This edited collection reports the results of a comparative study of video surveillance/CCTV in Germany, Poland, and Sweden. It investigates how video surveillance as technologically mediated social control is affected by national characteristics, with a specific concern for recent political history. The book is motivated by asking what makes video surveillance "tick" in three very different cultural settings, two of which (Poland and Sweden) are virtually unexplored in the literature on surveillance. The selection of countries is motivated by an interest in societies with recent experiences of authoritarianism, and how they respond to the global trend towards intensified technical means of control. With thorough empirical studies, the book constitutes an important contribution to security studies, surveillance studies, and post-communist area studies.

Investigating the theoretical and empirical relationships between transparency and trust in the context of surveillance, this volume argues that neither transparency nor trust provides a simple and self-evident path for mitigating the negative political and social consequences of state surveillance practices. Dominant in both the scholarly literature and public debate is the conviction that transparency can promote better-informed decisions, provide greater oversight, and restore trust damaged by the secrecy of surveillance. The contributions to this volume challenge this conventional wisdom by considering how relations of trust and policies of transparency are modulated by underlying power asymmetries, sociohistorical legacies, economic structures, and institutional constraints. They study trust and transparency as embedded in specific sociopolitical contexts to show how, under certain conditions, transparency can become a tool of social control that erodes trust, while mistrust—rather than trust—can sometimes offer the most promising approach to safeguarding rights and freedom in an age of surveillance. The first book addressing the interrelationship of trust, transparency, and surveillance practices, this volume will be of interest to scholars and students of surveillance studies as well as appeal to an interdisciplinary audience given the contributions from political science, sociology, philosophy, law, and civil society. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Surveillance and transparency are both significant and increasingly pervasive activities in neoliberal societies. Surveillance is taken up as a means to achieving security and efficiency; transparency is seen as a mechanism for ensuring compliance or promoting informed consumerism and informed citizenship. Indeed, transparency is often seen as the antidote to the threats and fears of surveillance. This book adopts a novel approach in examining surveillance practices and transparency practices together as parallel systems of accountability. It presents the house of mirrors as a new framework for understanding surveillance and transparency practices instrumented with information technology. The volume centers around five case studies: Campaign Finance Disclosure, Secure Flight, American Red Cross, Google, and Facebook. A series of themed chapters draw on the material and provide cross-case analysis. The volume ends with a chapter on policy implications.

Developed by Bruno Latour and his collaborators, actor-network theory (ANT) offers crimes studies a worthy intellectual challenge. It requires us to take the performativity turn, consider the role of objects in our analysis and conceptualize all actants (human and non-human) as relational beings. Thus power is not the property of one party, but rather it is an effect of the relationships among actants. This innovative collection provides a series of empirical and theoretical contributions that shows: ¢ The importance of conceptualizing and analyzing technologies as crucial actants in crime and crime control. ¢ The many facets of ANT: its various uses, its theoretical blending with other approaches, its methodological implications for the field. ¢ The fruitfulness of ANT for studying technologies and crime studies: its potential and limitations for understanding the world and revamping crime studies research goals. Students, academics and policy-makers will benefit from reading this collection in order to explore criminology-related topics in a different way.

Central state and non-covert surveillance began in earnest at the start of the twentieth century. By the start of the twenty-first century, the UK was one of the most surveilled societies on earth. This groundbreaking volume by Inga Kroener analyses the particular combination of factors that have created this surveillance state. Kroener argues against the inevitability of the rise of CCTV that is so often found in this literature, to map out the early history of CCTV, tracing its development from a tool for education, safety and transport during the 1950s, to one of politics in the 1970s and 1980s, to eventually become a tool of surveillance during the 1990s. Within this analysis, the complex role of the public in 'allowing' the widespread and rapid dissemination of CCTV is discussed and the representation of CCTV in the media is also studied. This volume will be of interest to all scholars working in the fields of surveillance studies; science, technology and society departments; and social historians more generally.

This book argues that information communication technologies are not creating new forms of social structure, but rather altering long-standing institutions and amplifying existing trends of social change that have their origins in ancient times. Using a comparative historical perspective, it analyzes the applications of information communication technologies in relation to changes in norms and values, education institutions, the socialization of children, new forms of deviant and criminal behaviors, enhanced participation in religious activities, patterns of knowledge creation and use, the expansion of consumerism, and changing experiences of distance and time.

This book explores contemporary transformations of identities in a digitizing society across a range of domains of modern life. As digital technology and ICTs have come to pervade virtually all aspects of modern societies, the routine registration of personal data has increased exponentially, thus allowing a proliferation of new ways of establishing who we are. Rather than representing straightforward progress, however, these new practices generate important moral and socio-political concerns. While access to and control over personal data is at the heart of many contemporary strategic innovations domains as diverse as migration management, law enforcement, crime and health prevention, "e-governance," internal and external security, to new business models and marketing tools, we also see new forms of exclusion, exploitation, and disadvantage emerging.