Category: academic

My plans

Today there probably won´t be that much new here as I am concentrating on preparing for interviews for the next two weeks in Saõ Paulo and Brasília. I will be talking to various NGOs (mainly concerned with urban violence and security), academics, parliamentarians and representatives for the federal police and government ministers. I am also meeting Danilo Doneda later today, who is the leading Brazilian legal expert on privacy and data protection, and a member of the Habeus Data network, which campaigns for information rights in Latin American.

(My netbook has also decided not to work today, so if I can´t get that fixed there might not be much here at all for the next two weeks! Why do these things always happen just when it is least convenient?)

US No-Fly List is a big fat waste of money

I can’t say I am remotely surprised, but in the journal, Homeland Security Affairs, Marcus Holmes has written a comprehensive demolition of the claim that the US federal government’s No-Fly List is an efficient security policy. He isn’t concerned with civil liberties – ACLU has done that elsewhere – nor with effectiveness – Bruce Schneier nailed that one a while back. He simply demonstrates, using elementary Cost-Benefit Analysis that the policy is a big fat waste of money. The article isn’t complicated to understand, so the best thing I can suggest is that you just go read it… (and thanks to Bruce Schneier and Boingboing.net for posting on this one).

Datawars Conference

There will be a very interesting -looking conference in Amsterdam, 11-12 June, called Datawars: Fighting Terrorism through Data. According to the call for papers, the workshop will be held at the University of Amsterdam in June and will explore the ethical and political implications of the new data-led approach to security, risk and fighting terrorism in Europe. Suggested topics include:

  • Privacy, security and human rights
  • Ethics, responsibility and justice in European data wars
  • Risk, prevention, preemption
  • Data and surveillance
  • Private authorities, states and the European Union
  • Constituting Europe through data

It´s part of a project run by a couple of excellent researchers, Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede, of the Universities of Durham and Amsterdam respectively (who probably don´t remember but I worked in an tiny attic office opposite them in the Politics Dept at Newcastle for a few months just after my PhD!). I might go as I have been doing some work on attempts to create global databases, called ´From Echelon to Server in the Sky´, but the timing might be awkward (unfortunately I can´t reveal why yet…).

Major new report on surveillance out next week

House of Lords
House of Lords

I hear on the grapevine that the British House of Lords’ Constitution Committee Report on Surveillance and Data Sharing will be out next Friday 6th February. The inquiry conducted by the committee has been one of the most thorough of any so far conducted, and certainly promises to be more considered than the rather rushed House of Commons Home Affairs Committee report, A Surveillance Society? from last year. Both reports were ordered largely in response to the Report on the Surveillance Society that Surveillance Studies Network wrote for the UK Information Commissioner in late 2006, and which is still getting coverage around the world (see CCTV in Canada for example). Check the Committee’s website for the report itself and, of course, back here for a review, on Friday.

New Issue of Surveillance & Society Out Now!

survsoc
It’s taken a lot of time and effort but finally we have… a New Website, New Automated Submissions System, New Calls for Papers and a NEW ISSUE OUT NOW!

6.1 Relaunch Issue: Revisiting Video Surveillance

New papers from Chris Williams, William Webster, Francisco Klauser, Dietmar Kammerer and Jeremy Douglas, insightful comment from Mike Nellis, a police surveillance film from 1935, and loads of book reviews.

Still to come this year: 6.2 Surveillance and Medicine; 6.3 Gender, Sexuality and Surveillance; 6.4 Open Issue; 6.5 Surveillance and Resistance.

Calls for Papers:

  1. Surveillance, Children and Childhood (ed. Val Steeves and Owain Jones) – deadline August 31st 2009;
  2. Performance, New Media and Surveillance (ed. John McGrath and Bill Sweeney) – deadline March 30th 2009.

Check the Announcements section of the website for details. As always, we have an open call for submissions on anything related to surveillance. And if you’re a postgrad or an early career researcher, you can even qualify for our new prizes! We also have a new video stream to handle films and slideshows.

Got a great idea for an issue? Any other questions? Get in touch. Contact our Editorial Assistant: Emily Smith.

Do you have a book that would be of interest to S&S readers, or want to review for us? Contact our Book Review Editor: Kevin Haggerty.

…and we are still completely free of any charges for publication or access. Want to support us? Join the Surveillance Studies Network, which runs Surveillance & Society and supports the development of Surveillance Studies worldwide.

Behind the scenes at Surveillance & Society

pkpI’ve been keeping quiet about this on the blog so far because it’s too close to me and probably of little interest to anyone who’s reading this, but what’s been occupying just about all my so-called spare time, and driving me crazy, for the last few months has been finally getting Surveillance & Society converted to a new website which runs on the really rather excellent Open Journal System, run by the Public Knowledge Project.

If it’s so excellent, why has it been driving me crazy? Well, being a piece of Open Source software, there’s a lot that is down to the user in terms of trouble-shooting and fixing unexpected problems. And unfortunately, despite being someone who often researches software, and computer systems, I am not massively geeky (ok, so my Geek Quotient is probably higher than some but that’s mostly down to teenage role-playing activities!). I originally taught myself HTML to design the original site, but using OJS has meant that I have had to develop a familiarity with CSS, XML and PHP. If I’d known how simple it was at the beginning it probably would have only taken me a few days, but I had periods of utter despair just looking at the site every so often over days and then weeks, and wondering why the <bleep> it wasn’t working… by the end I was just wondering how I could have been quite so stupid.opensource_logo

Well, there’s still lots to do but the site works. That makes me happy. And, more importantly it confirms both my and Surveillance & Society‘s commitment to open flows – Open Source, Open Access and the Creative Commons. The latest issue has even been produced entirely on a Linux-driven netbook from here in Brazil using Open Office (ok, maybe I am getting just a tiny bit geeky!). There is still a perception especially amongst those who buy into the corporate model of publishing that online journals are just pale imitations or easier to get published in, but Surveillance & Society is no weak online version of anything else, it is a proper academic journal with proper academic standards. Of course it is free to publish in and free to access. We aren’t going to go down the route of pay-to-view or pay-to-publish. Knowledge should be free. The downside is that our organisation has been literally amateurish and our ability to keep to deadlines has depended way too much upon my timetable and state of mind: the new issue was the result of another overnighter – I haven´t slept for 36 hours…

cclogocircleWhat has kept the journal just about going until this new website was developed has been time given mainly by me, but also by the other members of the Editorial Board and our Editorial Assistant, oh and also Nilz, and the techs from all-inkl.de and the OJS Support Forum who have really been very patient! It is sometimes like an extra full-time job for which I don’t get paid… hopefully now, with a site that is at least partly automated and to which many people can contribute, that will no longer be the case. Surveillance & Society will finally be able to stick to a timetable, and I will be a lot less stressed.

But to do this we need some income and the main way we get this is by membership and donations. If you are interested in surveillance studies and want to support us, you can join Surveillance Studies Network or give us whatever you want – we’re a registered charity that owns Surveillance & Society and works to develop Surveillance Studies worldwide. That, and the income from reprints of articles in books, is about the only income we have.

March Surveillance Workshop

If I wasn’t still in Brazil in March, I would be at my friend and colleague, Torin Monahan‘s latest workshop, on Surveillance and Empowerment at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. The aim is to reverse the usual way all too many of us think about surveillance as negative to “explore the potential of surveillance for individual autonomy and dignity, fairness and due process, community cooperation and empowerment, and social equality.” It’s a way of thinking that I have been trying to consider for a while, however unpopular it is with some Surveillance Studies scholars and anti-surveillance activists… should be controversial in the most productive way – and Torin’s workshops are always productive.

Civil liberties in Britain

In February, the Convention on Modern Liberty will be taking place in cities across the UK and online. Unfortunately I will still be in Brazil and there are no listed events in Newcastle, which is a great shame – I would certainly have been organising some. This is an issue that tends to cross party lines and unite people of all political persuasions, so I hope as many people as possible in the UK get involved…

The Guardian newspaper´s Comment is Free site also has a special section set up for the event called Liberty Central. Surveillance Studies Network and Surveillance & Society were supposed to be listed there (they contacted us), but they aren´t yet…