Expansion Of Surveillance Research Articles

A Synthesized Approach to Explaining the Expansion of Surveillance: Risk Perceptions and Surveillance as a Positive Feedback Loop

This paper is a review of partially available surveillance literature which attempts to synthesize information about the field of surveillance within sociology. It will provide a clearer understanding of the expansion of surveillance. This paper argues that modern surveillance paradigms evolve much like a positive feedback loop in the biological sense, where increasing surveillance feeds back into the need for more surveillance, causing (if left unchecked) an exponential rise in the level of surveillance within society. This position is supported through evidence from a thought-provoking philosophical anecdote, surveillance assemblages, risk as a psychological and sociological process and its effect on surveillance, surveillance capitalism, and national security and its role in this expansion. Finally, this paper concludes with a possible recommendation for dealing with surveillance going forward, how to end the feedback loop, and shows where future research within sociology and surveillance as a focus could be taken.

Enterovirus D68-Associated Acute Respiratory Illness ─ New Vaccine Surveillance Network, United States, July-November 2018-2020.

Enterovirus D68 (EV-D68) is associated with a broad spectrum of illnesses, including mild to severe acute respiratory illness (ARI) and acute flaccid myelitis (AFM). Enteroviruses, including EV-D68, are typically detected in the United States during late summer through fall, with year-to-year fluctuations. Before 2014, EV-D68 was infrequently reported to CDC (1). However, numbers of EV-D68 detection have increased in recent years, with a biennial pattern observed during 2014-2018 in the United States, after the expansion of surveillance and wider availability of molecular testing. In 2014, a national outbreak of EV-D68 was detected (2). EV-D68 was also reported in 2016 via local (3) and passive national (4) surveillance. EV-D68 detections were limited in 2017, but substantial circulation was observed in 2018 (5). To assess recent levels of circulation, EV-D68 detections in respiratory specimens collected from patients aged <18 years* with ARI evaluated in emergency departments (EDs) or admitted to one of seven U.S. medical centers† within the New Vaccine Surveillance Network (NVSN) were summarized. This report provides a provisional description of EV-D68 detections during July-November in 2018, 2019 and 2020, and describes the demographic and clinical characteristics of these patients. In 2018, a total of 382 EV-D68 detections in respiratory specimens obtained from patients aged <18 years with ARI were reported by NVSN; the number decreased to six detections in 2019 and 30 in 2020. Among patients aged <18 years with EV-D68 in 2020, 22 (73%) were non-Hispanic Black (Black) persons. EV-D68 detections in 2020 were lower than anticipated based on the biennial circulation pattern observed since 2014. The circulation of EV-D68 in 2020 might have been limited by widespread COVID-19 mitigation measures; how these changes in behavior might influence the timing and levels of circulation in future years is unknown. Ongoing monitoring of EV-D68 detections is warranted for preparedness for EV-D68-associated ARI and AFM.

Bacteria and Their Antibiotic Resistance Profiles in Ambient Air in Accra, Ghana, February 2020: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Inappropriate use of antibiotics has led to the presence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria in ambient air. There is no published information about the presence and resistance profiles of bacteria in ambient air in Ghana. We evaluated the presence and antibiotic resistance profiles of selected bacterial, environmental and meteorological characteristics and airborne bacterial counts in 12 active air quality monitoring sites (seven roadside, two industrial and three residential) in Accra in February 2020. Roadside sites had the highest median temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and PM10 concentrations, and median airborne bacterial counts in roadside sites (115,000 CFU/m3) were higher compared with industrial (35,150 CFU/m3) and residential sites (1210 CFU/m3). Bacillus species were isolated in all samples and none were antibiotic resistant. There were, however, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Escherichia coli, Pseudomonas species, non-hemolytic Streptococci, Coliforms and Staphylococci species, of which six (50%) showed mono-resistance or multidrug resistance to four antibiotics (penicillin, ampicillin, ciprofloxacin and ceftriaxone). There was a positive correlation between PM10 concentrations and airborne bacterial counts (rs = 0.72), but no correlations were found between PM10 concentrations and the pathogenic bacteria nor their antibiotic resistance. We call for the expansion of surveillance of ambient air to other cities of Ghana to obtain nationally representative information.

“Once again, a meth lab exploded and somebody died”: Narratives of volatility and risk in the rural drug war

Methamphetamine (“meth”) has received a massive amount of media attention in the United States over the last decade. In reporting, journalists, politicians, and police commonly link meth to widespread risk, violence, criminality, and rural decay. Although the rise in meth use, addiction, and crime has been largely overstated, such imagery legitimizes an expansion of surveillance and policing to rural landscapes. In this research, I examine the way meth and meth makers are represented in case coverage of a meth lab fire sited in upstate New York. I find that reporters narrate a more general meth lab “social problem formula story” with caricature villains (meth makers), victims (community members), and heroes (law enforcement and legislators). Significantly, this model of storytelling conveys a distorted and exaggerated understanding of meth as a social problem, turning the atypical meth lab case into the “typical,” while legitimizing law and order solutions. In contributing to the contemporary “methamphetamine imaginary,” this formula story forgoes a structural analysis that considers the prevailing global drug war, rural poverty, or broader capital inequality.

The Difference Prevention Makes: Regulating Preventive Justice

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States and many other countries have adopted a “paradigm of prevention,” employing a range of measures in an attempt to prevent future terrorist attacks. This includes the use of pretextual charges for preventive detention, the expansion of criminal liability to prohibit conduct that precedes terrorism, and expansion of surveillance at home and abroad. Politicians and government officials often speak of prevention as if it is an unqualified good. Everyone wants to prevent the next terrorist attack, after all. And many preventive initiatives, especially where they are not coercive and do not intrude on liberty, are welcome. But the move to a “preventive justice” model also creates potential for significant abuse. These risks suggest that we should be cautious about adopting preventive approaches, especially where they involve coercion. In part I of this essay, I articulate why preventive coercion is a problem. I respond, in particular, to a recent essay by Fred Schauer, The Ubiquity of Prevention, which argued that “it is a mistake to assume that preventive justice is a problem in itself [because] preventive justice is all around us, and it is hard to imagine a functioning society that could avoid it.” In part II, I outline the formal constitutional and other constraints that are implicated by preventive measures in the United States, and I demonstrate that these constraints play a relatively small role in the actual operation of preventive measures. In part III, I maintain that informal constraints may actually play a more significant operational role in checking the abuses of prevention.

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.

Australian regulatory framework for telecommunication: interception and access law

This article reviews recent regulatory framework relating to the provisions of the Telecommunications (interception and access) Act 1979 (Cth) and the amendments to the Act. The steady expansion of surveillance powers in Australia over the past two decades is critically evaluated. The article analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the existing regulatory system for telecommunications interception and access. The author conclude that Australasian framework for telecommunications interception that accept the idea of ‘balancing’ privacy to allowing law enforcement agencies to obtain access to such telecommunication for the purpose of national security and public security.

Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America. By Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove with Daniel Wolfe. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. xxiv, 342 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 978-0-520-25202-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25325-4.)

In this well-documented, comprehensive, and important new book, Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove, medical historians associated with Columbia University's Center for the History and Ethics of Public Health, examine the complicated and conflict-punctuated expansion and transformation of public health surveillance over the last century and a quarter against the backdrop of concurrent change in the nature and importance of individual privacy in American society. They show that while the expansion of surveillance has often provoked fears of the violation of privacy, it has not always done so. Indeed, they demonstrate that the relationship between the advocacy of privacy and the advocacy of surveillance has been a complicated one, contingent on what types of health threats and issues of privacy have been at stake and on how those involved have viewed the benefits and risks of surveillance. The authors divide their narrative into three sections. The first focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when public health officials—armed with newly developed abilities both to isolate pathogens causing specific diseases and to identify the people who harbored them—sought mandatory physician reporting of the names of those infected with a number of contagious diseases. That stance provoked resistance, but resistance that centered less on the threat to individual privacy posed by such name-based reporting than on the challenge it raised to the confidential relation between physician and patient, a relation rightly understood by physicians as integral to their professional authority. Individual privacy was at issue, especially since some of the diseases—most notably tuberculosis and venereal disease—carried strong social stigma, but the political conflict was primarily between physicians and public health officials and thus is labeled by the authors as paternalistic.

The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility. Edited by Kevin Haggerty and Richard Ericson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press Incorporated, 2006, VII + 386pp. £20.00 pb, £40.00 hb)

In covering more and more facets of everyday life, ‘surveillance’ is often depicted as fractured, decentred, difficult to resist and, at times, indiscernible. ‘The new politics of surveillance’—found in consumption, the workplace, the management of crime and the conduct of war, welfare and advertising—points to difficulties in grasping these new techniques in governance. As this collection seeks to demonstrate, the complexity and multi-grounded nature of surveillance mean that it can be used to achieve ‘any number of institutional goals’ (p. 3). Like other collections of surveillance, this one displays multifaceted areas of interest, in gathering eclectic subject matter written by the ‘leading scholars of surveillance’. The editors note the strengths and weaknesses of such eclectic approaches and the problems of generalizing from divergent cases. As the Introduction argues, the task of surveillance analysts should be to explore the multiplicity of influences on surveillance as well as the divergent political implications arising from surveillance practice. The Introduction states that ‘no single factor has caused this expansion of surveillance’, nor has it ‘proliferated because it renders the state, capital, or power more effective’ (p. 4). Is this the same as saying that surveillance (however unintended in its consequences) does not render the state, capital or power more effective? As a whole, this book does not approach this question or the latter concepts as structural problems. Instead, surveillance is ‘ubiquitous’ and ‘diverse’, so that ‘it is almost impossible to speak more coherently about “surveillance” more generally’ (p. 22). As the editors note, focusing on discrete mechanisms and areas of surveillance risks ignoring how surveillance systems become interconnected, thus morphing ‘into something quite different’ (p. 23). The chapters in this book do not suggest agreement in thinking about surveillance—its mechanisms and effects—and, in part, this too reflects the diversity of the subject matter and nuances in the various theoretical positions advanced.

Surveillance Strategies and Populations at Risk: Biopolitical Governance in Canada’s National Security Policy

This article examines how Canada’s new national security policy operates through language and practices that take elusive risks to the health and safety of the population as an opportunity for action, and is made possible through an expansion of surveillance. The biopolitical character of security has greatly reduced the traditional distinction between the state as a military apparatus and the state as a service provider and manager of the citizenry. The article argues that the biopolitical governance strategies of Canada’s national security policy treat the problems for political freedom, equality and democratic accountability posed by encroaching security measures as largely negligible in the face of indeterminable danger. Using a Foucauldian analysis, the article establishes the connection between biopolitics and security. It subsequently examines how the Canadian policy deploys truth claims about the immanence of ‘threat’ and how claims about Canadian values produce an internal ‘other’ that represents the proliferation of threats. The article then focuses on two principle techniques of governance: first, guarding the freedom, health and safety of the population, and, second, expanding surveillance to give national security a totalizing reach. The article concludes by theorizing the implications of security governance for legitimating racial profiling and the ‘war on terror’.

The thinking eye

PurposeTo discuss and review the shift to computer enhanced self‐monitoring CCTV surveillance systems of public spaces and the social implications of this shift.Design/methodology/approachA review of the research and evaluation literature concerning CCTV surveillance systems culling out the history of public space CCTV systems and the concerns associated with first and second generation CCTV surveillance.FindingsThe main difference between first and second generation surveillance is the change from a “dumb camera” that needs a human eye to evaluate its images to a computer‐linked camera system that evaluates its own video images. Second generation systems reduce the human factor in surveillance and address some of the basic concerns associated with first generation surveillance systems such as data swamping, boredom, voyeurism, and profiling. Their enhanced capabilities, though, raise new concerns, particularly the expansion of surveillance and its intrusiveness.Research limitations/implicationsAdditional research is needed to assess CCTV surveillance on a set of social dynamics such as informal guardianship activities by citizens.Practical implicationsThe adoption of computer‐enhanced CCTV surveillance systems should not be an automatic response to a public space security problem and their deployment should not be decided simply on the technology's availability or cost.Originality/valueThis paper provides a concise overview of the concerns associated with first generation CCTV surveillance and how the evolution of computer‐enhanced CCTV surveillance systems will alter and add to these concerns. For researchers it details research questions that need to be addressed. For practitioners and government officials considering the use of public space CCTV surveillance it provides a set of issues that should be considered prior to system adoption or deployment.

Surveillance of Pediatric HIV Infection

This Policy Statement was retired December 2015. Pediatric human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) surveillance should expand to include perinatal HIV exposure and HIV infection as well as AIDS to delineate completely the extent and impact of HIV infection on children and families, accurately assess the resources necessary to provide services to this population, evaluate the efficacy of public health recommendations, and determine any potential long-term consequences of interventions to prevent perinatal transmission to children ultimately determined to be uninfected as well as for those who become infected. Ensuring the confidentiality of information collected in the process of surveillance is critical. In addition, expansion of surveillance must not compromise the established, ongoing surveillance system for pediatric AIDS. An expanded pediatric HIV surveillance program provides an important counterpart to existing American Academy of Pediatrics and American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists recommendations for HIV counseling and testing in the prenatal setting.