This chapter considers the issues of security, risk, and surveillance. It discusses the meaning of these terms within criminology; introduces key relevant theories; summarizes criminological research in these areas; identifies some new security and surveillance technologies; and discusses their implications, concerns, and debates surrounding their use.
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21. Surveillance and security in a risk society
Richard Jones
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1. The death of privacy and the growth of surveillance
The topic of privacy has many aspects. In some instances, especially where well-known figures are involved, it relates to the legal ability to stop the bringing of information about their private lives into a more public arena. For most people, it involves the ability to go about everyday life without having details of movements and actions recorded and analysed to form the basis for further actions relating to them. In some cases, this may appear relatively harmless. Most people are familiar with the notion of web advertising targeted by reference to a user’s browsing history but there have been more potentially threatening applications ranging from the use of automated facial recognition systems to monitor activity in public spaces to the oft cited use of Facebook data for political purposes as seen in the 2016 US Presidential election. More and more actions are recorded, processed and used as the basis for action that affects the individual concerned. Whether this is a force for good or ill is something that can be debated. What is clear is that informational surveillance will impact very significantly upon debates as to the nature of the societies that we wish to live in.
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9. The Right to Private Life
The Concentrate Questions and Answers series offers the best preparation for tackling exam questions. Each book includes typical questions, diagram answer plans, caution advice, suggested answers, illustrative diagrams and flowcharts, and advice on gaining extra marks. Concentrate Q&A Human Rights & Civil Liberties offers expert advice on what to expect from your human rights and civil liberties exam, how best to prepare, and guidance on what examiners are really looking for. Written by experienced examiners, it provides: clear commentary with each question and answer; bullet point and diagram answer plans; tips to make your answer really stand out from the crowd; and further reading suggestions at the end of every chapter. The book should help you to: identify typical law exam questions; structure a first-class answer; avoid common mistakes; show the examiner what you know; all making your answer stand out from the crowd. This chapter covers the right to private and family life, including the scope of privacy and private and family life, protection in domestic law and under the ECHR, privacy and press freedom, and surveillance powers and privacy.
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13. Information: Public Access, Protecting Privacy and Surveillance
Patrick Birkinshaw
The Freedom of Information Act is a statute of great constitutional significance. The Act heralded a right to publicly held information which government had attempted to keep private. FOIA laws have their origins in the pre-digital age and any discussion of information rights must take on board the contemporary reality of the global digitization of communications via social media networks and the enhanced capabilities of state intelligence agencies to conduct surveillance over electronic communications. The General Data Protection Regulation seeks to give greater security to personal data. However, private information is harvested by private tech companies which they have obtained often ‘voluntarily’ and used by intermediaries to influence public events, public power and elections—as illustrated by recent scandals involving the practice of ‘data farming’ by social media networks and the sale of personal data to political campaign consultants seeking to pinpoint electors and thereby affect the outcomes of national elections and referenda. Government surveillance is age-old, but the emergence of digital power has enabled public authority to invade our private lives far more intrusively and effectively. The most recent example is the Investigatory Powers Act 2016. All this poses substantial challenges for the public regulation of information access in a growing confusion of public and private in the constitution. Courts, meanwhile, have to balance demands for privacy protection, open justice and secrecy.
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2. Sources of Knowledge about Crime and Deviance
This chapter examines various sources of knowledge on the sociology of crime, deviance, and control, noting the lack of a straightforward route to the collection of information available. It argues that information is difficult to obtain due to the tendency of subjects to protect, conceal, or misrepresent. As a result, sociologists of deviance have to content themselves imperfect data. The materials upon which theories are fabricated are characterised by limitations, constraints, and distortions. In addition to the covert nature of deviance, deviants themselves rarely engage in collective efforts to interpret their own behaviour. Due to secret practices and restricted information, rule-breaking is represented to inquisitive outsiders as something else, most research is limited and parochial, and the field of criminology is littered with uncertainties. This chapter also examines a number of methods used by criminologists to dispel those uncertainties. Finally, it discusses the development of criminological theory.
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10. Police and media
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
This chapter synthesizes a theoretical view of police and media which considers not only media content, but also how different kinds of media technologies function as tools in the hands of different kinds of institutional actors. It also considers police-media relations in the light of neo-liberal market conditions. Relations between police and media have traditionally been conceptualized between two poles of argument, on the one side the orthodox/hegemonic and on the other the revisionist/subversive. However, the social fragmentation of ‘postmodern conditions’ at the cusp of the millennium troubled this binary. A common question in thinking about the police and media concerned the manufacture of consent and the creation of socially integrative conditions for policing by consent of the governed. This chapter argues that social conflict and dissensus are functional symptoms of neo-liberal social order in which security has become a commodity. The social disintegration accompanying an over-mediatized society does not inhibit market relations, but it does make policing more difficult.
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7. Below, beyond, and above the police: pluralization of policing
Benjamin Bowling, Robert Reiner, and James Sheptycki
The chapter surveys theories concerning the hybrid nature of the plural policing web. It evaluates the claim that a fundamental shift in policing occurred at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Holding police métier as a definitional constant, the chapter examines how policing is enacted from different institutional positions in plural policing. It outlines the history of claims about the rise of plural policing before discussing its relation to law, the military, technology, territory, locality, the rising importance of private ‘high policing’, and the centrality of surveillance. The chapter demonstrates the complex opportunity structure of the plural policing web, the variety of legal and technological tools involved in its operations, and suggests that it poses fundamental problems for the democratic governance of police that have not been resolved. It concludes that there is both continuity and change in the politics of the police and that claims of a fundamental break have been overstated.
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6. Non-interrogatory evidence and covert policing
Ed Cape
This chapter examines the main types of non-interrogatory evidence gathered through criminal justice processes. First we look at witness and identification evidence; like the interviewing of suspects, this is not as straightforward as it might appear. We then move onto entry of premises (eg suspects’ homes, places of work, etc), search of those places and seizure of ‘suspicious’ goods discovered by searches. Whereas most entry and search is known to the suspects and/or owners of the premises concerned, ‘covert’ policing is, by definition, not made known to the subjects of the policing. Covert policing takes many forms: eg, surveillance, ‘undercover’ policing, use of informers, interception of communications. Finally we examine scientific evidence which, like witness evidence, is far from straightforward. There are many problems common to all these types of information-gathering. These include the fragility and ambiguity of what often appears solid and objective; the way they erode human rights; the effect of ‘police culture’ on what is gathered and how it is interpreted; and the lack of accountability for what is done and how it is done.
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4. Investigating crime and gathering evidence
The criminal process is, to a large extent, an investigative one, existing to prepare cases for effective trial. To this end, authorities are given powers enabling them to gather evidence. But these powers can infringe numerous interests, some relating to the workings of the process itself, in addition to external ones, such as liberty, privacy, freedom from humiliation, and bodily integrity. This chapter examines how the gathering of evidence is and should be affected by these concerns and covers powers and practices in relation to the investigation of crime and the gathering of evidence. It discusses stop and search, surveillance, eyewitness identification evidence, voice identification, forensic and biometric samples, and the privilege against self-incrimination.
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28. Security and smart cities
Ben Bradford and Pete Fussey
This chapter explains the profound implications of digital society on the questions of crime, security, surveillance, and policing. In recent decades, digital technologies brought profound changes to human societies and the way they are governed. The chapter explains that digital processes do more than accelerate the production and availability of information, which highlights the implications of digital society from the abundance of data. The digital revolution has rendered criminological preoccupations more urgent and pressing than ever before. The chapter also provides an overview of the concept of a smart city by considering its criminogenic consequences and its potential for crime prevention and surveillance.
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15. Article 8: right to respect for private and family life
Without assuming prior legal knowledge, books in the Directions series introduce and guide readers through key points of law and legal debate. It discusses European Convention law and relates it to domestic law under the HRA. Questions, discussion points, and thinking points help readers to engage fully with each subject and check their understanding as they progress and knowledge can be tested by self-test questions and exam questions at the chapter end. This chapter focuses on Article 8. Article 8 is concerned with matters that are considered personal, over which individuals are sovereign, and with which the state should not interfere. In its first paragraph, it recognises ‘private life’, ‘family life’, ‘home’, and ‘correspondence’ as the general concepts in terms of which this sphere of the personal is to be protected under the European Convention on Human Rights. These terms are defined and discussed in the chapter. The second paragraph presents the general legal conditions that must be satisfied before such interference can be considered justified and compatible with the Convention. Much of the chapter is concerned with the application of Article 8 to various situations such as surveillance, the environment, deportation, abortion, and euthanasia. Article 8 is also invoked in respect of important and controversial matters such as the situation of transgendered persons and the duties of states towards homosexual families.
