Surveillance Regime Research Articles

Failure to Enroll: The Blurring Rhetorical Power of Anonymizing Tools and Photographs in Making In/Visible Black Lives

As Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests surged in response to the continued murders of black men and women, state surveillance practices, too, have increasingly monitored, tracked, and prosecuted protesters. Among the growing surveillance arsenal are facial recognition technologies (FRT), which authorities use to identify protesters, often leading to the mis/recognition of black and brown people, false arrests, and blacklisting from public spaces. In response to the prevalence of FRT, protesters and photographers are urging and employing anonymizing blurring technologies to evade state and citizen surveillance. I argue that these technologies materially and rhetorically disrupt the racialized surveillant gaze. I employ Simone Browne’s (2015) term “dark sousveillance” as a framework for understanding how blurring technologies enable evasion from state violence and promote ethical photography practices. Such practices challenge the relationship between whiteness and the law enforcement surveillance regime.

Beyond control? The political economy of private interception, intrusion, and surveillance markets

Private intrusion, interception, and surveillance (PIIS) markets represent a key vehicle for the global expansion of digital surveillance regimes. Yet, due to their opacity and notorious secrecy, these markets have received relatively little scholarly attention. Triangulating between a unique dataset comprising 5973 industry presentations, interviews, and industry reports, this article provides novel insights into the evolution of market structures and public control efforts. Conceptualizing the PIIS-market as a dynamic and fluid assemblage, we highlight how the enmeshment of social, political, and technological dimensions shaped hierarchies and agencies of control. Our findings point towards the existence of three intersecting dynamics of territorialization, changing technological affordances, and ordering that persistently undermined attempts to limit market operations. In reflecting on these past failures, the presented approach points towards the importance of timing and highlights a need to re-conceptualize control in state-market relations from an assemblage perspective, pragmatically working across bureaucratic boundaries and leveraging disparate power centers across the public and private divide. Considering the growing interest in economic dependencies and the strategic dimension of high-tech markets, these findings have a wider relevance to current debates about the rise of economic security states.

CheckOut: User-Controlled Anonymization for Customer Loyalty Programs

To resist the regimes of ubiquitous surveillance imposed upon us in every facet of modern life, we need technological tools that subvert surveillance systems. Unfortunately, while cryptographic tools frequently demonstrate how we can construct systems that safeguard user privacy, there is limited motivation for corporate entities engaged in surveillance to adopt these tools, as they often clash with profit incentives. This paper demonstrates how, in one particular aspect of everyday life -- customer loyalty programs -- users can subvert surveillance and attain anonymity, without necessitating any cooperation or modification in the behavior of their surveillors. We present the CheckOut system, which allows users to coordinate large anonymity sets of shoppers to hide the identity and purchasing habits of each particular user in the crowd. CheckOut scales up and systematizes past efforts to subvert loyalty surveillance, which have been primarily ad-hoc and manual affairs where customers physically swap loyalty cards to mask their real identities. CheckOut allows increased scale while ensuring that the necessary computing infrastructure does not itself become a new centralized point of privacy failure. Of particular importance to our scheme is a protocol for loyalty programs that offer reward points, where we demonstrate how CheckOut can assist users in paying each other back for loyalty points accrued while using each others' loyalty accounts. We present two different mechanisms to facilitate redistributing rewards points, offering trade-offs in functionality, performance, and security.

Between control and participation: The politics of algorithmic management

AbstractUnderstanding the role of human management is crucial for the debate over algorithmic management—to date limited to studies on the platform economy. This qualitative case study in logistics reconstructs the actor constellations (managers, engineers, data scientists and workers) and negotiation processes in different phases of algorithmic management. It offers two major contributions to the literature: (1) a process model distinguishing three phases: goal formation, data production and data analysis, which is used to analyse (2) the politics of algorithmic management in conventional workplaces, which differ significantly from platform companies. The article goes beyond surveillance to elucidate the role of the regulatory framework, various actors' knowledge contributions to the algorithmic management system, and the power relations resulting therefrom. While the managerial goals in the examined case were not oriented towards a surveillance regime, the outcome was nevertheless a centralisation of knowledge and disempowerment of workers.

Becoming (In)Visible: Self-Assertion and Disappearance of the Self in Contemporary Surveillance Narratives

Abstract Visible surveillance technologies are vanishing in the wake of dataveillance. The practice of surveillance is certainly not disappearing, but it has become inconspicuous. In a regime of invisible surveillance, the watchers and the watched alike are hard to identify, for the latter have also become socially invisible as human beings. I argue that the idea of becoming invisible in both digital and pre-digital surveillance societies is multifaceted. On the one hand, it suggests total deprivation of personal autonomy as a result of overexposure resulting in the disappearance of the subject and, on the other hand, it implies a possibility of resistance and self-assertion. Self-exposure is taken to extremes in Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel The Circle (2013) where the protagonist becomes the centre of attention in a “viewer society” (Mathiesen 1997) and “goes transparent” (Eggers 2013, 351). In contrast, Wolfgang Hilbig’s Stasi novel “Ich” (1993) works with different notions of invisibility. Recruited to spy for the Stasi, Hilbig’s protagonist – an unsuccessful poet – is at the same time targeted by East Germany’s secret police and wants to become invisible, hiding from the omnipresent Stasi surveillance in Berlin’s maze-like cellar corridors in an attempt of self-assertion. The comparison of these novels will elucidate how different discourses on (in)visibility and transparency contribute to an account of subjectivity that attempts to resist surveillance.

Watch and Wait for Rectal Cancer

About one third of all colorectal carcinomas (CRC) are localised in the rectum. As part of a multimodal therapy concept, neoadjuvant therapy achieves downstaging of the tumour in 50-60% of cases and a so-called complete clinical response (cCR), defined as clinically (and radiologically) undetectable residual tumour after completion of neoadjuvant therapy, in 10-30% of cases.In view of the perioperative morbidity and mortality associated with radical rectal resection, including the occurrence of a symptom complex known as low anterior resection syndrome (LARS) and the need for deviation, at least temporarily, the question of the risk-benefit balance of organ resection in the presence of cCR has been raised. In this context, the therapeutic concept of a "watch-and-wait" approach with omission of immediate organ resection and inclusion in a structured surveillance regime, has emerged.For a safe, oncological implementation of this option, it is necessary to develop standards in the definition of a suitable patient clientele and the implementation of the concept. In addition to the initial correct selection of the patient group that is suitable for a primarily non-surgical procedure, the inherent goal is the early and sufficient detection of tumour recurrence (so-called local regrowth) during the "watch-and-wait" phase (surveillance).In this context, in this paper we address the questions of: 1. the optimal timing of initial re-staging, 2. the criteria for assessing the clinical response and selecting the appropriate patient clientele, 3. the rhythm and design of the surveillance protocol.

Precision Medicine, Future Risk and the Present Self

In May 2015, my mother was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer and passed away three months later at the age of 78. Two years later, my older brother, only 53 at the time, was also diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He passed away 15 months later. With this news, we engaged in the genetic retelling of family histories and connections, drawing genealogical maps on pieces of paper that reminded me of teaching Anthro 101 and starkly reimagined which relatives ‘mattered’ in our lives. As an anthropologist interested in subject formation and spatiality informed by a Foucauldian analytic, I have been propelled into exploring what it means to become ‘high risk’ (as a biologically related daughter and sister), subject to new regimes of surveillance and self‐management espoused by the field of precision medicine. This paper addresses this experience and thus contributes to questions of subject formation within the already‐existing truth‐making practices of genetic probability and personalized risk management.

Double Intussusceptions in Peutz-Jeghers Syndrome Patient: A Case Report

Background: Peutz-Jeghers Syndrome is one of the hereditary gastro-intestinal cancer syndrome with characteristic mucocutaneous pigmentation and histologically distinctive hamartomatous polyps in gastro-intestinal tract. Although it is characteristically benign hamartomatous polyp, majority of affected individuals develop symptoms starting from their second decades. We reported a known Peutz-Jeghers Syndrome case developed recurrent polyps leading to double intussusceptions required bowel resection. Multidisciplinary management and patient compliance to surveillance regime are important in managing PJS patients with potential gastro-intestinal tract complications and relative high risk of developing syndrome specific cancers.

Pancreatic cysts: can surveillance interval for small low-risk lesions be lengthened?

Surveillance of pancreatic cysts are necessary due to risk of malignant transformation. However, reported progression rates to advanced neoplasia are variable and the high frequency of surveillance scans may pose a considerable burden on healthcare resources. To validate the effectiveness of the Fukuoka Guidelines surveillance regime and determine if a longer surveillance interval can be established. All magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies of the pancreas performed at our institution between January 2014 and December 2016 with at least one pancreatic cystic lesion and follow-up MRI or computed tomography (CT) over at least two years were reviewed for size, worrisome feature (WF), and high-risk stigmata (HRS) at diagnosis and follow-up imaging (up to year 6). Reference standards for advanced neoplasia were based on endoscopic ultrasound, fine needle aspiration cytology, or the presence of ≥2 WF or ≥1 HRS on imaging. Comparison of MRI features of progression and outcomes of diagnostic endpoints between lesions <20 mm and ≥20 mm was performed. A total of 270 patients were included (201 cysts <20 mm, 69 cysts ≥20 mm). Compared with cysts <20 mm, cysts ≥20 mm were more likely to be associated with WF or HRS (40.6% vs. 12.4%; P ≤0.00001), demonstrate increase in size of ≥5 mm in two years (20.3% vs. 10.9%; P = 0.049), and develop advanced neoplasia (24.6% vs. 0.5%; P <0.00001). Pancreatic cysts <20 mm have a low risk of developing WF and HRS and surveillance interval may be lengthened.

Regimes of visibility and algorithmic surveillance on digital platforms: operationalizing the thought through images in a collaborative perspective

In this article, I present and analyze the results obtained in the first interview for the ongoing thesis project, which investigates how visibility regimes interfere with the algorithmic surveillance regime of bodies in contemporary times. In an initiative stimulated by the exchanges carried out in the Thematic Group Digital and Popular Communication, promoted by the IX ALAIC Summer School, I propose to connect in a single interview the two methodological fronts addressed: the construction of a collaborative visual atlas in the theoretical wake of archeology of visual knowledge, inspired by Aby Warburg, and conducting semi-structured interviews with collective leaders who question aspects of the capitalist culture of surveillance. To this end, the interviewee was presented with a set of images of artistic works related to the themes of body visibility and algorithmic surveillance. The data obtained brought up three thematic nodes: 1) Historical struggles, 2) Countercolonial cosmovisions, and 3) Thinking of images in opposition, which will be analyzed in resonance with the reflections of the authors Antônio Bispo do Rosário, Tarcízio Silva, and Kate Crawford.

Architectures of discretion: Autohoteles and the fortified enclaves of Guatemala city

Autohoteles in Guatemala City are mid-market, pay-by-the-hour hotels designed for sexual encounters. Folding quietly into the landscape of Central America’s largest metropolitan region, these establishments provide middle-class Guatemalans with the opportunity to evade (even if only for an afternoon) the very regimes of surveillance that they have come to expect from fortified enclaves. Autohoteles have walls but no windows, guards but no guest books, and security booths but no surveillance cameras. They are one of the few places where the middle-class in Guatemala City pay not to be watched. Set against the increasing panopticism of everyday life in Central America, this essay engages the autohoteles of Guatemala City to understand an architectural form that minimizes rather than maximizes visibility, for the sake of discretion rather than discipline. It argues that these buildings evidence an intimate and necessary imbrication between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of fortified enclaves.

When 'green' becomes 'saffron': Wind extraction, border surveillance, and citizenship regime at the edge of the Indian state

Low-carbon mega-infrastructures constitute one of the main institutional responses to climate change in India's agrarian settings, as they are imagined around features of 'greenness' and 'cleanness.' But this story entails a problematic construction of land, the reconfiguration of space for extractive development, and a complete disruption of agrarian social structures around features of exclusion and dispossession. This research adopts perspectives from political ecology to understand the persistence of class-caste relations, the legacy of coloniality, and the new citizenship regime underlying 'green' extractivism in India's low-carbon infrastructures. Wind turbines align with broad ethno-religious conceptions of Indian citizenship and space as Hindu, and their expansion over new border areas serves nationalist projects of territorial reconfiguration, cultural identity revivalism, border-making, and Muslim populations' surveillance.

Research supervision as praxis: A need to speak back in dangerous ways?

Viewing research supervision as praxis offers alternative perspectives on this crucial aspect of academic work. In this paper, we consider the contributions in this Special Issue as counterpoints to dominant discourses on research supervision by drawing on the idea of praxis as morally committed and history-making action. This brings insights from Swedish research into dialogue with literature from across the world, particularly the Global South. We thematize these contributions by highlighting issues of complexity; considering how history, future and positionality shape supervision praxis; challenging narrow production-oriented discourses in favour of creativity as a foundation for supervision as praxis; and reflecting on how a shift from precarity to nuance may enable us to view supervision as praxis as enablement towards a better future. Our consideration of research supervision as praxis necessitates a stance that does not conform to the status quo, thus provoking further debate and action to think, and supervise, in non-routine, future-changing ways. As supervisors, we do not need to be resigned to futures where neoliberal regimes of surveillance, measurement and accountability shape our practices as strongly as they do today. We argue that there is a need to speak back to supervision as praxis in dangerous ways.

Elimination of lymphatic filariasis: Where do we stand so far?

Lymphatic filariasis (LF), an asymptomatic, acute, and chronic condition in human beings, is the second most common vector-borne disease after malaria. According to the World Health Organization, there are 120 million LF cases detected in 81 tropical and subtropical countries, and one billion people are at risk. Therefore, the Global Program to Eliminate Lymphatic Filariasis was launched in 2000, with the primary objective of stopping LF transmission among all at-risk groups using mass drug administration (MDA), managing morbidities, and preventing LF-related impairments using a minimum treatment package. Additionally, other programs such as epidemiological assessment including National Filaria Control Program and World Health Organization recommended routine and pre-MDA microfilaremia surveys also implemented to stop the LF transmission. The routine filaria surveys were also carried out in around 2 000-4 000 individuals/month throughout the year whereas pre-MDA surveys were also conducted every year in approximately 4 000 individuals in four fixed and four random sites. Furthermore, the Transmission Assessment Survey was also conducted to check the risk of LF among primary school children. Moreover, potential diagnostic methods, systematic surveillance regimes, the Direct Network Report system, and regular trainings and awareness may be also effective in preventing the recurrence of LF. Hence, this review emphasizes the potential advocacy tools and various strategies as well as procedures for monitoring, which could be impactful in eliminating LF.

“I Do Love / To Note and to Observe”: The Pleasures of Surveillance and Resistance in the Work of Ben Jonson

Poet, playwright, religious dissident, and collaborator with the state surveillance apparatus: Ben Jonson experienced a long and tortuous relationship with surveilling in late-Tudor/early-Stuart England. The cultures of surveillance he encountered extended beyond espionage to social and religious surveillance, which in early modern England often bled into and facilitated the workings of the state’s network of informants. His literary output and unusually detailed (for the time) biographical information combine to give us a complex picture of his engagement with surveilling, secrecy, and resistance. Jonson’s experience of surveillance involved incarceration and the threat of corporal punishment, but in his writings, he associates surveilling and being surveilled with pleasure in the context of his Humanist education, his conversion to Catholicism at a time when the Protestant English state had outlawed such worship, and his work as a satirist, playwright, and poet. Using Freud’s notion of unheimlich, or the uncanny, I argue that Jonson demystifies surveilling, but approaches his critique from two directions simultaneously: he interrogates and encourages resistance to state violence and coercion while highlighting his own acquiescence to the pleasures of voyeurism and exhibitionism, suggesting that surveilling is seemingly irresistible, as in both overpowering and appealing. Because he centers the uncanny in his writings, Jonson may be a useful guide for those theorizing and navigating the complexities of surveillance. He exemplifies how resistance to asymmetries of power persists through time and despite outward conformity to a regime of surveillance, which itself may be unheimlich.

From subjects to subversives: Chinese migrants and the evolution of the French colonial surveillance regime in Sài Gòn-Chợ Lớn, 1874-1930

ABSTRACT In 1874, the French colonial state introduced an extensive regime of ethnic surveillance in the port cities of Sài Gòn-Chợ Lớn. This pioneering system in Vietnam relied on an innovative anthropometric science to target Chinese migrants, whose mobile networks posed ongoing concerns for the imperial authority. This article explores the strategies employed by Chinese migrants to navigate the enforced ethnic classifications and regulations imposed by the colonial administration, exploiting the uncertain boundaries between subjects, foreigners, and citizens. It argues that Chinese subversions emerged through a dynamic interplay with the evolving French bureaucratic practices, shaped by the coexistence of two overlapping imperial systems: a decentralized Chinese empire and a French colonial state aiming to consolidate its rule in Cochinchina. The article reveals that French colonial surveillance was not a one-sided, rigid process of panoptic imperial dominance, but rather a complex landscape characterized by negotiated coexistence, mutual collaborations, and acts of resistance.

Introduction: Abolitionist Worldmaking

Introduction:Abolitionist Worldmaking Alyosha Goldstein (bio) The publication of Abolition Geography: Essays towards Liberation, the highly anticipated collection of Ruth Wilson Gilmore's writing edited by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano, provides an auspicious occasion to reflect on Gilmore's decisive contributions and significant influence.1 There is perhaps no better testament to the importance of Gilmore's writing, teaching, and public lectures than how generative this work has been for so many community organizers, activists, students, scholars, and people engaged in everyday struggle. Active in social movement building since the 1970s, Gilmore earned a doctorate in geography in 1998 and cofounded grassroots organizations including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network.2 In publications such as her widely influential 2007 book Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California and the essays and interviews assembled in Abolition Geography,3 she analyzes the carceral geographies of racial capitalism as a way to open up new possibilities for building a politics and practice of liberation. Abolition Geography gathers together Gilmore's critical interventions and insights at precisely the fortuitous moment when decades of abolitionist analysis and organizing and the 2020 uprisings ignited by the police murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade have converged to make abolition a matter of mainstream debate. The essays that follow, by Alisa Bierria, Lisa Lowe, Sarah Haley, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Angela Y. Davis, reflect on Abolition Geography as a vital touchstone and indispensable resource for abolitionist worldmaking. Today's prison abolition movement continues the unfinished work of the nineteenth-century movement for the abolition of slavery.4 In Black Reconstruction (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois showed how the 1876 "counter-revolution [End Page 359] of property" reanimated the conditions of enslavement through new or reinvigorated forms of racial terror, disfranchisement, extraction, coercion, and carcerality. He argued that the legal end of slavery was insufficient and that "abolition democracy" required establishing and sustaining the material conditions and institutions that would make possible substantive Black freedom.5 Taking up the project of abolition democracy, the present-day abolition movement emerged partly from the growing momentum of the prisoners' rights movement and campaigns to free political prisoners catalyzed by the 1971 Attica rebellion at the so-called correctional facility in upstate New York and the murder of the political prisoner George Jackson at San Quentin Prison in California.6 Books such as If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, edited by Angela Y. Davis with the Soledad Brothers and other political prisoners, published in 1971, and the Prison Research Education Action Project's 1976 Instead of Prisons: A Handbook for Abolitionists further galvanized the movement.7 The annual assemblies of the International Conference on Prison Abolition first held in Toronto, Canada, in 1983, and the organizing work of Critical Resistance that began in California in 1997 provided crucial spaces for expanding abolitionist networks and organizing. It is likewise important to note that women of color and queer, trans*, and gender-nonconforming people have consistently been at the forefront of these movements. To introduce and frame this forum on Gilmore's book, I focus here on briefly highlighting aspects of Gilmore's work in the context of the movement for abolition since the 1990s. Written over more than thirty years, the essays and interviews assembled in Abolition Geography argue for understanding prison abolition as a far-reaching project of fundamental social transformation rather than an effort focused solely on dismantling discrete carceral institutions. Gilmore shows how the abolition of the system of control, criminalization, and punishment that includes jail, prison, probation, policing, security and surveillance regimes, border patrol, and migrant detention is fundamental to building alternative futures. She demonstrates how and why the prison-industrial complex is situated within an expansive economy of United States imperialism and militarism, with consequences that extend into the intimate spheres of interpersonal violence, and must necessarily be addressed in struggles for racial, gender, and environmental justice. Abolition as a project is both specific and capacious. Abolition centers the racial, gendered, sexual, and heteropatriarchal dynamics of prisons, jails, policing, and other carceral institutions and practices while situating these...

Accurate prognosis for localized prostate cancer through coherent voting networks with multi-omic and clinical data

Localized prostate cancer is a very heterogeneous disease, from both a clinical and a biological/biochemical point of view, which makes the task of producing stratifications of patients into risk classes remarkably challenging. In particular, it is important an early detection and discrimination of the indolent forms of the disease, from the aggressive ones, requiring post-surgery closer surveillance and timely treatment decisions. This work extends a recently developed supervised machine learning (ML) technique, called coherent voting networks (CVN) by incorporating a novel model-selection technique to counter the danger of model overfitting. For the challenging problem of discriminating between indolent and aggressive types of localized prostate cancer, accurate prognostic prediction of post-surgery progression-free survival with a granularity within a year is attained, improving accuracy with respect to the current state of the art. The development of novel ML techniques tailored to the problem of combining multi-omics and clinical prognostic biomarkers is a promising new line of attack for sharpening the capability to diversify and personalize cancer patient treatments. The proposed approach allows a finer post-surgery stratification of patients within the clinical high-risk category, with a potential impact on the surveillance regime and the timing of treatment decisions, complementing existing prognostic methods.

Partners in crime: smuggling economies (Kaçak/Qaçax) and human-animal collaborations in Turkey’s Kurdish borderlands

ABSTRACT When is a horse not just a pack animal but a criminal accomplice? When is a lamb more than just livestock, but a form of contraband or a witness in court? Pursuing these questions in Van, a Kurdish-majority province of Turkey bordering Iran, this article examines how human-animal collaborations facilitated Kurdish smuggling economies, or what locals called qaçax. I conceptualize qaçax and kaçak (the Turkish word from which it originated), as the inexhaustible capacity to escape control. As the state’s counterinsurgency against Kurdish guerillas established an extensive regime of surveillance and control in the Van borderlands, pack animals enabled smuggling convoys to evade state control and survive deadly anti-smuggling ambushes. Smugglers (and smuggler animals) also collaborated to elude the legal evidentiary processes and undermine allegations of smuggling brought against them. Rather than viewing animals as mere objects of legal knowledge, as existing studies have tended to do, the human-animal collaboration in court shows how the animals actually co-produce such knowledge. The smugglers’ evasion of criminal charges in court further troubles the categories of illegality and informality that are frequently associated with smuggling, and permits us to think of smuggling economies beyond binaries of legal-illegal, formal-informal, human-nonhuman or living-nonliving.

A mosaic of dovetailing laws: India’s communications surveillance regime

ABSTRACT India’s communications surveillance regime can be aptly described as a legal mosaic with different provisions in various statutes, yet they are neatly dovetailed with each other. This Conspectus paper examines India’s communications surveillance law and analyses the characteristics of the state’s surveillance power, the nature and scope of the legal restraints and procedural safeguards afforded to prevent arbitrariness, indiscriminate use and violation of the right to communications privacy. It further identifies the key issues and major decisions of the European courts on mass surveillance in post-Puttaswamy years.