Surveillant Assemblage Research Articles

The fallacy of perfect regulatory controls: Lessons from database surveillance of migration in West Germany from the 1950s to the 1970s

AbstractSurveillance studies have long argued that electronic databases are designed to maximize state surveillance as a “superpanopticon” or “surveillant assemblage.” But how are databases being implemented in practice, and do they actually enhance control? This article addresses these questions by examining the case of the German Central Foreigners Register (Ausländerzentralregister [AZR]). Established in 1953, the AZR was one of the first databases on migrants in the western liberal world, and remains a pillar of Germany's migration control system today. By analyzing internal ministerial records from the 1950s to the 1970s – the time when this database was introduced, expanded, and automatized while still relatively free from legal or public constraints – this article examines whether, or how, databases enhance state control. I argue that the AZR did not provide the “perfect surveillance” it was intended to deliver; rather, it produced major bureaucratic and political challenges and a series of malfunctions. This case study confirms that database surveillance, such as the German AZR in the 1970s and European databases today, depends on three basic conditions: shared expectations regarding data usages, cooperation in data supply, and capacities of data storage and maintenance. Moreover, databases serve the additional symbolic function of reassuring the self‐imagination of sovereign, modern state power.

Smart Security Cameras: The Corporatization of the Surveillant Assemblage

Using a political economy approach, this paper considers how home smart security cameras function as part of the surveillance-industrial complex and strengthen the relationship between law enforcement agencies and multinational technology companies for the benefit of private interests. This dynamic is maintained by the surveilled citizens themselves, who finance the smart security camera industry and participate in a culture of surveillance. The concepts of surveillant assemblage and panoptic surveillance will be used to ground these claims. This paper will reference scholarly articles and news pieces about Amazon Inc.’s Ring doorbell to illustrate two important consequences of the proliferation of smart security cameras: the outsourcing of policing and the shaping of consumer behavior.

Negotiating the Hyphens in a Culture of Surveillance: Embodied Surveillance and the Representation of Muslim Adolescence in Anglophone YA Fiction

In the era defined by the war on terror, border security, and increased Western cultural anxiety, the discourses of politics, race, and gender influence the representation of non-normative bodies, notably in the signification of female Muslim adolescent bodies as sites of political, racial, and cultural contestation within a culture of surveillance. Mirroring Western society, Anglophone YA fiction typically privileges white normative portrayals of Western adolescence. Fostered in a culture of suspicion, the revitalized orientalist tropes depict Muslim adolescent girls as bodies to “save,” “fear,” and “Westernize.” An emerging group of YA novels presents a substantive challenge to this tradition by seeking to disrupt patriarchal, white normative conceptualizations of Western adolescence. Through an analysis of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s When Michael Met Mina and S. K. Ali’s Saints and Misfits, this article explores the ways in which the female Muslim adolescent body is constructed as a product of surveillance, problematizing the experiences of embodied surveillance and the complexities of being identified as a part of racialized surveillant assemblages.

Viral living.

As much of the world has gone into complete lockdown, woefully unprepared, many countries have turned to South Korea for answers, given its handling of COVID‐19 Rapid and widespread testing, expansive surveillance assemblage and selected quarantine practices are upheld by many countries and public health professionals as superb, a model to adopt But this is not South Korea’s only lesson Indeed, the world is on edge, scrambling in the here and now, but trying to figure out what happens to sociality going forward

Digital Sousveillance: A Network Analysis of the US Surveillant Assemblage

This paper introduces a new methodological approach to the study of surveillance that I call digital sousveillance— the co-optation of digital data and the use of computational methods and techniques to resituate technologies of control and surveillance of individuals to instead observe the organizational observer. To illustrate the potential of this method, I employ quantitative network analytic methods to trace the changes in and development of the vast network of public and private organizations involved in surveillance operations in the United States—what I term the “US surveillant assemblage”—from the 1970s to the 2000s. The results of the network analyses suggest that the US surveillant assemblage is becoming increasingly privatized and that the line between “public” and “private” is becoming blurred as private organizations are, at an increasing rate, partnering with the US government to engage in mass surveillance.

The Ambivalent Subject: Reconciling Contradictory Subjective Experiences of Surveillance

This article discusses the surveillant assemblage operating within the brandscape of two American mega–casinos and the ways in which the mechanisms of this surveillance impact the subjective experiences of older adults who frequent these facilities in retirement. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at these sites from 2015 to 2017, I argue that these immersive and all-inclusive spaces deploy a variety of intensive surveillance methods to ensure profitability but largely avoid many of the negative associations that this level of surveillance engenders in other settings. Older adults present an especially interesting demographic when examining intensive surveillance. While they often benefit from increased oversight and security, they are generally opposed to accessing it through other institutions, such as assisted living or nursing facilities. This apparent contradiction produces ambivalent subjects who dislike the notion of intrusive surveillance but simultaneously appreciate the benefits it can convey. This paper contributes to the ongoing dialogue in surveillance studies about the complexities of surveillant subjects, as well as presents a new perspective on the attitudes of senior citizens towards institutionalized surveillance in private and public space.

The authoritarian surveillant assemblage: Authoritarian state surveillance in Turkey

This article examines Turkey’s authoritarian state surveillance regime by developing the concept of the authoritarian surveillant assemblage (ASA), building on and expanding the concept of the surveillant assemblage (SA). Turkey’s ASA is the outcome of diverse surveillance systems, which continuously expand their reach, form new connections and incorporate new actors. These systems include a protest and dissent surveillance system, an internet surveillance system, a synoptic media surveillance system and an informant–collaborator surveillance system. Turkey’s ASA is controlled by the Turkish state and serves its repressive interests. Although pivotal in emphasizing the complexity of surveillance connections and increasing diversification of and collaboration among surveillance actors, the SA model of surveillance puts the main emphasis on decentralized, uncoordinated and multifaceted forms of surveillance, and does not offer sufficient analytical space to understand how an authoritarian state could coordinate diverse surveillance systems and use it for the overarching purpose of control. The article draws on Michael Mann’s theory of state power and the authoritarian state to address these limitations of the SA and conceptualize the ASA. It shows how the diverse systems of Turkey’s ASA work in concert with one another under the hierarchical command of Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) to control the population and suppress dissent.

Surveillance in China’s Xinjiang Region: Ethnic Sorting, Coercion, and Inducement

ABSTRACT Over the last decade, the Chinese Communist Party has built an unprecedented surveillant assemblage in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) with the region’s Uyghur Muslim minority as the chief target of augmented Party-state controls. This article interrogates the mechanics, logic and implications of Xinjiang’s surveillance society. It demonstrates how Party-state monitoring comes not only in the form of physical monitoring and forced kinship but also automated, technology-driven tools such as GPS tracking, voice and facial recognition technologies, machine learning algorithms, and other software and hardware. The Chinese Party-state employs surveillance to delineate ‘correct’ thought and behaviour among its citizens, and then persuade (through coercion and inducement) self-alignment with Party and Han-defined norms. The results are fewer spaces for autonomous, bottom-up social mobilization by the Uyghurs and other minorities, the abolition of non-Han cultural, linguistic and religious practices, and the erosion of social trust in Xinjiang society.

China’s Hukou Platform: Windows into the Family

When news media in the UK and US discuss China’s surveillance networks, it is often to imply that the Chinese government is creating a “techno-authoritarian state” to track and monitor its citizens. News outlets, however, are missing a larger point. The specific problem with China’s surveillance apparatus is not that it is technologically “totalizing” and “intrusive,” but that it relies on a newly digitized information platform that connects surveillance subjects to information about their households and family members, allowing the simultaneous identification and monitoring of everyone in each kinship network. Referred to as the Household Register or hukou, this platform is the backbone of China’s “surveillant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Until the late 1990s when it was digitalized, hukou was an individually separate and distinct surveillance system that contained both general and detailed information about a household and its members. With digitalization, hukou became a platform that integrates different computer systems and databases. CCTV surveillance that involves facial recognition and Internet surveillance practices are connected to, and supported by, information from hukou. In the case of CCTV surveillance, cameras equipped with facial recognition features match the face of surveillance subjects with their ID and trace them back to their families. As for Internet surveillance, the connection between hukou and surveillance subjects happens via telephone number. Access to the Internet and social media platforms such as WeChat, SinaWeibo, and e-mail services requires a telephone number purchased with a government-issued ID card, which is connected to a household register and, therefore, the telephone card owner’s family. Chinese law enforcement’s ability to treat individual Internet users also as “collective units” represents the most distinctive feature of Chinese surveillance, an unlimited source of coercion for the Communist Party to reproduce itself as the ruling party.

Platform Surveillance and Resistance in Iran and Russia: The Case of Telegram

Telegram messenger, created by an exiled Russian entrepreneur Pavel Durov, brands itself as a non-mainstream and non-Western guarantor of privacy in messaging. This paper offers an in-depth analysis of the challenges faced by the platform in Iran, with 59.5% of the population using its services, and in Russia, where Telegram is popular among the urban dissent. Both governments demanded access to the platform’s encrypted content and, with Durov’s refusal, took measures to ban it. Relying on the concept of surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), this paper portrays how authoritarian states disrupt, block, and police platforms that do not comply with their intrusive surveillance. Additionally, we consider the tools and actors that make up internet control assemblages as well as the resistance assemblages that take shape in response to such control.

Droning Discourse

How is gendered language utilised to position the United States in relation to target states to morally justify Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) strikes? State discourse of the US during the George W. Bush and Barrack Obama administrations projected an image of remotely piloted systems as mechanisms of masculine protection. US officials assert that RPAs not only protected Americans at home, they protected populations vulnerable to terrorist attack abroad. While the RPA itself was coded as masculine, RPA pilots are feminised because they are protected from battle while using the RPA. The RPA takes the position of the ultimate masculine protector and its operators become feminised in US rhetoric. The surveillant assemblage of pilot, RPA, and sensor-analytics systems sustaining the RPA, is examined through a rigorous discourse analysis of state officials’ statements during the Bush and Obama administrations. Statements are taken from a number of reputable publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, CNN, and BCC, among others. Statements are also taken from the report “Living Under Drones,” from the law schools of Stanford and New York University. This research begins to answer the question of how technology is gendered in relation to RPAs and RPA strikes.

Maroon In/Securities

This essay uses the concept of “Maroon in/securities” to refer to a number of creative practices of survival and a range of experiences and feelings that converge in the Maroon narrative. These two terms, when brought together, productively facilitate a dialogue between Maroon studies and security studies that might lead to keen interventions in both fields. The concept first allows us to talk about military praxis (and in particular, guerilla warfare) as a key part of the Maroon experience and narrative but also, at the same time, allows us to link this to strategies of survival. It discusses Maroon insecurity as a feeling forged in the unsettled intimacies of colonial relations. This feeling, in several ways, structured relations between Maroons and plantations and impacted the organization of daily life across both frontiers as well as the deployment of a range of surveillance assemblages. But even more than a feeling, Maroon insecurity might be said to describe an experience of precarity. This attention to these Maroon in/securities revises the grand narratives of marronage in heroic terms that have often been dominant in the cultural and popular imagination across a range of sites of representation. In attending to these different registers, the essay suggests that the concept allows us to think not only across Maroon studies and security studies but also across a range of experiences and relations that converge in the Maroon narrative and that resist and complicate easy categories and taxonomies.

“Warning! You’re entering a sick zone”

PurposeTraditional public health methods for tracking contagious diseases are increasingly complemented with digital tools, which use data mining, analytics and crowdsourcing to predict disease outbreaks. In recent years, alongside these public health tools, commercial mobile apps such as Sickweather have also been released. Sickweather collects information from across the web, as well as self-reports from users, so that people can see who is sick in their neighborhood. The purpose of this paper is to examine the privacy and surveillance implications of digital disease tracking tools.Design/methodology/approachThe author performed a content and platform analysis of two apps, Sickweather and HealthMap, by using them for three months, taking regular screenshots and keeping a detailed user journal. This analysis was guided by the walkthrough method and a cultural-historical activity theory framework, taking note of imagery and other content, but also the app functionalities, including characteristics of membership, “rules” and parameters of community mobilization and engagement, monetization and moderation. This allowed me to study HealthMap and Sickweather as modes of governance that allow for (and depend upon) certain actions and particular activity systems.FindingsDraw on concepts of network power, the surveillance assemblage, and Deleuze’s control societies, as well as the data gathered from the content and platform analysis, the author argues that disease tracking apps construct disease threat as omnipresent and urgent, compelling users to submit personal information – including sensitive health data – with little oversight or regulation.Originality/valueDisease tracking mobile apps are growing in popularity yet have received little attention, particularly regarding privacy concerns or the construction of disease risk.

Protesters’ Reactions to Video Surveillance of Demonstrations: Counter-Moves, Security Cultures, and the Spiral of Surveillance and Counter-Surveillance

This article analyses protesters’ reactions to police video surveillance of demonstrations in Germany. Theoretically, we draw on the concept of a “spiral of surveillance and counter-surveillance” to understand the interaction processes which—intentionally or not—contribute to the deepening of the “surveillant assemblage” in the field of protest policing. After introducing video surveillance and its importance for selective protest policing, we discuss concepts of counter-surveillance. Widening the individualist scope of former research on “neutralisation techniques,” collective and interactive dimensions are added to cover the full counter-surveillance repertoire. We identified six basic categories of counter-surveillance moves: consider cameras, disguise, attack, hide, sousveillance, and cooperation. They can be classified along the axes of (a) degree of cooperation with the police, and (b) directedness (inwards/outward). It becomes obvious that activists are not predominantly deterred by video surveillance but adapt to the situation. If and how certain counter-surveillance moves are applied depends on the degree of exposure, perceptions of conflict dynamics, political interpretations, and on how these factors are processed in the respective security cultures. Security cultures, which are grounded in the respective relations between protest groups and police, are collective sets of practices and interpretive patterns aimed at securing safety and/or anonymity of activists as well as making their claims visible. Thus, they are productive power effects, resulting from the very conditions under which protest takes place in contemporary surveillance societies. This article elaborates on these ambiguities and unintended effects with regard to sousveillance and disguise techniques, such as masking or uniform clothing. The analysis is based on qualitative data collected between 2011 and 2016 consisting of group discussions and interviews with activists from different political spectra, journalists, politicians, and police officers, as well as observations of demonstrations and document analyses of movement literature.

I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me. Understanding the Authoritarian Tendencies of the U.S. National Security State

George Orwell’s novel 1984 defined authoritarianism as a consequence of overarching surveillance in the modern state. Nearly 70 years later, the threat of tyranny reemerges in the present surveillance state—the U.S. Beyond the Orwellian concept of Big Brother to examine the U.S. national security state, this research examines the expansion of domestic surveillance in the post-9/11 age. Using a within-case comparative analysis of the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, it argues that institutional manipulation has forged the U.S. national security state into a surveillance heavy Banopticon (Bigo 2006). Though the latter operates to maintain state and citizen security, it undermines citizens’ freedoms through invasive surveillance policies which embolden state repression, despotism, and unconstitutional policy. Such authoritarian tendencies can be seen in the creation of surveillance under Bush and the expansive development of surveillant assemblages, surveillant culture, and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015) during the Obama era.

The racialized surveillant assemblage: Islam and the fear of terrorism

ABSTRACT Increasingly intense, multifaceted, and integrated forms of surveillance are a central feature of Western national security attempts to counter the violence of “Islamic terrorism.” However, there has been a lack of research examining contemporary regimes of surveillance as profoundly racialized. This study examines how counterterrorism efforts are underpinned by ill-conceived accounts of radicalization that preemptively construct Muslim migrants as a threat to national security, thereby justifying practices of mass surveillance that further propagate racist discourses of uncertainty and risk. We advance an analysis of a racialized surveillant assemblage, which is generative of mutable, algorithmically determined profiles of the Muslim-as-terrorist. Such a regime of mass surveillance effectively puts all Muslims under suspicion. We highlight that, paradoxically, mass data-mining operations stifle, rather than aid, the identification of actual terrorist threats. This conditions a paranoid surveillant racism, through which Muslim populations become modulated as an unknowable threat of death and destruction.

Digital Dystopia: Surveillance, Autonomy, and Social Justice in Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story

This essay proposes Gary Shteyngart's dystopian satire, Super Sad True Love Story, as an appropriate heuristic model for understanding surveillance and society in the twenty-first century. While George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four remains influential, many of his observations now seem anachronistic. Shteyngart, it is argued, offers a more appropriate vision for our world of decentralized digital "surveillant assemblages" that maintain a "control society" with little need for a Big Brother–like state. Unlike Orwell, who predicted the "proles" would be relatively free from surveillance, Shteyngart also emphasizes the disproportionate impact of surveillance on different sections of society. Finally, this essay turns to the thorny question of personal liberty and autonomy as a justification for the right to privacy and as a central theme within the dystopian genre. Many critics argue that dystopian literature is inherently reactionary because of its anti-utopianism and individualism. This essay, however, argues that the kind of autonomy that privacy activists and dystopian novelists most often wish to defend should be understood not as a self-sufficiency but as personhood that is socially embedded and politically engaged, and, crucially, a necessary but insufficient precondition for the resistance and refusal of digital mass surveillance.

Agency and the Digital Alter Ego

Wearables produce a body of data controlled by the user of the wearable, and the institution creating the device or collecting the device information, and community members engaging with the devices. This article examines the privacy policies of the top five wearable vendors of 2016 to analyze how corporations describe the bodies of digital data they amass through surveillant assemblage. Results indicate four points of agency which surround bodies of digital information: data as alter ego, data under personal control, institutional power, and community. Although scholarship often emphasizes that entities of power control information, and wearable companies emphasize the user's ability to control their information, there are multiple ways the authors can think about the data, and not addressing the complexity of data can lead to limited ideas about agency, identity, surveillance, and visibility.

Suspicion of money laundering reporting obligations: Auditor compliance, or sceptical failure to engage?

Money laundering has become of increasing concern to law makers in recent years, principally because of its associations with terrorism. Recent legislative changes in the United Kingdom mean that auditors risk becoming state law enforcement agents in the private sector. We examine this legislation from the perspective of the changing nature of the relationship between auditors and the state, and the surveillant assemblage within which this is located. Auditors are statutorily obliged to file Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) into an online database, ELMER, but without much guidance regarding how suspicion is determined. Criminal rather than civil or regulatory sanctions apply to auditors’ instances of non-compliance. This paper evaluates the surveillance implications of the legislation for auditors through lenses developed in the accounting and sociological literature by Brivot and Gendron, Neu and Heincke, Deleuze and Guattari, and Haggerty and Ericson. It finds that auditors are generating information flows which are subsequently reassembled into discrete and virtual ‘data doubles’ to be captured and utilised by authorised third parties for unknown purposes. The paper proposes that the surveillant assemblage has extended into the space of the auditor-client relationship, but this extension remains inhibited as a result of auditors’ relatively weak level of engagement in providing SARs, thereby pointing to a degree of resistance in professional service firms regarding the deployment of regulation that compromises the foundations of this relationship.

Counter-Mapping Surveillance: A Critical Cartography of Mass Surveillance Technology After Snowden

This article critically examines mass surveillance technology revealed by Snowden’s disclosures. It addresses that we do not only live in a society where surveillance is deeply inscribed but more urgently, that it is increasingly difficult to study surveillance when its technologies and practices are difficult to distinguish from everyday routines. Considerably, many of the technologies and systems utilised for surveillance purposes were not originally designed as proper surveillance technologies. Instead, they have effectively become surveillance technologies by being enrolled into a particular surveillant assemblage. Three contributions are made towards critical scholarship on surveillance, intelligence, and security. First, a novel empirical cartographic methodology is developed that employs the vocabularies of assemblages and actor–networks. Second, this methodology is applied to critically examine global mass surveillance according to Snowden. Multiple leaked data sources have been utilised to trace actors, their associations amongst each other, and to create several graphical maps and diagrams. These maps provide insights into actor types and dependence relations described in the original disclosed documents. Third, the analytical value of three ordering concepts as well as the logistics of surveillance are explored via notable actors and actor groups. In short, this contribution provides empirical cartographic methods, concepts, and analytical targets for critically examining surveillance technology and its particular compositions. It addresses challenges of resisting mass surveillance and some forms of data activism, and calls for the continuing proliferation of counter-maps to facilitate grounded critique, to raise awareness, and to gain a foothold for meaningful resistance against mass surveillance.