Police Visibility presents empirically grounded research into how police officers experience and manage the information politics of surveillance and visibility generated by the introduction of body cameras into their daily routines and the increasingly common experience of being recorded by civilian bystanders. Newell elucidates how these activities intersect with privacy, free speech, and access to information law and argues that rather than being emancipatory systems of police oversight, body-worn cameras are an evolution in police image work and state surveillance expansion. Throughout the book, he catalogs how surveillance generates information, the control of which creates and facilitates power and potentially fuels state domination. The antidote, he argues, is robust information law and policy that puts the power to monitor and regulate the police squarely in the hands of citizens.

A most timely publication in view of current concerns about snooping. Thomas Mathiesen describes how the major databases of Europe have become interlinked and accessible to diverse organizations and third States; meaning that, largely unchallenged, a 'Surveillance Monster' now threatens rights, freedoms, democracy and the Rule of Law. As information is logged on citizens' every move, data flows across borders via systems soon to be under central, global or even non-State control. Secret plans happen behind closed doors and 'systems func tionaries' become defensive of their own role. Goals expand and entire processes are shrouded in mystery. Alongside the integration of automated systems sits a weakening of State ties as the Prum Treaty and Schengen Convention lead to systems lacking transparency, restraint or Parliamentary scrutiny. As Mathiesen explains, the intention may have been fighting terrorism or organized crime, but the means have become disproportionate, unaccountable, over-expensive and lacking in results which ordinary vigilance and sound intelligence in communities should provide.

Video surveillance, public records, fingerprints, hidden microphones, RFID chips: in contemporary societies the intrusive techniques of surveillance used in daily life have increased dramatically. The "war against terror" has only exacerbated this trend, creating a world that is closer than one might have imagined to that envisaged by George Orwell in 1984.How have we reached this situation? Why have democratic societies accepted that their rights and freedoms should be taken away, a little at a time, by increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of surveillance?From the anthropometry of the 19th Century to the Patriot Act, through an analysis of military theory and the Echelon Project, Armand Mattelart constructs a genealogy of this new power of control and examines its globalising dynamic. This book provides an essential wake-up call at a time when democratic societies are becoming less and less vigilant against the dangers of proliferating systems of surveillance.

'This book will change the way you think about today's new media technologies' - Daniel J. Solove, author of ""The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age"". Whether you're purchasing groceries with your Safeway 'club card' or casting a vote on ""American Idol"", those data are being collected. From Amazon to iTunes, smart phones to GPS devices, Google to TiVo - all of these products and services give us an expansive sense of choice, access, and participation. Mark Andrejevic shows, however, that these continuously evolving new technologies have also been employed as modes of surveillance and control, most disturbingly exemplified by revelations about the NSA's secret monitoring of our phone calls, e-mails, and internet searches. Many contend that our proliferating interactive media empower individuals and democratize society. But, Andrejevic asks, at what cost? In ""iSpy"", he reveals that these and other highly advertised benefits are accompanied by hidden risks and potential threats that we all tend to ignore. His book, providing the first sustained critique of a concept that has been a talking point for twenty years, debunks the false promises of the digital revolution still touted by the popular media while seeking to rehabilitate, rather than simply write off, the potentially democratic uses of interactive media. Andrejevic opens up the world of digital rights management and the data trail each of us leaves - data about our locations, preferences, or life events that are already put to use in various economic, political, and social contexts. He notes that, while citizens are becoming increasingly transparent to private and public monitoring agencies, they themselves are unable to access the information gathered about them - or know whether it's even correct. (The watchmen, it seems, don't want to be watched.) He also considers the appropriation of consumer marketing for political campaigns in targeting voters and examines the implications of the Internet for the so-called War on Terror. In ""iSpy"", Andrejevic poses real challenges for our digital future. Amazingly detailed, compellingly readable, it warns that we need to temper our enthusiasm for these technologies with a better understanding of the threats they pose - to be able to distinguish between interactivity as centralized control and as collaborative participation.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 2001, surveillance has been put forward as the essential tool for the aEURO"war on terror,aEURO(t) with new technologies and policies offering police and military operatives enhanced opportunities for monitoring suspect populations. The last few years have also seen the publicaEURO(t)s consumer tastes become increasingly codified, with aEURO"data minesaEURO(t) of demographic information such as postal codes and purchasing records. Additionally, surveillance has become a form of entertainment, with aEURO"realityaEURO(t) shows becoming the dominant genre on network and cable television.In The New Politics of Surveillance and Visibility, editors Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson bring together leading experts to analyse how society is organized through surveillance systems, technologies, and practices. They demonstrate how the new political uses of surveillance make visible that which was previously unknown, blur the boundaries between public and private, rewrite the norms of privacy, create new forms of inclusion and exclusion, and alter processes of democratic accountability. This collection challenges conventional wisdom and advances new theoretical approaches through a series of studies of surveillance in policing, the military, commercial enterprises, mass media, and health sciences.

The United States has poured over a billion dollars into a network of interagency intelligence centers called "fusion centers." These centers were ostensibly set up to prevent terrorism, but politicians, the press, and policy advocates have criticized them for failing on this account. So why do these security systems persist? Pacifying the Homeland travels inside the secret world of intelligence fusion, looks beyond the apparent failure of fusion centers, and reveals a broader shift away from mass incarceration and toward a more surveillance- and police-intensive system of social regulation. Provided with unprecedented access to domestic intelligence centers, Brendan McQuade uncovers how the institutionalization of intelligence fusion enables decarceration without fully addressing the underlying social problems at the root of mass incarceration. The result is a startling analysis that contributes to the debates on surveillance, mass incarceration, and policing and challenges readers to see surveillance, policing, mass incarceration, and the security state in an entirely new light.

Examines how AI/Robotics is overwhelming the fundamental institutions of Western society. But are we prepared for the social impact of the vast changes soon to be upon us? - Half the world's workers could be replaced by machines within the next 30 years. The McKinsey Global Institute and Oxford University researchers predict massive job loss with 47% to 50% of US jobs eliminated by 2030 and up to 800 million more jobs destroyed worldwide. - Nor will the AI/robotics transformation produce large numbers of replacement jobs. The AI/robotics systems are already being designed to do those. No area of work is sacrosanct. Work opportunities are being eliminated from the most "intellectual" activities down to the basic areas of services and labor, including a range of professional occupations heretofore thought of as distinctly human: in middle management, finance, banking, insurance, medicine, high-tech, transportation, law and even the arts. Worse, it is playing out in the context of a set of critical issues. - Birth rates are plummeting below replacement levels in economically developed nations. People are living to ages wellbeyond historical averages. - At least fifty percent of Americans have little or nothing saved for retirement. - Poor and uneducated migrants are coming into Western nations at a time when the agricultural, construction and home care jobs migrants have traditionally filled are being increasingly replaced by robotic workers. - An already bankrupt US government is projected to experience annual deficits above $1 trillion for at least the next ten years. The US national debt is officially admitted to be $21 trillion, but is actually closer to $65 trillion dollars according to a former US Comptroller General. As AI/robotics eliminates jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels--underfunded or non-existent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction--will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence . All this will take place in an environment of increased AI-facilitated surveillance by governments, aggressive militarization using AI systems and autonomous weapons, and the degradation of of the world;s economic and political order. The final five chapters of CONTAGION offer possible solutions.

Threats of terrorism, natural disaster, identity theft, job loss, illegal immigration, and even biblical apocalypse - all are perils that trigger alarm in people today. Although there may be a factual basis for many of these fears, they do not simply represent objective conditions. Feelings of insecurity are instilled by politicians and the media, and sustained by urban fortification, technological surveillance, and economic vulnerability. ""Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity"" fuses advanced theoretical accounts of state power and neoliberalism with original research from the social settings in which insecurity dynamics play out in the new century. Torin Monahan explores the counterterrorism-themed show ""24"", Rapture fiction, traffic control centers, security conferences, public housing, and gated communities, and examines how each manifests complex relationships of inequality, insecurity, and surveillance. Alleviating insecurity requires that we confront its mythic dimensions, the politics inherent in new configurations of security provision, and the structural obstacles to achieving equality in societies.