The case of Pavel Eliseevich Shchegolev, an individual under public police surveillance

This article contains documents clarifying the circumstances of the scientistʼs deportation under police surveillance and his stay in Yuryev, the village of Syabrenitsy and Lubanʼ (1908—1909).

How to Watch the Watchers? Democratic Oversight of Algorithmic Police Surveillance in Belgium

In the last decade and more recently triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, algorithmic surveillance technologies have been increasingly implemented and experimented with by the police for crime control, public order policing, and as management tools. Police departments are also increasingly consumers of surveillance technologies that are created, sold, and controlled by private companies. They exercise an undue influence over police today in ways that are not widely acknowledged and increasingly play a role in the data capture and processing that feeds into larger cloud infrastructures and data markets. These developments are having profound effects on how policing is organized and on existing power relations, whereby decisions are increasingly being made by algorithms. Although attention is paid to algorithmic police surveillance in academic research as well as in mainstream media, critical discussions about its democratic oversight are rare. The goal of this paper is to contribute to ongoing research on police and surveillance oversight and to question how current judicial oversight of algorithmic police surveillance in Belgium addresses socio-technical harms of these surveillance practices.

REGULATING THE NON-MILITARY USE OF DRONES AND PROTECTION OF PRIVACY

In last few years we are witnesses of strong development of drones’ capacity not only for military purposes but also for civilian use, particularly for police surveillance, investigations, arrests and search and rescue operations. Up until now not even United States of America adopted unified laws considering the use of drones and their impact on privacy but it is obvious that legal, administrative and justice framework for balancing these two conflicted interests and demands will soon be developed. This article will give the review of legal problems and solutions from literature covering countries which are the leaders in this field of technology and law.

Police–school partnerships and the war on black youth

This article discusses the growing presence of police officers in British schools, under a resurgent police–school partnerships policy agenda in the ‘war on gangs’ and serious youth violence. It argues that while efforts to coordinate law enforcement and education implicate schools in general, evidence on race and policing raises concerns about the disproportionate impact of such strategies on black students. Police–school partnerships enhance existing and escalating forms of multi-agency police surveillance and profiling, while also giving officers a greater role in everyday schooling matters. Thus, grassroots anti-racist movements face a developing and dynamic challenge to resist not only the militarised policing of black youth, but also the corresponding weaponization of schools and the wider welfare state.

“Purely Artistic”

Following World War II, French police surveillance in Algeria increasingly focused on the threat of Algerian nationalism and policing theater proved no exception. The police assiduously investigated the contents of plays and the background of performers, seeking to determine whether a performance could be considered “purely artistic.” In cracking down on theater, the police attempted to produce “pro-French” art that could influence Algerian loyalties, a cultural civilizing mission carried out by the unlikely figure of the beat cop. Ultimately, their mission failed. Live performances presented an opportunity for spontaneity and improvisation that revealed the weakness of colonial policing. In this article, I argue that in trying to separate art from politics, the police created an impossibly capacious idea of the political, giving officers justification for inserting themselves into intimate moments of daily life. The personal, the interpersonal, and the artistic became a realm of police intervention.

Lawful Illegality: Authorizing Extraterritorial Police Surveillance

This paper examines Lisa Austin’s (2015) concept of lawful illegality, which interrogates the legal foundations for potentially unlawful surveillance practices by United States (US) signals intelligence (SIGINT) agencies. Lawful illegality involves the technically lawful operation of surveillance powers that might be considered unlawful when examined through a rule of law framework. We argue lawful illegality is expanding into domestic policing through judicial decisions that sanction complex and technically sophisticated forms of remote online surveillance, such as the use of malware, remote hacking, or Network Investigative Techniques (NITs). Operation Pacifier targeted and dismantled the Playpen dark web site, which was used for distributing child exploitation material (CEM), and has generated many judicial rulings examining the legality of remote surveillance by the FBI. We have selected two contrasting cases that demonstrate how US domestic courts have employed distinct logics to determine the admissibility of evidence collected through the NIT deployed in Operation Pacifier. The first case, United States v. Carlson (2017 US Dist. LEXIS 67991), offers a critical view of the use of NITs by the FBI, with physical geography constraining the legality of this form of surveillance in US criminal procedure. The second case, United States v. Gaver (2017 US Dist. LEXIS 44757), authorizes the use of NITs because the need to control crime is believed to justify suspending the geographic limits on police surveillance to identify people involved in the creation and dissemination of CEM. We argue this crime control emphasis expands the reach of US police surveillance while undermining due process of law by removing the protective function of geography. We conclude by suggesting the permissive geographic scope of police surveillance reflected in United States v. Gaver (2017 US Dist. LEXIS 44757), and many other Playpen cases, erodes due process for all crime suspects, but is particularly acute for people located outside the US, and suggest a neutral transnational arbiter could help limit contentious forms of remote extraterritorial police surveillance.

Police surveillance over prostitution as an intrinsic element of ethical discipline in the conditions of regulation

The authors examine the aspects of law enforcement practice of the local police authorities of the Russian Empire with regards to surveillance over prostitution in the conditions of its regulation since the late XIX century. Emphasis is made on analysis of the activity of police in Nizhny Novgorod Governorate, which was among the first alongside the capital to establish medical-police committee. However, attention is focused not on the sanitary control, but rather surveillance carried out by the police officers over prostitutes and persons involved in organization of prostitution, multiple administrative norms and rules regulating such activity. The research is based on dialectical method of cognition that allows examining police surveillance over prostitution in evolution and interconnection of all its manifestations. The events and facts related to the process of regulation of prostitution were studied in accordance with the principle of historicism, Formal-legal method was applies in analyzing the departmental regulatory legal acts and police law enforcement practice of surveillance activity. The authors’ main contribution consists in examination and introduction into the scientific discourse of archival sources that helped to restore the mechanism of surveillance activity, which includes a range of organizational measures of local police authorities over prostitution and its organization.

Sound

Chapter 1 lays out the tension between ideas about music’s political efficacy and the productive work that sound did for the opposition in Poland. Within the intellectual community that shaped much of dissident culture, poets, filmmakers, and actors were more engaged with politics than composers and musical performers. To understand the logic behind claims that music was less politically meaningful, the chapter compares the Communist Party’s policies toward music with those debated in the oppositional journal Independent Culture. In contrast, the opposition’s cassette culture circumvented the Censorship Bureau and stumped secret police surveillance, revealing the powerful political potential of sound. Its founders were invested in tape contra print as well as cassettes’ transnational distribution and alternative economies. Listening to these cassettes as sounding artifacts reveals diverse repertories and creative editing techniques that belie the assumption that music was politically impotent for the opposition.