Pluto Press, 2003. — 181 p.
The Intensification of Surveillance Crime Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age edited by by Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster was produced following a conference entitled ‘The intensification of surveillance: Implications for crime, terrorism and warfare’ held at the University of Birmingham in March 2002. Our public and private lives are under surveillance as never before. Whether we are shopping with a credit card, walking down the street or emailing a colleague at work, our activities are monitored. Surveillance has become more routine, more integrated and more intrusive. It is vital to ask how and why this should be so, and assess what the consequences are. Since September 11th 2001 surveillance has intensified further. Yet although individuals, groups, governments and states are more closely monitored, our security is not assured. The contributors to this volume explore the vast range of issues related to increased surveillance. What is going on in an area clouded by secrecy from the state and complacent reassurances from corporations? How do we track suspects and combat crime without also eroding our civil liberties and sacrificing our rights to privacy? Does electronic tagging of prisoners work? What are retailers up to with 'lifestyle profiling'? Focusing on these and other issues such as paedophilia, money-laundering, information warfare, cybercrime, and related legislation, this book spotlights benefits and costs of surveillance, and suggests how it is likely to develop in the future. Experts from Europe and America offer an international perspective on what is now a worldwide issue, making this book of interest to a wide range of people including legal practitioners, law enforcement agencies, policymakers and students across the social sciences.
Surveillance involves the observation, recording and categorization of information about people, processes and institutions. It calls for the collection of information, its storage, examination and – as a rule – its transmission. It is a distinguishing feature of modernity, though until the 1980s the centrality of surveillance to the making of our world had been underestimated in social analysis. Over the years surveillance has become increasingly systematic and embedded in everyday life, particularly as state (and, latterly, supra-state) agencies and corporations have strengthened and consolidated their positions. More and more we are surveilled in quite routine activities, as we make telephone calls, pay by debit card, walk into a store and into the path of security cameras, or enter a library through electronic turnstiles. It is important that this routine character of much surveillance is registered, since commentators so often focus exclusively on the dramatic manifestations of surveillance such as communications interceptions and spy satellites in pursuit of putative and deadly enemies.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
The Intensification of Surveillance
Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster
Surveillance after September 11, 2001
David Lyon
Data Mining and Surveillance in the Post-9/11Environment
Oscar H. Gandy
Joined-up Surveillance: The Challenge to Privacy
Charles D. Raab
‘They Don’t Even Know We’re There’: The Electronic Monitoring of Offenders in England and Wales
Mike Nellis
Information Warfare, Surveillance and Human Rights
Frank Webster
Mapping out Cybercrimes in a Cyberspatial Surveillant Assemblage
David S. Wall
The Constant State of Emergency?: Surveillance after 9/11
David Wood, Eli Konvitz and Kirstie Ball
Notes on Contributors
Bibliography
Index