High Technology And Monitoring And Surveillance

Abstract

Our daily spaces seem to have become inexorably populated by surveillance devices which range from the cookies on our computers, closed circuit television (CCTV) in buildings and on our streets, and the proliferation of bureaucratic forms requiring personal disclosure from our insurance companies and their ilk. These surveillance devices range in technological sophistication from the mind-boggling to the banal; and range in interest from the intensively individual to the extensive, aggregate acts of populations. Expressed in metaphors such as 'Big Brother', the dense ecology of surveillance seems to threaten cherished notions of privacy and individuality; but equally, such devices seem to provide security and coordination as we interact with our social worlds. In this milieu, geographers have started to explore the historical and contemporary logics and practices of surveillance, and in doing so have contributed to understanding surveillance as consisting of contingent, embedded practices rather than the totalitarian 'will-to-power' which informs much of the cultural imagination of surveillance.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION3

Implications3

Surveillance and the Social Sciences3

Panoptic Visions3

Omnioptic Visions3

CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW3

Toward a Surveillance Assemblage3

Electronic surveillance3

Criminal Activities3

Marketing and Advertising3

Employers and Employees3

CHAPTER THREE: RESEARCH METHODOLOGY3

The Network Camera3

Sending Images Over the Network\3

The Benefit of Digital Storage3

Analog Systems Go Digital3

Getting More Value out of the Surveillance Investment3

Future of Digital Surveillance3

The CCTV Security Market and Network Video3

Status of CCTV and Network Video Markets3

Compelling User Benefits3

Remote Accessibility Cuts Costs3

Scalability3

Capacity for Integration3

Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TOC)3

Future Proof3

Taking the First Steps to Network Video3

Network Video Applications3

Remote Monitoring3

CHAPTER FOUR: ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION3

Current Market3

A Typical Remote Monitoring System3

Technical Opportunity3

Business Opportunity3

CHAPTER FIVE: CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS3

Digital Makes Video Surveillance Faster, Clearer, More Efficient3

9/11 redefines video surveillance for the future3

The Internet Revolution In Video Surveillance3

WORKS CITED3

Chapter One: Introduction

Surveillance can be defined as the organized monitoring of the activities of actors in order to produce personal data. As such surveillance is not practiced in isolation, but rather is linked to efforts to (re)order the conduct of actors. Surveillance is a feature of all societies, but has been most closely associated in the work of geographers with the rise of state and capitalist, bureaucratic apparatuses. The systematic collection of information about births, baptisms, marriage, and deaths has had a long ecclesiastical history, but as nascent nation-states coalesced in Europe during the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, a synergistic relationship developed between states' needs for more information in order to govern and states' capacity to produce information from their subjects. The increasing collection of individual information was initially tied to more intensive forms of state policing. Indeed the use of surveillance as a tool of intensive state policing has remained an overt feature of authoritarian and colonial regimes, as well as an implicit tactic in ostensibly liberal democracies. However, in the emergent liberal democracies, states' interest in their citizens gradually shifted from the maintenance of power implied in state policing to an interest in ensuring 'national' improvement and progress. Simultaneously animated by questions of control and improvement, contemporary states and commercial enterprises have become reliant upon the production, collection, storage, and coordination ...