Surveillant Assemblage Research Articles

Lawyers' Perspectives on Surveillance in U.S. Immigration Enforcement

ABSTRACTIncreasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data in surveillance by the U.S. immigration enforcement has led to important ethical considerations. This paper aims to explore the extent to which immigration lawyers are aware of surveillance technologies in their work with immigrants and the lawyers' potential concerns about surveillance technologies. Through a thematic analysis of six semi‐structured interviews with U.S. immigration lawyers and legal practitioners, this research reveals three overarching themes that describe lawyers' perspectives on surveillance: surveillance knowledge, surveillance assemblage, and surveillance implications. These themes are rooted in lawyers' understandings, experiences, and encounters with surveillance in their daily work with immigrant communities and contribute to existing work at the intersection of surveillance, information studies, and immigration. This work calls on information scholars to explore and expand on understandings of surveillance within U.S. immigration enforcement.

Appified surveillance: TripAdvisor as a site for entextualized surveillant assemblage

Appified surveillance: <i>TripAdvisor</i> as a site for entextualized surveillant assemblage

What Hath Dobbs Wrought? Abortion activism in precarious and punitive times

ABSTRACT In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022) overturned Roe v. Wade (1973), abolishing the constitutional right to abortion. Significant in its radical criminalization of abortion, Dobbs reinvigorated feminist activism for reproductive justice. Digital and mobile technologies are used in innovative ways by activists to organize, educate, and dispel counter-narratives about abortion, including feminist global networks that provide medication abortion and abortion storytelling through social media and media interventions. There continue to be analogue interventions that are the legacy of the 1960’s-era Jane Collective. In this vexatious legal environment, the communication technologies that facilitate abortion activism are weaponized by restrictionist actors to not only misinform, but also, through abortion surveillance, to track and curtail access to reproductive care by tapping into and exploiting what we term the personal data economy of reproductive health. Activists are thus countering the surveillant assemblages engaged by restrictionist states whose objective is to criminalize abortion access and care across borders. This article considers the historical and current media ecology surrounding reproductive health, care and justice, the technologies that have and continue to shape it, and the array of analogue, digital, mobile and hybrid feminist activist interventions emerging post-Roe.

GÖZETİM ASAMBLAJI: BUGÜNÜN DİSTOPYASI OLARAK DAVE EGGERS’ IN THE CIRCLE ADLI ROMANI ÜZERİNE ELEŞTİREL BİR OKUMA

Surveillance studies have gained momentum in today’s societies. These studies have put forward various theorems on surveillance since the states and/or corporations’ purposes of monitoring people are nebulous and open to discussion. However, the dystopian aspect of surveillance holds a common ground in most of these studies. No doubt, they have a fair share in their discussion since the growing fear of surveillance societies deeply instilled in the worlds of the futuristic-dystopian fiction has become a fact of our present world. That is, surveillance society has become today’s dystopia. Unlike the Foucaldian panopticon, surveillance in today’s society is relatively more complex and decentralized. This kind of surveillance is, what Haggerty and Ericson call, “the surveillant assemblage”. Dave Eggers’ The Circle is perhaps one of the best examples that portray it blatantly. As it shows us the complexities of the surveillant assemblage, it portrays its role to destroy individual zone by making them the willing agents to expose themselves to full transparency. This will eventually lead to the demise of the individual. With this purpose in mind, this research article examines Dave Eggers’s The Circle as today’s dystopia by giving utmost consideration to Haggerty and Ericson’s theory of surveillant assemblage and its discontents.

"Vse (Everyone) Online?": an exploration of the evolution of the Russian Federation's digital government portal during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The penetration of digital technologies in government has been met with both optimism and caution. This study seeks to contribute to this field by examining how digital government evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using media reports on Russia's government services portal (Gosuslugi), it finds that authorities made the portal a centerpiece of their pandemic response by enhancing its communicative, transactional, and participatory functions. These efforts aimed to not only house public health services on Gosuslugi, but to channel financial, commercial, and communication services through it, expanding Russia's digital corporatist state. While pandemic governance infused Gosuslugi with the qualities of a surveillant assemblage, it also made the portal into a space for novel forms of civic participation. Gosuslugi's evolution in this direction was limited, however, by security concerns as well as apprehension about digital participation. These findings highlight the importance of attending to political and cultural contexts in understanding digital government. In Russia, ruling elites' unwillingness to hold competitive elections and the public's lack of confidence in the political system limit the potential of digital government, regardless of its potential to manage crises.

Gods, Informers, and the Erotics of Surveillance: The Critique of Surveillance in King Lear

Ideologically, surveillance in early modern England was justified through claims that Providence guided the state counter-espionage apparatus, especially when preventing assassinations of Protestant English monarchs. King Lear critiques such idealized surveilling by conflating it with another, more quotidian and odious surveillance assemblage, the qui-tam system of surveillance-for-profit. This was the most notable, or notorious, feature of surveillance in Shakespeare’s England, and was perceived as having a corrupting influence on politics, economics, and the legal system, its abusive nature in Lear being conceptualized as sexually perverse. The play also stages the intersection of qui-tam surveillance-for-profit with religiously justified forms of surveilling, calling into question the validity of such rationalizations and linking the eroticized, abusive informing with more socially accepted modes of surveilling, including the benevolent oversight of divine justice. This article contributes to surveillance studies by arguing that the erotics of surveillance informs discussions of the relationship between surveillance and capital, of epistemologies and ideologies of surveillance, and of surveillance art, while suggesting that King Lear can enrich our understanding of the complexities of surveilling.

Surveillant assemblage: Overt, covert, movement and social surveillance in domestic and family violence in Singapore

This paper explores the role of surveillance technologies in domestic and family violence in Singapore. To do so, it outlines findings from a pilot research project which focused on technology and violence against women in Singapore and involved fourteen semi-structured interviews with frontline workers in the fields of domestic and family violence, sexual violence and LGBT support. Drawing from Dragiewicz et al.'s (2018) work on technology facilitated coercive control, this paper outlines how overt, covert, social and movement surveillance via digital, internet and communication technologies was used to control and constrain survivors. This article explores how the dynamics of domestic and family violence shaped the use of the surveillance technologies reported in these accounts. It also argues that wider gendered, global and local surveillance cultures generated important permissions which legitimated surveillance as a technology of control and reproduced women and girls as normalised surveillance subjects.

Artistic sousveillance in the societal surveillant assemblage – on Dragonfly Eyes and Eye Contact

ABSTRACT Built on theoretical frameworks of surveillant assemblage, sousveillance and other surveillance and biopolitical scholarship, I analyze two Chinese art projects, Dragonfly Eyes (2017), an experimental film by Xu Bing and Eye Contact (2016), a performance piece by Ge Yulu, as artistic sousveillance to resist surveillance biopower in a control society. I put the two works in dialogue as their shared yet different strategies critically engage with the surveillant assemblage, DIY technology and biopolitical production. Apart from problematizing the algorithmic violence and biopower of the global and also local surveillant assemblage, both art projects also contribute to more-than-human configurations of the surveillance system. I also point out that as these two surveillance artworks are symptomatic of surveillance systems, they may embody mimetic violence and post considerations for more ethical reflections in artistic sousveillance.

A Synthesized Approach to Explaining the Expansion of Surveillance: Risk Perceptions and Surveillance as a Positive Feedback Loop

This paper is a review of partially available surveillance literature which attempts to synthesize information about the field of surveillance within sociology. It will provide a clearer understanding of the expansion of surveillance. This paper argues that modern surveillance paradigms evolve much like a positive feedback loop in the biological sense, where increasing surveillance feeds back into the need for more surveillance, causing (if left unchecked) an exponential rise in the level of surveillance within society. This position is supported through evidence from a thought-provoking philosophical anecdote, surveillance assemblages, risk as a psychological and sociological process and its effect on surveillance, surveillance capitalism, and national security and its role in this expansion. Finally, this paper concludes with a possible recommendation for dealing with surveillance going forward, how to end the feedback loop, and shows where future research within sociology and surveillance as a focus could be taken.

Platform Pimps

&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D; This essay compares the complex hierarchy of surveillance embedded in the content sharing platform OnlyFans to Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon prison. OnlyFans creators have found a sweet spot in a novel surveillant assemblage, capitalizing on the voyeuristic tendencies of their followers who are subsequently subject to data surveillance by the platform and its intermediaries. In the classic panopticon, prisoners are held captive in a circular room under the gaze of a single guard in a tower, unable to determine if and when they are being watched. In the inverted OnlyFans panopticon, the content creator stands alone in the tower and captivates their invisible audience below. Each creator maintains a single porn-opticon (pornographic-opticon) to be ultimately surveilled by the platform, a faceless, bodiless puppet master running the show from behind the scenes. Through this analogy, this essay explores the particular set of affordances that set OnlyFans and its creators apart from other platforms and forms of sex work.&#x0D; &#x0D; &#x0D;

Facebook and the Surveillance Assemblage: Policing Black Lives Matter Activists &amp; Suppressing Dissent

This article outlines the “social media surveillance assemblage” (Trottier 2011: 63) on Facebook, including its deployment against social activists. In particular, it traces intersecting, dynamic, and opaque data flows among Facebook, third parties, and law enforcement that undermine Black Lives Matter activists and suppress social dissent in the United States. Sources of data include interviews with academics, lawyers, and researchers as well as an in-depth examination of platform policies, Freedom of Information Act requests/lawsuits, and news articles. Theories of the surveillance assemblage (Trottier 2011), the surveillance-industrial complex (Hayes 2012), and surveillance capitalism (Zuboff 2015, 2019) frame the interviews and documents, demonstrating the multi-faceted nature of social media surveillance. Providing an interdisciplinary focus, this article engages with the fields of private policing, surveillance studies, and social movements literature. The article’s empirical data contribute to the existing literature by stressing the role of third parties and providing insights into the nontransparent system of surveillance on social media.

License to Heal: Understanding a Healthcare Platform Organization as a Multi-Level Surveillant Assemblage

Platform organizations bring renewed attention to power disparities and risks in the rise of surveillance capitalism. However, such critical accounts provide a partial understanding of the complexity of surveillance phenomena in such shifting socio-technical and digital environments. The findings from a netnographic investigation of a healthcare platform organization, PatientsLikeMe, unravel how platforms become the locus where multi-level flows of surveillance converge, thereby constituting what we identify as a surveillant assemblage. We develop a comprehensive approach for understanding how platforms constitute a dynamic crossroads of micro-, meso- and macro-surveillance phenomena within and beyond the online communities they create. This study highlights this surveillant assemblage’s emerging practices and potentially empowering outcomes that enable multi-stakeholder involvement in big data and knowledge generation in healthcare. Broader implications of multi-level surveillance in and through platforms are discussed.

Mutual surveillance on Airbnb

Digital technology affords new means of controlling and managing. The platform economy relies on complex surveillance techniques to analyze, control, and manipulate on the basis of reviews, evaluations, and other volunteered data. This paper conceptualizes mechanisms of surveillance, with a focus on Airbnb. It sets out with a discussion of trust and reputation-building to then analyze the mechanisms employed to control guests and accommodation providers. Findings suggest that communication techniques, technological tools, services, and policies form a surveillant assemblage. Mutual evaluations are engineered as mechanisms supportive of trust. The article contributes to the discussion of emerging complexities of these forms of control, in tourism and for society more generally.

The Library/Surveillance Interface

AbstractFew topics are more often discussed than surveillance, particularly in the context of surveillance technologies that reflect structural inequities. There is space, however, to bring more discussion of surveillance tech into the library literature. At the same time, literature on digital surveillance and associated systems such as Big Data, surveillance capitalism, and platform capitalism often discuss these phenomena as if they are novel rather than iterations of long‐standing inequitable circumstances. We propose that a dialogue between surveillance literature and critical library literature will benefit both areas: theories from the surveillance domain can strengthen examinations of structural oppression in libraries while theories from critical library literature can strengthen acknowledgment of surveillance techs' historical roots. Moreover, overlap exists between concepts used in surveillance and library literature, including concerns about neutrality and classification practices. Therefore, after reviewing surveillance theories and their applicability to libraries, we demonstrate how these scholarly areas may strengthen each other, with three major consequences: (a) moving library literature beyond considerations of the panopticon in favor of the surveillant assemblage; (b) recognizing that surveillance tech is a hyper‐visible form of historical oppression; and (c) acknowledging that the library ethos is critical to any fight for justice within information science.

Handling COVID-19 with big data in China: increasing ‘governance capacity’ or ‘function creep’?

ABSTRACT Building a national system of social governance (guojia zhili tixi), which is the long-running governance dream of Xi Jinping, has triggered the creation of China’s ‘smart state’ using the tools of new information technologies to advance governance capacity (zhili nengli). These systems were already deployed nationally when the COVID-19 pandemic hit China, but were connected at a lesser capacity, targeting specific domains of security, industry or government administration. In response to the crisis, multiple technologies have been merged, exceeding the scope of their originally intended functions. This is known as function creep, when surveillant technologies remain functional past achievement of their intended purpose, or surveillant assemblages, where multiple surveillant technologies are combined. As more countries turn to digitalisation to increase public security and intensify social and market governance, the expansion of surveillant functions in China and their now-palpable effects on people’s lives raises new and pressing questions for scholars and decision-makers alike.

Smart Cities as Surveillance Theatre

In this opinion piece, we challenge the dominating view that surveillance in smart cities is driven by surveillance capitalism alone. Whilst this literature unpicks important factors and trends, we argue that a focus on surveillance capitalism as a sole driver risks ignoring the more intricate realities of surveillance assemblages. They are often propelled by many different desires and power relations (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). We argue for a more nuanced analysis of the drivers instead, taking into account practices in other countries beyond the United States and the United Kingdom. We argue that much of the existent research skews the picture due to inherent bias, and seldom observed drivers are revealed when smart city developments in different countries such as Belgium and Brazil are considered. We suggest that what we call “surveillance theatre,” the performative uses of surveillance that characterize security discourses, is an overlooked yet important driver of smart city development. Such a driver is particularly evident when it comes to security discourses.

Infrastructural obfuscation: unpacking the carceral logics of the Ring surveillant assemblage

ABSTRACT Amazon’s Ring relies on infrastructural obfuscation to hide their infrastructures through urban camouflage (as doorbells, floodlights, sensors) while simultaneously expanding the carceral state and extending the industrial police-surveillant state. Through a critical analysis of the Ring surveillant assemblage, this paper reveals the way Ring and its associated apps produce fear and paranoia of the racialized Other, promote community buy-in that more surveillance will improve safety, while obscuring private partnerships with local law enforcement. I argue Ring cannot be viewed in isolation from its entangled corporate owner, Amazon, which relies on an ever-expanding infrastructural network, including surveillance of their highly prized package delivery service. Ring is more than individual community members installing doorbells with cameras that extend beyond their property into public space; it is the blurring of boundaries between police work and civilian surveillance, the reliance on obscured digital infrastructures that hide to whom and what users are connecting when they install a Ring device, and the expansion of Amazon’s vast infrastructural power. By recentering critique on the infrastructural backbone, made up of discourses and fixtures, this paper argues for the need for infrastructural accountability from companies such as Amazon, who not only profit from fear, but actively reproduce structural violence through their data infrastructures.

Three Sides of the Same Coin: Datafied Transparency, Biometric Surveillance, and Algorithmic Governmentalities

This article explores how datafied transparency resulting from the use of facial recognition technologies creates different risks and dynamics of power and control. Theoretically, the article draws on Foucauldian studies and assemblage theory and analyzes how the power specific to facial recognition technologies rests on algorithmic governmentalities and interaction of humans and technologies in surveillant assemblages. Empirically, the article examines facial recognition legislation and its use in different corporate and institutional sectors around the world. The article concludes that datafied transparency is inseparable from the operation of surveillant assemblages and algorithmic governmentalities, and that algoactivism could be one form of resistance to counter such forms of power and control.

Pushing the limits of accountability: big data analytics containing and controlling COVID-19 in South Korea

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to illustrate how big data analytics pushed the limits of individuals' accountability as South Korea tried to control and contain coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).Design/methodology/approachThe authors draw upon Deleuzo-Guattarian framework elaborating how a surveillant assemblage was rhizomatically created and operated to monitor a segment of the population holding them accountable. Publicly available secondary data, such as press release from the government and media coverage, were used.FindingsA COVID-19 Smart Management System and a Self-Quarantine Safety Protection App constituted a surveillance assemblage operating in a “state-form”. This comprises the central government departments, local councils, policing systems, providers of telecommunication and financial services, and independent groups of people. This assemblage pushed the limits of accountability as individuals who tested positive or might bear possible future risks of the infection and transmission were held accountable for their locations and health conditions.Practical implicationsPolicymakers may consider constructing this type of state-form for containing and controlling pandemics, such as COVID-19, while dealing with the issue of undermined privacy.Social implicationsThe mass may consider to what extent individuals' personal information should be protected and how to hold the governments accountable for the legitimate use of such information.Originality/valueWhile accountability studies have largely focussed on formal organisations, the authors illustrated how a broader context of a state-form, harnessing big data analytics, pushes the limits of accountability.

“No shit Sherlock”! Canine DNA and policing public space

PurposeThis paper argues that this animal surveillance has the potential for considerable function creep going far outside the scheme's original objectives and acts as a conduit for more problematic surveillance of humans. This results in social sorting of people with subsequent unforeseen consequences leading to discrimination and curtailment of freedoms for both animals and their owners. Ultimately this opens people up to further intrusive targeting by commercial interests and, more alarmingly, scrutiny from law enforcement agencies.Design/methodology/approachAn empirical study examining an initiative involving the collection of canine DNA sources data from publicly available Cabinet, Select Committee and Scrutiny Committee records from the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD). It also draws on news media sources, publicity material from the company running the scheme and from this and other local authorities. Methods include analysis of documents, semiotic and discourse analysis.FindingsThis paper highlights the importance of animals to surveillance studies and examines the extent to which animals are a part of the surveillant assemblage in their own right. It also demonstrates how nonhuman animals extend the reach of the surveillant assemblage.Social implicationsThe scheme was called a badge of considerate dog ownership, yet it is one that can be franchised to tie up with diverse income streams being described as advantageous in the age of austerity. In 2017, it was reported that this scheme was to be rolled out in other areas and was moving from being voluntary to being mandatory with the enforcement of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs). These have been described as “geographically defined ASBOS” that have come into force under the Anti-social Behaviour and Policing Act (2014); they often work to criminalise activities that were not previously considered illegal.Originality/valueIn the theorising of surveillance, animals have been largely overlooked. Epidemiological studies proliferate, yet the role of animals in many aspects of everyday surveillance has been neglected.