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Books > Business & Economics > Industry & industrial studies > Service industries > Security services > Surveillance services
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.
Chapter One reviews basis elementary of residence security,
classical residence security and health care surveillance system
versus computer vision technique system, as well as directional
versus omnidirectional imaging. Chapter Two provides practical
guidelines for specialists who design, tune and evaluate video
surveillance systems based on the automated tracking of moving
objects. Chapter Three presents a methodology for tracker
evaluation that quantifies performance against variations of the
tracker input (data and configuration).
By 1990 the Berlin Wall had fallen and the East German state
security service folded. During forty years, they had amassed more
than a billion pages in manila files detailing the lives of their
citizens. Overnight, almost a hundred thousand Stasi employees,
many of them experienced officers with access to highly personal
information, found themselves unemployed. This is the story of what
they did next. Former FBI Agent Ralph Hope uses critical insider
knowledge and access to Stasi records to track and expose
ex-officers working everywhere from the Russian energy sector to
the police and even the government department tasked with
prosecuting Stasi crimes. He examines why the key players have
never been called to account and, in doing so, asks whether we have
really learned from the past at all. He highlights a man who
continued to fight the Stasi for thirty years after the Wall fell,
and reveals a truth that many don't want spoken. The Grey Men comes
as an urgent warning from the past at a time when governments the
world over are building an unprecedented network of surveillance
over their citizens.
Political discourse on immigration in the United States has largely
focused on what is most visible, including border walls and
detention centers, while the invisible information systems that
undergird immigration enforcement have garnered less attention.
Tracking the evolution of various surveillance-related systems
since the 1980s, Borderland Circuitry investigates how the
deployment of this information infrastructure has shaped
immigration enforcement practices. Ana Muniz illuminates three
phenomena that are becoming increasingly intertwined: digital
surveillance, immigration control, and gang enforcement. Using
ethnography, interviews, and analysis of documents never before
seen, Muniz uncovers how information-sharing partnerships between
local police, state and federal law enforcement, and foreign
partners collide to create multiple digital borderlands. Diving
deep into a select group of information systems, Borderland
Circuitry reveals how those with legal and political power deploy
the specter of violent cross-border criminals to justify intensive
surveillance, detention, brutality, deportation, and the
destruction of land for border militarization.
In spite of Edward Snowden's disclosures about government abuses of
dragnet communication surveillance, the surveillance industry
continues to expand around the world. Many people have become
resigned to a world where they cannot have a reasonable expectation
of privacy. The author looks at what can be done to rein in these
powers and restructure how they are used beyond the limited and
often ineffective reforms that have been attempted. Using southern
Africa as a backdrop, and its liberation history, Jane Duncan
examines what an anti-capitalist perspective on intelligence and
security powers could look like. Are the police and intelligence
agencies even needed, and if so, what should they do and why? What
lessons can be learnt from how security was organised during the
struggles for liberation in the region? Southern Africa is seeing
thousands of people in the region taking to the streets in
protests. In response, governments are scrambling to acquire
surveillance technologies to monitor these new protest movements.
Southern Africa faces no major terrorism threats at the moment,
which should make it easier to develop clearer anti-surveillance
campaigns than in Europe or the US. Yet, because of tactical and
strategic ambivalence about security powers, movements often engage
in limited calls for intelligence and policing reforms, and fail to
provide an alternative vision for policing and intelligence.
Surveillance and Intelligence in Southern Africa examines what that
vision could look like.
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The Right to Privacy
(Hardcover)
Samuel D. Warren, Louis D. Brandeis; Foreword by Steven Alan Childress
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R572
Discovery Miles 5 720
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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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.
What limits, if any, should be placed on a government's efforts to
spy on its citizens in the interests of national security? Spying
on foreigners has long been regarded as an unseemly but necessary
enterprise. Spying on one's own citizens in a democracy, by
contrast, has historically been subject to various forms of legal
and political restraint. For most of the twentieth century these
regimes were kept distinct. That position is no longer tenable.
Modern threats do not respect national borders. Changes in
technology make it impractical to distinguish between 'foreign' and
'local' communications. And our culture is progressively reducing
the sphere of activity that citizens can reasonably expect to be
kept from government eyes. The main casualty of this transformed
environment will be privacy. Recent battles over privacy have been
dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance or
CCTV; the coming years will see debates over data-mining and
biometric identification. There will be protests and lawsuits,
editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. Those
battles are worthy. But they will all be lost. Modern threats
increasingly require that governments collect such information,
governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens
increasingly accept that they will collect it. The point of this
book is to shift focus away from questions of whether governments
should collect information and onto more problematic and relevant
questions concerning its use. By reframing the relationship between
privacy and security in the language of a social contract, mediated
by a citizenry who are active participants rather than passive
targets, the book offers a framework to defend freedom without
sacrificing liberty.
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