admin

 by admin

Workshop Programme: Times of Surveillance

Times of Surveillance

Monday 3rd April 2023,

River Room, King’s College London

 

 

9:00 – Registration and Coffee

9:30 – Welcome and Introduction: Vita Peacock

9:45 – Keynote Lecture: Sun-ha Hong

 

10:30  Times of (health)care 

10:30 – Meyer and Albrechtslund, Timely Responses: Using Surveillance Technologies to Support Dementia Care

10:50 – Claire Dungey, Surveillance in the family: monitoring, care and temporality in Germany 

11:10 – Liam Simmonds, Generating Self-Knowledge for Health/Pleasure Outcomes in Recreational Drug Consumption Practices through Digital, Social, and Ethical Surveillance 

11:30 – Discussion (Discussant and Chair: Kenni Bruun)

 

12:10  Real-time Monitoring

12:10 – Alice Riddell, Citizen app: The digitization of crime and the temporality of personalised security  

12:30 – Andreas Stoiber, At the intersection of scientific knowledge and humanitarian action: Space-Eye and the temporalities of satellite surveillance/sousveillance

12:50 – Karolina Kupinska, Temporal Control as a Result of “Small Act” Surveillance During COVID-19 Pandemic in Xiamen, P.R.C.

13:10 – Discussion (Discussant and Chair: Claire Dungey)

 

14:30  Time is money

14:30 – Martin Webb, Putting the selfie to work: Image making and work/time discipline in the margins of the Indian state  

14:50 – Martina Eberle, “Your voice counts” – Managing response to resistance through surveillance regimes: digital people analytics platforms as instruments of governance in corporate environments

15:10 – Lake Polan, Sin, Intimacy, and Disavowal in the Internet’s Business Model

15:30 – Discussion (Discussant and Chair: Matan Shapiro)

 

16:00  Policing (and) the Future

16:00 – Sophia Goodfriend, The Banality of Surveillance: On Maintaining Israel’s Surveillance State in the Occupied Palestinian Territories 

16:20 – Carolina Sanchez Boe, Temporal Experiences of Digital Detention and Extractions of Time for Profit. Electronic Monitoring of Asylum Seekers in the USA. 

16:40 – Becky Kazansky, Resisting the violent temporalities of preemptive surveillance: strategies and their tensions

 

17:00  Discussion (Discussant and Chair: Vita Peacock)

 

17:30 – 18:30  Concluding Discussion (chair: Vita Peacock, discussant: Sun-ha Hong)

in News
 by admin

Why privacy is not the antidote we need to intrusive digital surveillance

As part of the Net Gains? Living Well With Technology series hosted by the Faculty of Arts & Humanities at King’s College London, Vita Peacock interrogates our desire for privacy and what it really means. You can read Vita’s blog, along with other stories, here.

What is the opposite of surveillance?

Traditionally, privacy has been considered the first line of defence against any form of surveillance experienced as intrusive. As enshrined in the Human Rights Act, General Data Protection Legislation, and a plethora of new bills across the U.S. among others, it plays a varied and active legal role in asserting moral limits to the collection of personal information. As a linguistic term, privacy is also one of the primary handles for organizations and activists seeking to defend democratic goods in a digital age.

Without undermining the valuable ongoing work that the category of privacy does, is now the moment to take stock of whether this line of defence has been successful, either legally or politically, in the face of the fundamental reorientation of societies around digital surveillance as an economy, politics, and a way of life?

Indicators point to yes.

One of the organisers of the Big Brother Awards – a satirical prize-giving ceremony held annually in Germany that highlights unethical surveillance practices – announced recently that when they started out in 2002 they never thought they would still be giving awards twenty years later, as the problem they were highlighting would have been solved. Yet precisely the opposite happened. If we consider this period statistically, the amount of personal information that is produced, collected and stored has increased exponentially, with estimates that a single internet user now produces around 150,000 MB of data every day. Moreover, the development of new biometric technologies such as facial recognition software, now allow for the linkage of datasets across multiple systems around single legal identities in real time, creating new possibilities for titrating access to cultural life that previously did not exist. In a recent example, the technology prevented lawyer Kelly Conlon from attending a Christmas show in New York with her daughter, as the firm she worked for was engaged in litigation with the venue.

If we look more closely at the contemporary phenomenon of privacy as both a conceptual and a legal category, cracks start to appear. A study of privacy advocacy groups across the world ascertained that although members of these organisations were passionate about privacy, few worked with a guiding definition of what privacy meant in practice. Indeed legal scholar Daniel Solove argues that privacy has no essential meaning at all. Moreover, the legal right to privacy across a number of jurisdictions is already on shaky ground. A recent constitutional ruling in India declared that Indians had no legal right to privacy that would necessitate any change to the compulsory biometric Aadhaar platform before being rolled out. Meanwhile here in the UK, citizens only acquired the legal right to privacy by proxy in 2000 through the implementation of the Human Rights Act, and it may disappear once more through the latter’s substitution with a Bill Of Rights (that makes no mention of privacy) if passed into law. As the production and processing of personal data looks set to only intensify, is it time to consider the problem afresh?

The historical roots of privacy offer a generative path forward. Nowadays, privacy is often represented in the anglophone world as something akin to a personal possession, like a wallet or a handbag. It is something we ‘have’, something which can be ‘invaded’ and must be ‘protected’. Yet in its eighteenth-century form privacy was an actual physical space, namely the private dwelling for which the right was asserted not to be subject to unauthorised searches or intrusions.

This spatial conception of privacy in fact already exists in relation to digital monitoring in the UK, albeit in a variegated and largely uncodified way. Consider for instance the prohibition on video cameras in film theatres, polling stations, or when accessing NHS services. In these settings, there is an implicit acknowledgment that there are social goods to be protected through forms of non-monitoring – whether intellectual property, the concept of a free vote, or the integrity of the human body. Instead of responding to intrusive forms of digital surveillance with a discourse of individual possession, is it time to frame it once again in relationship to space? A right to non-monitoring, for example, could be drawn up, codified, and signalled in any venue however large or small, using a standard set of symbols like the Highway Code.

The question driving the applied aspect of our research at King’s is – if privacy is not the antidote to intrusive digital surveillance – then what is?

in Blog / Sem categoria
 by admin

Call for Papers: Times of Surveillance

The Department of Digital Humanities at King’s College London is delighted to host workshop “Times of Surveillance” in early April 2023, welcoming keynote speaker Sun-Ha Hong, author of Technologies of Speculation: The Limits of Knowledge in a Data-Driven Society (NYU Press 2020).

Please send paper proposals (including a title, 300-word abstract and short biography, using your name as the file title) to kate.davis@kcl.ac.uk by 16th January 2023. It is intended that the workshop will also lead directly to the publication of an edited volume.

Further information below:

Watching over through technology has changed in the twenty-first century. Once a more binary dynamic between nation-states and citizens, the role of surveillance in societies has proliferated into a multiple and reciprocal relation between smart device users, and a vast array of small and large corporations and authorities. Many people around the world live in times of surveillance where, particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic (Lyon 2022), it is presented as index of modernization and security (Frois 2013, Lyon 2014). This workshop brings social anthropology into conversation with surveillance studies and related fields, to assess the temporal effects of this new regime. If the industrial revolution brought with it an orientation around the clock (Thompson 1967) – what time or times does surveillance capitalism impose (Zuboff 2019)?

While dressed in a rhetoric of linear progression, many monitoring technologies perpetuate a particular version of the present (O’Neil 2016). From the ‘extended present’ of daily self-tracking (Bergroth 2018), to the hyperreality of real-time recording or the oblivion of the infinite scroll (Genosko and Thompson 2006), the future may be dramatically shrunk into a thin horizon of responsive behaviour. Beyond this, these technologies can also be strategically applied by existing and emerging elites to double down on the status quo, foreclosing the possibility of alternatives (Byler 2022, Yonucu 2022). Future threats of insecurity legitimate the states of emergency that prepare the ground for more surveillance (Massumi 2010, Holbraad and Pedersen 2013); while the companies of Silicon Valley actively design futures shaped in their own moral image (Hong 2022). Amazon boss Jeff Bezos is currently investing in a clock that will last ten thousand years officially named, ‘The Clock of the Long Now’.

In this new historical context of reciprocity, these technologies also multiply through their utility, offering ways for individuals and collectives to wrest temporal control over their lives. They can assist with the work of social and biological reproduction by enhancing private or public health (Ajana et al. 2022, Davies 2017), or allowing for the care of children or the elderly at a distance (Widmer and Albrechslund 2021, López-Gómez et. al 2021). They might assist in smaller ways by speeding up the time it takes to travel through an airport, or just passing the time while waiting (Flaherty 2011, Jeffrey 2010). This being said, enduring memories of how such technologies were used in the past may inhibit or obstruct their social uptake (Boersma et al. 2014). Each monitoring technology is programmed in a way that delimits human temporal experience, and while this may be embraced, in practice it can also be stretched, shifted, subverted or switched off by those for whom it is designed (Schwennesen 2019, Trnka 2016).

We invite papers that explore ethnographically these times of surveillance. This workshop seeks to empirically and cross-culturally identify and theorize different temporal conceptions, experiences and imaginaries, that manifest in the contexts of technological monitoring. Topics may include but are not limited to:

  • Live facial recognition, CCTV, GPS, wearables, heart-rate monitors, or other sensors
  • Social messaging in real time
  • Synopticism and social media
  • Waiting and watching, passing time
  • Care at a distance and mediated intimacies
  • Data storage, data retention, cloud computing
  • Memories of authoritarian surveillance
  • Loss of social memory through cancelling, blocking, and deleting
  • Digital technologies of self-tracking and self-inspection
  • Education on surveillance capitalism
  • Campaigning for or against digital surveillance
  • Blockchain surveillance, crime alerts, and identity verification
  • Temporalities in and of Open-Source Intelligence
  • Use of safety apps and the temporality of personal security
in Blog / News
 by admin

Book Talk with Darren Byler on Wednesday 15 December, 2021

On 15 December 2021, ANSUR (The Anthropology of Surveillance Network) hosted a book talk on Zoom with Darren Byler, anthropologist and Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University. Darren presented his two recently published books, In the Camps: China’s High-Tech Penal Colony, and Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City, both of which draw on a decade of ethnographic research in and on Xinjiang, a north-western province of China. Within the last decade Xinjiang has become known as the most surveilled territory in the world, and while the subject matter can be affectively challenging at times, it was an honour to hear Darren discuss his research for ANSUR’s inaugural event series, Under Surveillance. The talk is freely available for download here.

ANSUR will be holding their next event on Friday 13 May 2022 in discussion with anthropologist Catarina Frois – you can register here!

in Blog / Care / Citizenship / Health / News / Safety
 by admin

New ERC Project Exploring the Intersection between Surveillance and Morality

‘Smart cities’, ‘employee assistance programmes’, the pervasive language of ‘security’ – the implementation of surveillance technologies has consistently been framed in relation to moral ideas. This ambiguity has been observed by surveillance scholars for many years, David Lyon once describing the alternating ends of ‘care’ and ‘control’ which these technologies serve. Yet the study of surveillance has predominantly concerned itself with the latter. This ERC-funded project, recently initiated through the Department of Digital Humanities, opens up a different range of questions. If morality is the medium through which surveillance technologies have so often been popularly legitimized, then what if there is a history of the phenomenon yet to be written – in which surveillance proliferates not as a lever in power relations – but through these accepted notions of ‘the good’.

The project is anchored in the discipline of anthropology, involving four ethnographies that explore everyday relationships to digital monitoring. This shapes its epistemological approach in two important ways. The first is a conceptual collectivism. Although many of the ethnographic encounters will be with individuals, the focus is not on individuals per se, but on the role that digital monitoring plays in the mediation of their wider relationships, both intimate but also potentially very abstract. The second is a sensitivity to cultural difference. With two studies in each country, the project erects a binary contrast between Germany and Britain, as places with visibly distinct histories and attitudes towards surveillance. Aside from modest opposition to the introduction of ID cards, the response to the intensification of surveillance in Britain has been placid, even sympathetic. By contrast, Germany has witnessed widespread civic mobilizations against monitoring over the past forty years: from the census protests of the 70s and 80s, to more recent protests against the retention of data by mobile phone companies, or the boycotting of image collection by Google StreetView. Through this comparison the project aims to problematize this question of the good further. What kinds of collective experiences are being drawn on when people support or oppose surveillance?

Overall, the study pivots around the moral ambivalence of surveillance that members of highly technologized societies increasingly find themselves faced with. If surveillance enables forms of care – for the body, the friend, the family, the nation – cannot their insalubrious applications simply be overlooked? It is this moral tangle that, we offer, consistently inhibits restrictions on the growth of these technologies. By studying, through long-term ethnographic fieldwork, how and why people themselves use monitoring technologies voluntarily, we aim to establish greater clarity on those modes of monitoring that support human health, happiness and dignity – and those that are inimical to it.

in Blog / Care / Citizenship / Health / Safety