In the popular imagination, surveillance involves public police agents working undercover against foreign enemies, organized crime networks, corporate fraudsters, drug dealers, and ordinary crooks in hot spots of thieving. The police do undertake such work, although it has a minor role in their repertoire of investigative methods (Marx 1988; Ericson 1993; Sharpe 2002).
Surveillance of this type is more common among private security operatives, who have the advantage of greater legal and practical access to private spheres compared to their counterparts in public policing. Moreover, they can be paid at a fraction of the cost of public police officers for what is labor intensive and sometimes unproductive work. Some industries have developed substantial private investigation units based on this type of surveillance. For example, the insurance industry uses both internal special investigation units and private investigators on contract to conduct surveillance regarding fraud (Ericson, Doyle, and Barry 2003; Ericson and Doyle 2004).
The undercover police operative who observes and records is only one role in the division of labor for surveillance. Surveillance is best defined as the production, analysis, and distribution of information about populations in order to govern them (Giddens 1987; Dandeker 1990; Haggerty and Ericson 2005). As such, surveillance is integral to the activities of all major social institutions, for example, governments that administer police, military, taxation, and social security systems, banks that profile credit ratings of customers, health service providers that compile medical histories, insurance companies that form risk pools for efficient underwriting and claims management, and marketing agencies that use media audience consumption and ratings data to place their ads and target consumers.
Surveillance has been greatly enhanced by the development of electronic technologies—for example, computers, smart cards, video cameras, and satellites—that produce information about populations instantly and with worldwide transmission capabilities. Surveillance technologies not only monitor people as individuals but also through processes of disassembling and reassembling data about them. People are broken down into a series of discrete information flows that are stabilized and captured according to preestablished classifications. Their reconfigured identities are then transported to data systems to be reassembled and combined in ways that serve the specific purposes of the institutions involved. The accumulated information constitutes one’s ”data double,” a virtual/informational profile that circulates in the electronic networks of various institutions and their specific contexts of practical application.
One result of this process is an enhanced capacity to govern populations across institutions through ”datamatching” or ”dataveillance” (Garfinkel 2000). Another result is ”datamining,” using applied mathematics and sophisticated computer systems to discover new data and patterns that are useful in strategic intelligence. Datamining has been used extensively in target marketing, but it also has a number of security applications, for example, to identify attacks on computer systems based on deviations from the normal flow of server traffic.
The new surveillance capacities of data systems are making information an increasingly valuable commodity. Indeed, the population database of an organization is often one of its most valuable assets, sold selectively to other organizations that can use the data for further surveillance and their own purposes of policing and governance. For example, insurers access data from government statistical agencies, credit agencies, and marketing firms to decide whether an applicant for insurance is suspect and to investigate fraudulent activities (Ericson, Barry, and Doyle 2000). At the same time, disclosure of information is highly selective and at times politically charged. In the commercial sector there are many trade secrets. In the public sector the state protects a wide range of information, especially that deemed in need of secrecy for national security purposes.
Public police agencies now operate in an assemblage of data systems (Chan 2003). Most of a police officer’s time is spent in producing information about people and incidents encountered during routine patrol and investigation (Ericson and Haggerty 1997). This information is demanded not only for internal police purposes and those of the criminal justice system but also by a range of external institutions—for example, insurance companies, health service providers, safety inspectors, and schools—that require knowledge of incidents for their own practical purposes of case settlement, statistical profiling of risks, and security provision. In turn, the police access data from external institutions for their own law enforcement purposes.
The role of the police as information workers in surveillance networks developed long before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon of September 11, 2001. However, it has accelerated with the PATRIOT Act and other enabling legislation that gives police access to a broader range of databases in both public and private institutions (Lyon 2003). The main justification for such enhancement is that aggregate data on populations improve the capacity for intelligence-led policing, especially that based on categorical suspicion. In the post-9/11 environment the police are moving from a system of resourceful intelligence for selective law enforcement purposes to one of universal suspicion where everyone is on a continuum of risk.
This post-9/11 environment has fostered a new politics of surveillance and visibility in which critical issues are contested. One key issue is privacy rights. Who has the right to information about the person, organization, community, or other entity? Who has the right to access information given up for one purpose but used for another purpose? What remedies are available for inaccuracies and misuses of information, where the concern is not so much ”Big Brother” but ”Big Bungler” (Brodeur and Leman-Langlois 2005)? The privacy concern is not only about the bits of information collected but also about the information systems involved and the program of policing with which they are associated. While it may be an exaggeration to claim that we are experiencing ”the end of privacy” (Whitaker 2000), there is no doubt that we are in a new information age of surveillance and visibility with privacy problems that cannot be legislated away (Brin 1998).
Another critical issue is the transformation of legal principles and due process protections that is occurring in the new environment of surveillance and visibility. Surveillance is more pervasive and influential than criminal law or the criminal justice system in governing populations. Crime prevention and efficient forms of private justice can be accomplished through surveillance techniques beyond the law (Norris and Armstrong 1999). Furthermore, when the criminal law is invoked, surveillance mechanisms such as video evidence, financial transaction records, and DNA evidence are increasingly used to obtain confessions from suspects, guilty plea settlements, and other forms of expedient case resolution. In both prevention and enforcement contexts, the rise of surveillance is accompanied by a decline of innocence or presumption of guilt (Ericson and Haggerty 1997).
Surveillance is often seen negatively, especially among those concerned with privacy rights and the decline of innocence. This tendency is a legacy of two of the most influential writers on surveillance, George Orwell (1949) and Michel Foucault (1977).
Both Orwell and Foucault depict surveillance as a centralized, top-down capacity of Big Brother to know too much about populations to their detriment. But it should be kept in mind that surveillance has many benefits, for example, efficiency in the provision of goods and services, management of social security programs, detection of criminal activity, administration of taxation systems, and sharing of insurance risks.
Too much emphasis on privacy can inhibit the development of desirable social policies (Etzioni 1999). Some of the early developments in surveillance were a response to the problems of privacy and the need to develop more information about populations that would establish trustworthy identities for the collective good (Torpey 2000). Another consideration is that while people sometimes feel their privacy is ”invaded,” at other times they are happy to exchange personal data for perks, efficiencies, and other benefits offered by the institution concerned.
Surveillance is a necessary aspect of participation in the institutions that make modern life flow in efficient and rewarding ways. It is also clear that many people enjoy peering into the private lives of others. Reality television shows and other voyeuristic offerings on television and the Internet indicate a broader cultural acceptance of watching and being watched. The police also participate in this culture, whether it is through reality television shows or by encouraging citizens to use their own video and computer equipment to conduct surveillance as part of the law enforcement effort (Doyle 2003).
Contemporary surveillance differs from the Big Brother depiction in another respect. Far from being controlled by centralized institutions in a top-down manner, surveillance is now dispersed in myriad networks of knowledge and power. There is a ”surveil-lant assemblage” (Haggerty and Ericson 2000) of criss-crossing, loosely connected information systems. These systems are composed of surveillance operatives observing and recording, smart cards reading the time and place of transactions, closed-circuit television cameras capturing the flows and foibles of populations, scanners penetrating material objects and human bodies, and data systems mining the products of all of the above for new patterns. These information systems are as likely to be owned by private entities and operated by their police as they are to be part of public policing. Moreover, these systems cut across the public-private divide. The border is now blurred, and it is increasingly difficult to make conventional distinctions such as public and private, inside and outside, inclusion and exclusion.
No one can escape surveillant assemblages and their capacity to make things visible, coordinate activities, exclude some, benefit others, and reconfigure social structure and organization. Everyone contributes to surveillant assemblages in some way, whether as sources of information, system operatives, system resistors, beneficiaries, subjects of control, or any combination thereof. The police are in the same position as other entities in this respect. Entwined in the surveillant assemblage, their methods and functions are being transformed. As information workers in a surveillance-based society, they participate in all of the productive gains as well as pitfalls of surveillance outlined here.
