Surveillance, Crime and Social Control
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Surveillance, Crime and Social Control

Dean Wilson, Clive Norris, Dean Wilson, Clive Norris

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eBook - ePub

Surveillance, Crime and Social Control

Dean Wilson, Clive Norris, Dean Wilson, Clive Norris

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About This Book

Post 9/11 the need for an expansion of surveillance and greater expenditure on surveillance capabilities has been argued for by government and industry to help combat terrorism. This has been coupled with increasing incorporation of surveillance technologies into the routine practice of criminal justice. This important collection draws together key contemporary writings to explore how the surveillance gaze has been directed in the name of crime control. Key issues include theories on surveillance, CCTV, undercover police surveillance, bodies databases and technologies, and surveillance futures. It will be an essential collection for law librarians and criminologists.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351896740
Topic
Law
Edition
1
Part I
Theory
[1]
I’ll Be Watching You
Reflections on the New Surveillance
T. Marx Gary
Popular culture is sometimes far ahead of academic analysis in identifying important social currents. This is true of the hit song Every Breath You Take, sung by a celebrated rock group known as The Police. It contains these lines:
every breath you take
[breath analyzer]
every move you make
[motion detector]
every bond you break
[polygraph]
every step you take
[electronic anklet]
every single day
[continuous monitoring]
every word you say
[bugs, wiretaps, mikes]
every night you stay …
[light amplifier]
every vow you break …
[voice stress analysis]
every smile you fake
[brain wave analysis]
every claim you stake …
[computer matching]
I’ll be watching you
[video surveillance].
From this song we can draw hints of what can be called “the new surveillance.” The surveillance component of social control is changing radically. The rationalization of crime control, which began in the 19th century, has crossed a critical threshold as a result of broad changes in technology and social organization. Surveillance has become penetrating and intrusive in ways that previously were imagined only in fiction.
The information-gathering powers of the state and private organizations are extending ever deeper into the social fabric. The ethos of social control has expanded from focused and direct coercion used after the fact and against a particular target to anticipatory actions entailing deception, manipulation, planning, and a diffuse panoptic vision.
I shall attempt here to (1) describe some of the major types of this new surveillance; (2) indicate how contemporary forms differ from traditional ones; (3) consider some undesirable consequences of these changes.
The gigantic data banks made possible by computers raise important surveillance questions. Many basic facts about the computerization of credit, banking, medical, educational, employment, tax, welfare, telephone, and criminal-justice records are well known. But beyond the increased amount of information they make available, computers have altered the very nature of surveillance. Record surveillance is routinized, broadened and deepened, and, for practical purposes, records become eternal. Bits of scattered information that in the past did not threaten the individual’s privacy and anonymity are now joined. Organizational memories are extended over time and across space. Observations have a more textured, dimensional quality. Rather than focusing on the discrete individual at one point in time and on static demographic data such as date of birth, surveillance increasingly involves more complex transactional analysis, interrelating persons and events (for instance, the timing of phone calls, travel, bank deposits).1
A thriving new computer-based, data-scavenging industry now sells information gleaned from such sources as drivers’ licenses, vehicle-and voter-registration lists, birth, marriage, and death certificates, land deeds, telephone and organizational directories, and censustract records.
Many issues—such as privacy, civil liberties, uses of and control over information, unauthorized access, errors, and the rights of the person about whom information is gathered—are raised by the computer-matching and -profiling operations that have come into increased prominence in the last decade.2
Matching involves the comparison of information from two or more distinct data sources. In the United States, more than 500 computer-matching programs are routinely carried out by government at state and federal levels, and the matching done by private interests is far more extensive. Profiling involves an indirect and inductive logic. Often, clues are sought that will increase the probability of discovering violations. A number of distinct data items are correlated in order to assess how close an event or person comes to a predetermined model of known violations or violators. Consider the following examples:
• A Massachusetts nursing-home resident lost her eligibility for government medical assistance because of a match of bank and welfare records. The computer match discovered that she had more than the minimum amount welfare recipients are permitted in a savings account. What the computer did not know was that the money was held in trust for a local funeral director, to be used for her burial expenses. Regulations exempt burial contracts from asset calculations.
• The Educational Testing Service uses profiling to help discover cheating. In 1982 it sent out about 2,000 form letters alleging “copying” to takers of its scholastic aptitude test based partly on computer analysis. A statistical review had “found close agreement of your answers with those on another answer sheet from the same test center. Such agreement is unusual and suggests that copying occurred.” Students were told that in two weeks their scores would be canceled and colleges notified, unless they provided “additional information” to prove they had not cheated.
• In New York City, because of computer matching, persons cannot purchase a marriage license or register a deed for a new home if they have outstanding parking tickets.
I
Some of fiction’s imaginary surveillance technology, like the two-way television that George Orwell described, is now reality. According to some observers, video-telephone communication is likely to be widespread in private homes by the year 2000. One-way video surveillance has expanded rapidly, as anyone who ventures into a shopping mall or uses an electronic bank teller should realize. The interior of many stores is monitored by closed-circuit TV. The camera is often inside a ceiling globe with complete 360-degree movement and the ability to tape-record. Amber or mirrored surfaces hide where the cameras are aimed.
Among the new techniques that permit intrusions that only recently were in the realm of science fiction, or not even envisioned there, are new or improved lasers, parabolic mikes and other bugs with still more powerful transmitters, subminiature tape recorders, remote-camera and videotape systems; means of seeing in the dark, detecting heat or motion; odor, pressure, and contraband sensors; tracking devices and voice stress analyzers.
The last decade has seen the increased use of supposedly scientific “inference” or “personal truth technology” based on body clues (such as the polygraph, voice stress analysis, the stomach pump, the “passive alcohol detector,” and blood or urine analysis for drugs). These highly diverse forms of detection have at least one thing in common—they seek to verify an implicit or explicit claim put forth by an individual regarding identity, attitudes, and behavior.
“Mini-Awacs” and satellites that can spot a car or a person from 30,000 feet up have been used for surveillance of drug traffickers. The CIA has apparently used satellite photographs for “domestic coverage” to determine the size and activities of antiwar demonstrations and civil disorders. The “starlight scope” light amplifier, developed for the Vietnam War, can be used with a variety of cameras and binoculars. When it amplifies light 85,000 times it turns night settings into daylight. Unlike the infrared devices developed earlier, it does not give off a tell-tale glow.
The highly secretive National Security Agency—using 2,000 staffed interception posts throughout the world, and satellites, aircraft, and ships—monitors all electronic communication from and to the United States. Its computer system permits simultaneous monitoring of about 54,000 telephone calls and cables. The agency is beyond the usual judicial and legislative controls and can disseminate its information to other government agencies without a warrant.3
The 1968 wiretap law makes it a felony for a third party to place an electronic listening device on a telephone or in a room. Government agents can do this only under strictly defined conditions with a warrant. Yet this law refers only to aurally transmitted “conversations.” It says nothing about nonvoice and video communications. No restrictions are placed on the interception of information transmitted in digital microwave form. As a result of recent technical developments, more than half of all long-distance telephone calls are now transmitted from point to point in digital form and then converted back to a familiar voice sound. Telephone voice communications will increasingly be sent this way. Much computer information is also sent via microwaves. Even if laws were to be passed granting this information the same protection as voice conversations, the information can easily be picked up without leaving a trace by anyone with even modest snooping equipment.
Another surveillance use of the telephone involves the expansion of hot lines for anonymous reporting. One of the largest programs is TIP (Turn-in-a-Pusher). The video equivalent of the old reward posters, a program found in hundreds of communities, is called Crime Stoppers USA, Inc. It uses televised reenactments (“The Crime of the Week”) to encourage witnesses to unsolved crimes to come forward. There are also radio and newspaper versions. Many companies maintain an internal hot line for anonymous reporting. WeTiP, Inc., a nonprofit organization, offers a general, nationwide 24-hour toll-free hot line for reporting suspicious activities. All 19 federal inspector-generals and some state and local agencies have hot lines for receiving allegations.
THE REAL ACTION, in the future, will be with nonhuman informers: a 400-pound, bulletproof mobile robot “guard” has been developed. It is equipped with a sonar range finder, sonic and infrared sensors, and an odor detector for locating humans. The robot can find its way through a strange building. Should it encounter an intruder, it can say in a stern, synthesized voice, “You have been detected.” Another “mobile robotic sentry,” resembling a miniature tank, patrols an area and identifies intruders. Users can choose the robot’s weaponry and whether or not human permission (from a remote monitoring station) is needed before it opens fire. But not to worry. The manufacturer assures us that in the U.S. the device will not be “armed with lethal weapons”; or if it is, “there will always be a human requirement in the loop.”
Telemetric devices attached to a subject use radio waves to transmit information on the location and/or physiological condition of the wearer and permit continuous remote measurement and control. Such devices, along with new organizational forms based on theories of diversion and deinstitutionalization (such as halfway houses and community treatment centers), diffuse the surveillance of the prison into the community.
After over a decade of discussion, telemetric devices are now being tried in the criminal-justice system. Offenders in at least four experimental jurisdictions are serving court-supervised sentences that stipulate wearing a monitoring anklet containing an electronic transmitter. The radio signal it emits is picked up by a receiver connected to the telephone in the wearer’s home. This receiver relays the signal to a central computer. If the wearer goes beyond 150 feet from this telephone or tries to remove or unplug the device, the interruption of the signal is displayed on the computer. The judge receives a daily copy of the printout, and any errant behavior must be explained.
In other proposed systems subjects are not restricted to their residence; however, their whereabouts are continuously known. The radio signal is fed into a modified missile-tracking device that graphs the wearer’s location and can display it on a screen. In some police departments, an automatic car-locator system has been tried to help supervisors know exactly where patrol cars are at all times. There also are various hidden beepers that can be attached to vehicles and other objects to trace their movements.
The Hong Kong government is testing an electronic system for monitoring where, when, and how fast a car is driven. A small radio receiver in the car picks up low-frequency signals from wire loops set into streets and then transmits back the car’s identification number. The system was presented as an efficient means for applying a road tax to the many cars in Hong Kong’s concentrated traffic areas. It can, of course, also be used to enforce speed limits and for surveillance. In the U.S., a parking meter has recently been patented that registers inserted coins and then radios police when the time has run out.
Surveillance of workers, whether on assembly lines or in offices or stores, has become much more severe with computerized electronic measures. Factory outputs and mistakes can be more easily counted and work pace, to a degree, controlled. Employee theft of expensive components or tools may be deterred by embedded sensors that emit a signal when taken through a barrier. Much has been written about the electronic office, where the data-processing machine serves both as a work tool and monitoring device. Productivity and employee behavior thus are carefully watched, and even executives are not exempt. In some major American corporations communication flows (memo circulation, use of internal phone systems) now are closely tracked.
In some offices, workers have to inform the computer when they are going to the bathroom and when they return. Employees may be required to carry an ID card with a magnetic stripe and check in and out as they go to various “stations.”
Integrated “management systems” offer visual, audio, and digital information about the behavior of employees and customers. Information may be recorded from cash-register entries, voices, motion, or when standing on a mat with a sensor. Audiovisual recordings and alarms may be programmed to respond to a large number of “triggering devices.”
Means of personal identification have gone far beyond the rather easily faked signature or photo ID. Thus one new employee security-checking procedure involves retinal eye patterns. Before gaining access, or a benefit, a person’s eyes are photographed through a set of binoculars, and an enlarged print of the retina pattern is compared to a previous print on file. Retinal patterns are said to be more individual than thumbprints, offering greater certainty of identification.
FINALLY, UNDERCOVER PRACTICES—those old, traditional means of surveillance and investigation—have drastically changed in form and expanded in scale during the last decade. The new devices and techniques have enabled police and federal agencies to penetrate criminal, and sometimes noncriminal, milieus in utterly new ways.4
In the United States, the federal agency that is most affected is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In the past, the FBI viewed undercover operations as too risky and costly (for both individuals and the agency’s reputation) for use in routine investigations of conventional criminal activity. Now, however, in the words of an agent, “Undercover operations have become the cutting edge of the FBI’s efforts to ferret out concealed criminal activity.” In the mid-1970s the FBI began using undercover agents in criminal investigations. The number of such investigations has steadily increased from 53 in 1977, to 239 in 1979, to 463 in 1981.
Beyond well-known cases—such as Abscam, the fake consulting firm run jointly by IBM and the FBI that sold “stolen” data to Japanese companies, the John DeLorean case, police posing as derelicts with exposed wallets or as fences purchasing stolen property—recent cases have involved policewomen posing as prostitutes and then arresting the men who propositioned them; tax agents stationed in banks and businesses posing as prospective buyers or clients to gain information; phony cases entered into the criminal-justice system to test if prosecutors and judges would accept bribes; “bait sales” in which undercover agents offer to sell, at a very low price, allegedly stolen goods to merchants or persons they meet in bars; agents acting as guides for big game hunters and then arresting them for killing protected species or animals out of season. These examples—and we could add many more—surely make clear that it is a new ball game, and that its players are sometimes beyond m...

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