research has been done to identify the potential implications of biometric technology on marginalized populations’ privacy and autonomy, this paper contributes to existing research by examining these technologies in healthcare settings. Drawing from insights across surveillance studies, rhetoric of health and medicine, and technical communication, we identify how one leading healthcare institution in New York City has employed rhetorics of efficiency, effectiveness, safety, and security regarding its biometric technology system. This employment of biometric technologies often contributes to patients’ marginalization and dismissal. As we explore, interrogating the language used by the healthcare institution to describe biometrics opens opportunities for us—surveillance studies scholars, patients, allies, students, and more—to ensure that innovations within the healthcare system promote equity, agency, and improved outcomes for all.