We live in an age saturated with surveillance. Our personal and public lives are increasingly on display for governments, merchants, employers, hackers—and the merely curious—to see. In Windows into the Soul, Gary T. Marx, a central figure in the rapidly expanding field of surveillance studies, argues that surveillance itself is neither good nor bad, but that context and comportment make it so. In this landmark book, Marx sums up a lifetime of work on issues of surveillance and social control by disentangling and parsing the empirical richness of watching and being watched. Using fictional narratives as well as the findings of social science, Marx draws on decades of studies of covert policing, computer profiling, location and work monitoring, drug testing, caller identification, and much more, Marx gives us a conceptual language to understand the new realities and his work clearly emphasizes the paradoxes, trade-offs, and confusion enveloping the field. Windows into the Soul shows how surveillance can penetrate our social and personal lives in profound, and sometimes harrowing, ways. Ultimately, Marx argues, recognizing complexity and asking the right questions is essential to bringing light and accountability to the darker, more iniquitous corners of our emerging surveillance society. For more information, please see www.garymarx.net.

Product Description: Surveillance, Capital and Resistance is a major contribution to current debates on the subjective experience of surveillance. Based on a large research project undertaken in a Northern City in the UK and focusing mainly on the use of surveillance in the context of policing and security, the book explores how a diverse range of social groups (‘school children’, ‘political protesters’, ‘offenders’, ‘unemployed people’, ‘migrants’, and ‘police officers’) experience and respond to being monitored by ‘new surveillance’ technologies such as CCTV surveillance cameras and computers...read more

Product Description: Security concerns have mushroomed. Increasingly numerous areas of life are governed by security policies and technologies. Security Unbound argues that when insecurities pervade how we relate to our neighbours, how we perceive international politics, how governments formulate policies, at stake is not our security but our democracy...read more

What limits, if any, should be placed on a government's efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security? Spying on foreigners has long been regarded as an unseemly but necessary enterprise. Spying on one's own citizens in a democracy, by contrast, has historically been subject to various forms of legal and political restraint. For most of the twentieth century these regimes were kept distinct. That position is no longer tenable. Modern threats do not respect national borders. Changes in technology make it impractical to distinguish between 'foreign' and 'local' communications. And our culture is progressively reducing the sphere of activity that citizens can reasonably expect to be kept from government eyes.The main casualty of this transformed environment will be privacy. Recent battles over privacy have been dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance or CCTV; the coming years will see debates over DNA databases, data mining, and biometric identification. There will be protests and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. Those battles are worthy. But the war will be lost. Modern threats increasingly require that governments collect such information, governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it.One Nation Under Surveillance proposes a move away from questions of whether governments should collect information and onto more problematic and relevant questions concerning its use. By reframing the relationship between privacy and security in the language of a social contract, mediated by a citizenry who are active participants rather than passive targets, this book offers a framework to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty.

Product Description: Surveillance and Identity analyses the discourse of surveillance in the contemporary United Kingdom, drawing upon public language from central government, governmental agencies, activist movements, and from finance and banking. Examining the logics of these discourses and revealing the manner in which they construct problems of governance in the light of the insecurity of identity, this book shows how identity is fundamentally linked to surveillance, as governmental discourses privilege surveillance as a response to social problems...read more

Product Description: Surveillance has a long-standing relationship with crime and its identification, prevention, detection, and punishment. With information on each citizen spanning up to 700 databases and over 4 million CCTV cameras in the UK alone, many have put forward the notion that we live in a 'surveillance society'...read more

Product Description: This collection represents the first sustained attempt to grapple with the complex and often paradoxical relationships between surveillance and democracy. Is surveillance a barrier to democratic processes, or might it be a necessary component of democracy? How has the legacy of post 9/11 surveillance developments shaped democratic processes? As surveillance measures are increasingly justified in terms of national security, is there the prospect that a shadow "security state" will emerge? How might new surveillance measures alter the conceptions of citizens and citizenship which are at the heart of democracy? How might new communication and surveillance systems extend (or limit) the prospects for meaningful public activism? Surveillance has become central to human organizational and epistemological endeavours and is a cornerstone of governmental practices in assorted institutional realms...read more

Product Description: This broad ranging volume discusses protecting privacy in video surveillance from various technical points of view. It also examines surveillance from a societal perspective. The book features state-of-the-art research from leading global experts.

Product Description: Here are poems that strike deep into the core of our shifting yearning lying selves. I've read nothing better in the field these last ten years. Angela Shaw is simply furiously miraculous. --Junot Díaz.Angela Shaw's The Beginning of the Fields is a brilliant reminder of what distinguishes poetry from prose...read more

Product Description: Surveillance is commonly rationalized as a practice to address existing political or social problems such as crime, fraud, and terrorism. This book also explores how surveillance, disguised as managing risk or reducing harm, can cause a range of problems, including poverty, over-policing, and exclusion...read more

Product Description: This volume presents recent insights in the sociological study of surveillance and governance in the context of criminal justice and other control strategies. The chapters provide a varied set of theoretical perspectives and substantive research domains on the qualities and quantities of some of the most recent transformations of social control as well as their historical precursors in diverse social settings...read more

Product Description: The study of surveillance is more relevant than ever before. Thefast growth of the field of surveillance studies reflects both theurgency of civil liberties and privacy questions in the war onterror era and the classical social science debates over the powerof watching and classification, from Bentham to Foucault andbeyond...read more

Product Description: In Loving Big Brother the author tackles head on the overstated claims of the crime-prevention and anti-terrorism lobbies. But he also argues that we desire and enjoy surveillance, and that, if we can understand why this is, we may transform the effect it has on our lives...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Our public and private lives are under surveillance as never before. Whether we are shopping with a credit card, walking down the street or emailing a colleague at work, our activities are monitored. Surveillance has become more routine, more integrated and more intrusive. It is vital to ask how and why this should be so, and assess what the consequences are. Since September 11th 2001 surveillance has intensified further. Yet although individuals, groups, governments and states are more closely monitored, our security is not assured. The contributors to this volume explore the vast range of issues related to increased surveillance. What is going on in an area clouded by secrecy from the state and complacent reassurances from corporations? How do we track suspects and combat crime without also eroding our civil liberties and sacrificing our rights to privacy? Does electronic tagging of prisoners work? What are retailers up to with 'lifestyle profiling'? Focusing on these and other issues such as paedophilia, money-laundering, information warfare, cybercrime, and related legislation, this book spotlights benefits and costs of surveillance, and suggests how it is likely to develop in the future. Experts from Europe and America offer an international perspective on what is now a worldwide issue, making this book of interest to a wide range of people including legal practitioners, law enforcement agencies, policymakers and students across the social sciences. (view table of contents)

Product Description: Lyon (sociology, Queen's U., Kingston, Ontario, Canada) examines the constant computer-based scrutiny of ordinary daily life for citizens and consumers as they participate in contemporary societies. He uses an analytical, political, and ethical framework to explore emerging trends in surveillance, with emphasis on some basic ambiguities of surveillance, which may be traced to religious sources in western cultures...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)