BiblioVault - Books about Surveillance

A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY

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20 books about Surveillance

The Compassionate Court?

Support, Surveillance, and Survival in Prostitution Diversion Programs

Corey S. Shdaimah, Chrysanthi S. Leon, and Shelly A. Wiechelt

Temple University Press, 2023

Laws subject people who perform sex work to arrest and prosecution. The Compassionate Court? assesses two prostitution diversion programs (PDPs) that offer to “rehabilitate” people arrested for street-based sex work as an alternative to incarceration. However, as the authors show, these PDPs often fail to provide sustainable alternatives to their mandated clients. Participants are subjected to constant surveillance and obligations, which creates a paradox of responsibility in conflict with the system’s logic of rescue. Moreover, as the participants often face shame and re-traumatization as a price for services, poverty and other social problems, such as structural oppression, remain in place.

The authors of The Compassionate Court? provide case studies of such programs and draw upon interviews and observations conducted over a decade to reveal how participants and professionals perceive court-affiliated PDPs, clients, and staff. Considering the motivations, vision, and goals of these programs as well as their limitations—the inequity and disempowerment of their participants—the authors also present their own changing perspectives on prostitution courts, diversion programs, and criminalization of sex work.

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Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy

David Lyon and Elia Zureik, Editors

University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy was first published in 1996. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

From computer networks to grocery store checkout scanners, it is easier and easier for governments, employers, advertisers, and individuals to gather detailed and sophisticated information about each of us. In this important new collection, the authors question the impact of these new technologies of surveillance on our privacy and our culture.

Although surveillance-literally some people "watching over" others-is as old as social relationships themselves, with the advent of the computer age this phenomenon has acquired new and distinctive meanings. Technological advances have made it possible for surveillance to become increasingly global and integrated-both commercial and government-related personal data flows more frequently across national boundaries, and the flow between private and public sectors has increased as well.

Addressing issues of the global integration of surveillance, social control, new information technologies, privacy violation and protection, and workplace surveillance, the contributors to Computers, Surveillance, and Privacy grapple with the ramifications of these concerns for society today. Timely and provocative, this collection will be of vital interest to anyone concerned with resistance to social control and incursions into privacy.

Contributors: Jonathan P. Allen, Colin J. Bennett, Simon G. Davies, Oscar H. Gandy Jr., Calvin C. Gotlieb, Rob Kling, Gary T. Marx, Abbe Mowshowitz, Judith A. Perrolle, Mark Poster, Priscilla M. Regan, James B. Rule.

David Lyon is professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada. His previous books include The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (Minnesota, 1994). Elia Zureik is also professor of sociology at Queen's University, Canada, and coedited (with Dianne Hartling) The Social Context of the New Information and Communication Technologies (1987).

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Crisis Vision

Race and the Cultural Production of Surveillance

Tom Monahan

Duke University Press, 2022

In Crisis Vision, Torin Monahan explores how artists confront the racializing dimensions of contemporary surveillance. He focuses on artists ranging from Kai Wiedenhöfer, Paolo Cirio, and Hank Willis Thomas to Claudia Rankine and Dread Scott, who engage with what he calls crisis vision—the regimes of racializing surveillance that position black and brown bodies as targets for police and state violence. Many artists, Monahan contends, remain invested in frameworks that privilege transparency, universality, and individual responsibility in ways that often occlude racial difference. Other artists, however, disrupt crisis vision by confronting white supremacy and destabilizing hierarchies through the performance of opacity. Whether fostering a recognition of a shared responsibility and complicity for the violence of crisis vision or critiquing how vulnerable groups are constructed and treated globally, these artists emphasize ethical relations between strangers and ask viewers to question their own place within unjust social orders.

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Dark Matters

On the Surveillance of Blackness

Simone Browne

Duke University Press, 2015

In Dark Matters Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and by the methods of policing black life under slavery, such as branding, runaway slave notices, and lantern laws. Placing surveillance studies into conversation with the archive of transatlantic slavery and its afterlife, Browne draws from black feminist theory, sociology, and cultural studies to analyze texts as diverse as the methods of surveilling blackness she discusses: from the design of the eighteenth-century slave ship Brooks, Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon, and The Book of Negroes, to contemporary art, literature, biometrics, and post-9/11 airport security practices. Surveillance, Browne asserts, is both a discursive and material practice that reifies boundaries, borders, and bodies around racial lines, so much so that the surveillance of blackness has long been, and continues to be, a social and political norm.

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Disobedient Aesthetics

Surveillance, Bodies, Control

Anthony Stagliano

University of Alabama Press, 2024

Examines emergent forms of creative civil disobedience that have arisen in response to digital tools of bodily surveillance and control

The contemporary world bristles with tools of observation and manipulation. Security cameras, social media, data mining, biometric scans, and other instruments ensnare the individual in a web of surveillance. In Disobedient Aesthetics, Anthony Stagliano exposes the use of human lives as sites of data exploitation and outlines paths of resistance. From the thermal-vision systems used on military drones, which use human body heat itself as a media object, to facial recognition platforms that use human faces as data mines, and from law enforcement tools of DNA analysis to data-driven urban governance, the realm of algorithmic surveillance and control is wide and subtle.

Disobedient Aesthetics outlines interventions into the technical systems subtending data-driven surveillance and control. Stagliano maps not only the surveillant regimes afforded by recent networked technologies, but also the inventive, artistic research into ways of undermining, upending, or redirecting such technologies. The concluding chapter examines creative, critical, and collective efforts to democratize access to the technology that undergirds such scrutiny and enables ways to detect and contest its power.

In a fascinating epilogue, Stagliano revisits current theories of control and offers an alternative reading of Gilles Deleuze’s oft-cited thesis on control societies: namely that it is not a matter of “finding new weapons” to undermine control but developing new techniques, new designs, new prototypes, and new modes of creative escape.

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Inside Tenement Time

Suss, Spirit, and Surveillance

Kezia Page

Rutgers University Press

Inside Tenement Time is the first comprehensive treatment of literary and cultural texts on surveillance in the Caribbean. Covering the long historical arc of the twentieth to the twenty-first centuries, Inside Tenement Time uses Jamaica as a case study to examine moments of crisis and particular spaces, especially urban yard enclaves and their environs, in the Caribbean encounter with surveillance. Making the argument that the Caribbean situation reveals flexible hegemonies rather than provinces of exclusive control, the book demonstrates the countervailing force of sussveillance and spiritveillance, Afro-Indigenous variations on surveillance. Sussveillance and spiritveillance are exemplars of vernacular arts and sciences that operate at and within the frangible borders of state power, exposing the unique dynamics of surveillance in the region and marshalling the acts of imagination with which it contends. For example, the Smile Jamaica concert of 1976, headlined by reggae Superstar Bob Marley, and the reputedly US government-backed 2010 Tivoli Gardens incursion in West Kingston, both moments that have dramatic, even mythic residue in Caribbean and global memory, are among the real-life events brought into conversation with literary representations of this history.

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The Intensification of Surveillance

Crime, Terrorism and Warfare in the Information Age

Edited by Kirstie Ball and Frank Webster

Pluto Press, 2003

Monitored

Business and Surveillance in a Time of Big Data

Peter Bloom

Pluto Press, 2019

Our contemporary age is confronted by a profound contradiction: on the one hand, our lives as workers, consumers and citizens have become ever more monitored by new technologies. On the other, big business and finance become increasingly less regulated and controllable.

What does this technocratic ideology and surveillance-heavy culture reveal about the deeper reality of modern society? Monitored investigates the history and implications of this modern accountability paradox. Peter Bloom reveals pervasive monitoring practices which mask how at its heart, the elite remains socially and ethically out of control.

Challenging their exploitive 'accounting power', Bloom demands that the systems that administer our lives are oriented to social liberation and new ways of being in the world.

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Overseers of the Poor

Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy

John Gilliom

University of Chicago Press, 2001

In Overseers of the Poor, John Gilliom confronts the everyday politics of surveillance by exploring the worlds and words of those who know it best-the watched. Arguing that the current public conversation about surveillance and privacy rights is rife with political and conceptual failings, Gilliom goes beyond the critics and analysts to add fresh voices, insights, and perspectives.

This powerful book lets us in on the conversations of low-income mothers from Appalachian Ohio as they talk about the welfare bureaucracy and its remarkably advanced surveillance system. In their struggle to care for their families, these women are monitored and assessed through a vast network of supercomputers, caseworkers, fraud control agents, and even grocers and neighbors.

In-depth interviews show that these women focus less on the right to privacy than on a critique of surveillance that lays bare the personal and political conflicts with which they live. And, while they have little interest in conventional forms of politics, we see widespread patterns of everyday resistance as they subvert the surveillance regime when they feel it prevents them from being good parents. Ultimately, Overseers of the Poor demonstrates the need to reconceive not just our understanding of the surveillance-privacy debate but also the broader realms of language, participation, and the politics of rights.

We all know that our lives are being watched more than ever before. As we struggle to understand and confront this new order, Gilliom argues, we need to spend less time talking about privacy rights, legislatures, and courts of law and more time talking about power, domination, and the ongoing struggles of everyday people.

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People's Pornography

Sex and Surveillance on the Chinese Internet

Katrien Jacobs

Intellect Books, 2012

Since its establishment in 1949, the People's Republic of China has upheld a nationwide ban on pornography, imposing harsh punishments on those caught purchasing, producing, or distributing materials deemed a violation of public morality. A provocative contribution to Chinese media studies by a well-known international media researcher, People’s Pornography offers a wide-ranging overview of the political controversies surrounding the ban, as well as a fascinating glimpse into the many distinct media subcultures that have gained widespread popularity on the Chinese Internet as a result. Rounding out this exploration of the many new tendencies in digital citizenship, pornography, and activist media cultures in the greater China region are thought-provoking interviews with individuals involved.

A timely contribution to the existing literature on sexuality, Chinese media, and Internet culture, People’s Pornography provides a unique angle on the robust voices involved in the debate over about pornography’s globalization.

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Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance

James M. Harding

University of Michigan Press, 2018

Placing the disciplines of performance studies and surveillance studies in a timely critical dialogue, Performance, Transparency, and the Cultures of Surveillance not only theorizes how surveillance performs but also how the technologies and corresponding cultures of surveillance alter the performance of everyday life. This exploration draws upon a rich array of examples from theatre, performance, and the arts, all of which provide vivid illustration of the book’s central argument: that the rise of the surveillance society coincides with a profound collapse of democratic oversight and transparency—a collapse that, in turn, demands a radical rethinking of how performance practitioners conceptualize art and its political efficacy. The book thus makes the case that artists and critics must reexamine—indeed, must radically redefine—their notions of performance if they are to mount any meaningful counter to the increasingly invasive surveillance society.

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The Seventies Now

Culture as Surveillance

Stephen Paul Miller

Duke University Press, 1999

Most would agree that American culture changed dramatically from the 1960s to the 1980s. Yet the 1970s, the decade “in between,” is still somehow thought of as a cultural wasteland. In The Seventies Now Stephen Paul Miller debunks this notion by examining a wide range of political and cultural phenomena—from the long shadow cast by Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal to Andy Warhol and the disco scene—identifying in these phenomena a pivotal yet previously unidentified social trend, the movement from institutionalized external surveillance to the widespread internalization of such practices.
The concept of surveillance and its attendant social ramifications have been powerful agents in U.S. culture for many decades, but in describing how during the 1970s Americans learned to “survey” themselves, Miller shines surprising new light on such subjects as the women’s movement, voting rights enforcement, the Ford presidency, and environmental legislation. He illuminates the significance of what he terms “microperiods” and analyzes relevant themes in many of the decade’s major films—such as The Deer Hunter, Network, Jaws, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now—and in the literature of writers including John Ashbery, Toni Morrison, Adrienne Rich, and Sam Shepard. In discussing the reverberations of the 1969 Stonewall riots, technological innovations, the philosophy of Michel Foucault, and a host of documents and incidents, Miller shows how the 1970s marked an important period of transition, indeed a time of many transitions, to the world we confront at the end of the millennium.
The Seventies Now will interest students and scholars of cultural studies, American history, theories of technology, film and literature, visual arts, and gay and lesbian studies.

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Spectatorship in the Age of Surveillance

Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, and Tom Sellar, special issue editors

Duke University Press, 2018

Contributors to this special issue investigate the ways surveillance and the fields of theater and performance inform one another. Considering forms of surveillance from government mass spying to data mining to all-seeing social networks, the contributors demonstrate how surveillance has found its way into our lives, both online and off, and how theater and performance—art forms predicated on heightened experiences of viewing—might help us recognize it. This issue includes scripts, photographs, essays, interviews, and reviews from Live Arts Bard’s 2017 performance biennial We’re Watching, a series of commissioned performances paired with a conference of scholars and artists. The performances focus on the appropriation and integration of surveillance technologies into theater and performance, such as a piece that uses Python code and Twitter data to create performance text, and one that uses an interplay of video projection, movement, and poetry. Drawing on these performances and more, contributors collectively argue that contemporary surveillance is characterized by both anonymous systems of digital control and human behaviors enacted by individuals.

Contributors: David Bruin, Annie Dorsen, Shonni Enelow, Miriam Felton-Dansky, Jacob Gallagher-Ross, Caden Manson, John H. Muse, Jemma Nelson, Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Alexandro Segade, Tom Sellar

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Surveillance, Transparency, and Democracy

Public Administration in the Information Age

Akhlaque Haque

University of Alabama Press, 2015

Investigates public administration’s increasing dependence on technology and how its pervasive use in complex and interrelated socioeconomic and political affairs has outstripped the ability of many public administrators and the public to grasp the consequences of their choices

In this well-informed yet anxious age, public administrators have constructed vast cisterns that collect and interpret a meteoric shower of facts. Akhlaque Haque demonstrates that this pervasive use and increasing dependence on information technology (IT) enables sophisticated and well-intentioned public services that nevertheless risk deforming public policy decision-making and sees a contradiction inherent in a public that seeks services that require a level of data collection that in turn triggers fears of a tyrannical police state.

The author posits that IT’s potential as a tool for human development depends on how civil servants and citizens actively engage in identifying desired outcomes, map IT solutions to those outcomes, and routinize the applications of those solutions. This leads to his call for the development of entrepreneurs who generate innovative solutions to critical human needs and problems. In his powerful summary, he recaps possible answers to the question: What is the best way a public institution can apply technology to improving the human condition?

Engrossing, challenging, and timely, Surveillance, Transparency, and Democracy is essential reading for both policy makers as well as the great majority of readers and citizens engaged in contemporary arguments about the role of government, public health and security, individual privacy, data collection, and surveillance.

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Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War

Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland

Stephen E. Towne

Ohio University Press, 2015

A History Book Club Reading Selection

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War represents pathbreaking research on the rise of U.S. Army intelligence operations in the Midwest during the American Civil War and counters long-standing assumptions about Northern politics and society. At the beginning of the rebellion, state governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois cooperated with federal law enforcement officials in various attempts—all failed—to investigate reports of secret groups and individuals who opposed the Union war effort.

Starting in 1862, army commanders took it upon themselves to initiate investigations of antiwar sentiment in those states. By 1863, several of them had established intelligence operations staffed by hired civilian detectives and by soldiers detailed from their units to chase down deserters and draft dodgers, to maintain surveillance on suspected persons and groups, and to investigate organized resistance to the draft. By 1864, these spies had infiltrated secret organizations that, sometimes in collaboration with Confederate rebels, aimed to subvert the war effort.

Stephen E. Towne is the first to thoroughly explore the role and impact of Union spies against Confederate plots in the North. This new analysis invites historians to delve more deeply into the fabric of the Northern wartime experience and reinterpret the period based on broader archival evidence.

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Surveillance in the Time of Insecurity

Monahan, Torin

Rutgers University Press, 2010

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.

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Surveillance, Privacy, and the Law

Employee Drug Testing and the Politics of Social Control

John Gilliom

University of Michigan Press, 1996

Employee drug testing is an invasive and controversial new social control policy that burst into the American work place during the war on drugs of the 1980s. Workers, judges, and politicians divided over whether it was an unnecessary and unconstitutional program of surveillance or an effective and appropriate new weapon in the anti-drug arsenal. When the dust had settled, the new technique was widely used and had been strongly approved by the United States Supreme Court. This raises the fundamental question: Why was the momentum behind testing so strong and the opposition to testing so ineffective?
Drawing on theories of ideological hegemony and legal mobilization, John Gilliom begins the search for answers with an examination of how the imagery of a national drug crisis served as the legitimating context for the introduction of testing. Surveillance, Privacy, and the Law then moves beyond the specific history of testing and frames the new policy within a broader transformation of social control policy seen by students of political economy, society, and culture. The book cites survey research among skilled workers and analyzes court opinions to highlight the sharply polarized opinions in the workplaces and courthouses of America. Although federal court decisions show massive and impassioned disagreement among judges, the new conservative Supreme Court comes down squarely behind testing. Its ruling embraces surveillance technology, rejects arguments against testing, and undermines future opposition to policies of general surveillance.
Surveillance, Privacy, and the Law portrays the apparent triumph of testing policies as a victory for the conservative law-and-order movement and a stark loss for the values of privacy and autonomy. As one episode in a broader move toward a surveillance society, the battle over employee drug testing raises disturbing questions about future struggles over revolutionary new means of surveillance and control.
John Gilliom is Professor of Political Science, Ohio University.

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Surveillance, Volume 23

Richard Maxwell

Duke University Press

Since the 1960s, and increasingly since September 11, 2001, “surveillance studies” has become a rapidly expanding field, devised to examine the ways in which information about people’s personal lives is obtained, stored, and shared and how these details are used to influence and manage populations. This special issue of Social Text takes on surveillance in its domestic and international forms, exploring the impact that it has on labor, technology, and privacy.

One article looks at the emergence of the biometrics industries and its effect on surveillance systems and businesses. Another addresses the labor of surveillance and how surveillance work and policy affect the homeland security workforce. Various geographic areas are highlighted in several essays, including those on sex workers in Bengal, local surveillance in Turkey, and welfare surveillance and resistance in Appalachian Ohio. Additional themes include historical modes of surveillance, processes of legitimation for intensifying surveillance, and cultural representations of surveillance.

Contributors. Kelly A. Gates, Swati Ghosh, John Gilliom, Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Richard Maxwell, Laikwan Pang, David J. Phillips, Michael J. Shapiro, Çagatay Topal

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