Ad Hoc Sessions at the International Sociological Association World Congress, Durban, South Africa
Security, Surveillance and Social Sorting
July 25-26, 2006, 18:00-20:00
Convenor: David Lyon, Queen's Research Chair, Sociology, Director, The Surveillance Project, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada
Security requirements have been raised to a high level of priority in nation-states around the world, following the attacks of 9/11. The resulting increase in the routine surveillance of citizens, and especially of travelers, raises questions of sociological interest regarding the intensified means of technology-dependent governance common to many countries. How effective are these new surveillance measures in procuring security? By what means are risks assessed and threats prioritized? What are the effects on civil liberties of techniques that rely on discriminatory categories? The quality of social existence in a globalizing world is affected directly by the automated identification and social sorting systems that are proliferating, especially at borders, but also within the routines of everyday life. This Ad Hoc session will examine these processes with a view to fostering further international comparative understanding of contemporary surveillance.
Ad Hoc 1: Security, surveillance and social sorting
Session 1: Security, risk, profiling and identification post 9/11
Date: Tuesday, 25 July 2006
Time: 18:00-20:00
Location: Durban Exhibition Centre, DEC, Room SS9
Authors and Papers
Ad Hoc 1: Security, surveillance and social sorting
Session 2: Surveillance and CCTV in Policing and Everyday Life
Date: Wednesday, 26 July 2006
Time: 18:00-20:00
Location: Durban Exhibition Centre, DEC, Room SS9
Authors and Papers
Abstracts
Session 1: Security, risk, profiling and identification post 9/11
David Lyon (Queen's University, Canada):
Security, Surveillance and Social Sorting
Security requirements have been raised to a high level of priority in nation-states around the world, following the attacks of 9/11. The resulting increase in the routine surveillance of citizens, and especially of travelers, raises questions of sociological interest regarding the intensified means of technology-dependent governance common to many countries. How effective are these new surveillance measures in procuring security? By what means are risks assessed and threats prioritized? What are the effects on civil liberties of techniques that rely on discriminatory categories? The quality of social existence in a globalizing world is affected directly by the automated identification and social sorting systems that are proliferating, especially at borders, but also within the routines of everyday life. This paper addresses these questions with reference to two aspects of post-9/11 security and surveillance; the proliferation of new airport security measures and the emergence of the globalized ID. In both cases standards are being harmonized such that similar measures are in place at many airports round the world and similar national ID card-and-registry systems are being established, each with capacities for the cross-national sharing of personal data. The implications for governance in general and for civil liberties in particular are explored and subjected to critique.
Download PDF version of paper here (password protected)
David Lyon
Department of Sociology
Queen's University, Kingston
Ontario, Canada
Heather Cameron (Technical University of Berlin, Germany):
Automated screening: London, Amsterdam, Beijing
In this paper I will discuss three world cities which have recently implemented surveillance systems at their thresholds. Beijing installed a thermal imaging system to help identify possible SARS carriers at the Beijing Capital International Airport in April 2003. London introduced congestion charging and new enforcements for traffic offences in the spring of 2002. The British system watches Londoners in cars, buses, and taxis through static, Closed Caption Television (CCTV) and outward looking bus-mounted camera systems. Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport launched a pilot project to test their iris-scanning border-passage technology Privium in October 2001. I will discuss how each of these systems sets a new standard for automated screening activity and each raises questions about the enforcement of norms, the specificity of identification, and the possibility for discrimination in systems built to minimize the need for human contact.
Download PDF version of paper here (password protected)
Heather Cameron
Centre for Technology and Society
Technical University of Berlin
Berlin, Germany
Dean Wilson (Monash University, Australia):
Biometrics, Citizenship and the Australian Border
In line with many other nation states, Australia has witnessed considerably expanded deployment of biometric identification technologies since 9/11. Since 2001 there has been significant expansion of biometric identification technologies that seek to fix individual identities through the use of physical identifiers such as iris patterns and fingerprints. This is most evident at the borders of nation states, where biometric passports and registration systems are in the process of 'social sorting'. This Australian case study considers the socio-cultural and political implications of biometric technologies. This study will utilize two case studies: the SmartGate biometric traveller identification system trialed at Sydney airport and the use of biometric identifiers to denote "non-citizens" stipulated in the Migration Legislation Amendment (Identification and Authentication) Act 2004. The paper will examine the arguments advanced for the technology by key claims makers and the discursive construction of the technology evident through media reporting. This paper argues that biometric technologies as deployed in Australia are pivotal to emerging cultures of securitisation that are enacted both internally and externally. Biometrics have thus coincided and contributed to the construction of sharply polarised notions of inclusion (citizenship) and exclusion (non-citizen). In Australia the efficacy of biometric technologies has been less significant than their powerful signifying function in suggesting the continued capacity of the Australian state to demarcate and inscribe the borders of the nation in the global era.
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Dean Wilson
Lecturer in Criminal Justice and Criminology
School of Political and Social Inquiry
Monash University, Caulfield, Australia
Mun Cho Kim (Korea University, South Korea)
Dialectics of Security Need and Risk Awareness
While 'security' has long been regarded as an ordinary concept describing the state of physical, material, institutional or psychological comfort, 'risk' represents an analytical term that enables us to discuss the negative aspects of our life condition. After the seminal work of C. Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies in 1984, 'risk' has become one of popular topics of academic discourse. Moreover, thanks to the accomplishment of several leading scholars of reflexive modernity, 'risk' emerges as a keyword that can account for many malfunctions of 'high modern society.' In contrast, 'security' remains to be a simple denotative term lacking analytic implications. Due to this pragmatic disparity, the interplay between 'security' and 'risk' has not been fully explored yet. As to a selection of risk disputes ranging from natural disaster through nuclear plant, GMO to high-tech medical treatment, a case study to investigate the dialectical trajectory of security and risk is conducted. Just as the developmental process between detection and labelling in labelling theory of criminal behavior, so does the association of security need and risk awareness tend to produce a strong confluent effect of exponential growth. Thus, advanced surveillance/sorting technologies are taken to be effective means to cope with increasing demand for 'societal security' in the age of high-risk society.
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Mun Cho Kim
Sociology
Korea University
Seoul, South Korea
Minas Samatas, (University of Crete, Greece)
Security and Surveillance in Athens 2004 Olympics: Some lessons from a troubled story
This paper presents an ongoing sociological study of the Athens 2004 Olympics' security and surveillance, the first summer Olympic Games after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. International interconnected politico-economic, governmental and corporate interests have exploited real and perceived terrorist threats to significantly prescribe extremely high security requirements and a triple more expensive security budget- compared to previous Sydney 2000 and Salt Lake 2002 winter Olympics- in a small and financially weak state, like Greece. Athens 2004 Olympics, as a mega-sports and mega-media event was used as a testing ground for the latest anti-terrorist super panoptic technology, which actually failed. In fact, the dubious security-surveillance system (C4I) was impossible to work on time for the Games; hence the security of the last Athens Olympics was mainly based on conventional means. Using primary and secondary sources the paper inquires the interesting but troubled story of the deficient Olympics security system; also its overall mixed impact on policing and civil liberties, and the Greek citizens' post-Olympics anti-surveillance concerns. One of the concluding arguments is that the successful Athens 2004 Olympics were actually more secure not merely due to the latest and costly 'super panopticism' but substantially due to the friendly relations of Greece with Moslem and Arab nations, with Palestinians and Israeli authorities, and especially to the non military involvement of Greece in the Iraq war.
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Minas Samatas
Department of Sociology
University of Crete
Rethymno, Crete, Greece
Session 2: Surveillance and CCTV in Policing and everyday life
Nils Zurawski with Stefan Czerwinski (University of Hamburg, Germany)
Video Surveillance and Everyday Life: Assessments of CCTV and the cartography of socio-spatial imaginations
CCTV has become the icon of surveillance, both in popular culture as well as in actual politics. The prothesitc form penetrating our public spheres and spaces are surrounded by much discussion - especially concerning crime and crime prevention. Although much research has been undertaken into the matter, politicians and the general public do still argue on a very simple level about the pros and cons of CCTV and other forms of public and private video surveillance. From a study that was aimed at the people's assessments and knowledge of CCTV a more differentiated analysis can be drawn. Rather than an emphatic support or a total denial of CCTV, many people are much more contradictory in their views, often based on an insufficient knowledge of how the technology and whole systems in fact work. In relation to issues such as in/security, spatial mobility and social stereotypes these assessment and its consequences concerning personal behaviour and attitude towards CCTV might give some interesting insights and are worth discussing in a general framework of surveillance and people's everyday lives, of which CCTV might become one feature.
Download PDF version of paper here (password protected)
Nils Zurawski
University of Hamburg
Institute of Criminology and Sociology
Hamburg, Germany
Ann Rudinow Saetnan (Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Norway)
Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear? Assessing technologies for diagnosis of security risks
After tragic events - the murder of James Bulger; 9/11; 7/7 - surveillance technologies tend to show a market boom. Demand for surveillance technologies surges under the assumption that these technologies would accurately identify only those guilty of serious crimes, thus not intruding on the privacy of the majority of citizens. But how accurate are surveillance technologies as crime "diagnostic" tools? Even the latest surveillance technologies, technologies that we associate with modernity and science, technologies such as CCTV, facial recognition, or DNA identification - these technologies have not been tested for accuracy, at least not in the manner we expect for medical diagnostic technologies. This paper first explains the questions that tests of medical technologies are expected to answer: How sensitive is the test, i.e. how many of those affected by a given disease does the test identify? How specific is it, i.e. how many unaffected by the disease does the test show as healthy? Given the incidence of the disease, what then is the value of a positive or negative test result? Many are surprised to find that even for tests with over 90% sensitivity and specificity, the majority of test positive results are false. Using value estimates for facial recognition and DNA identification, the paper then estimates what the answers to these questions would be for crime surveillance technologies. Again, the vast majority of test positive results would be false. In other words, even those of us with "nothing to hide" have much to fear from crime surveillance technologies.
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Ann Rudinow-Saetnan
Sociology
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Oslo, Norway
Torin Monahan (Arizona State University, USA)
Neoliberal Security and the Regulation of Space
Modern surveillance and security regimes increasingly function as extensions of the neoliberal state. Surveillance practices, fueled by the ongoing construction of criminal or terrorist threats, serve to regulate social, symbolic, and material boundaries in obvious places such as airports but also throughout everyday life. In urban settings, boundary regulation may be seen most clearly with the rise of private security forces and fortified enclaves, such as gated communities, but little attention has been paid to the ways in which surveillance systems contribute to spatial exclusions by means of their integration into urban space and their enforcement of political norms. Drawing upon interviews with city engineers, police, private security personnel, and residents in Phoenix, Arizona (a large and diverse city in the southwestern United States), this paper shows how surveillance systems are interpreted as boundary drawing devices that offer a sense of stability in what is perceived to be an unstable world. Instability, in this broader context, is less about terrorist threats than it is about economic inequalities brought about by the dismantling of social programs and rise in social-spatial segregation. As with gates and walls, electronic surveillance operates as a less visible but similarly political fortification of urban space, presenting durable barriers to social inclusion within cities.
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Torin Monahan
Arizona State University
School of Justice & Social Inquiry
Tempe, AZ, USA
Christine Hentschel (University of Leipzig, Germany):
Making (in)visible: CCTV, "living cameras," and their objects in a Post Apartheid Metropolis
"Go inside," cries the police officer to the young men drinking outside a liquor outlet on a Friday night in Durban's entertainment mile. Certain forms of "unsocial behaviour" seem to matter less when they are beyond public visibility, especially in prestigious areas. The city's project to cover the central Durban area with CCTV systems indicates the opposite tendency: namely "the will to see," a logic that is also reflected by the project to initiate crime-mapping expertise for the South African Police and the attempt to bring more drinking outlets under better control. There are two completely opposite logics of dealing with social issues, one making invisible (i.e. pushing the ungovernable off the streets), the other making visible (e.g. observing, mapping, classifying). I intend to explore in this paper how these logics interact within the management of "crime and grime" (Samara 2005) in contemporary Durban. It will be shown that the presence of cameras, guards, and policemen also mark a place as worth being watched, while others, less prestigious, "dysfunctional" are neglected or labelled as "breeding grounds of crime." This has consequences for the categorisation of people and their control. "How are you watched?" might become one of the key questions to measure the different qualities of (D)urban citizenship.
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Christine Hentschel
Department of African Studies
University of Leipzig, Germany
Nelson Arteaga Botello (Independent University of the State of Mexico, Mexico):
Surveillance and Social Control of the Violence in Mexico
Electronic surveillance has a significantly expanded in Mexico over the last ten years. This represented a change in the forms of social organization, in the measure in which electronic surveillance present two faces: care and control. On the one hand to reduce the risks; but the other, the administration of the population. The document examines, in the case of an urban municipality of Mexico, how the definition of a problematization as a mode of reading violence on the part of local authorities and society, constitutes an orchestration of power relations that determine the organization of electronic surveillance, and institutionalizes certain logic of cultural and social exclusion.
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Nelson Arteaga Botello
Independent University of the State of Mexico
Mexico
Pete Fussey (University of East London, UK):
Blurring the boundaries of transgression? Surveillance and counter-terrorism in London
This paper traces the growing adoption of existing infrastructures and ideas to tackle 'conventional' forms of criminality towards averting terrorism in London's public spaces. A central theme here regards the increasing orientation of these controlling strategies around (progressively asocial forms of) technological surveillance. In doing so the ways in which CCTV surveillance has been utilised during a range of terrorist campaigns in London over the past 15 years is examined. In particular, this applies to CCTV and the reconfiguration of public space following the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) bombings of the Square Mile and Docklands areas of the city during the 1990s; the use of CCTV during police investigations of the reactionary nail bomber David Copeland (1999), the (failed) attempts to use CCTV to catch the perpetrators of the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA) bombing campaign of 2000-1, and also the role of camera surveillance following the July 7th bombings of 2005. In assessing the relative merits (and otherwise) of CCTV in these contexts, this paper argues that the potential efficacy of electronic surveillance is in part contingent on the configurations of different dissident groups. Where reactionary terrorist activity may be amenable to disruption through CCTV strategies, the same cannot be said for the actions of groups structured in more nebulous formations, such as those behind the recent London bombings. Given the limited value of open-street surveillance in preventing and deterring terrorist activity, real difficulties are identified in grafting conventional crime-control surveillance strategies onto counter-terrorism. Moreover, the post-event functionality of such surveillant applications necessarily emphasises the role of the human agent and thus suggests that moves toward asocial strategies are misplaced. Such post-hoc counter-terrorist surveillance measures are also contrasted against trends identified in urban geographical and 'risk society' literature concerning the reconfiguration of urban spaces to manage out deviance and tackle transgression before it happens. Finally, this paper examines a number of unintended corollary effects of such strategies including their likely impact upon the categorisation and potential radicalisation of individuals during the course of surveillant-sorting processes.
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Pete Fussey
University of East London, UK
The Surveillance Studies Centre
c/o David Murakami Wood
Department of Criminology
University of Ottawa
Canada
