Predictable policing: New technology, old bias, and future resistance in big data surveillance

2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 1108-1124
Author(s):  
Xerxes Minocher ◽  
Caelyn Randall
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Science And Technology Studies ◽  
New Technology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Surveillance Network ◽  
Predictive Policing ◽  
Sociotechnical System ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Data Surveillance ◽  
And Control

Within this article, we explore the rise of predictive policing in the United States as a form of big data surveillance. Bringing together literature from communication, criminology, and science and technology studies, we use a case study of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA to outline that predictive policing, rather than being a novel development, is in fact part of a much larger, historical network of power and control. By examining the mechanics of these policing practices: the data inputs, behavioral outputs, as well as the key controllers of these systems, and the individuals who influenced their adoption, we show that predictive policing as a form of big data surveillance is a sociotechnical system that is wholly human-constructed, biases and all. Identifying these elements of the surveillance network then allows us to turn our attention to the resistive practices of communities who historically and presently live under surveillance – pointing to the types of actions and imaginaries required to combat the myth and allure that swirls around the rhetoric of big data surveillance today.

Digital technologies and the violent surveillance of nonbinary gender

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jama Shelton ◽  
Kel Kroehle ◽  
Emilie K. Clark ◽  
Kristie Seelman ◽  
SJ Dodd
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Digital Technologies ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Predictive Policing ◽  
Root Cause ◽  
Gender Binary ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Trans People ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Control

The enforcement of the gender binary is a root cause of gender-based violence (GBV) for trans people. Disrupting GBV requires that we ensure that ‘gender’ is not presumed synonymous with White cisgender womanhood. Transfeminists suggest that attaining gender equity requires confronting all forms of oppression that police people and their bodies, including White supremacy, colonialism and capitalism (Silva and Ornat, 2016; Simpkins, 2016). Part of this project, we argue, includes confronting the structures of GBV embedded within digital technologies that are increasingly part of our everyday lives. Informed by transfeminist theory (Koyama, 2003; Stryker and Bettcher, 2016; Simpkins, 2016; Weerawardhana, 2018), we interrogate the ways in which digital technologies naturalise and reinforce GBV against bodies marked as divergent. We examine the subtler ways that digital technology can fortify binary gender as a mechanism of power and control. We highlight how gendered forms of data violence cannot be disentangled from digital technologies that surveil, police or punish on the basis of race, nationhood and citizenship, particularly in relation to predictive policing practices. We conclude with recommendations to guide technological development to reduce the violence enacted upon trans people and those whose gender presentations transgress society’s normative criteria for what constitutes a compliant (read: appropriately gendered) citizen.<br /><br />Key messages<br /><ul><li>Violence against trans people is inherently gender-based.</li><br /><li>A root cause of gender-based violence against trans people is the strict reinforcement of the gender binary.</li><br /><li>Digital technology and predictive policing can fortify binary gender as a mechanism of power and control.</li><br /><li>Designers of digital technologies and the policymakers regulating surveillance capitalism must interrogate the ways in which their work upholds the gender binary and gender-based violence against trans people.</li></ul>

scholarly journals Screening Power: Harry Truman and the Nuclear Leviathan (ENG)

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (12) ◽  
pp. 38-52
Author(s):  
Isabelle Freda
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear Age ◽  
Political Sovereignty ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
The Media ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
And Control ◽  
First Time

Harry Truman’s succession to the United States presidency upon Franklin Roosevelt’s death in 1945 thrust an obscure and inexperienced politician into the center of one of the 20th century’s most critical historical moment: the final months of World War II, as the United States was preparing to deploy nuclear weapons for the first time. Truman’s clear unequalness (in both image and substance) to the tasks at hand, in juxtaposition with the epic scale of the tasks themselves, provides a unique exposure of the illusory nature of presidential authority in the Nuclear Age. Using Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan as a means of delineating the theory and image of political sovereignty, this essay examines three distinct moments from the early days of Truman’s administration that serve to elucidate the absence of presidential power and control that continues to this day to underlie the media apparatus that defines the American presidency.

scholarly journals Experiments on Socio-Technical Systems: the Problem of Control Received

TECHNOLOGOS ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 27-39
Author(s):  
Peter Kroes
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Experimental System ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Technological System ◽  
Social Software ◽  
Sociotechnical System ◽  
Technical Systems ◽  
And Control

My aim is to question whether the introduction of new technologies in society may be considered to be genuine experiments. I will argue that they are not, at least not in the sense in which the notion of experiment is being used in the natural and social sciences. If the introduction of a new technology in society is interpreted as an experiment, then we are dealing with a notion of experiment that differs in an important respect from the notion of experiment as used in the natural and social sciences. This difference shows itself most prominently when the functioning of the new technological system is not only dependent on technological hardware but also on social ‘software’, that is, on social institutions such as appropriate laws, and actions of operators of the new technological system. In those cases we are not dealing with ‘simply’ the introduction of a new technology, but with the introduction of a new sociotechnical system. I will argue that if the introduction of a new socio-technical system is considered to be an experiment, then the relation between the experimenter and the system on which the experiment is performed differs significantly from the relation in traditional experiments in the natural and social sciences. In the latter experiments it is assumed that the experimenter is not part of the experimental system and is able to intervene in and control the experimental system from the outside. With regard to the introduction of new socio-technical systems the idea that there is an experimenter outside the sociotechnical system who intervenes in and controls that system becomes problematic. From that perspective we are dealing with a different kind of experiment.

The New Dynamics of Organizational Change

2019 ◽  
pp. 129-149
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Weber
Keyword(s):  
Organizational Change ◽  
News Media ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Large Data ◽  
The United States ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
And Control

Organizational change is well established as an important area of academic research. Across disciplines, from communication to sociology to management, scholars have produced a wide array of notable works examining various facets of organizational change. In recent years, however, advances in methodology and access to large data sets have opened up innovative avenues of research. This chapter examines new dynamics of organizational change, illustrated through a case study of the evolution of the news media industry in the United States. Many processes of organizational change are still based on traditional theories and established dynamics, but extant research and the present case study demonstrate that new technology and emergent patterns of communication lead to the development of new dynamics for coordination and control of information flow as organizations change over time. The chapter concludes with guidance and future directions for this evolving domain of scholarship.

Third World vulnerabilities and global negotiations

1983 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 235-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen D. Krasner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Third World ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The United States ◽  
The North ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
The Common ◽  
Long Term Prognosis ◽  
And Control

What do Third World countries want? More wealth. How can they get it? By adopting more economically rational policies. What should the North do? Facilitate these policies. How should the North approach global negotiations? With cautious optimism. What is the long term prognosis for North–South relations? Hopeful, at least if economic development occurs. This is the common wisdom about relations between industrialized and developing areas in the United States and much of the rest of the North, Within this fold there are intense debates among adherents of conventional liberal, reformist liberal, and interdependence viewpoints. But the emphasis on economics at the expense of politics, on material well-being as opposed to power and control, pervades all of these orientations.

scholarly journals Surveillance Farm: Towards a Research Agenda on Big Data Agriculture

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 370-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco Klauser
Keyword(s):  
Big Data ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Research Agenda ◽  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Smart Cities ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
Smart Farming ◽  
Smart Technologies ◽  
And Control

Farming today relies on ever-increasing forms of data gathering, transfer, and analysis. Think of autonomous tractors and weeding robots, chip-implanted animals and underground infrastructures with inbuilt sensors, and drones or satellites offering image analysis from the air. Despite this evolution, however, the social sciences have almost completely overlooked the resulting problematics of power and control. This piece offers an initial review of the main surveillance issues surrounding the problematic of smart farming, with a view to outlining a broader research agenda into the making, functioning, and acting of Big Data in the agricultural sector. For surveillance studies, the objective is also to move beyond the predominant focus on urban space that characterises critical contemporary engagements with Big Data. Smart technologies shape the rural just as much as the urban, and “smart farms” are just as fashionable as “smart cities.”

scholarly journals Environmental Politics

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-100
Author(s):  
Ali Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Environmental Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Global Dimension ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
The One ◽  
And Control

The problem that confronts scholars who intend to engage in organizing issuesassociated with the environment in a manner that is logical and coherent is thatmany of those issues are conceptually overlapping, territorially interrelated, andacademically multidisciplinary. Added to this are the submerged and not so submergedtensions between environmentalism on the one hand, which restrains thefrontier exercise of human power and control over natural resources, and neoliberali.smon the other, which ordinarily considers such limitations oddities. Manyof the scholars who have been successful in this endeavor have tried to focus onrelated environmental mediums, issues, or regions.Despite its wider scope, Environmental Politics: Domestic and Global Dimensions,which is in its third edition, weaves through the maze of topics it covers using aprocess perspective. The book focuses on formal and informal institutions andprocesses in trying to develop an understanding about how global environmentalpolicies are developed in the United States. It is essential to note from the outsetthat the domestic and global dimensions of the book basically focus on the UnitedStates' responses to those challenges and, accordingly, a foreign reader may readinto the title: The US. Environmental Politicr: Domestic and Global Dimensions.The author, Dr. Jacqueline V. Switzer, does not waste any time in letting thereader know that the approach to the book is through the process model, a processwhereby the Congress, the president and his executive branch, and the judiciaryjostle for influence in formulating, implementing or redirecting environmentalpolicies (p. viii). An associate professor of political science at Northern ArizonaUniversity, the author deploys her understanding of the history, process, and conflictinginterests that have shaped the United States' environmental policies bothat home and at the international plane, to organize the complex issues covered inthe book. The third edition is remarkable for carefully updating a book that isreputed to be an information powerhouse regarding environmental policy, actors,disputes, and processes, up through the final years of the Clinton administration.It also incorporates, in each chapter, a global dimension of the main topic of thechapter, and it revises the "Another View, Another Voice" boxes of each chapter ...

THE EXTRAORDINARY CHAMBERS IN THE COURTS OF CAMBODIA AND THE PROGRESS OF THE ‘KHMER ROUGE TRIALS’

2008 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 373-389
Author(s):  
Nina H.B. Jørgensen
Keyword(s):  
Vietnam War ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Khmer Rouge ◽  
The United States ◽  
Phnom Penh ◽  
Power And Control ◽  
The World ◽  
Asian Nation ◽  
And Control ◽  
Modern Era

AbstractThe world has witnessed many atrocities since the followers of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, better known as the Khmer Rouge, marched into Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975 and unleashed a regime of terror of more than three and a half years on the Cambodian people in which an estimated quarter of the population perished. However, the fate that befell this small South-East Asian nation continues to grip and challenge the imagination. Perhaps it is the notion of the State turning on its own people on such an unprecedented scale that is so difficult to fathom. Perhaps it is the tranquil, smiling populace, forging a space in the modern era against the proud backdrop of the ancient Angkorian temples that makes such a dark recent history so improbable. Or perhaps it is the scales of justice, finally weighing in, more than thirty years after the crimes in defiance of donor countries' ‘tribunal fatigue’, that have refocused the world's attention.The Khmer Rouge takeover had been preceded by a struggle for power which saw Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who had abdicated and governed Cambodia since independence in 1953, overthrown by Prime Minister Lon Nol and Prince Sisowath Sirik Matak on 17 March 1970. The new government was allied to the United States in the Vietnam War, fuelling Khmer Rouge resentment as well as that of Sihanouk who aligned himself with the communists. The Khmer Rouge gradually consolidated its power and control of territory, and when the time was seen to be ripe to institute the planned nationwide ‘agrarian dictatorship’, it easily overpowered the weak and corrupt Lon Nol government.

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