Nature Of Surveillance Research Articles

COVID-19 and the Rise of Participatory SIGINT: An Examination of the Rise in Government Surveillance Through Mobile Applications.

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a significant growth in government surveillance techniques globally, primarily through the use of cell phone applications. However, although these applications can have actionable effects on public health efforts to control pandemics, the participatory or voluntary nature of these measures is obscuring the relationship between health information and traditional government surveillance techniques, potentially preventing effective oversight. Public health measures have traditionally been resistant to the integration of government-led intelligence techniques, such as signals intelligence (SIGINT), because of ethical and legal issues arising from the nature of surveillance techniques.We explore this rise of participatory SIGINT and its nature as an extension of biosurveillance through 3 drivers: the rise of surveillance capitalism, the exploitation of a public health crisis to obscure state of exception politics with a moral imperative, and the historically enduring nature of emergency-implemented surveillance measures.We conclude that although mobile applications may indeed be useful in containing pandemics, they should be subject to similar oversight and regulation as other government intelligence collection techniques.

The Future of Organizational Surveillance and the Very Future of Organizations

Combining surveillance theory and social geography, we adopt a longue duree approach to re-examine organizational surveillance. Drawing on the work of Jacques-Alain Miller, we identify two forms of the generalized surveillant gaze–Subjective and Objective. We then combine these with the insights provided by Henri Lefebvre to identify four states of organizational surveillance–Police, Panoptic, Distributed, and Market–where these two forms of the gaze interact in distinct ways to create characteristic Surveillant Spaces of organization that are experienced by employees in different ways. Whilst police and panoptic surveillance are well understood through Michel Foucault’s influential work, we argue that they fall short of adequately capturing the distributed nature of surveillance as experienced within contemporary work arrangements like telework. Finally, we speculate how market surveillance as featured in today’s sharing economy is likely to not only impact our lived experiences of the social spaces within organizations, but also to give rise to the potential dissolution of established organizational forms into a deterritorialized and cellular form of economic governance.

Forced Entertainment? Gamified Surveillance in Theatre Conspiracy’sForeign Radical

The nature of surveillance is changing. It is becoming gamified. This article charts a shift in thinking about surveillance culture, from the panopticon models advanced by Jeremy Bentham and Michel Foucault to current analyses of the increasingly participatory and gamified models of surveillance in the age of big data. That shift is played out literally in Theatre Conspiracy’s immersive play Foreign Radical, in which participants are led through a game environment in which they reveal aspects of their online behaviour and judge each other in a way that replicates the kinds of social sorting that take place in both social media and surveillance. The game leads them to deliberate on the case of an Iranian-Canadian man named Hesam, who stands accused of terrorism. As the case against Hesam comes to rest increasingly on his Middle Eastern and Islamic identity, the show reveals the role that racism and Islamophobia come to play in the interpretation of surveillance data. Although surveillance operates on a seemingly empirical basis, the stories it tells about people nevertheless remain fictions, assembled from statistical probability and speculation. In this way, surveillance adds to the sense that we live in a post-truth society.

When video cameras watch and screen: Privacy implications of pattern recognition technologies

Computer vision technologies based on pattern recognition software will soon allow identifying human behaviour that deviates from a pre-defined normality. Such applications are foreseen, amongst others, to be used in public places with purposes of crime prevention, especially in the context of the fight against terrorism. This technology increases the level of automation of video surveillance, changing the main nature of surveillance. The balance of power between the citizen and the State is altered, calling for a new balancing of interests. The automation of risk detection moreover raises the issue of the protection against partially automated decision-making. This paper will deal with the challenges raised by proactive video surveillance technologies to the way how privacy and security have been balanced so far. Attention will moreover be brought to the new safeguards that should be devised to protect the citizens from increased scrutiny and growing automation of the decision-making process.

Making art from evidence: Secret sex and police surveillance in the Tearoom

In 1962, police officers concealed themselves for two weeks in a men’s public toilet in Mansfield, Ohio, and filmed men performing illicit homosexual sex acts. The film footage was used to secure convictions for sodomy, and inaugurated a new form of police surveillance of homosexual public sex. In 2008, the visual artist William E. Jones screened the police footage in art galleries around the world, to both critical acclaim and public objection. This article examines the film, both as a prosecutorial artefact and an artwork, to explore what it says about public sex, police surveillance, the criminalization of homosexual practices, visual evidence, and contemporary art. It considers the validity of the public/private distinction as it applies to anonymous sex, it evaluates the probative value of images, the changing nature of surveillance, and the meanings of silence in both criminal procedure and artistic practice. This article argues that the act of transforming traumatic evidence into visual art requires deep ethical examination. Whatever artistic, political or historical contribution may be claimed for this work must be measured against the harm that it does to the film’s silent subjects.

Commodifying Terrorism

Commodifying Terrorism

Professional standards for physical education teachers' professional development: technologies for performance?

Background: The widespread and diverse models of professional standards for teaching raise questions with respect to the need to provide teachers with a pathway for continuing professional development balanced with the public nature of surveillance and accountability that may accompany standards. Ways of understanding technologies of power in relation to standards for teaching gives us a new language and, in turn, new questions about the standards agenda in the physical education profession. Purpose: To analyse how one health and physical education (HPE) teacher worked with Education Queensland's (EQ) professional standards for teaching within the broader context of teacher professional development and renewal. Participants and setting: An experienced HPE teacher working in an urban secondary school was the ‘case’ for this article. Tim was the only experienced HPE teacher within the larger pilot study of 220 selected teachers from the volunteer pool across the state. Data collection: The case-study data comprised two in-depth interviews conducted by the first author, field notes from workshops (first author), teacher diaries and work samples, notes from focus groups of which Tim was a member, and electronic communications with peers by Tim during the course of the evaluation. Findings: Tim was supportive of the teaching standards while they did not have a strong evaluative dimension associated with technologies of power. He found the self-regulation associated with his reflective practices professionally rewarding rather than being formalised within a prescribed professional development framework. Conclusion: Tim's positive response to the professional standards for teaching was typical of the broader pilot cohort. The concept of governmentality provided a useful framework to help map how the standards for teaching were received, regardless of teacher specialisation or experience. We suggest that it is not until the standards regimes are talked about within the discourses of power (e.g. codification for career progression, certification for professional development imperatives) that we can understand patterns of acceptance and resistance by teachers to policies that seek to shape their performance.

Surveillance as a Nursing Intervention: Use in Community Nursing Centers

The purpose of this multisite retrospective descriptive study was to describe the nature of surveillance as a nursing intervention within 3 urban community nursing centers (CNCs). Secondary analysis of clinical data was conducted for clients seen in 1995. The CNCs used the Automated Community Health Information System (Lundeen & Friedbacher, 1994), a relational database. Nursing diagnoses and interventions were described according to the Omaha Classification System (Martin & Scheet, 1992b). The sample included 1,506 unduplicated clients who received care during 5,248 encounters and was characterized by more adults 20 years and older (56.1%), women (71.0%), and African Americans (77.2%). The age range of the clients was infancy to 95 years (M= 29.90 years). Surveillance was a significant nursing intervention making up 27.1% of all interventions (7,557 of 27,898), and 68.5% of the clients received surveillance. There was a significant relation between the provision of surveillance and age range, χ² (5, N = 1,427) = 211.96, p _ .001, V = .385, and gender, χ² (1, N = 1,501) = 17.90, p _.001, φ = .109. Clients who were 40 years and older and who were women were more likely to receive surveillance. Surveillance was provided most often for the diagnoses of circulation and nutrition. Health promotion and disease prevention diagnoses were more likely to prompt surveillance. The provision of surveillance was linked to age and developmental risk factors.

Call Centre Employees' Responses to Electronic Monitoring: Some Research Findings

There is a growing literature on employment in call centres, much of which suggests that they are characterised by high levels of work intensification and surveillance. Recently, a debate has emerged about the nature of surveillance in such workplaces and the level and character of employee resistance (Bain and Taylor 2000; Fernie and Metcalf 1998; Mulholland 1999) with some, such as Bain and Taylor, claiming that the argument is characterised by a paucity of empirical evidence. Against this background, this paper reports on the results of an observational study of call centre work. In what follows we describe the ways in which managers, supervisors and call centre operatives oriented to the monitoring and surveillance capabilities of call centre technology, to the complex social context in which it was embedded and to a range of negotiated definitions of the nature and purposes of the centre's operations. We make no claims here that the call centre reported on is typical of all such centres. Nor do we seek directly to enter the debate about whether call centre surveillance is panoptic in character or about the extent and character of resistance. Nevertheless, it will become apparent that our findings do have relevance for these debates.