All content tagged with: Surveillance

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  • BLOG 3: Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, & the Law

    By: Rihan Issa, Executive Articles Editor, Vol. 27 Part 1 of the series discussed the argument in Simone Browne’s book, Dark Matters. She highlighted the importance of racializing surveillance as an important conceptual understanding of the way surveillance has been used to order society along racial lines. She argues that…

  • BLOG 2: Runaway Slave Advertisements & Counting Violent Extremism

    By: Rihan Issa, Executive Articles Editor, Vol. 27 In part one of the blog series, I presented an overview of Simone Browne’s argument in Dark Matters. She argues that one cannot understand the history of surveillance without examining its racial past. She presents a few examples of the racial roots…

  • American Informant

    Part of my childhood was spent in Baghdad, Iraq, during the rule of Saddam Hussein. At that time, the regime offered free and universal education and healthcare. Literacy rates in the country surpassed much of the Arabic-speaking world and, indeed, the Global South. As the celebrated Egyptian intellectual, Taha Hussein, famously put it: “Cairo writes; Beirut prints; and Baghdad reads.” Booksellers were everywhere in Baghdad. Its people read voraciously and passionately debated literature, poetry, and a range of other subjects. But what struck me, even as a child, was the absence of sustained talk about politics in bookshops, markets, and other public spaces. I knew that adults could not stay away from the topic of politics in more intimate, private settings, where a deeper level of trust usually reigned. Once you entered the public sphere, however, discretion about politics—and especially local politics—clearly became the better part of valor. Iraqi society had been so thoroughly infiltrated by elements of Hussein’s intelligence services that ordinary people knew to tread with extreme caution. After all, the person standing within earshot at a bustling Baghdad market, overhearing your conversation—or maybe even your direct interlocutor— could be an informant. And the stakes were high: incarceration, torture, or death. That was an early introduction to the valency of informants—their capacity to interact with the society that surrounds them and their distorting effect on it. The lesson has colored my subsequent work on surveillance, including this reflection on the contemporary role of informants in the United States.

  • Tightening the OODA Loop: Police Militarization, Race, and Algorithmic Surveillance

    This Article examines how military automated surveillance and intelligence systems and techniques, when used by civilian police departments to enhance predictive policing programs, have reinforced racial bias in policing. I will focus on two facets of this problem. First, I investigate the role played by advanced military technologies and methods within civilian police departments. These approaches have enabled a new focus on deterrence and crime prevention by creating a system of structural surveillance where decision support relies increasingly upon algorithms and automated data analysis tools and automates de facto penalization and containment based on race. Second, I will explore these militarized systems, and their effects, from an outside-in perspective, paying particular attention to the racial, societal, economic, and geographic factors that play into the public perception of these new policing regimes. I will conclude by proposing potential solutions to this problem that incorporate tests for racial bias to create an alternative system that follows a true community policing model.

  • The Price of Carceral Citizenship: Punishment, Surveillance, and Social Welfare Policy in an Age of Carceral Expansion

    The unprecedented rise in the number of people held in U.S. jails and prisons has garnered considerable attention from policy makers, activists, and academics alike. Signaled in part by Michelle Alexander’s New York Times bestseller, The New Jim Crow, and the unlikely coalition of activists, policy makers, celebrities, and business leaders on both sides of the political aisle who have pledged to end mass incarceration in our lifetime, the prison system has returned to public policy discourse in a way that was unforeseen less than a decade ago. On any given day in 2014, just over 2.3 million people were held in U.S. jails and prisons.1 This figure represents a tenfold increase in the inmate census since 1973, and about 22 percent of the world’s prisoner population.2 Unfortunately, while the causes and consequences of mass incarceration warrant rigorous examination, the focus on arrest and imprisonment has left a curious, yet equally historic phenomenon hidden in plain sight—the rise of a supervised society, and with it, an alternate track of citizenship.