Search results

1 – 10 of over 16000
Open Access
Book part
Publication date: 9 December 2021

Kevin Macnish

This short chapter is an introduction to my 2018 book: The Ethics of Surveillance: An Introduction (Macnish, 2018). It is provided at the start of this PRO-RES collection of…

Abstract

This short chapter is an introduction to my 2018 book: The Ethics of Surveillance: An Introduction (Macnish, 2018). It is provided at the start of this PRO-RES collection of essays because it anticipates and supplements the range of issues covered in this collection and lays out some of the fundamental considerations necessary to ensure if surveillance must be conducted, it will be done as ethically as possible.

When is surveillance justified? We can largely agree that there are cases in which surveillance seems, at least prima facie, to be morally correct: police tracking a suspected mass murderer, domestic state security tracking a spy network, or a spouse uncovering partner’s infidelity. At the same time, there are other cases in which surveillance seems clearly not to be justified: the mass surveillance practices of the East German Stasi, an employer watching over an employee to ensure that they do not spend too long in the toilet, or a voyeur watching the subject of his lust undress night after night.

As an introductory text, my book does not seek to provide a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for ethical surveillance. What it does provide is an overview of the current thinking in surveillance ethics, looking at a range of proposed arguments about these questions, and how those arguments might play out in a variety of applied settings. It hence provides a useful and accessible volume for policymakers wishing to rapidly get up to speed on developments in surveillance and the accompanying ethical discussions.

Details

Ethical Issues in Covert, Security and Surveillance Research
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80262-414-4

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 7 March 2024

Nehemia Sugianto, Dian Tjondronegoro and Golam Sorwar

This study proposes a collaborative federated learning (CFL) framework to address personal data transmission and retention issues for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled video…

Abstract

Purpose

This study proposes a collaborative federated learning (CFL) framework to address personal data transmission and retention issues for artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled video surveillance in public spaces.

Design/methodology/approach

This study examines specific challenges for long-term people monitoring in public spaces and defines AI-enabled video surveillance requirements. Based on the requirements, this study proposes a CFL framework to gradually adapt AI models’ knowledge while reducing personal data transmission and retention. The framework uses three different federated learning strategies to rapidly learn from different new data sources while minimizing personal data transmission and retention to a central machine.

Findings

The findings confirm that the proposed CFL framework can help minimize the use of personal data without compromising the AI model's performance. The gradual learning strategies help develop AI-enabled video surveillance that continuously adapts for long-term deployment in public spaces.

Originality/value

This study makes two specific contributions to advance the development of AI-enabled video surveillance in public spaces. First, it examines specific challenges for long-term people monitoring in public spaces and defines AI-enabled video surveillance requirements. Second, it proposes a CFL framework to minimize data transmission and retention for AI-enabled video surveillance. The study provides comprehensive experimental results to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed framework in the context of facial expression recognition (FER) which involves large-scale datasets.

Details

Information Technology & People, vol. ahead-of-print no. ahead-of-print
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0959-3845

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 December 1996

Rachel Fleishman, Dror Walk and Gad Mizrahi

As part of the evaluation of an experimental programme of surveillance of institutions for the semi‐independent and frail elderly using the RAF method, an examination was made of…

380

Abstract

As part of the evaluation of an experimental programme of surveillance of institutions for the semi‐independent and frail elderly using the RAF method, an examination was made of the licensing status, quality of care, and completeness of the surveillance process. Included in the examination were 126 institutions which underwent the surveillance process between 1990 and 1993. Aims to investigate whether the RAF method of surveillance was being implemented in a professional and uniform manner. Concludes that surveyors’ recommendations to grant or not grant a licence were usually based on findings about the quality of care. Nevertheless, in order to reinforce the relationship between licensing and quality of care, it was suggested that surveyors be given clear criteria of quality on which to base their recommendations regarding conditional licensing. It was found that the surveillance process is indeed implemented uniformly in long‐term care institutions of varying quality.

Details

International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, vol. 9 no. 7
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0952-6862

Keywords

Article
Publication date: 1 March 1994

David Atkins

Summarizes the UK′s food chemical surveillance programme. This programmeis an extensive series of checks, tests and analyses (approximately130,000 per annum) designed to monitor…

798

Abstract

Summarizes the UK′s food chemical surveillance programme. This programme is an extensive series of checks, tests and analyses (approximately 130,000 per annum) designed to monitor the safety and quality of the UK′s food supply. The paper describes the scale of the programme and its management through the Steering Group on Chemical Aspects of Food Surveillance (SGCAFS) and its 11 working parties‐which cover the wide range of food surveillance activities including chemical contaminants, natural toxicants, nutrition, food additives, radionuclides and authenticity. Although the programme′s results are generally reassuring, important information is produced on emerging potential problems. Provides examples where this surveillance has enabled these potential problems to be identified and appropriate remedial action taken. Describes the extensive publication of surveillance data through the Food Surveillance Paper series (HMSO) and reports on the recent Ministerial decision for the rapid publication of the most important food surveillance data.

Details

British Food Journal, vol. 96 no. 2
Type: Research Article
ISSN: 0007-070X

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 1 March 2013

Priska Daphi, Anja Lê and Peter Ullrich

This chapter provides an analysis of images produced and employed in protests against surveillance in Germany in 2008 and 2009. For this purpose, a method of visual analysis is…

Abstract

This chapter provides an analysis of images produced and employed in protests against surveillance in Germany in 2008 and 2009. For this purpose, a method of visual analysis is developed that draws mainly on semiotics and art history. Following this method, the contribution examines a selection of images (pictures and graphic design) from the anti-surveillance protests in three steps: description of components, detection of conventional signs, and contextual analysis. Furthermore, the analysis compares the images of the two major currents of the protest (liberal and radical left) in order to elucidate the context in which images are created and used. The analysis shows that images do not merely illustrate existing political messages but contribute to movements’ systems of meaning creation and transportation. The two currents in the protests communicate their point of view through the images both strategically and expressively. The images play a crucial role in formulating groups’ different strategies as well as worldviews and identities. In addition, the analysis shows that the meaning of images is contested and contextual. Images are produced and received in specific national as well as issue contexts. Future research should address the issue of context and reception in greater depth in order to further explore the effects of visual language on mobilization. Overall, the contribution demonstrates that systematic visual analysis allows our understanding of social movements’ aims, strategy, and collective identity to be deepened. In addition, visual analysis may provide activists with a tool to critically assess their visual communication.

Details

Advances in the Visual Analysis of Social Movements
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78190-636-1

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 20 September 2014

Patrick Rafail

Scholarship on the state control of social movements has predominately focused on overt repression, resulting in comparatively less attention to more covert forms of control…

Abstract

Scholarship on the state control of social movements has predominately focused on overt repression, resulting in comparatively less attention to more covert forms of control. Researchers have suggested that government surveillance of social movement organizations (SMOs) has become increasingly widespread and routinized in the post-September 11, 2001 era, but this hypothesis has remained untested. Since contemporary surveillance is grounded in a logic of information gathering that has diffused across law enforcement agencies since the September 11 attacks, government actors now cast a wide net and monitor a large variety of groups. This study shows that a result, traditional factors predicting surveillance, such as contentious behavior, have less explanatory power. Using a database of 409 SMOs active in Philadelphia between January 1996 and October 2009, the research asked who and why particular groups are monitored by the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security (PA-OHS) between November 2009 and September 2010. Bayesian logistic regression analysis is used to examine the variables predicting surveillance. Findings show that 23% of the SMOs in the sample were targets of surveillance. Organizational ideology was the strongest predictor and there was little evidence that history of contentious protests or previous conflict with the police influenced coming under surveillance. However, groups with less visibility in traditional media sources were more likely to be monitored.

Details

Intersectionality and Social Change
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-78441-105-3

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 2 March 2011

Carlo Gola and Francesco Spadafora

The global financial crisis has magnified the role of Financial Sector Surveillance (FSS) in the International Monetary Fund's activities. This chapter surveys the various steps…

Abstract

The global financial crisis has magnified the role of Financial Sector Surveillance (FSS) in the International Monetary Fund's activities. This chapter surveys the various steps and initiatives through which the Fund has increasingly deepened its involvement in FSS. Overall, this process can be characterised by a preliminary stage and two main phases. The preliminary stage dates back to the 1980s and early 1990s, and was mainly related to the Fund's research and technical assistance activities within the process of monetary and financial deregulation embraced by several member countries. The first ‘official’ phase of the Fund's involvement in FSS started in the aftermath of the Mexican crisis, and relates to the international call to include financial sector issues among the core areas of Fund surveillance. The second phase focuses on the objectives of bringing the coverage of financial sector issues ‘up-to-par’ with the coverage of other traditional core areas of surveillance, and of integrating financial analysis into the Fund's analytical macroeconomic framework. By urging the Fund to give greater attention to its member countries' financial systems, the international community's response to the global crisis may mark the beginning of a new phase of FSS. The Fund's financial sector surveillance, particularly on advanced economies, is of paramount importance for emerging market and developing countries, as they are vulnerable to spillover effects from crises originated in advanced economies. Emerging market and developing economies, which constitute the majority of the Fund's 187 members, are currently the recipients of over 50 programmes of financial support from the Fund (including those of a precautionary nature), totalling over $250 billion.

Details

The Impact of the Global Financial Crisis on Emerging Financial Markets
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-85724-754-4

Keywords

Book part
Publication date: 29 February 2008

Kevin Stenson

An industry of description and interpretation has developed around the growth of surveillance, accelerated by: the development of the internet; volatile international relations…

Abstract

An industry of description and interpretation has developed around the growth of surveillance, accelerated by: the development of the internet; volatile international relations since the collapse of communism; demographic mobility, segregation by class and ethnicity in the rich and poor worlds, sharpening inequalities, and post 9/11 fears of terrorism. Influential narratives have emphasised the diminishing power of sovereign nation-states in a marketised and globalised world. This chapter challenges the notion that coercive, sovereign modes of rule are a monarchical survival in decline. Rather, sovereign technologies of rule, in which surveillance is central involves strategies of governance from below as well as from above. They combine coercive with rhetorical, metaphorical communication and other ‘soft’ modes of rule. These make thinkable the nation-state as a discrete, defensible entity. Political communication translates between the complex technical expertise of evolving surveillance and security technologies and language intelligible to the public. Though surveillance technologies and information can be produced by commercial and other non-state sites of governance, metaphorically, much surveillance can be viewed as the extension of the eye of the sovereign. Although we are all targets of surveillance, those seen as threatening to the majority help to constitute and reproduce the social collectivity.

Details

Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-7623-1416-4

Book part
Publication date: 29 February 2008

Benoît Dupont

Surveillance studies scholars have embraced Foucault's panopticon as a central metaphor in their analysis of online monitoring technologies, despite several architectural…

Abstract

Surveillance studies scholars have embraced Foucault's panopticon as a central metaphor in their analysis of online monitoring technologies, despite several architectural incompatibilities between eighteenth and nineteenth century prisons and twenty-first century computer networks. I highlight a number of Internet features that highlight the limits of the electronic panopticon. I examine two trends that have been considerably underestimated by surveillance scholars: (1) the democratization of surveillance, where the distributed structure of the Internet and the availability of observation technologies has blurred the distinction between those who watch and those who are being watched, allowing individuals or marginalized groups to deploy sophisticated surveillance technologies against the state or large corporations; and (2) the resistance strategies that Internet users are adopting to curb the surveillance of their online activities, through blocking moves such as the use of cryptography, or masking moves that are designed to feed meaningless data to monitoring tools. I conclude that these two trends are neglected by a majority of surveillance scholars because of biases that make them dismiss the initiative displayed by ordinary users, assess positive and negative outcomes differently, and confuse what is possible and what is probable.

Details

Surveillance and Governance: Crime Control and Beyond
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-0-7623-1416-4

Book part
Publication date: 19 July 2022

Max Crumley-Effinger

This chapter contributes to the literature on surveillance in education toward the development of a new branch of studies in educational surveillance that foregrounds the

Abstract

This chapter contributes to the literature on surveillance in education toward the development of a new branch of studies in educational surveillance that foregrounds the intersections of surveillance with international education, internationalization in higher education, and the global competition for international student enrollments. This study examines the literature on the Student Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS), a web-based data collection system that provides a pervasive surveillance mechanism to track the activities and locations of non-immigrant international students studying in the United States. Through a qualitative content analysis, I identified key themes evident in the literature; the findings serve as a measure of the current (though dated) state of research on SEVIS while also identifying that which is not examined or discussed in this scholarship. Often taken for granted as a background necessity for national security and labor market protection in relation to hosting international students, SEVIS is regrettably under-examined from student-centered, student affairs, and critical surveillance studies perspectives. In presenting the findings of this literature analysis, this chapter provides a research agenda for future empirical study of SEVIS and the surveillance of international students.

Details

Annual Review of Comparative and International Education 2021
Type: Book
ISBN: 978-1-80382-618-9

Keywords

1 – 10 of over 16000