Globalizing Surveillance

Abstract

If surveillance was once thought of as primarily the domain of the nation-state, or of organizations such as firms within the nation-state, in the 21st century it must be considered in a broader context. Surveillance has to do with the rationalized control of information within modern organizations, and involves in particular processing personal data for the purposes of influence, management, or control. It also depends for its success on the involvement of its ‘data-subjects’. In countries of the global north, surveillance expanded with increasing rapidity after computerization from the 1970s onwards, a process that also enabled it to spread more readily to other areas, especially from workers and citizens to consumers and travellers. Since the 1980s, surveillance has become increasingly globalized, as populations become more mobile, and as social relations and transactions have stretched more elastically over time and space. Globalizing surveillance was also catalyzed by the events of 11 September 2001. However, surveillance processes occur differently in different cultural contexts, as do responses to them. Understanding comparatively the various modes of surveillance, understood sociologically, helps us grasp one of the key features of today’s world and also to see political and policy responses to it in perspective.