Search results

This chapter demonstrates that while in most late modern societies there is a neoliberal hegemony to expand police Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) surveillance for crime control and antiterrorism, in Greece there is serious controversy and resistance against the post-Olympic use of more than 1,200 Olympic CCTV cameras. Drawing on the interesting politics of CCTV expansion and resistance, the chapter traces the reasons why, in the Greek context, this very expensive Olympic surveillance “dowry” has been opposed, even for traffic control. It critically attributes Greek citizens’ fear and mistrust primarily to their past police-state experience of authoritarian, thought-control surveillance.

We live in an age of unparalleled access to personal data. Technological advances that seem second nature today allow for the mass accumulation of personal information by even the smallest of companies. The same technology also can be used directly by the state to accumulate mass information on its citizens. In the hands of government law enforcement officials, these surveillance advances also can be used to greatly enhance the state’s ability to exercise social control – a circumstance that has both positive and negative connotations. This chapter discusses the increasingly important confluence of privacy rights, surveillance, and social control as seen from a constitutional standpoint.

After years of limiting the expectations of privacy that citizens may have in their day-to-day lives, several recent Supreme Court decisions have attempted to take account of the privacy expectations held by individuals in today’s ever-evolving technological world, and in doing so have limited the ability of law enforcement to engage in surveillance without first obtaining a warrant. Yet more needs to be done. Specifically, the author argues that the law of standing must be updated to permit judicial claims by individuals who challenge the legality and constitutionality of comprehensive surveillance programs.

A policy of surveillance which interferes with the fundamental right to a private life requires credible justification and a supportive evidence base. The authority for such interference should be clearly detailed in law, overseen by a transparent process and not left to the vagaries of administrative discretion. If a state surveils those it governs and claims the interference to be in the public interest, then the evidence base on which that claim stands and the operative conception of public interest should be subject to critical examination. Unfortunately, there is an inconsistency in the regulatory burden associated with access to confidential patient information for non-health-related surveillance purposes and access for health-related surveillance or research purposes. This inconsistency represents a systemic weakness to inform or challenge an evidence-based policy of non-health-related surveillance. This inconsistency is unjustified and undermines the qualities recognised to be necessary to maintain a trustworthy confidential public health service. Taking the withdrawn Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between NHS Digital and the Home Office as a worked example, this chapter demonstrates how the capacity of the law to constrain the arbitrary or unwarranted exercise of power through judicial review is not sufficient to level the playing field. The authors recommend ‘levelling up’ in procedural oversight, and adopting independent mechanisms equivalent to those adopted for establishing the operative conceptions of public interest in the context of health research to non-health-related surveillance purposes.

The potential afforded by contemporary forms of surveillance to monitor vast amounts of information raises a number of problems, including ‘who or what’ should be distinguished as the subject of surveillance and how is the extension and intensification of surveillance to be legitimated without encroaching on the sensibilities of those who deem themselves innocent. It is argued that the ‘chav’, one of the latest variants of an underclass discourse to emerge in the United Kingdom, provides an example of how an ideological figure can be employed both to justify the introduction of disciplinary surveillance technologies and become the proposed identification of targets for such apparatus. Following an outline of the term underclass and a guide to the language and imagery of the ‘chav’, the argument presented in this chapter is developed and represented through an examination of a range of media representing and responding to anti-social behaviour. The utilisation of media to render visible and represent those seen as responsible for anti-social and criminal behaviour is both an application of new technologies of surveillance and a re-invention of older forms of collective and communal punishment, control and regulation. What these examples share is the communication of a frame that equates ‘chavs’ with ‘anti-social’ behaviour and surveillance as a central component of any strategy for community safety. Thus, rather than the existence of ‘chavs’, or any allegedly threatening ‘other’ requiring surveillance, it is argued that it is surveillance that requires the existence of the ‘chav’. Put another way, if ‘chavs’ did not exist, then, for the exponents of surveillance at least, they would have to be invented.

Whenever America has fought wars, civil liberties are compromised. Led by Hoover, whose career began in the Library of Congress, the FBI has historically conducted questionable surveillance, often spying illegally on American citizens. There is a history of FBI surveillance in the Academy, including surveillance in libraries. Researchers, students, and librarians have been the subjects of FBI surveillance efforts. Today, the Patriot Act has reignited concerns about FBI surveillance in academic institutions. Librarians have often led the fight against limits imposed on accessing information. This is a short history of the conflict between the Academia and FBI surveillance.

The purpose of this chapter is to promote the importance, utility and necessity of applying a sociocultural lens to the analysis of the normalized appropriation of surveillance technologies and wearables across sports settings.

The chapter synthesizes existing literature that has embraced a sociocultural lens to examine the implications of the increasingly normalized adoption of surveillance technologies in sport settings. In doing so we hope to provoke discussion regarding the contemporary effects of technologies in order that they may be better understood by not only sports scholars but those who operate within sport. To achieve this aim, we provide an exemplar of how Michel Foucault's concepts have been a useful heuristic for this endeavour.

Within the highly commercialized and spectacularized domain of corporate sport, the performing athletic body has become a commodity of vital importance. Correspondingly, sports practitioners across the globe have rallied to devise innovative ways to train, protect and improve athletes. As this chapter details, one of the main ways in which this project has occurred is through the increased appropriation of wearable (and increasingly invasive) surveillance technologies. A major finding from existing literature is that surveillance technologies can contribute to the unproblematized production of compliant athletic commodities in sports settings. Moreover, that this can have significant limiting outcomes for athletes' development and well-being and coaches' practices.

The chapter argues for three future ‘touchstone’ areas of study: Surveillance technologies and athlete retirement, unintended consequences of more technology and resisting the regulatory intentions of behavioural nudges.

This chapter provides one of the first summaries of the socioculturally informed research that has examined the implications of the increasingly normalized presence of surveillance technologies across sports settings. In doing so, it also acts as one of the first resources designed to help those who coach and develop athletes to reflect upon the significant dangers and limiting outcomes that can be associated with the unconsidered deployment of surveillance technology.

The chapter critically analyzes the concepts and the practices of surveillance in modern and postmodern societies along with their consequences. We show the changes in the systems, which are used to monitor individuals, and emphasize the transition toward soft surveillance systems, probably stimulated by digital technologies. This switch from top-down control to “lateral” monitoring systems encloses surveillance practices with suggestive names like interveillance, synopticon, and dataveillance. The dark side of digital health has a bright start. According to Topol’s (2016) vision of the future, we will soon be the “consumers,” the real protagonists, of the management of our health – thanks largely to the practically endless data about our bodies, behaviors, and lifestyles we will be able to collect and analyze. We will share our health information in real time with the doctors whom we will choose based on their score in clinical rankings (here, too, quantification rears its head). Yet, this simplified version of health makes it seem that there are always some solutions, which the algorithm can supply as long as it has enough information. Moreover, in the United States, some health-insurance companies have started to offer a discount on premiums to the members who agree to collect and share self-tracking data with them. Clearly, the discount is given only to the workers who have healthy habits. At first sight, this can seem as a win-win trade-off; however, what today is presented as an individual option can easily become a requirement tomorrow.

This chapter, based on a sociological approach, addresses the ethical issues of surveillance research from the perspective of the profound transformations that science and innovation are undergoing, as part of a broader shift from modern to post-modern society, affecting also other major social institutions (such as government, religion, family, and public administration). The change occurring in the science and technology system is characterised by diminishing authority, uncertainty about internal mechanisms and standards, and a declining and increasingly difficult access to resources. Such changes, also related to globalisation and new digital technologies, have transformed the way research is conducted and disseminated. Research is now more open and its results more easily accessible to citizens.

Scientific research is also put under increased public scrutiny, while, at the same time, public distrust and disaffection towards science is rising. In such a context, it is more important than ever to make sure that research activities are not compromised by fraudulent and unethical practices. The legitimate expectations of citizens to enjoy their rights, including the ability to protect their private sphere, are growing. Scientific and technological development is deeply interrelated with the widespread awareness of these rights and the possibility of exercising them, but it produces also new risks, while a widespread sense of insecurity increases. The digital revolution, while improving people’s quality of life, offers at the same time new opportunities for crime and terrorism, which in turn has produced a demand to strengthen security systems through increasingly advanced and intrusive surveillance technologies. Misconduct in the field of surveillance may not only undermine the quality of research, but also further impair society’s trust in research and science as well as in the State and its institutions.

This paper will provide an overview of the contemporary surveillance environment in the age of Big Data and an insight into the complexities and overlap between security, bodily and informational surveillance as well as the subsequent impacts on privacy and democracy. These impacts include the ethical dilemmas facing librarians and information scientists as they endeavour to uphold principles of equality of access to information, and the support of intellectual freedom in private in an increasingly politicised informational environment. If we accept that privacy is integral to the notion of learning, free thought and intellectual exploration and a crucial element in the separation of the state and the individual in democratic society, then the emergence of the data age and the all-encompassing surveillance and exposure of once private acts will undoubtedly lead to the reimagining of the social and political elements of society.