Surveillance Regime Research Articles

:Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East

The striking image on the cover of Priya Satia's impressive study—a small Wapiti airplane whizzing over a camel party striding in the desert—is a perfect emblem of this book's theme: the role played by the informal network of Edwardian British spies in the construction of Britain's “covert empire” in Arabia, that “new form of imperial rule, invisible, barely existing on paper, designed for an increasingly anti-imperialist postwar world” (p. 7). Juxtaposing the romance of the timeless dunes with the violence of modern warfare—contrasting the slow movement of the caravan's horizontal progress with the airplane's all-encompassing vertical gaze—the photograph suggests how the creation of Britain's brutal aerial surveillance regime in post-World War I Iraq was rooted in the physical nature of the Arabian desert, constructed in the British imagination as an unfathomable, unreadable space, which must be made legible to the emerging colonial state, “a state that could not see” (p. 4).

Elite athletes’ duty to provide information on their whereabouts: Justifiable anti-doping work or an indefensible surveillance regime?

In this article, we explain and reflect critically upon the athlete whereabouts reporting system in top-level sports initiated by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). This system makes it compulsory for athletes who are in a registered testing pool in their national and/or international federation to submit information about their whereabouts. In this way, athletes are required to be available for a no advance notice doping test throughout the year. If an athlete provides incorrect information or cannot be found when a no advance notice test is supposed to be taken (a missed test), he or she may be given a warning. In most sports and national anti-doping regulations, three such warnings within 18 months may be regarded as a violation of the doping regulations and may lead to exclusion from sport for between 3 months and 2 years. The system is controversial. In this article, we examine the key objections to the system and, more specifically, objections connected to ideas of justice and athletes’ autonomy and right to self-determination. The argument will be a practical ethical one informed by a survey on attitudes towards the whereabouts system carried out among 236 athletes belonging to the registered testing pool in Norway. We conclude that if the basic principles of anti-doping work are accepted, WADA's whereabouts reporting system represents nothing other than an efficient extension of this work.

English in a Surveillance Regime: Tightening the Noose in New Zealand

It is a contemporary commonplace that we live in a ‘text‐saturated’ environment – a semiosphere that complements those biologically rooted spheres our bodies inhabit. The neon cityscape of Tokyo in...

Incentives and control in primary health care: findings from English pay‐for‐performance case studies

The authors' aim was to investigate mechanisms and perceptions of control following the implementation of a new "pay-for-performance" contract (the new General Medical Services, or GMS, contract) in general practice. This article was based on an in-depth qualitative case study approach in two general practices in England. A distinction is emerging amongst ostensibly equal partners between those general practitioners conducting and those subject to surveillance. Attitudes towards the contract were largely positive, although discontent was higher in the practice which employed a more intensive surveillance regime and greater amongst nurses than doctors. The sample was small and opportunistic. Further research is required to examine the longer-term effects as new contractual arrangements evolve. Increased surveillance and feedback mechanisms associated with new pay-for-performance schemes have the potential to constrain and shape clinical practice. The paper highlights the emergence of new tensions within and between existing professional groupings.

Aneurysm Sac Pressure Measurement with Minimally Invasive Implantable Pressure Sensors: An Alternative to Current Surveillance Regimes after EVAR?

Current protocols for surveillance after endovascular repair (EVAR) of abdominal aortic aneurysms are mostly based on costly and time-consuming imaging procedures and aim to detect adverse events such as graft migration, endoleaks or aneurysm sac enlargement. These imaging procedures are either associated with radiation exposure to the patients or may be harmful to the patient due to the use of iodine- or gadolinium-containing contrast agents. Furthermore the advantages of EVAR in the short term might be negated by the necessity for endograft surveillance over years. Thus, alternative modalities for follow-up are being investigated. One of these technologies provides pressure information directly from the aneurysm sac. This noninvasive, telemetric pressure sensing was tested in vitro as well as in first clinical trials and was able to identify successful aneurysm exclusion after EVAR. The telemetric pressure sensors showed a promising efficacy and accuracy in detecting type I and type III endoleaks and will help to clarify the clinical relevance of type II endoleaks. This article provides an overview of the in vitro sensors investigated as well as the first clinical trials and the sensors' potential to change the current endograft surveillance regimes.

Surveillance of patients following surgery with curative intent for colorectal cancer

Surveillance after resection of colorectal cancer with curative intent is an important component of post-operative care. Clinical review, imaging, colonoscopy, and cost to the community are among significant issues to consider in planning a surveillance regime. This review aims to identify the available evidence for the use of surveillance and its individual components. The literature pertaining to follow-up of patients following potentially curative surgery for colorectal cancer was reviewed in order to formulate a summary of the wide range of clinical practice. There is evidence of improved survival of patients undergoing more intense follow-up compared with those having minimal surveillance, with an estimated overall 5-year gain of up to 10%. The efficacy of individual components of follow-up regimes remains unclear, but an overall package of 'intensive' follow-up including clinical review, liver imaging, and colonoscopy appears to be of benefit. It is cost-effective and can be specialist or community-based.

The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies, Biopolitics

This article examines the micropolitics of the border by tracing the interface between government and individual body. In the first act of confession before the vanguard of governmental machinery, the border examination is crucial to both the operation of the global mobility regime and of sovereign power. The visa and passport systems are tickets that allow temporary and permanent membership in the community, and the border represents the limit of the community. The nascent global mobility regime through passport, visa, and frontier formalities manage an international population through and within a biopolitical frame and a confessionary complex that creates bodies that understand themselves to be international. The author charts the way that an international biopolitical order is constructed through the creation, classification, and contention of a surveillance regime and an international political technology of the individual that is driven by the globalization of a documentary, biometric, and confessionary regime. The global visa regime and international borders are crucial in constructing both international mobile populations and international mobile individuals.

Atoms for Peace, Scientific Internationalism, and Scientific Intelligence

Abstract The promotion of the benign atom as an instrument of American foreign policy and hegemonic ambitions was important to scientists and policy makers alike who sought to win “hearts and minds” in the early years of the cold war. The distribution of radioisotopes to friendly nations for research and medicinal purposes in the late 1940s was followed by Eisenhower’s far more spectacular Atoms for Peace initiative, announced at the United Nations in December 1953. This chapter describes the polyvalent significance of the diffusion first of radioisotopes, then of reactor technology, notably at the famous conference in Geneva in 1955. It places particular emphasis on the role of scientists and their appeal to scientific internationalism to promote national scientific leadership. It is stressed that openness and security, sharing knowledge or technology and implementing regimes of surveillance, were two sides of the same coin.

Surveillance in Decolonized Social Space

In depicting contemporary panopticism Roy Boyne has identified as the single most effective cause of surveillance where danger from our enemies from those who might grow into our enemies [and] from those who could not look after themselves were different categories. The dangers posed by the vulnerable and the criminal are linked within the regime of surveillance that has been imposed on the sexually marginalized female prostitutes of Bengal who are neither criminals nor victims and yet have been both criminalized and victimized by the medico-moral-legal code of surveillance that defines them. The prostitute as the site of work sex disease power desire and pleasure has recently emerged from these contested constructions as a new political subject. The global epidemic of AIDS has forced a radical remapping of sexual boundaries with prostitutes as the most likely group to contract and spread the disease. The concern for sexual health has given the prostitutes new visibility: from the familiar status of a marginal group of sexually aberrant women they are now being considered a significant target for public health policy. In the post-1990 phase of modernization the Indian state has been keen to include them in the welfare agenda and regulate their behavior through surveillance that marks their bodies as domains of sexual health and social discipline. (authors)

Structural Knowledge and Success of Anti- Terrorist Activity: The Downside of Structural Equivalence

Given the increasing threat of terrorism and spread of terrorist organizations, it is of vital importance to understand the properties of such organizations and to devise successful strategies for destabilizing them or decreasing their efficiency. However, intelligence information on these organizations is often incomplete, inaccurate or simply not available. This makes the study of terrorist networks and the evaluation of destabilization strategies difficult. In this paper, we propose a computational methodology for realistically simulating terrorist networks and evaluating alternative destabilization strategies. We proceed to use this methodology to evaluate and conduct a sensitivity analysis of the impact of various destabilization strategies under varying information surveillance regimes. We find that destabilization strategies that focus on the isolation of individuals who are highly central are ineffective the long run as the network will heal itself as individuals who are nearly structurally equivalent to the isolated individuals move in and fill the communication gaps.

Umbilical cord entanglement in monoamniotic twins.

Monochorionic–monoamniotic twin pregnancies are a rare obstetric high-risk situation with an estimated frequency of 1 per 25 000 pregnancies. They occur when the division of the morula into two similar totipotent parts takes place between days 9 and 12 after conception. Perinatal mortality is extremely high, ranging between 28% and 70%1. Fetal mortality is caused by prematurity, cord complications and associated congenital anomalies. These days, with the widespread application of sophisticated first-trimester ultrasound, the detection of monoamniotic twin pregnancies can occur earlier and be more precise. Sonographic criteria include single placenta, absence of separating membrane and concordant sex. However, this improved diagnosis has little impact on the regime of surveillance, management and outcome of such pregnancies. While intensive surveillance of monoamniotic twin pregnancies is generally performed, the right time for and mode of delivery are still under discussion. Delivery by Cesarean section at 32 weeks' gestation is recommended by some groups2 in order to avoid intrauterine complications in late pregnancy. However, whether there is excess mortality after 30–32 weeks is questionable. A recent study by Demaria et al.3 of 19 monoamniotic twin pregnancies documented that there were no double fetal deaths after 26 weeks. Delivery of monoamniotic pregnancies by Cesarean section can also help avoid intrapartum accidents of collision and impaction. However, Demaria et al.3 report a 40% rate of uncomplicated vaginal deliveries. The Picture of the Month (Figure 1a) demonstrates prenatal color Doppler imaging of a monoamniotic twin pregnancy in week 26 showing the two very close cord insertions. Under strict surveillance the pregnancy was successfully continued until week 32. Two healthy newborns were delivered via primary Cesarean section after systematic pulmonary maturation. Part (b) illustrates the large umbilical cord entanglement with a very short section of ‘free’ cord in both twins. In this case a cord accident with a tight clinch and entanglement with impaired umbilical perfusion seems probable if the pregnancy had been prolonged. Furthermore, this situation excludes a normal vaginal delivery. In retrospect, a planned Cesarean section in the 32nd week was justified since both newborns showed a normal neonatal adaptation period. (a) Prenatal color Doppler ultrasound image of a monoamniotic twin pregnancy in week 26 showing the two very close cord insertions. (b) Postnatal photograph showing the large umbilical cord entanglement (black arrows) with a very short section of ‘free’ cord (white arrow) in both twins. Knowing that no optimal protocol for the management of monoamniotic pregnancies has been defined, we believe that sonographic investigation and documentation of the umbilical cord may contribute helpful information to the decision-making process.

Time Varying Volatility in the Indian Stock Market

This paper investigates the nature and characteristics of stock market volatility in India. The volatility in the Indian stock market exhibits characteristics similar to those found earlier in many of the major developed and emerging stock markets. Various volatility estimators and diagnostic tests indicate volatility clustering, i.e., shocks to the volatility process persist and the response to news arrival is asymmetrical, meaning that the impact of good and bad news is not the same. Suitable volatility forecast models are used for Sensex and Nifty returns to show that: The ‘day-of-the-week effect’ or the ‘weekend effect’ and the ‘January effect’ are not present while the return and volatility do show intra-week and intra-year seasonality. The return and volatility on various weekdays have somewhat changed after the introduction of rolling settlements in December 1999. There is mixed evidence of return and volatility spillover between the US and Indian markets. The empirical findings would be useful to investors, stock exchange administrators and policy makers as these provide evidence of time varying nature of stock market volatility in India. Specifically, they need to consider the following findings of the study: For both the indices, among the months, February exhibits highest volatility and corresponding highest return. The month of March also exhibits significantly higher volatility but the magnitude is lesser as compared to February. This implies that, during these two months, the conditional volatility tends to increase. This phenomenon could be attributed to probably the most significant economic event of the year, viz., presentation of the Union Budget. The investors, therefore, should keep away from the market during March after having booked profits in February itself. The surveillance regime at the stock exchanges around the Budget should be stricter to keep excessive volatility under check. Similarly, the month of December gives high positive returns without high volatility and, therefore, offers good opportunity to the investors to make safe returns on Sensex and Nifty. On the contrary, in the month of September, i.e., the time when the third quarter corporate results are announced, volatility is higher but corresponding returns are lower. The situation is, therefore, not conducive to investors. The ‘weekend effect’ or the ‘Monday effect’ is not present. For other weekdays, the ‘higher (lower) the risk, higher (lower) the return’ dictum does not hold consistently and Wednesday provides higher returns with lower volatility making it a good day to invest. The domestic investors and the stock exchange administrators do not need to lose sleep over gyrations in the major US markets since there is no conclusive evidence of consistent relationship between the US and the domestic markets. The volatility forecast models presented for Sensex and Nifty can be used to forecast future volatility of these indices.

La caza y su régimen normativo

El presente trabajo examina el régimen jurídico de la caza en España, las competencias administrativas, la regulación de la propia actividad cinegética, el régimen de vigilancia así como el sistema de infracciones junto con otros aspectos no menos importantes como el seguro obligatorio de responsabilidad civil o la protección de la caza.

From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization

Michel Foucault was the great theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation. Writing at the zenith of the postwar Keynesian welfare state, he taught us to see the dark underside of even its most vaunted achievements. Viewed through his eyes, social services became disciplinary apparatuses, humanist reforms became panoptical surveillance regimes, public health measures became deployments of biopower, and therapeutic practices became vehicles of subjection. From his perspective, the components of the postwar social state constituted a carceral archipelago of disciplinary domination, all the more insidious because self-imposed. Granted, Foucault did not himself understand his project as an anatomy of fordist regulation. Positing a greater scope for his diagnosis, he preferred to associate disciplinary power with “modernity” simpliciter. And most of his readers, including me, followed suit. As a result, the ensuing debates turned on whether the Foucauldian picture of modernity was too dark and one-sided, neglecting the latter’s emancipatory tendencies. 1 Today, however, circumstances warrant a narrower reading. If we now see ourselves as standing on the brink of a new, postfordist epoch of globalization, then we should reread Foucault in that light. No longer an interpreter of modernity per se, he becomes a theorist of the fordist mode of social regulation, grasping its inner logic, like the Owl of Minerva, at the moment of its historical waning. From this perspective, it is significant that his great works of social analysis – Madness and Civilization, The Birth of the Clinic, Discipline and Punish, The History of Sexuality, volume one – were written in the 1960s and 1970s, just as the OECD countries abandoned Bretton Woods, the international financial framework that undergirded national Keynesianism and thus made possible the welfare state. In other words, Foucault mapped the contours of the disciplinary society just as the ground was being cut out from under it. And although it is only now with hindsight becoming clear, this was also the moment at which discipline’s successor was struggling to be born. The irony is plain: whether we call it postindustrial society or neoliberal globalization, a new regime oriented to “deregulation” and “flexibilization” was about to take shape just as Foucault was conceptualizing disciplinary normalization. Of course, to read Foucault in this way is to problematize his relevance to the present. If he theorized fordist regulation, then how does his diagnosis relate to

The Omniscient Eye: Satellite Imagery, "Battlespace Awareness," and the Structures of the Imperial Gaze

This paper explores the role of aerial and satellite imagery in the US military's command, control, and intelligence (C4I) systems, with an historical focus on the Persian Gulf War of 1991. Using satellite imagery for military intelligence and warfare is part of an ongoing effort in the US Department of Defense to make all cartographic and topographic space, and the objects in it, totally visible and "transparent," what the US military calls "total battlespace awareness." It is where imagery production is attached to concrete and purposive action in the abstract realm of "battlespace," an example of how the mundane and the monstrously violent intersect around the production of visual data and artefacts. Borrowing a metaphor from Paul Edwards, I suggest that satellite imagery can not only "open up" the world (making it transparent), but can also "close down" geographical space under a regime of surveillance and violent military control. The discursive power of aerial and satellite imagery is derived from its position as an objectifying transcendent gaze, above and beyond subjectivity (Donna Haraway's "God Trick"), and when these images are disseminated in the mass media as testaments to military prowess, they become visual representations of geographical domination (as in Denis Cosgrove's "Apollonian Eye"). In this sense, satellite imagery, photo reconnaissance, and imagery interpretation are rich sites and artefacts for exploring how power and national sovereignty turn on the visual.

Digital Technology and the Market for Political Surveillance

Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public commons and as a tool for surveilling private lives. This paper addresses the manner in which such technological innovations have enabled a dramatically expanded market for public policy opinion data, and explores the potential role of that market in facilitating panoptic regimes of both private and state surveillance. Whereas information about public policy opinion used to be highly reductive, expensive to collect, and restricted to a limited number of powerful political actors, today it is much less expensive, highly nuanced, and widely available. Pollsters now also have the ability to extrapolate political information from our commercial and noncommercial activities. We investigate the work of two organizations, a public policy polling firm named Grapevine Polling, and an advocacy consulting firm named United Campaigns. We find that both the increased sophistication of these firms' methods and the reduced cost of increasingly personalized data together have the potential to undermine the very public sphere that digital media were hoped to reinvigorate. Moreover, overlapping state and private demand for the products of such pollsters reflects the extent to which politics and the marketplace are increasingly intertwined and inseparable under the current articulation of democracy in the US.

Somatic Surveillance: Corporeal Control through Information Networks

Somatic surveillance is the increasingly invasive technological monitoring of and intervention into body functions. Within this type of surveillance regime, bodies are recast as nodes on vast information networks, enabling corporeal control through remote network commands, automated responses, or self-management practices. In this paper, we investigate three developments in somatic surveillance: nanotechnology systems for soldiers on the battlefield, commercial body-monitoring systems for health purposes, and radio-frequency identification (RFID) implants for identification of hospital patients. The argument is that in present and projected forms, somatic surveillance systems abstract bodies and physiological systems from social contexts, facilitating hyper-individualized control and the commodification of life functions.

Overseers of the poor: surveillance, resistance, and the limits of privacy

In Overseers of the Poor, John Gilliom confronts the everyday politics of surveillance by exploring the worlds and words of those who know it best-the watched. Arguing that the current public conversation about surveillance and privacy rights is rife with political and conceptual failings, Gilliom goes beyond the critics and analysts to add fresh voices, insights, and perspectives. This powerful book lets us in on the conversations of low-income mothers from Appalachian Ohio as they talk about the welfare bureaucracy and its remarkably advanced surveillance system. In their struggle to care for their families, these women are monitored and assessed through a vast network of supercomputers, caseworkers, fraud control agents, and even grocers and neighbors. In-depth interviews show that these women focus less on the right to privacy than on a critique of surveillance that lays bare the personal and political conflicts with which they live. And, while they have little interest in conventional forms of politics, we see widespread patterns of everyday resistance as they subvert the surveillance regime when they feel it prevents them from being good parents. Ultimately, Overseers of the Poor demonstrates the need to reconceive not just our understanding of the surveillance-privacy debate but also the broader realms of language, participation, and the politics of rights. We all know that our lives are being watched more than ever before. As we struggle to understand and confront this new order, Gilliom argues, we need to spend less time talking about privacy rights, legislatures, and courts of law and more time talking about power, domination, and the ongoing struggles of everyday people.

Technologies of Suspicion: Coercion and Compassion in Post-disciplinary Surveillance Regimes.

Drug-use surveillance systems appear in this paper as symptomatic “technologies of suspicion” that constitute a set of empirical modes for producing and interpreting “data” or test results in ways that conflate prediction with prescription, acting as technological forms of supervision, monitoring, supposed deterrence, and ultimately control. Technologies of suspicion are predicated upon a framework of trust; they are deployed within a “system of takings-for-granted” that presupposes trust and thus makes distrust possible. Drug-testing provides an excellent example of the institutionalization of distrust through the deployment of technologies of suspicion not only within institutions but beyond their real and virtual walls. The paper considers the also considers the decentralization and deinstitutionalization of distrust, the capillary dispersion of suspicion throughout the carceral society, and the role of distrust in underwriting the development of certain kinds of knowledge systems and technologies, forms of social and cognitive order, and the functional dispersion of police practices to individuals such as parents, teachers, and peers. Studying why bio-surveillance modalities should diffuse despite their unreliability and their contribution to a generalized climate of suspicion enables the characterization of certain features of the post-sovereign subject in a post-disciplinary regime.

On Imperial Spectacle: The Dialectics of Seeing in Colonial Nigeria

Critical studies of visual culture have established profound connections between capitalism, state power and the “scopic regimes of modernity” (Jay 1988). As the dominant philosophical leitmotif of the European enlightenment, visuality characterized the domain of reason and truth, modeling both the clear and distinct ideas of Continental rationalism and the sense-based epistemology of British empiricism. Compelling in its “given” transparency, the rhetoric of vision continually conceals the historical conditions of its production. Indeed, as Marx first stated in the 1844 manuscripts, the history of seeing belongs to that political economy of the senses so deeply embedded in historical materialism (Marx 1978:89). Critical models of visuality and spectacle, however, remain largely overdetermined, either as bourgeois forms of consumption and display (Debord 1977; Richards 1990), strategic stagecraft serving political ends (Edelman 1988; Falasca-Zamponi 1997; Scott 1998), or as hegemonic forms of objectification incorporating citizens and subjects into the discursive armature of modern states and empires (Crary 1990; Diehl 1986; Foucault 1995; Morris 1982; Mitchell 1988; Coombes 1994:63–108).I do not mean to reduce these theoretically rich and innovative studies to such banal and simplistic propositions, but rather to characterize the dominant orientations within which they fall. For a nuanced collection of perspectives on scopic regimes of surveillance and desire, see Brennan and Jay (1996), with special reference to de Bolla's (1996) discussion of Adam Smith's theory of spectatorial subjectivity. For a more dialectical approach to visual economy, applied to visual images in the Andes, see Poole (1997).