Fredrika Björklund - Video Surveillance and Social Control in a Comparative Perspective

1 Science and the Media

Alternative Routes in Scientific Communication

Massimiano Bucchi

2 Animals, Disease and Human Society

Human-Animal Relations and the Rise of Veterinary Medicine

Joanna Swabe

3 Transnational Environmental Policy

The Ozone Layer

Reiner Grundmann

4 Biology and Political Science

Robert H Blank and Samuel M. Hines, Jr.

5 Technoculture and Critical Theory

In the Service of the Machine?

Simon Cooper

6 Biomedicine as Culture

Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life

Edited by Regula Valrie Burri and Joseph Dumit

7 Journalism, Science and Society

Science Communication between News and Public Relations

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8 Science Images and Popular Images of Science

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9 Wind Power and Power Politics

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10 Global Public Health Vigilance

Creating a World on Alert

Lorna Weir and Eric Mykhalovskiy

11 Rethinking Disability

Bodies, Senses, and Things

Michael Schillmeier

12 Biometrics

Bodies, Technologies, Biopolitics

Joseph Pugliese

13 Wired and Mobilizing

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Victoria Carty

14 The Politics of Bioethics

Alan Petersen

15 The Culture of Science

How the Public Relates to Science Across the Globe

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The Challenges of Web 2.0 and Social Media

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17 The Good Life in a Technological Age

Edited by Philip Brey, Adam Briggle and Edward Spence

18 The Social Life of Nanotechnology

Edited by Barbara Herr Harthorn and John W. Mohr

19 Video Surveillance and Social Control in a Comparative Perspective

Edited by Fredrika Bjrklund and Ola Svenonius

Edited by

Fredrika Bjrklund and Ola Svenonius

First published 2013

by Routledge

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Simultaneously published in the UK

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Video surveillance and social control in a comparative perspective / edited by Fredrika Bjrklund and Ola Svenonius.

p. cm. (Routledge studies in science, technology and society ; 19)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Video surveillanceSocial aspects. 2. Social control.
3. Privacy, Right of. I. Bjrklund, Fredrika. II. Svenonius, Ola.

TK6680.3.V52 2012

303.3'3dc23

2012017973

ISBN: 978-0-415-62860-0 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-203-08290-4 (ebk)

FREDRIKA BJRKLUND AND OLA SVENONIUS

PART I
Comparative Studies

FREDRIKA BJRKLUND

OLA SVENONIUS

PATRICIA JONASON

PART II
Case Studies

WOJCIECH SZRUBKA

PAWE WASZKIEWICZ

ERIC TPFER

ELFAR LOFTSSON

This book documents the project Balancing Integrity and Legal SecurityA Comparison of Popular Surveillance in Germany, Sweden, and Poland, which was carried out at Sdertrn University, Stockholm, 20082011. Thanks to the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies for financing this project. Among several accommodating and helpful people who have contributed to making this book possible, we owe Dr. Micha Bron special thanks for his competent assistance with the interviews and field studies in Poland.

Fredrika Bjrklund and Ola Svenonius

Introduction

One defining characteristic of the last twenty years is without a doubt the emergence of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a central aspect in all areas of social life. Since the 1960s, and most notably after 1990 and the fall of the Iron Curtain, technological development has increased exponentially. Whereas the increasing dependence on, and belief in, technologys potential for making our lives easier is generally a positive feature of late capitalism, there is also reason to be very wary of how ICTs are deployed. This regards specifically the ever-increasing availability of relatively inexpensive ICTs developed for purposes of surveillance and social control. In this volume, the type of equipment that we are especially interested in is cameras, and the surrounding, attaching, and enhancing technologies that improve their functionality. But surveillance is much more than the electrified computer circuit linked to a lens and a digital receiver. What is interesting about surveillance practices are their motivations, practice, and institutional embeddedness.

Surveillance in general, and video surveillance in particular, can be understood in terms of the indirect social control it facilitates, its central position in late modernity, and its function as a replacement for the direct social control that existed prior to the development of inexpensive ICTs. The discourse on surveillance in the social and human sciences owes much to the work of Foucault and Deleuze who, from an early stage, influenced critical scholars to take a very sceptical view of social control, as a perpetual machinery with no end to its appetite for increased discipline/control (Fiske 1998; Gandy 1993; Lyon 2006; Mathiesen 1989; Norris 2003). The possibility that surveillance technologies could be used for ill by authoritarian regimes was always there, but even in a democracy, freedom could be a technology of power as explored in Foucaults and Deleuzes work. During the 1970s and80s, many Western European countries created strict institutional restrictions to prevent any trend towards the type of authoritarianism that existed in communist Eastern Europe, and which had been vividly described by George Orwell in 1984. However, in the decades after 198990, as the old geopolitical distinction between East and West lost much of its meaning, and surveillance technology became more available, governments started to relax the strict regulations that were once in place. At the same time, new ideas concerning security have gained ground across Europe, which promote video surveillance as an effective means of crime prevention and to increase perceptions of security (Svenonius 2011). As the memory of Communism fades, new technological forms of social control have become dominant where before there was fear of authoritarianism. This book seeks to understand how that change came to be and how surveillance practices are institutionalised today.