SURVEILLANCE SECURITY

Surveillance Security



Abstract

Security requirements have been raised to a high level in nation-states around the world following the 9/11 attacks. The resulting increase in routine surveillance of citizens, and especially of travellers, raises questions of sociological interest regarding the intensified means of technology dependent governance common to many countries. The quality of social existence in a globalizing world is directly affected by the automated identification and social sorting systems proliferating especially at borders but also in everyday life. This paper addresses two aspects of post-9/11 security and surveillance: the proliferation of new airport security measures and the emergence of the globalized ID. In both cases, standards are being harmonized such that similar measures are in place at many airports around the world and similar national ID card-and registry systems are being established, each capable of sharing personal data cross-nationally. Implications for governance in general and civil liberties in particular are explored and critiqued.

Surveillance Security

Security requirements have been raised to a high level of priority in nation-states around the world following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Among other outcomes, the resulting increase in the routine surveillance of citizens, and especially of travellers, raises questions of sociological interest regarding the intensified means of technology-dependent governance common to many countries. These questions may include the relatively banal “How effective are these new surveillance measures in procuring security?” but more profoundly include matters of governance, human rights, and civil liberties—“human security,” in other words—in a world that is rapidly adopting deterritorialized means of “remote control” using computer networks and creating new social spaces and practices that go beyond conventional sociological analysis. My title suggests several problem areas for analysis (Amoore, 2005, 149).

The “surveillance” dimensions of (inter)national security arrangements have everything to do with “social sorting.” That is, they are coded to categorize personal data such that people thus classified may be treated differently. People from suspect countries of origin or with suspect ethnicities can expect different treatment from others. Although the category of “citizen” is still used, for example in passports and IDs, this term is both broader and narrower than it at first appears. Even citizens with those “awkward” aspects of identity may find themselves in a separate group from majority citizens. And some forms of identification relate as much too commercial as to conventionally state-generated criteria. Last, the “borders” where they may be checked are digital. Actual checking occurs upstream of physical or territorial borders (in visa offices and consulates) as well as at those sites. Such an analysis demands an understanding of socio-technical systems in their political- economic context as well as a sense of who the relevant players are. Governance, by definition, involves not only governments but also other entities such as corporations and nongovernmental organizations, and their uses of new surveillance technologies from biometrics to closed circuit television (CCTV) to radio frequency identification have to be understood in relation to risk management and social sorting and their consequences. By what means are risks assessed and threats prioritized? ...