Evidence Locker By Jill Magid: Chapter Analysis

Historically, surveillance came in the form of a watch tower, designed to watch out for danger in order to protect citizens. In a more recent context, the implementation has evolved now to supervise the citizens in order to watch out for danger. The modern “watch tower” does not occupy the same physical space as its predecessor and does not impress by its height, but rather, impresses by its seemingly omnipresent eye in all channels of society and its reach into the lives of individuals, but that reach is only enough to protect very specific dangers. Although mass surveillance portrays itself as proficient in preventing threats to a collective, Nikki Giovanni’s “Surveillance” reveals her mother’s physical abuse and, as a result, the dissonance

A Surveillance Society by Thompson and Hickey is about how public surveillance is everywhere, looking at everything, and is never turned off. First, the PATRIOT Act was passed by Congress shortly after 9/11, and has allowed the government to start watching people. Ever since then the U.S. has increased its use of cameras in public places. Today, just about everywhere businesses and shoppers are, there are cameras. High-tech surveillance devices are more prevalent across populated areas. Corporations, agencies and even individuals monitor social areas with surveillance. With today’s technology, cameras are able to scan images and identify people. Organizations regularly share databases, swapping personal information. Some are opposed

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 movie Rear Window captivates the audience by presenting a thrilling murder mystery, where Jeff Jefferies, the masculine hero, is confined to a wheel chair in his apartment, which leads to the spying on his neighbors. In the movie, Hitchcock beautifully captures the turn of events from Jeff’s wrongful surveillance of his neighbors, to catching the killer. His examination of the idea of surveillance and privacy, plays into the current American debate of the rise of the surveillance debate. Hitchcock’s movie also falls into a traditional pattern where men are the active dominant roles and women are the submissive, background roles. Consequently, I believe that women are not a part of the rise of surveillance state conversation,

Surveillance is not a new thing. In fact, espionage, tracking, and sleuthing were part of society ever since 5000 B.C. But in the rise of the modern era, the idea of surveillance in the public eye serves as a controversial topic of discussion. People everywhere complain about the existence of security cameras, government tracking, and the right to privacy. Such problems, however, are not due to the sudden discovery of surveillance, but the modern abuse of it. Seeing the disastrous effects of over surveillance from George Orwell’s 1984, the public rightfully fears societal deterioration through modern surveillance abuse portrayed in Matthew Hutson’s “Even Bugs Will Be Bugged” and the effects of such in Jennifer Golbeck’s “All Eyes On You”. The abuse of surveillance induces the fear of discovery through the invasion of privacy, and ensures the omnipresence of one’s past that haunt future endeavors, to ultimately obstruct human development and the progress of society overall.

When the government or law enforcement has reasonable suspicion of criminal behavior, different methods of obtaining information and evidence must be used in the interest of preventing violence and decreasing crime. This is seen in the actions of Persistent Surveillance Systems, a security company run by Ross McNutt that utilizes military grade cameras, flown on planes two miles in the sky, to gain a bird's eye view of a region and any crimes that might occur. A controversy over privacy surrounds these methods; people tend to be uneasy with the feeling that they are being watched all the time, and it is easy to draw a parallel to Orwell’s all-seeing Big Brother. However, the cameras overhead are not forcing citizens to conform to a single mold or limiting freedom, they are monitoring for crime, or used to retrace the path of a crime after it occurs, as is the case in a murder in Juarez, Mexico. In this case, the police brought Persistent Surveillance the location of a body, which had been shot with no witnesses. McNutt and his team used the photos taken that day to locate the murder at the time it happened and trace the killer’s path to their current location, in less than a day. Upon further investigation the

Ball, K.S.(2001). Surveillance Society: Monitoring everyday life. Information Technology & People, 14(4), 414-419. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/222415193?accountid=32521

Originally an architectural model for a prison (Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon), American philosopher Michel Foucault applies the panopticon’s characteristics – which include: the lack of privacy; the forced conformity and changes in behaviour to cope with the lack of privacy; and lack of knowledge of who is watching you, why they are watching you, how, or whether you are being watched or not– to our modern world (Simon 2-3). Bart Simon argues, “To know one is being seen without being able to see carries with it uncertainty that becomes a source of anxiety, discomfort and terror” (Simon 4). In other words, feeling that you are being watched causes stress, which ultimately leads to “normalization” and “conformity” – changing our behaviour (which mimics the behaviour of those around us) to adapt (Simon 4-5, 7; Langlois). Furthermore, in the panoptic prison of our everyday world, we are inmates who try to adapt to the slow deterioration of our right to privacy. Citizenfour, presents the concepts of privacy and surveillance following the September 11 Terrorist Attacks, along with the behavioural effects of knowing one is relentlessly being watched by the state. Through the behaviour of Edward Snowden and the director’s use of symbolism, Citizenfour reveals the panoptic prison present in our modern

“Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. (pp.333-34)”

At the time Radebaugh’s comic was published, it likely gave rise to a plethora of questions about the government’s ability to track and trace members of the public. People may have questioned whether giving up their privacy was the necessary cost of safety. Perhaps the police were going to turn into their own sort of ‘Big Brother’, and they would abuse their power of surveillance techniques in order to control the masses. Consequently, the 21st century is also beset with many relevant questions concerning this topic. Ultimately, it can be stated that, in contrast with Radebaugh’s comic, the real world does a significantly more effective job of using surveillance techniques, as law enforcement uses video surveillance more cost-effectively, they utilize new and alternative technologies in addition to the CCTV camera, and they consistently do a better job of acknowledging the people’s right to privacy. Thus, this essay sets out to suggest that, while the social cost of surveillance techniques remains high, the legal provisions regarding privacy that exist in the real world have kept police

surveillance as a source of agency and power in order to break through the confines of

In early June 2013, when the Guardian newspaper reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens, the scandal broke. Edward Snowden was the source of the report. Edward Joseph Snowden, a computer expert, who used to work for the CIA of the United States turned into a whistleblower and exposed the U.S. government’s secret surveillance programs. Before this case happened, most U.S. citizens had not known that their privacy data had been surveilled by government agencies. When law enforcement and intelligence agencies want to glean information, to detect or to prevent crime and terrorism, or to investigate them that have already taken place, they use surveillance.

Nevertheless, video surveillance has a bad rap with skeptics, especially elders due to the stigma attached that the government is watching us. But even if they are, it’s beneficial for your wellbeing that you essentially give up your privacy for the sake of your life. As seen from the reports of unnecessary violence, the victims got justice for the wrongdoings of others due to the video taping that is constantly going on around

"Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. (pp.333-34)"

The idea of utilizing cameras in law enforcement is not a new idea as we employed them long before the recent civil unrest. However, the question remains how are we to effectively wear them, when should we turn them on, and will they exactly represent the entirety of the incident, and are there privacy issues? These are just a few problematic areas related to camera usage by officers, with numerous other areas of concern that require addressing. Additionally, the reflex decision to attempt nationwide implementation of camera utilization is terrible, and in reality, a Band-Aid for dealing with the people’s mistrust of government.

In Michael Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”, the late eighteen century English philosopher Jeremy Bentham's model of Panopticon was illustrated as a metaphor for the contemporary technologies of mass surveillance.