Hi everybody;
I hope we can use this space for members to update the rest of us with surveillance-related developments in general, or in your particular discipline, such as technological innovations or ethical and other debates. A few recent stories have appeared in the British media, across a range of issues, which illustrate the fecundity of happenings - surveillance-wise. For example, have you read in the ‘Observer’ of October 11, 1998 ‘Police switch on the candid camera that knows your face’, about the development of CCTV technology that can ‘recognise’ the facial features of individuals who have already been identified by security personnel on previous occasions? They can be spotted because the technology is programmed with the facial features of ‘suspects’ and can then rapidly scan crowds, looking for the one it ‘recognises’. Clearly, this raises a lot of debates about the ways in which strategies for targeting crime, crowd control, and the identification of individuals or groups rely on normative expectations about who ‘lawbreakers’ are, and what kind of behaviour is ‘suspect’. Furthermore, these systems have been developed by Software and Systems International, and have been approved for experimental installation by Labour controlled Newham Council, London, at a cost of sixty-thousand pounds. As somebody has already raised the questions here a few weeks back about the government funding ‘security’ and ‘crime prevention’ initiatives - is this where the money is going?
In a wider context, what is the importance of these practices - which in this instance comes from commercial, policing, local government and security industry interests - as they come together to produce new suspect communities and suspect individuals? what do they say about ‘governance’, and about the way that consensus for these practices are generated - by being justified in terms of personal safety and the more efficient and costs-reducing use of scarce police resources? Does anybody have any comments about this, or related type of development?
Regards
Mary Corcoran
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