Private Surveillance Research Articles

Policing on camera

On any shift a police officer might be filmed by some combination of public or private surveillance cameras, including the cameras of individual citizens, activists, journalists, businesses, and a range of police-controlled cameras. This loosely coordinated camera infrastructure is part of the broader transformation of policing from a historically “low visibility” to an increasingly ‘high visibility’ occupation. This article reports on the findings of a participant-observation study of how police officers understand and respond to this transformation. We identify three distinct orientations, and highlight the multifaceted and contradictory relationship between police officers and cameras. The study raises questions about the extent to which camera technologies represent a straightforward way to “police the police”.

Private Searches in the Age of Big Data

Dragnet surveillance is the bogeyman of Fourth Amendment law. But in today’s world, much dragnet surveillance — particularly related to data — is spearheaded by private actors, who increasingly perform the “first line of offense” in law enforcement investigation. As policing becomes more dependent on data and algorithms, this trend is only likely to intensify. Should private surveillance be categorically off-limits to Fourth Amendment scrutiny? Construed at face value, existing law appears to say yes. That answer, however, is both normatively and doctrinally implausible. In a world of “big data policing,” the Fourth Amendment’s state action requirement must be relaxed. The doctrinal test should focus on the functional role that private actors play in investigations — whether the private actor has effectively displaced, and come to substitute for, law enforcement labor — not on formalities of public and private. In fact, current doctrine already invites a distinction along these lines, though it has been sidelined in favor of a wooden “state agency” test. Once the Supreme Court’s private search canon is reconstructed, however, it becomes clear that the salient question — in both a descriptive and a normative sense — is whether law enforcement has been outsourced, not the precise legal relationship between private actors and law enforcement officials. One aspect of the question, instructive though not necessarily exhaustive, is whether the initial (private) surveillance has a dragnet character or not.

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique

The Internet Imaginary: Between Technology and Technique

An ex-ante economic appraisal of Bluetongue virus incursions and control strategies

SUMMARYThe incursion of Bluetongue disease into the UK and elsewhere in Northern Europe in 2008 raised concerns about maintaining an appropriate level of preparedness for the encroachment of exotic diseases as circumstances and risks change. Consequently the Scottish government commissioned the present study to inform policy on the specific threat of Bluetongue virus 8 (BTV8) incursion into Scotland. An interdisciplinary expert panel, including BTV and midge experts, agreed a range of feasible BTV incursion scenarios, patterns of disease spread and specific control strategies. The study was primarily desk-based, applying quantitative methodologies with existing models, where possible, and utilizing data already held by different members of the project team. The most likely distribution of the disease was explored given Scotland's agricultural systems, unique landscape and climate. Epidemiological and economic models are integrated in an ex-ante cost-benefit appraisal of successful prevention of hypothetical BTV8 incursion into Scotland under various feasible incursion scenarios identified by the interdisciplinary panel. The costs of current public and private surveillance efforts are compared to the benefits of the avoided losses of potential disease outbreaks. These avoided losses included the direct costs of alternative vaccination, protection zone (PZ) strategies and their influence on other costs arising from an outbreak as predicted by the epidemiological model. Benefit-cost ratios were ranked within each incursion scenario to evaluate alternative strategies. In all incursion scenarios, the ranking indicated that a strategy, including 100% vaccination within a PZ set at Scottish counties along the England–Scotland border yielded the least benefit in terms of the extent of avoided outbreak losses (per unit cost). The economically optimal vaccination strategy was the scenario that employed 50% vaccination and all Scotland as a PZ. The results provide an indicator of how resources can best be targeted for an efficient ex-ante control strategy.

The New Culture of Security and Surveillance

While the UN introduced the paradigm of ‘human security’ in the 1990s, the post 9/11-legislation has returned to the paradigm of national security, in the name of ‘homeland’ security. The paper explores the ramifications of this reorientation in view of new and emerging security and surveillance technologies. It argues that a culture of surveillance has emerged that contradicts the vision and values of the human security concept. Regarding the intersection of political and private security and surveillance technologies, the ubiquity and entanglement of surveillance technologies with everyday life goes far beyond the purpose of security. Therefore, the paper argues for a reorientation that is backed by moral and political theory, and a (new) social contract that is based on the concept of social freedom, deliberative democracy, and a human rights-oriented concept of justice.

Colombia: Vigilancia, seguridad privada y manejo de armas 1994-2013

La cultura del control de los comportamientos en defensa de la vida es tan antigua como la interacción social. Las dos guardan una necesaria relación para lograr la convivencia, la seguridad y la justicia, según los pactos establecidos en cada sociedad. En el Estado moderno la Declaración Universal de los Derechos del Hombre y del Ciudadano motivó la institucionalización de la fuerza pública para el logro de tales objetivos, que para el mundo occidental opera desde el postulado del “monopolio de la violencia física legítima” planteada por Weber y que es el dispositivo político para la distribución y conservación del poder.Pero, las grandes transformaciones “en la segunda mitad del siglo XX, desde los mercados económicos globales y el sistema de los Estados nacionales hasta la vida cotidiana y la dinámica psicológica de las familias y los individuos”, según David Garland (2005, p. 141) generó el cambio en los asuntos a cargo del Estado entre ellos la seguridad de las personas, su tranquilidad, el cuidado de sus bienes y de los elementos del entorno que hacen posible la vida.En Colombia, la fuerza pública concentra la atención, predominantemente, en los delitos de alto impacto y muy poco en los conflictos ciudadanos que afectan la convivencia. Mientras tanto, la vigilancia y la seguridad privada crecen vertiginosamente para cuidar la integridad y los bienes de los particulares, a través de mecanismos y medios como las armas, antes de uso exclusivo de los miembros de la seguridad pública.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5377/rpsp.v4i1.1576

Lifting the Veil

The story of anti-communism in California schools is a tale well and often told. But few scholars have appreciated the important role played by private surveillance networks. This article examines how privately funded and run investigations shaped the state government’s pursuit of leftist educators. The previously-secret papers of Major General Ralph H. Van Deman, which were opened to researchers at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., only a few years ago, show that the general operated a private spy network out of San Diego and fed information to military, federal, and state government agencies. Moreover, he taught the state government’s chief anti-communist bureaucrat, Richard E. Combs, how to recruit informants and monitor and control subversives. The case of the suspicious death of one University of California, Los Angeles student – a student that the anti-communists claimed had been “scared to death” by the Reds – shows the extent of the collaboration between Combs and Van Deman. It further illustrates how they conspired to promote fear of communism, influence hiring and firing of University of California faculty, and punish those educators who did not support their project. Although it was rarely successful, Combs’ and Van Deman’s coordinated campaign reveals a story of public-private anticommunist collaboration in California that has been largely forgotten. Because Van Deman’s files are now finally open to researchers, Californians can gain a much more complete understanding of their state bureaucracy’s role in the Red Scare purges of California educators.

Crypto War II

Revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) and other intelligence agencies' widespread surveillance in the summer of 2013 have accelerated America's path toward a second critical battle over public cryptography. Because so much more of our society is now online, Crypto War II will be a far more devastating conflagration than the Crypto War of the 1990s—one that pits our fundamental right to control the computers and smart devices that are becoming an everyday part of our lives against a combination of corporate and government interests. While the Summer of Snowden has received widespread media coverage, the potential alignment of private and public sector surveillance interests pose a far greater threat to free communication in the 21st century than we've yet realized.

Crowdsourcing CCTV surveillance on the Internet

This article provides an exploratory overview of crowdsourced surveillance of closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage over the Internet. Although the use of CCTV in both public and private surveillance is well documented, footage is now distributed over the Internet for large crowds to monitor. This article briefly introduces the concept of crowdsourcing and explains its shift from a quasi-communitarian mode of production to a business model and crime-fighting strategy. This is followed by a review of relevant scholarly literature that provides a theoretical basis for understanding crowdsourcing as it applies to CCTV surveillance online. This article then considers four case studies of crowdsourced CCTV surveillance on the Internet. These four UK-based examples provide an overview of an emerging phenomenon of how crowds can be integrated into CCTV surveillance, ranging from identifying suspects to designating suspicious behaviour in everyday activity. This article concludes by considering the broader social risks, extending from literature on CCTV, surveillance and crowdsourced labour.

Counting the Costs of Farmed Salmonids Diseases

This article describes the assumptions and calculations underlying best estimates of the direct and indirect costs of three salmonid diseases in the United Kingdom: infectious salmon anaemia (ISA), viral haemorrhagic septicaemia (VHS), and infectious haemorrhagic necrosis (IHN) using a standardized spreadsheet-based model. The data input for the model was derived from the literature and from a small survey specifically conducted to obtain the additional information required. The costs of private and public surveillance, treatment, prevention, and eradication of the known outbreaks of ISA and VHS, and a simulated outbreak of IHN, were estimated. The average current costs of all aquaculture disease surveillance and control by the private and public sectors averaged £17.6 million per annum, of which the private sector share of expenditure averaged 80% per annum. Specific disease surveillance and control costs for three diseases ranged between £4.7 million and £5.6 million per annum. While the current literature supports the concept that indirect costs (such as export trade restriction and consumer response to disease outbreak) have the capacity to cause major losses in the industry, the indication in our model is that the magnitude of indirect costs for salmonid disease outbreak is not significant.

Tracing and analytical results of the dioxin contamination incident in 2008 originating from the Republic of Ireland

High levels of dioxins (PCDD/Fs) in pork were discovered in France and the Netherlands at the end of 2008. The contamination was rapidly traced back to a feed stock in the Republic of Ireland (RoI). Burning oil, used for the drying of bakery waste, appeared to be contaminated with PCBs. Consequently, very high levels up to 500 pg TEQ g−1 fat were found in pork. The congener pattern clearly pointed to PCB-oil as a source, but the ratio between the non-dioxin-like indicator PCBs (PCBs 28, 52, 101, 138, 152 and 180) and PCDD/Fs was much lower than observed during the Belgian incident, thereby limiting the suitability of indicator PCBs as a marker for the presence of dioxins and dioxin-like PCBs. This paper describes the tracking and tracing of the incident, the public–private cooperation, the surveillance activities and its results. A major lesson to be learned from this incident is the importance of good private food safety systems. In this incident, it was the private surveillance systems that identified the origin of contamination within 10 days after the first signal of increased dioxin levels in a product. On the other hand, retrospective analyses showed that signals were missed that could have led to an earlier detection of the incident and the source. Above all, the incident would not have occurred when food safety assurance systems had been effectively implemented in the involved feed chain. It is discussed that besides primary responsibility for effective private food safety systems, the competent authorities have to supervise whether the food safety procedures are capable of coping with these kinds of complex food safety issues, while private food companies need to implement the law, and public authorities should supervise and enforce them. Finally, it is discussed whether the health risks derived from consumption of the contaminated batches of meat may have been underestimated during the incident due to the unusually high intake of dioxins.

New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (review)

New York Undercover: Private Surveillance in the Progressive Era (review)

Deregulation and the power of private surveillance in markets

This paper serves as a brief discussion on the current international financial architecture, and the power afforded to private actors in capital markets. When the term 'private surveillance' is used, it denotes the activities of supervisory bodies which are privately owned, unelected and largely unaccountable to state, national or international authorities. This also encompasses the supervision of market participants which use products that are extraneous to current direct international regulatory structures. This paper is grounded in observational research; it uses observations of capitalist market ideology and its relationship with modern finance, together with brief discussions of market actors, to form a critique of the arrangements that have come to dominate regulation of the free market system. It also reflects the author's position as a lawyer, rather than an economist, and focuses on the regulatory challenges that face Western economies. Liberalized financial markets and the attendant increased capital flows between territories have required a deregulatory drive since the collapse of Bretton Woods. This deregulation is an aspect of the political philosophy referred to as neoliberalism, an ideology founded on the principles of minimum state intervention and highly decentralized and liberalized capital markets. This, in turn, has placed great power in the hands of non-state bodies and the market itself in the overarching framework of financial regulation, in preference to the ethos of state surveillance of financial services, products and capital flows which dominated during the post-war era. With this power comes responsibility for the integrity of the financial system, but this paper will highlight the ambiguous role that orthodox liberal philosophy has demanded of these private bodies, and discuss the implications this has for future regulatory structures. It will also critically analyse the danger that placing such power in the hands of private bodies may generate in terms of potential systemic risk. It will briefly address the experience of less financialized economies and their greater resilience to economic contraction. It will conclude by examining ways in which future regulation of capital markets may be served by moving away from the highly deregulated neoliberal paradigm and moving towards the creation of a more interventionist legal axiom. (original abstract)

Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders

This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental state, orchestrated by the security function, which ultimately strengthens the state. It is associated with the rise of a new governmentality discourse, which operates on a binary logic of productive/destructive, and where, in fact, the very distinctions between private and public, guilty, and innocent—classic categories of sovereignty—find decreasing currency. However, biometric borders reveal a complicated game of renegotiations between sovereignty and governmentality, whereby sovereignty is colonized by governmentality on the one hand, but still functions as a counterweight to it on the other. Furthermore, they bring out a particular function of the “destructive body” for the governmental state: it is both the key figure ruling the whole design of security management, and the blind spot, the inconceivable, for a form of power geared toward producing productive bodies.

An economic evaluation of the control of three notifiable fish diseases in the United Kingdom

We summarised the challenges faced in an ex ante cost–benefit appraisal of United Kingdom government spending on disease surveillance for three notifiable fish diseases: infectious salmon anaemia (ISA), viral haemorrhagic septicaemia (VHS) and infectious haemorrhagic necrosis (IHN). We used a social cost–benefit analysis and adopted a national perspective. We compared costs of current public and private surveillance effort with the benefits stated in terms of the avoided private and social costs of potential disease outbreaks. Spending on ISA and VHS were predicted to be efficient; the benefit–cost ratios were always ≥3.2 for ISA and ≥5.8 for VHS for all nine scenarios examined for each infection. However, the benefit–cost ratio for IHN was predicted never to exceed 1.6, and was <1.0 in five of the nine scenarios-so spending on IHN would be harder to justify.

Tariff Evasion and Customs Corruption: Does Pre-Shipment Inspection Help?

Abstract This paper provides a new approach to the evaluation of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) programs as ways of improving tariff-revenue collection and reducing fraud when customs administrations are corrupt. We build a model highlighting the contribution of private surveillance firms to the generation of information and describing how incentives for underinvoicing and collusive behaviour between importers and customs are affected by the introduction of PSI. It is shown theoretically that the introduction of PSI has an ambiguous effect on the level of fraud. Empirically, our econometric results suggest that the introduction of PSI services increased underinvoicing in Argentina and Indonesia, and reduced it in the Philippines.

Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000: Private Surveillance

Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000: Private Surveillance

Tariff Evasion and Customs Corruption: Does Pre-Shipment Inspection Help?

This paper provides a new approach to the evaluation of pre-shipment inspection (PSI) programs as ways of improving tariff-revenue collection and reducing fraud when customs administrations are corrupt. We build a model highlighting the contribution of private surveillance firms to the generation of information and describing how incentives for underinvoicing and collusive behaviour between importers and customs are affected by the introduction of PSI. It is shown theoretically that the introduction of PSI has an ambiguous effect on the level of fraud. Empirically, our econometric results suggest that the introduction of PSI services increased underinvoicing in Argentina and Indonesia, and reduced it in the Philippines.

The private policing of injured workers in Canada: legitimate management practices or human rights violations?

AbstractThis paper examines the use of private surveillance services in the context of workers’ compensation in Canada. Injured workers are now subject to clandestine surveillance by private investigators employed by employers and, in some provinces, by the workers’ compensation board itself. Surveillance is used not only to detect cases of fraud, where workers are receiving compensation benefits for temporary disability while performing undeclared work, but also to prove that workers are performing tasks of daily living that are incompatible with their functional impairment.The paper illustrates different situations in which such techniques are used and addresses some of the social and legal implications of these practices. The paper relies on interview data as well as traditional legal analysis.The legal issues to be addressed include those relating to privacy rights guaranteed both by human rights legislation and the Quebec Civil Code, Charter issues, including issues as to the admissibility of evidenc...

Das globale Panopticon

After the Cold war new analytic and information-processing capability o f the world’s intelligence communities are linked to new ideologies of national competitiveness. It is in this context that we outline new mechanisms of public and private surveillance in finance - or in the terminology coined by Jeremy Bentham, “panopticism”. A t the same t ime we c an o bserve the massive growth of the “informal”, secret, often illegal offshore political economy which escapes the systems of accountability and regulation. When combined in the global financial system, these structures facilitate both legal and illegal, formal and informal transfers of resources from the Third World to the affluent West, as well as money laundering, financial fraud, tax evasion and other ways that serve to redistribute wealth from the poor to the rich. This is shown by our case study the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). US Congressional indicated how American government and security officials using the BCCI may have plundered international financial structures to privatise foreign policy and (clandestine) warfare.