Surveillance Tactics Research Articles

Surveillance and Five Eyes: Changing Dimensions of India’s Cyber Security

Cyber security becomes more challenging in the interconnected global environment when digital borders surpass physical boundaries. This study closely looks into the dynamic interactions that exist between the Five Eyes Alliance’s widespread surveillance tactics and India’s cyber security resilience. Amid this complex web of international data protection dynamics, the tactics used by India provide insights into the difficulties faced and the creative solutions advancing the country’s digital defence. A thorough understanding of India’s response to the evolving threats posed by the cooperative intelligence efforts of Five Eyes’ alliance is shedding light on the multifaceted dimensions of the country’s cyber security posture as it navigates this challenging terrain. This investigation adds significant information to the larger conversation on global cyber security by highlighting the necessity of flexible tactics and creative solutions for protecting digital assets, both globally and domestically in India.

Cyber scares and prophylactic policies: Crossnational evidence on the effect of cyberattacks on public support for surveillance

While conventional terrorism has long been associated with enhanced support for surveillance, scholars have not determined whether variation in the type and outcome of terror attacks, including those emanating from cyberspace, influences public support for these policies. Further, existing studies typically examine public opinion in a single country, thereby failing to investigate cross-national trends in support for surveillance. In this article, we outline a theoretical relationship between cyberattacks and support for surveillance measures and then, through survey experiments conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel, explore whether variation in both the type (conventional or cyberterrorism) and outcome (non-lethal or lethal outcomes) of attacks influences support for a range of surveillance tactics. We find that while participants do not base their support for surveillance on attack type or outcome and do not differentiate between surveillance tactics when formulating their preferences, there are considerable cross-national differences in support. Participants from Israel generally responded more favorably to all forms of surveillance, independent of experimental treatment, with British respondents demonstrating high levels of support for CCTV cameras. American respondents, however, were generally less supportive of surveillance measures across treatments, with the differences being most notable in their relative reluctance to support the use of CCTV cameras. These findings have important implications not only for the sustainability of national policies but also for international collaboration to manage emerging risks.

In bed with the state

The aim of this paper is to unsettle dominant discourses about the state and forensic social work though “dehistoricization” through two historical case studies from Canada: the eugenics movement and the Indian Act. This critical and structural analysis will demonstrate how the state historically and contemporarily disproportionately disadvantages disabled and Indigenous peoples independently and intersectionally through social control tactics. Using a conceptual framework from Foucault’s History of the Present approach, I problematize how historical practices manifest in present-day technologies of the state. I also utilized Blackstock’s Touchstones of Hope, a model for reconciliation in children’s services through four phases: Truth Telling, Acknowledging, Restoring, and Relating. After situating myself in the work, I will then articulate the key concepts including forensic social work, the state, intersectionality, and settler colonialism followed by the dominant historical discourses in forensic social work. Next, I dehistoricize the eugenics movement and the Indian Act as case studies to demonstrate how the state used and uses social control tactics of surveillance, categorization, segregation, and containment of disabled and Indigenous peoples. Contemporary forensic social work practices with disabled and Indigenous peoples will demonstrate that the historical practices continue in the present. I conclude with a call for reconciliation and transformative change.

Heterogeneous features and deep learning networks fusion-based pest detection, prevention and controlling system using IoT and pest sound analytics in a vast agriculture system

Every country's foundation is its agricultural industry, which drives about half of global economic growth. Accurate farming is crucial for crop evaluation and pest control. Old-fashioned pest detection is unstable and gives inaccurate forecasts. These surveillance tactics are intrusive, expensive, and vulnerable to assumptions. Pest sounds can be caught with minimum effort by utilizing IoT networks. Deep learning algorithms, species distribution range assessments, and nature monitoring can automatically identify and categorize pest sounds. The IoT-driven computerized components in this research's unique pest identification system used machine learning on insect sound recordings. The Butterworth filter, Blackman and Flattop window, Ultraspherical Filter, Rife-Vincent Window, Cosine-Tapered Window, FFT, DFT, STFT, PNCC, RASTA-PLPCC, LSFCC, sound detectors, and PID sensors were employed. The intended study used the HFDLNet for training, testing, and validation, examining 7,200 pest sounds from 72 species to determine their unique characteristics and statistical attributes. The proposed model has 99.87 % accuracy, 99.96 % sensitivity, 99.88 % specificity, 99.96 % recall, 99.93 % F1 score, and 99.98 % precision. This study outperforms Inception-ResNet-v2, FRCNN ResNet-50, Fatser-PestNet, MD-YOLO, YOLOv5m, MAM-IncNet, and Xception. The suggested solution uses IoT networks and pest sound analysis to establish a pest preventive and management strategy and a solar-powered generator to power IoT devices across vast agricultural fields.

Defensive walls: A neglected security strategy in northern Nigeria

Nigeria from 2016 to 2023 has been facing new security challenges, including kidnapping of people for ransom, sporadic shooting of inhabitants, and the rustling of livestock. There is a rich history of how cities in Nigeria, erected defensive walls or fortifications to protect the inhabitants and their property against invaders, criminals, or rustlers centuries before the arrival of the European colonialists to Africa. The incessant attacks on rural communities, highways and urban centres have compelled criminologists and security experts to rethink and revisit the security strategies adopted in the past and worked effectively in protecting the populace and their belongings. Kingdoms and Empires, as well as Emirates in different parts of Africa, had developed or erected defensive walls or fortifications which if replicated in the 21st century, will ease neighbhourhood watch and community surveillance and policing. This paper has helped to identify cities in Nigeria with defensive walls and restrict entrances (gates) in places such as Kano, Katsina Sokoto, Zaria and Benin City. These are some of the cities known for prehistoric warfare and their people were brave and famous in intercity and inter-community battles. The study found that towns and cities in Nigeria and other parts of the world used defensive walls or fortified their jurisdiction against enemies or invaders. The strategy proved effective in protecting their people and property. Building defensive walls or fortifications of towns and cities that are facing acute security challenges in Nigeria can enable the Government and community members to protect the residents. The use of defensive walls will make the use of different mass surveillance tactics much easier because the areas are cordoned-off hence patrol, searching and arrest of criminals. Therefore, the researcher recommended that instead of spending huge amounts on the procurement of weapons by the Federal Government of Nigeria, the Government should erect or build fences that make criminal investigation more effective hence combat crime and criminals.

Anti-Muslim Surveillance: Canadian Muslims’ Experiences with CSIS

The targeting of Muslim communities through “the War on Terror” has given rise to a variety of schemes and tactics informed by Islamophobia and racializing narratives. Yet, there are few studies examining the specific intelligence practices deployed by governments as they engage in forms of racialized surveillance. This study analyses 95 in-depth interviews with Muslim community leaders in five Canadian cities to map the material structural practices employed by the Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) in its racialized surveillance of Muslim communities. This study documents how CSIS engages in the mass surveillance of Muslim communities, transforms Mosques into spaces of surveillance, creates a community of informants, and targets political activism. Moreover, we found that CSIS deploys illegal practices such as threatening citizenship and refugee status, intimidating people in their homes during the night and denying legal representation during interrogations. The article also explores how these state-led anti-Muslim surveillance tactics produce internal forms of community surveillance where individuals begin to self-regulate their own behavior. The level of CSIS surveillance of Muslim communities raises questions about the extent to which CSIS is overstepping its powers and engaging in illegal practices.

Women and Warcare: Gendered Islamophobia in Counterterrorism

ABSTRACT Counterterrorism continues to play a central role in international and national security strategies, including an expansion of a controversial programme known as Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). A central aspect of CVE frameworks is the integration of gendered counterterrorism programming and women into its scope and operations, which has been undertheorized or seen as less consequential compared to examining solely the racialised impacts of such programming. We argue that CVE’s incorporation of gendered approaches to counterterrorism, including its use of women’s empowerment initiatives, helps it secure traction and political legitimacy among the global community while undermining autonomous community movements. Our research documents the global reach of CVE beyond the US and its incorporation of gender, including tracing the entwinement of CVE with an important UN global initiative, Security Council Resolution 1325: Women, Peace, and Security (WPS). WPS programming draws on soft surveillance tactics that resource communities and invite intel. Alongside hard surveillance, the normalisation of soft surveillance programming allows for the institutionalisation of War on Terror ideologies in social sectors, in turn expanding the criminalisation of social justice movements wary of US militarisation both domestically and abroad.

The militarization of digital surveillance in post-coup Zimbabwe: ‘Just don’t tell them what we do’

While a large body of research has documented and theorized digital surveillance practices in various political contexts, little has been done to investigate the growing trend of military-driven digital surveillance practices in semi-authoritarian regimes. In this article, I use the case of the surveillance practices of the Zimbabwe Defence Forces to argue that scholarship needs to (re)evaluate this emerging trend. The article has three aims: first, it explores military-driven surveillance capabilities, the circulation of such capabilities and the surveillance tactics emerging in the semi-authoritarian context of Zimbabwe. Second, it examines the interface of factionalism and politics within the Zimbabwe Defence Forces and how this influences quotidian military-driven digital surveillance practices. Third, it locates military-driven surveillance practices within a growing and complex global political economy of trade in surveillance technologies that is centred on China. In doing so, the article helps locate a largely neglected but increasing practice of military-driven surveillance that is incrementally reconfiguring surveillance practices and architectures in semi-authoritarian regimes. Such a form of surveillance provides gateways for human rights abuses and shrinks the civilian spaces of protest and engagement, leading to digital authoritarianism. The article therefore calls for greater scrutiny of the emerging practice of military-driven digital surveillance in semi-authoritarian political contexts.

The role of bounded-authority concerns in shaping citizens' duty to obey authorities during COVID-19

PurposeThe COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the introduction of extra-ordinary restrictions to mitigate its spread. Authorities rely on the public's voluntary willingness to obey these restrictions, yet the intrusive nature of these measures may lead some people to believe that authorities are overstepping the limits of their rightful power (i.e. bounded-authority). This paper applies the bounded-authority framework to the COVID-19 context to understand the factors associated with the public's duty to obey authorities during COVID-19.Design/methodology/approachThis paper utilizes survey data from 1,582 individuals to examine what factors drive COVID-19-related bounded-authority concerns, and in turn, how bounded-authority concerns may impact one's duty to obey authorities during COVID-19.FindingsResults show that worry about freedom loss, opposition to surveillance tactics, police heavy-handedness and perceptions of procedural injustice from police during the pandemic all drive bounded-authority concerns. Findings also reveal that bounded-authority concerns are associated with reduced duty to obey and mediate the relationship between procedural justice and the duty to obey authorities' enforcement of COVID-19 restrictions.Originality/valueFindings reveal new evidence about the bounded-authority framework and the public's duty to obey authorities, with implications for the COVID-19 context and beyond.

Automating Platform Spectators

Algorithmic automation of visual culture opens an interesting discussion of the negotiation of agency and circulation of affect between the user and the network. On audiovisual platforms, the algorithmic procedure is looped into the demands of attention economy, keeping the user watching. Taking TikTok as the main case study due to its compelling assemblage of surveillance tactics tailored to techno-embodied modes of spectatorship, this paper questions how platforms renegotiate the user-spectators' agency and produce new modes of watching and experiencing images. I investigate algorithmic montage and affective scroll as TikTok's key attention capture and instrumentalisation devices, built into the lacunae of behavioural opportunity and capitalising on the affective drive of the moving image flow. I argue that users should be seen as user-spectators whose agency undergoes a double negotiation, as users who can interact with the platform and as spectators who are subjected to specific modes of attention capture; their agential dis/empowerment is, therefore, contingent and framed by the specific epistemic and aesthetic affordances of the platform governmentality. Considering the role of algorithmic montage and affective scroll leads to new insights in how algorithmic surveillance simultaneously participates in the aesthetic and temporal figuration of platform spectatorship and conditions the tactics of resistance to the

Queer Calculus, Warm Data, and Other Oxymorons

Queer Calculus, Warm Data, and Other Oxymorons

Labor, classification and productions of culture on Netflix

PurposeThis paper examines promotional practices Netflix employs via Twitter and its automated recommendation system in order to deepen our understanding of how streaming services contribute to sociotechnical inequities under capitalism.Design/methodology/approachTweets from two Netflix Twitter accounts as well as material features of Netflix's recommendation system were qualitatively analyzed using inductive analysis and the constant comparative method in order to explore dimensions of Netflix's promotional practices.FindingsTwitter accounts and the recommendation system profit off people's labor to promote content, and such labor allows Netflix to create and refine classification practices wherein both people and content are categorized in inequitable ways. Labor and classification feed into Netflix's production of culture via appropriation on Twitter and algorithmic decision-making within both the recommendation system and broader AI-driven production practices.Social implicationsAssemblages that include algorithmic recommendation systems are imbued with structural inequities and therefore unable to be fixed by merely diversifying cultural industries or retooling algorithms on streaming platforms. It is necessary to understand systemic injustices within these systems so that we may imagine and enact just alternatives.Originality/valueFindings demonstrate that via surveillance tactics that exploit people's labor for promotional gains, enforce normative classification schemes, and culminate in normative cultural productions, Netflix engenders practices that regulate bodies and culture in ways that exemplify interconnections between people, machines, and social institutions. These interconnections further reflect and result in material inequities that crystalize within sociotechnical processes.

SURVEILLANCE INFRASTRUCTURES IN AND FOR CRISES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF CHINA AND SOUTH KOREA’S DEVELOPMENT OF QUARANTINE SURVEILLANCE MOBILE APPLICATIONS DURING COVID-19

This article examines China and South Korea’s health surveillance infrastructures that are being developed and deployed during COVID19. To control the outbreak and maintain the state, the Chinese government implemented the "Alipay Health Code” in collaboration with technology giants like Alibaba, while South Korea launched a “self-quarantine safety protection app” to enforce home isolation to suspected carriers and monitor their health statuses. By comparatively analyzing these quarantine surveillance mobile applications that the Chinese and South Korean governments are utilizing in pandemic control, we investigate how these two different governmental regimes - one authoritarian and the other democratic - construct and propagate what their state-of-the-art surveillance technologies can offer to the public in moments of emergency. Through a mixture of walk-through method and situational analysis, this article aims to unpack the processes in which these technologies become developed and examine the politics around their deployment. More broadly, we argue that analyzing them offers new opportunities to investigate the relationship between state surveillance and personal privacy in the context of a national crisis. As surveillance tactics that were deemed oppressive and undemocratic in ordinary times get easily normalized in crisis situations, these moments allow us to reveal the precarious and flexible nature of surveillance and privacy while destabilizing the West-oriented, dichotomic understanding of these concepts. This article tackles this question by observing the relationships among relevant actors – the state officials, industry professionals, and general users – and various contestations/negotiations involved in the processes of designing and deploying these quarantine surveillance apps.

Maintaining Transmission: DirecTV’s Work-at-home Technical Support, Virtual Surveillance, and the Gendered Domestication of Distributive Labor

This article draws upon interviews with work-at-home (WAH) agents who did technical support for DirecTV between 2009 and 2016. Satellite television technical support workers comprise an important node in maintaining the flow of television content as it is distributed by corporations, like DirecTV, through complex and often fragile technological conditions. Using interviews, trade press, and online employee forums, I outline the history of DirecTV’s WAH call center work and employment conditions, and its dissolution after the merger with AT&T. This research intervenes to demonstrate the ways in which WAH television technical support work is an ambivalent form of distributive media labor, at once feminine and immaterial, while also creative and essential for television distribution. This article also demonstrates how technical support work is influenced by current precarious and digitally converged working conditions, surveillance tactics, and media conglomerate mergers and structures.

Deep strike: playing gender in the world of Overwatch and the case of Geguri

ABSTRACT What happens when a body surveilled causes pause to the norms of surveillance? Where does it get pulled or pushed? Where does it fall? These are the broad questions this paper seeks to address via a case study examining sexism in professional computer gaming, or esport. The case presented concerns a cheating accusation made against a Korean woman, professional computer gamer that ignited controversy regarding women in esport. We present findings from a textual analysis of the online discussion that occurred in conjunction with the cheating accusation. We situate our analysis within perspectives of queer and feminist scholarship to address how surveillance mechanisms designed into professional gaming troubled misogynistic narratives regarding the role of women in esport, but only to a point. We conclude with a discussion on how the sporting anti/misogyny is discursively constructed and persisted and normalized in surveillance tactics embedded in gaming culture.

Prescription Drug Policing: The Right to Protected Health Information Privacy Pre- and Post-Carpenter

This article operates at the intersection of privacy law, Fourth Amendment doctrine, and public health realities triggered by the United States drug overdose epidemic. Reputable reporting sources, public health scholars, and pundits frequently frame the ongoing American overdose crisis as a prescription drug overdose problem attributable to the overprescribing of opioid analgesics. The problem with this narrative is that it runs counter to the current epidemiological data, which indicate that the majority of American overdose deaths are now a result of illicit drug use and not prescription drug abuse. The prescription-centric frame has nonetheless sparked the rapid rise of law enforcement and regulatory surveillance of prescribers and patients in the form of state prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP) databases. State PDMPs, which maintain and analyze significant data concerning every dispensed prescription, collect a stunning amount of patient protected health information (PHI). To put things in context, Americans filled 4,063,166,658 prescriptions at retail pharmacies in 2017 alone. PDMPs are largely criminal and regulatory law enforcement tools dressed up in public health promoting rhetoric. Under the guise of rogue prescriber, pill mill, and doctor shopper crack downs, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has made it a routine practice to self-issue administrative subpoenas to conduct warrantless, dragnet-style sweeps of the swarms of sensitive protected health data stored in state PDMP databases. This widespread law enforcement prescribing surveillance tactic, which reveals highly personal health information, including, among other things, patients’ contraceptive histories, gender transition decisions, and HIV diagnoses, raises serious constitutional privacy concerns. The Supreme Court’s recent Fourth Amendment decision, Carpenter v. United States, however, may limit law enforcement’s ability to continue to access droves of electronically-stored patient prescribing-related PHI in the custody of a state regulatory agency without a court order supported by probable cause. The Court’s decision in Carpenter already has been heralded as “a landmark privacy case,” which this article uniquely applies to prescription drug monitoring and law enforcement surveillance tactics provoked by the U.S. overdose crisis and its dominant narrative. Carpenter and the Fourth Amendment doctrines central to its holding motivate this article and animate its two core contentions. First, this article maintains that pertinent pre-Carpenter precedent requires the DEA to obtain a Fourth Amendment warrant in order to conduct sweeps of state PDMP databases searching patient protected health information. It then posits that courts are even more likely to rule that warrantless DEA searches of sensitive and frequently revealing health care data run afoul of the Fourth Amendment in the post-Carpenter world. Simply stated, PDMP protected health information is entitled to Fourth Amendment warrant protection.

TREATMENT TACTICS FOR COMPARTMENT SYNDROME IN PATIENTS WITH COMBINED PHLEGMONS OF SUBMANDIBULAR AND SUBMENTAL SPACE

Case monitoring to reveal the clinical pattern of compartment syndrome in patients suffering from sub-mandibular and submental space phlegmons was carried out. Two trend groups were formed: the primary group (33 patients) where compartment syndrome was diagnosed and treated according to an original method (RF Patent No. 2612830) including ultrasound wound treatment and ozone therapy, and the control group (32 patients) treated using established methods. In the control group, steady-state character of postoperative status was observed, while the primary group demonstrated regressive character. Good results in 93,9% and satisfactory results in 6,1% of the patients allow to recommend the developed patient surveillance tactics for phlegmon cases in clinical practice.

Cruising in Plain View: Clandestine Surveillance and the Unique Insights of Antihomosexual Policing

The mid-twentieth century witnessed a boom in policing against homosexual cruising, the practitioners of which relied on a set of robust defense tactics to avoid detection by strangers. Frustrated by the difficulties of catching suspected cruisers, police departments developed a variety of surreptitious, deeply intrusive surveillance tactics for monitoring public bathrooms. Yet while necessitated by the insularity of modern cruising culture, these surveillance tactics were legitimized in court partly through judges’ very skepticism of that culture. Weighing the utility of clandestine surveillance against its intrusion on innocent citizens, judges frequently justified surveillance by characterizing cruisers as sexual predators eager to expose themselves to innocent victims. From inception to conviction, the utility of clandestine surveillance thus depended partly on an epistemic lag between the arms of the criminal justice system: a disconnect between the police’s sensitivity to contemporary homosexual practices and judges’ continuing insistence on an older paradigm of perverse predation.

Informants, Provocateurs, and Entrapment: Examining the Histories of the FBI’s PATCON and the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government and police departments across the United States, most notably the New York City Police Department, have been collecting intelligence targeting Muslim American communities. The controversial surveillance practices include the use of confidential informants, undercover operations, and entrapment, and infringing upon civil rights and civil liberties in the name of national security. A decade before 9/11, however, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) conducted the same practices against a completely different demographic – Christian Right militants, through a program called PATCON, short for Patriot Conspiracy. Building upon the concept of surveillance as social sorting (Lyon 2013) and surveillance and terrorism (Monahan 2013), This article will compare the history of surveillance tactics used by the FBI against Christian Right militants and those used by the NYPD against non-militant Muslim Americans, and assess their implications in the context of civil rights, leaving a legacy of mistrust between these respective groups and the federal government that further undermines the national security interests of the United States.

The Role of Hackers in Countering Surveillance and Promoting Democracy

Practices related to media technologies and infrastructures (MTI) are an increasingly important part of democratic constellations in general and of surveillance tactics in particular. This article does not seek to discuss surveillance <em>per se</em>, but instead to open a new line of inquiry by presenting qualitative research on the Chaos Computer Club (CCC)—one of the world’s largest and Europe’s oldest hacker organizations. Despite the longstanding conception of hacking as infused with political significance, the scope and style of hackers’ engagement with emerging issues related to surveillance remains poorly understood. The rationale of this paper is to examine the CCC as a civil society organization that counter-acts contemporary assemblages of surveillance in two ways: first, by de-constructing existing technology and by supporting, building, maintaining and using alternative media technologies and infrastructures that enable more secure and anonymous communication; and second, by articulating their expertise related to contemporary MTI to a wide range of audiences, publics and actors. Highlighting the significance of “privacy” for the health of democracy, I argue that the hacker organization is co-determining “interstitial spaces within information processing practices” (Cohen, 2012, p. 1931), and by doing so is acting on indispensable structural features of contemporary democratic constellations.