Colonial Surveillance

Elia Zureik recently published an article on colonial surveillance (in the Oct/Nov 2013 issue of Red Pepper). Census-taking, finger printing and other forms of colonial oversight, he argues, were a crucial part of constituting and ruling over colonial populations. Not only are these surveillance practices relevant for the colonised word, they also 'spilled over' to the colonising countries. Zureik illustrates this with historical cases (Alfred McCoy's research about the relation between the US and the Philippines), and with contemporary practices (the use of drones by Israel).

4S - 2014 edition

 And it goes on... "The king is dead, long live the king!" Or rather: just as 4S has come off the calendar for 2013, 4S is back on for 2014. Here's the full announcement for Buenos Aires:

CfP: STS in Singapore

News from the Calls front! In short: Global STS, 14-15 March 2014, Singapore, featuring a keynote by Wiebe Bijker, endorsed by 4S, submission deadline 15 January 2014.
Might well be worth looking into!

My day as a data dealer

A while back I stumbled upon a browser game which in some ways could be considered an attempt to gamify privacy literacy. Gamification in the context of surveillance usually means the exploitation of the pleasures of play in order to collect and sell data, i.e. in fitness or productivity apps. In a somewhat similar vein, a group of web developers/hacktivists based in Vienna, Austria, set out to make education about privacy issues more interesting and pleasurable (but I suspect they don’t want to sell the players’ data). The media reactions made me curious, so I spent one Sunday afternoon trying to experience the dark pleasures of big data.

Charles Raab on surveillance studies and political science

More guest author stuff (this might actually become a regular thing): Charles Raab blogging for the Political Studies Association on possible contributions of political science to surveillance studies. Not sure what astonishes me more, his - business as usual - brilliant insights or the fact that he is actually BLOGGING :)

4S Annual Meeting - a "surveillance review"

It's been a couple weeks now since the 2013 edition of the 4S Annual Meeting took place in San Diego. Time for a quick guest author's review! The event has been the largest conference organized by the Society for Social Studies of Science so far, assembling over 1.200 attendees in the "Town and Country Resort and Convention Center", and providing the convenient possibility to relax by the pool under palm trees between the sessions.

4S recap

We've been back from 4S for a while now and I think it's time for a little recap of some of the surveillance relevant sessions -- and there were quite a few! Let's say, big data was really BIG this time; it was present even in sessions which didn't have the magic words in the title. It was pretty amazing. Matthias will guest blog about the surveillance panels (yay!), and I'll try to talk a little about the algorithms stuff (which also was about big data) (man, big data! it's everywhere!).