Surveillance In America Research Articles

Back to the Future? Diabetes, Hiv, and the Boundaries of Public Health

The control of infectious diseases has traditionally fallen to public health and the clinical care of chronic diseases to private medicine. In New York City, however, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) has recently sought to expand its responsibilities in the oversight and management of chronic-disease care. In December 2005, in an effort to control epidemic rates of diabetes, the DOHMH began implementing a bold new plan for increased disease surveillance through electronic, laboratory-based reporting of A1C test results (a robust measure of blood-sugar levels). The controversy A1C reporting produced was relatively contained, but when Dr. Thomas Frieden, New York City health commissioner, called for the state to begin tracking viral loads and drug resistance among patients with HIV, both the medical community and a wider public took notice and have started to grapple with the meaning of expanded surveillance. In the context of the past century of medical surveillance in America, we analyze the current debates, focusing first on diabetes and then HIV. We identify the points of contention that arise from the city's proposed blend of public health surveillance, disease management, and quality improvement and suggest an approach to balancing the measures' perils and promises.

Surveillance in America

This is an interview with Christian Parenti hosted by Christopher Sprinkle for Flashpoints, a daily news magazine show heard on KPFA 94.1 FM, Berkeley, California, and other Pacifica Radio stations including affiliates, and produced by Dennis Bernstein, which aired on October 29, 2003. The subject of the interview is Parenti’s (2003) book, The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America From Slavery to the War on Terror. In his book, Parenti applied sociological analysis to the history of surveillance and the industry of dataveillance. He traced the history of surveillance in America back to its early use in monitoring slaves through World War II when the Nazis used IBM computers to help implement the final solution. In this interview, Parenti concisely described key aspects of his book while applying traditional sociological theoretical analysis to his findings. This compact and insightful interview neatly and sociologically extends traditional debates beyond public collective memory issues into a discussion about how private intelligence industries, which own, “mine,” and sell collected “commodity memory,” are affecting American society.

The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, from Slave Passes to the Patriot Act (review)

The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, from Slave Passes to the Patriot Act (review)

Tradeoffs in Undercover Investigations: A Comparative Perspective

One of the darker sides of the increasingly unregulated movement of persons and goods across national borders is the internationalization of crime and the networks that sponsor it. Efforts to expand criminal investigations across national borders create an urgent need to coordinate U.S. efforts with those of other governments. To meet this need, cooperating countries will have to assess the legitimacy of law enforcement methods that, while routine in the United States, are greeted with skepticism elsewhere. Among the most controversial of these methods is the use of covert tactics, especially undercover investigations, to infiltrate criminal networks. Different countries vary significantly in their attitudes toward the legitimacy of undercover investigations and in their approaches to regulating them. Responding to the increasing need of European and American policymakers to coordinate their efforts against crime, two highly synthetic and wide-ranging anthologies have collected the contributions of legal scholars, sociologists, criminologists, police officials, and policymakers in an effort to illuminate the differing national contours of the debate about undercover policing. The first of these books, Undercover: Police Surveillance in Comparative Perspective, came out in 1995. The editors are the Dutch criminologist Cyrille Fijnaut, who has written extensively about the European experience with undercover policing, and the American sociologist Gary Marx, who has authored seminal work on American undercover policing, including the invaluable Undercover: Police Surveillance in America! The second work, Undercover Policing and Accountability from an In-

Lifting the cover from undercover operations: J. Edgar Hoover and some of the other criminologists

Concern over the invasion of privacy, restrictions on liberty, entrapment, corruption, and stigmatizing of the justice system as a result of its alliances with criminals have been constant features accompanying the use of covert practices. Gary Marx, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America (1988: 33) In the mid-1930s, when J. Edgar Hoover first was invited to contribute biographical details to Who's Who in America, he listed himself as a "criminologist" and a "lawyer". That self-categorization persisted until 1948, when Hoover deleted "criminologist". Then, the following year, he altered his identification to "Dir. F.B.I.". It is a reasonable presumption that Hoover's removal of himself from the ranks of criminologists was a consequence of the company that he found himself in: as we shall see in this paper, contretemps with academic criminologists was one of the features of the surveillance work that preoccupied Hoover during his 48 years (1924--1972) as FBI director. As one of his closest associates wrote of Hoover: "He was suspicious of the academic community, of any intellectual - of any scholar. He disliked them instinctively."x In this paper, we will attend to Hoover's surveillance of two preeminent criminologists: Harry Elmer Barnes, the co-author of New Horizons in Criminology (lst ed., 1943), and Edwin H. Sutherland, author of Criminology (lst ed., 1924), and generally regarded as the doyen of American criminology. We will also examine the FBI's dealings with Jack Shaw, a FBI agent who got into trouble with the FBI while he was studying in New York City at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice. Our review of the FBI undercover operations against representatives of the criminological establishment employs case study information to address several issues raised by Gary Marx in Undercover. Though Marx views covert police actions with considerable esthetic and intellectual distaste, he grants that under "proper" circumstances, they may have a role to play in law enforcement. "On balance," he notes in his Preface, "the book neither argues for the

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access UNDERCOVER: POLICE SURVEILLANCE IN AMERICA . By GARY T. MARX . ( Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London University of California Press , 1988 283 pp.) Ian Leigh Ian Leigh Faculty of Law, University of Newcastle upon Tyne Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 31, Issue 1, 1991, Pages 100–101, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bjc.a048076 Published: 01 March 1991

Book reviews

Symbolic Communication: Signifying Calls and the Police Response. By Peter K. Manning. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The MIT Press. 1988 £31.50. Behind The Uniform. Policing in Britain and America. By Ian K. McKenzie and G. Patrick Gallagher. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. New York: St. Martin's Press. 1989. 229 pp. £12.50. Policing in Australia: Historical Perspectives. Edited by Mark Finnane. New South Wales University Press, 1987. x+239pp. Coining to Terms with Policing: Perspectives onlPolicy. Edited by Rod Morgan and David J. Smith. London and New York: Rout ledge. 1989. £14.95 Undercover; Police Surveillance in America. By G. T. Marx. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1988 (A Twentieth Century Fund Book) Police: Internal Security and Developmental Disorder In India. By P. D. Sharma. New Delhi: Uppal Publishing House. 1988.

Policing Liberal Society. By Steve Uglow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 176p. $29.95. - The Police, Public Order, and the State: Policing in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, the USA, Israel, South Africa, and China. By John Brewer, Adrian Guelke, Ian Hume, Edward Moxon-Browne, and Rick Wilford. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 241p. $49.95. - Undercover: Police

Policing Liberal Society. By Steve Uglow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 176p. $29.95. - The Police, Public Order, and the State: Policing in Great Britain, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republic, the USA, Israel, South Africa, and China. By John Brewer, Adrian Guelke, Ian Hume, Edward Moxon-Browne, and Rick Wilford. New York: St. Martin's, 1988. 241p. $49.95. - Undercover: Police

Undercover: police surveillance in America

Providing a rich picture of past and present undercover work, and drawing on unpublished documents and interviews with the FBI and local police, this penetrating study examines the variety of undercover operations and the ethical issues and empirical assumptions raised when the state officially sanctions deception and trickery and allows its agents to participate in crime.