Surveillance,technology and the everyday

Introduction and Aims of Themed Section

The collection of articles contained within this themed section all represent reflections on empirical and theoretical research into various aspects of, and ways of imagining, surveillance in crime control contexts. The significant unifying issue here is the ‘everyday’ quality of the surveillance contexts under discussion, be that driving a car, surfing the Internet, going shopping or simply using household objects. Surveillance, as Lyon (2003: 13) notes, ‘has spilled out of its old nation-state containers to become a feature of everyday life, at work, at home, at play and on the move’ and these articles seek to explore the significance of, and issues presented by, what is arguably a more relevant set of contexts for understanding contemporary surveillance than the often invoked panoptic diagram. What is presented here does not reveal a co-ordinated, centrally administered project, but a set of diverse practices and situations in which human agency combines with technology in some very everyday contexts most likely familiar to us all. These are not moments of exception, but of daily life.

The themed section engages with vulnerable and risky populations, surveillance as a response to crime and other social problems, the ambivalent focus of policing gazes, the power/knowledge relationships of representation of surveillance, reassurance, perception management, risk assessment and classification. Surveillance is therefore implicated both in knowledge about crime, but also knowledge about policing, both formally and through lived experiences.

Because of the strong links between the articles that follow, and the existence of a number of shared themes, this editorial seeks to approach these articles as a collective. Readers may come to individual articles from their own diverse disciplinary perspectives, and in support of their own research. They will certainly find value in each of the three individual articles, but we would like to take this opportunity to draw out those shared themes. We would like to situate this themed section of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the intersection of surveillance theory and criminology before we explore our themes of the everyday, ambiguously risky and vulnerable populations, and information management.

Surveillance and Criminology

The perspective of this themed section is indebted to recent work on surveillance. Surveillance studies takes as its object of study the multiple, complex socio-technological practices of intentional information gathering, especially when this information gathering is intended to support practices of control, organization, management or influence. This developing interdisciplinary field has drawn inspiration from a wide range of sources and produced a thriving research agenda that fits well with some of the important issues of our time.

From within surveillance studies, David Lyon (2007) identifies criminal justice as one the key foundational areas for surveillance theory (alongside workplace management and military power). He cites Cohen’s (1985) Visions of Social Control, and notes the strong association between ‘surveillance’ and police observation. This perspective on surveillance as primarily a policing activity is still dominant in media reporting on surveillance (Barnard-Wills, 2011). Policing, since its early days has required the ability to see and know the areas under its authority in order to fulfil its overt function of keeping the peace, as well as more contested roles in order maintenance and political policing (Bridges and Bunyan, 1983; Turk, 1982). Further, John McGrath (2004) argues that crime control is the key ideology justifying the use of surveillance technologies in public space, although the portrayal of surveillance in culture and entertainment is becoming more important.

As Coleman and McCahill (2011: 2) have also recently observed, surveillance and crime appear ‘intimately connected’ given that ‘knowledge about crime would be impossible without surveillance, along with any attempt to manage crime and criminality’. However, as they demonstrate, and as the articles which form this collection also show, the relationship between the two is far from simple. Surveillance in crime-related contexts can never accurately be understood simply as cameras watching criminals, though this CCTV-inspired image routinely dominates debates in this area. The politics of knowledge of crime is vital, even when that knowledge is not produced through surveillance technology. Knowledge about crime is political, it forms the basis of decisions, evaluations, and structures political choices, as debates over crime statistics have shown for a long time. This politics involves regimes of truth and what types of knowledge count as qualified (Foucault, 2003). Knowledge of crime is itself the site of political struggles.

Recent preoccupations with prevention and the foregrounding of risk in criminal justice contexts contribute to the centralizing of surveillance practices; practices that seemingly offer the potential to intervene proactively before harm is caused and to prevent it from occurring. Surveillance in criminal justice contexts is often general rather than specific, and relates to crimes that have not yet happened, as well as those that already have. This means introducing surveillance into areas where nothing crime-related has yet happened, and indeed may never happen. The innocent (or we might say, the innocent-for-now) are encouraged to accept a certain level of diminution in privacy in exchange for protection that may not be necessary, and which may turn on them should they begin to exhibit characteristics that have been defined as problematic. For Lyon (2007), this is ‘contingent categorization’ and it replaces ‘coercive control’, where all are subject to surveillance until they are sorted for inclusion, entry or ban on the basis of surveillance-generated biographical profiles which are continually subject to change. These sorting processes, as the subsequent articles show, may be based on rigid and inflexible constructions such as actuarial assessments, on reactionary responses to populist concerns or on subjective (and possibly discriminatory) classifications based on the whim, prejudice or suspicion of the human surveillance operator. As such, no individual, population or context is inherently ‘danger free’ and hence of no interest to crime control, rather they are placed on a continuum and subject to reclassification at any time, as their observed behaviour dictates. As Coleman and McCahill (2011: 4) again observe, ‘more surveillance means more gradations of behaviour are captured allowing for more risk to be identified and more legislative and practical responses to it’. For many, this means that previously private, or publically unproblematic behaviours are suddenly rendered visible and problematized, be they behaviours that mark the observed as risky or as at risk. In doing so, expanding surveillance practices (often featuring new technological possibilities and incorporating new types of operator) also highlight the contested nature of illegal actions. This demonstrates that not all illegal acts are considered legitimate surveillance targets by the public and, further, that not all surveillance practices ostensibly founded on crime control principles relate to illegal events or take place for crime control reasons. The surveilled, then, do not always respond in the ways anticipated, while those operating the surveillance do not always act in the ways that were intended. The surveilled, furthermore, no longer conform to the stereotype of the criminal, the marginalized, the deviant, but may, via the legitimation of risk be any one of us who possesses the potential to cause or become vulnerable to harms increasingly understood as criminal events. The local acceptance (or otherwise) of the relation of surveillance to crime control, again raises the spectre of the alternate, coercive, explanations for policing activity and its surveillance dimension.

This themed section therefore has strong sympathies towards and is aligned with the special issue of Theoretical Criminology on ‘Theorizing surveillance in crime control’. Haggerty et al. (2011: 233) argue that the study of surveillance and crime control is ‘increasingly about the ambiguity, paradoxes and often knotty interplays between the surveiller and the surveilled’. We too hope to provide a range of empirically grounded studies into the specific details of surveillance in particular everyday contexts. Our fundamental starting point for this is the conceptual notion of the ‘everyday’.

The Everyday

This collection focuses on the ‘everyday’ use and experience of surveillance. Such surveillance is, as we suggest above, no longer a necessary evil reserved for the exceptional but a more routine side-effect of the shift to preventative policing methods epitomized by, but by no means exclusively the domain of intelligence-led policing. The perceived need to act before events turn harmful renders us all potential risks and therefore worthy surveillance targets. Surveillance, whether it is for our protection or our problematization, becomes an everyday experience. We use the term ‘everyday’ to highlight the fact that contexts via which we explore surveillance are both everyday in that they are those that may be familiar locations or situations to us all, and everyday in a second sense in that they are encountered more frequently such that they, in many cases, become normal experiences. Everyday thus refers to both the situational and temporal routines of surveillance.

The articles engage with topics as diverse as speed cameras, the covert surveillance tactics employed by the police and children’s ‘e-safety’, and span the activities of public, private and ‘partner’ agents. The articles consider diffuse methods of surveillance and types of surveillance technology, from the image captured by the camera, the sound captured by the microphone, to the key-stroke of the computer, deployed into both public and private spaces, as well as where those concepts are blurred, such as the computer in the child’s bedroom. The articles therefore also consider the assemblages of practices and discourses within which the technologies are situated.

However, in exploring these routine, everyday contexts it becomes clear that, while it cannot in itself be described as exceptional, the deployment of surveillance in these contexts does make consistent reference to the sensational and the dramatic, with the ‘big risks’ such as terrorism or the spectre of the sexual predator often invoked in justifying the expansion of surveillance practices. While popular support is routinely considered to be strong for some methods of surveillance, such as CCTV, and often demanded when it comes to ‘our’ vulnerability to a feared ‘other’, this kind of public consent can neither be assumed nor relied upon. Big risks, however, are useful as mobilizing constructs when it comes to the expansion of surveillance in more mundane contexts. For example, Regulation of Investigatory Powers legislation – intended to be used as a measure of last resort for extreme (and extremely rare) offences of terrorism, is instead mobilized in much more mundane and everyday situations including dog fouling, littering and even for checking children’s eligibility for certain schools as well as drug taking, theft and vehicle crime (see the article by Loftus and Goold). Terrorism is also the fall-back justification used in an attempt to legitimate the increased surveillance of the roads (see the article by Haines and Wells). The spectre of the predatory paedophile is similarly mobilized to justify surveillance of children ‘for their own good’ but which simultaneously exposes their own behaviours to scrutiny and, potentially, sanction (as explored in the article by Barnard-Wills).

Everyday Power and Politics

Given the analytical focus upon the ‘everyday’, it is therefore important to understand the power relations in these contexts and in doing so link these micro-political environments back to a macro-political analysis. In Security, Territory, Population Michel Foucault (2007) engages with the historical emergence of the problem of the population, and as part of this works through an archaic, European understanding of ‘police’ as the calculation and technique of making good use of a state’s forces. It is the approaches developed here that are arguably of more importance in understanding contemporary surveillance than the often invoked panoptic diagram. The analytics of government (Dean, 2010) or governmentality (Miller and Rose, 2008) take forward this intellectual project. The focus is upon the method of analysing localized powers in terms of procedures, technologies, tactics and strategies, and relating this micro-analysis back to a macro-analysis through techniques that operate across multiple processes. Foucault compares the relation between governmentality and the State to that between segregation and the asylum, or biopolitics and medicine. It involves a stepping outside of the State and looking at it as an assemblage of different components and relations held together by various discursive regimes.

There is a need to consider the intervention of a broad range of actors and agencies in the conduct of populations, without relying entirely upon a coercive model, nor reifying the State as an inevitable, homogeneous, transcendent actor of social control. Loftus and Goold (this issue, p. x) observe that ‘[w]hereas in the past the surveillance powers of the State were directed only at particular individuals who were deemed to be at risk or undeserving of trust, today it would seem that surveillance powers are directed against everybody. In other words, the surveillance that was once reserved for the suspect or deviant has become extended to cover the majority of the population’ originating in a variety of state and non-state contexts (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). This shift can be problematic for various reasons and for both the traditionally watched (see Loftus and Goold, this section), and the traditional watchers (see Haines and Wells, this section). The diffusion of power through complex networks caused by the multiplication of actors involved in surveillance raises questions of accountability and transparency. While such challenges are a familiar aspect of discussions around pluralized policing, they are of equal if not greater significance to surveillance practices carried out by agencies and actors which we would not generally credit with having an overt policing or crime-control function. Given that different actors have different priorities it is not a simple task to determine the relative weight of different agencies within these policy networks, which can themselves be sources of resistance to surveillance. The introduction of policing actors into a network of practice or the attribution/adoption of policing roles by non-policing actors may distort existing priorities, for example generating a tension between evidence gathering for prosecution and intervention, making an educator adopt a policing role, or providing state coercive powers to profit-motivated organizations.

Ambiguously Vulnerable and Risky Populations

These pluralities and networks of policing variously intersect with numerous subjects of surveillance in diverse ways. These subjects are not homogeneous, but are pulled together into populations at least in part through the practices of everyday surveillance, as well as their discursive and political contexts. Technologies deployed within narratives of necessary protection are variously embedded into everyday activities and objects. In so doing these technologies allow the surveillance of, and intervention in, the activities of both law-breaking and law-abiding individuals. The latter is justified on the grounds that these groups must also be surveilled in order to monitor the extent to which they are taking responsible actions to minimize their exposure to risk, and to benefit from the protection the technologies offer when they fail to protect themselves. As such ‘everyday’ surveillance practices represent a paradox of protection and control, benign and malign attention. Different populations attract different technological attention and different sets of responses at different times. In contrast to the historical model examined by Foucault (2007), the concerns of contemporary policing (both within and beyond what we might recognize as ‘police’ actions) are multiple populations, each with their own tensions. This leads to a multiplicity of practices and techniques of crime control, each with their own blend of risk, precaution, information, surveillance and technology. The technologies of surveillance and policing that are orientated towards different populations carry implications for their acceptance or resistance. As Barnard-Wills (this section, p. x) notes in relation to children, ‘[y]oung people are a population whose activities must be known by adults in order to protect them’ and as such they, like other potential victims, must sacrifice some privacy in order to qualify for protection.

The populations covered here include those usually considered ‘vulnerable’ in crime control terms, the at risk, the potential victim, the ‘law-abiding citizen’ the ‘innocent’ the ‘member of the public’ whose interests are routinely mobilized in support of surveillance aimed at (or marketed as being aimed at) the ‘other’, the criminal, the dangerous outsider. Perception of the vulnerability of a population plays a part in this. Furedi (2007) writes about the expansion of the term ‘vulnerable’ from people facing a clearly defined problem to people vulnerable to any given problem (including groups such as the elderly, children, the unemployed, etc.). He argues that it is no longer necessary to specify in what way a group is vulnerable. Vulnerability has, for Furedi, become an intrinsic, essential quality of identity rather than a moment of individual’s lives, a condition existing independently of any specific event. We might tie this probabilistic version of vulnerable populations into the preventative role of modern policing. In many of these contexts, however, these populations occupy a problematic relationship with surveillance, being at once at risk and risky, vulnerable and causing others to become vulnerable, becoming the source of victimization for particular groups of those encouraged to conceptualize it as a protective and benign force. The articles by Barnard-Wills, and Haines and Wells reveal how populations of children and drivers respectively are represented in the same way – as unknown possessors of risk (and therefore potential risks) until they trigger or fail to trigger some aspect of the surveillance infrastructure that characterizes them as ‘risks’ or ‘at risk’. In the case of drivers, offences such as speeding are themselves created to reflect potential for harm (physical harm that does not materialize in most cases detected by speed camera), criminalizing ‘pre-crime’ (Zedner, 2007) activities which, in this case, are engaged in by the majority of drivers (Wells, 2012: 109).

Apparent, too, are the challenges of shifts in the nature of crime and the social world more generally, and the perceived role of surveillance technologies in addressing them. As well as being mobilized as a potential ‘techno-fix’, technologies, including but not limited to those of the virtual world, represent a challenge to policing approaches which generally assume a physical presence within a physically and geographical conceptualized context. Crimes such as those which take place in the virtual world therefore challenge understood manifestations of crime, criminals, victims and jurisdictions. Surveillance solutions are, in some cases it seems, struggling to keep up where (ironically given that they are about identifying who is doing what) identities are blurred and events contested. Identities are central to the surveillance project, but they are also problematic. This applies both to the surveilling authorities in their attempts to assign accurately responsibility and blame but also in respect of the surveilled populations who may attempt to resist the identities ascribed to them. The contributions of Haines and Wells (where drivers resist the implication that they are criminals), Loftus and Goold (where suspects attempt to change their appearance to confuse surveillance teams) and Barnard-Wills (where the Internet offers considerable opportunities for identity-play and deception) all demonstrate this. In each case the surveillance technology is deployed within a protection narrative, but experienced (and resisted) in a much more complex fashion, even by those presumed to benefit from its presence. These themes are traced across a range of spaces; online and offline, public and private.

The broadening scope of surveillance therefore points towards what is often an ambivalent status of the watched, where an individual can move between the categories of risky and at-risk as their dividual (Deleuze, 2002) elements are classified and re-classified according to varying risk assessing processes under the varying priorities of the assessing institution. The articles by Haines and Wells, and Barnard-Wills demonstrate how problematic this notion can be, where populations move in and out of categories of dangerous/in danger, sometimes disputing the way in which they are ‘sorted’ (Lyon, 2003), or in other ways being put in danger by the process of being watched in ways that they may consider to constitute victimization in themselves. The articles reveal the existence of ambivalent relationships with criminality and crime control apparatus, often defined by (or at least signalled by) the detection of predefined risky behaviours which themselves may not be criminal but which represent a tipping point between a role as protected by surveillance and problematized by it. Sub-themes of unwanted attention also therefore link these articles, where surveilled populations occupy ambivalent positions in relation to deviance, represented in these research projects as both legitimate targets for crime control and yet also able to be conceptualized as victims. The articles explore the way in which the intervention of surveillance technologies constructs complex identities for those who fall within their gaze. These interventions shape the surveillance experiences of a variety of seemingly ‘normal’ populations initially construed as deserving of protection and thus as the beneficiaries of surveillance technologies, but whose actual surveillance experience results in a more ambiguous status. Motorists are shown, by Haines and Wells, to be able to conceptualize themselves as victims of enforcement attention, rather than as offenders and therefore legitimate surveillance targets. Two apparently similar surveillance technologies deployed for the protection of the ‘average’ ‘law-abiding’ road user, yet met with contrasting public responses characterized by protection and victimization narratives, are explored. Children, the focus of the article by Barnard-Wills, are a population who are constructed as both potential victims and potential offenders in online settings. Both constructions render them increasingly likely to be construed as legitimate targets for surveillance and intervention by a variety of adult actors who prioritize certain educational methods in response to certain narrowly perceived threats.

In the article by Loftus and Goold, the undercover surveillance work of the police, by necessity, treats the public and the identified suspect as one audience, one target. Both need to be convinced that the scene set by the surveillance teams is a realistic and natural one, so both receive the same surveillance attention to some degree by being unknowing players on a ‘stage’, a scene which, to the suspect and public, would not look out of the ordinary. Where a ‘trap’ is set to lure an offender, the police do not know which member of the present public will take the bait and which will not so all are treated as suspects until one confirms their status. Articles in this themed section demonstrate how surveillance technologies and their surrounding symbolic and semiotic ensemble re-inscribe the conventional identities of populations, as well as the norms of conduct appropriate to them. To the extent that these conventional identities carry ambiguities or serve as the framework for discrimination then these are replicated in surveillance practices. Surveillance practices themselves can also produce and establish ambiguities at the same time as they reinforce non-technological norms. We should not assume that ‘pre-surveillance’ identities are settled or unproblematic, especially when they engage with matters of criminal justice. We can see this in the sometimes paradoxical attitudes towards young people, where they are seen as a combination of dangerousness and vulnerability (Barnard-Wills). To the extent that these surveillance practices are embedded in the everyday then they can serve as a powerful hidden force preventing movement away from these ascribed identities.

Information Management and the Representation of Risk

In relating surveillance to crime control and management through the context of the everyday, articles in this themed section draw out the politics of information that can be found at this nexus. This includes the combination of covert surveillance, the everyday, the marketing and presentation of surveillance, the role of information technology and information education.

Many of the discussions to follow also touch on the issue of the marketing of surveillance technologies, highlighting the way in which they are, often deliberately, promoted by having certain aspects and functions highlighted and others de-emphasized. Often, the clear message deployed by criminal justice agencies is that the focus on the deviant/marginal other, supporting the idea that ‘normal’, ‘law-abiding’ people need not fear surveillance (see Haines and Wells). This is against a background in which police agencies also reach out to populations for information. The everyday accessibility of methods of surveillance and of making that information instantly and widely available via the web, makes possible sousveillance, where the gaze becomes inverted turning the traditional watchers into the watched. Despite this, as David Lyon (2007: 40) notes, ‘calls for the public to pass on information [to the police or other authorities] have never been more frequent’, including the plea that young people report ‘things that make them feel uncomfortable online’ to the police (Barnard-Wills, this themed section). This demonstrates that the State continues to solicit both public support for, and co-operation with its own surveillance and control activities. In doing so it is attempting to assimilate sousveillance practices into its own surveillance assemblage, despite the fact that much sousveillance is carried out as a challenge to official watching practices. As such, certain populations may be demonstrating their lack of confidence in state sponsored surveillance, rather than the oft-cited insatiable appetite for it. Current examples would include the attempt to ‘crowd-source’ the identification of those involved in looting in London in August 2011 (escalating from a demonstration against police conduct). However, an analysis of everyday surveillance suggests that the model of ‘traditional watchers’ is itself problematic, and that theories of sousveillance cannot simply be about inversion.

The article by Loftus and Goold, however, reminds us that there is another side to this issue of impression management; a ‘subterranean’ side that deliberately and necessarily shuns promotion and publicity. While covert surveillance, in this sense, offers a different perspective on the issues, it also draws its authority from similar underpinning narratives and images. The intention of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) is to assist in the investigation of terrorism, yet its deployment in cases of mundane offending, demonstrates how the spectre of the terrorist can still be useful even in cases where specific public legitimation for surveillance activities is not sought. Even when legitimation is an active political process, the public or publics are often acting at an information disadvantage, therefore complicating assessment and evaluation.

In the case of e-safety education (the subject of Barnard-Wills’ contribution) technologies in the form of learning materials are intended to be delivered to the whole population of young people, not just to specific individuals. This approach is preventative in that it attempts to pre-empt crime in an environment seen as criminogenic, however, in contrast to technological surveillance measures it is not targeted at the offenders within the population (apart from in the secondary focus upon cyber bullying) instead it is targeted at victims. E-safety education is not therefore a direct surveillance practice, but instead it shows how deeply surveillance and information practices are integrated within contemporary policing activity, even when that surveillance is not conducted by the police themselves. The activity is offset from intelligence and surveillance functions of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) but still supports it through the construction of police agents as capable actors and the endorsing of reporting of online concerns to the police. It also demonstrates another way in which surveillance is involved in the construction of identities. Young people are constructed as particularly vulnerable to specific forms of abuse-motivated surveillance, and as potential victims of sexual abuse and bullying. This construction of risky identity is then fed back to them through interventions in the classroom. The concern regarding bullying online appears to be more organic among the targeted population of young people than the fear of the sexual predator, however it highlights the way in which information technology may make previously unseen but socially negative practices visible, legible and retrievable. The education practice presents a particular orientation towards information, privacy and supervision, introduces and normalizes surveillance actors, and presents a minimal account of privacy, insufficient to act as a basis for resistance to surveillance.

Constructions of risk can therefore be seen to underpin many of these contexts, though not in a simply actuarial sense. The criminal justice techno-fix should not be viewed as simply an actuarial response to crime and disorder problems. While an actuarial, artefact construction underpins the use of speed cameras, for example, the basic facts of risk on the road are often denied by drivers, who may consider other (objectively less risky) activities to be more worthy of surveillance attention. On the other hand, as Barnard-Wills’ research shows, it is the predatory paedophile and stranger danger that dominates organizational concerns about children’s online safety, with family members (the statistically more likely abusers) constructed as part of the solution.

Conclusion

The articles collected here therefore offer a range of perspectives on a highly current criminal justice issue, situated in highly relevant contexts. We hope this collection is able to argue successfully that the cumulative effect of relatively minor but quantitatively significant encounters with surveillance is at least as significant as the major and dramatic expansions in the surveillance assemblage which tend to provoke public debate. Furthermore, the focus here is not, as it turns out, on the traditional narratives associated with the ‘cons’ side of the surveillance coin. The contexts studied here are not generally centred around data protection or privacy concerns, but other perceived and actual harms that can result from being watched with a purpose. We also hope to highlight the politics of information inherent in policing and crime prevention through information management, identity construction and risk identification. Not just the gathering of information, but its repurposing, the direction of its flows and its symbolic weight are all important issues. Finally, we can also see that far from a simplistic narrative of control through observation, the politicized everyday context supports a wider and more nuanced reading of surveillance, criminality, policing, and their supporting social, political and informational infrastructures.