IRSP III: Surveillance Consequences of 9/11
(Team Leaders: Kevin Haggerty, University of Alberta, and Arthur Cockfield, Faculty of Law, Queen's University)
This research node explores how post-9/11 surveillance developments, including legal changes, surveillance technology developments and changing security dynamics, have contributed to the enhancement or the inhibition of the relationship of trust between individuals and major social institutions such as government and corporations. The trust relationship is fostered by citizen perceptions that they are being treated fairly and equally by institutions, and that their fundamental rights are being respected. Two main research foci will strive to assess this trust relationship:
1. Citizen Perceptions: To what extent do citizens trust institutions that are engaging in surveillance? Do citizens think the government has struck the right balance between national security and protecting other values such as the right to privacy? Does group identity influence these perceptions?
2. Police Powers: Have enhanced powers promoted trust? Have Canadian police officers, border agents and/or intelligence agencies changed their surveillance and investigatory practices as a result of enhanced police powers granted through post-9/11 legal and technological changes? The trust relationship will be assessed through different research methodologies, including empirical assessments via interviews and focus groups.
Work on developments post-9/11 is now fundamental to surveillance studies, and this IRSP will act as a magnet for such research, pulling together previously disparate studies and consolidating this indispensable field. It will also draw upon knowledge generated by other IRSPs about trends in different surveillance domains.
The research workshop The Surveillance Games is an outcome of IRSP III.
Visit the Security Games website.
The Vancouver Statement of Surveillance, Security and Privacy (2009): http://www.sscqueens.org/Vancouver_Statement
Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events
Edited by Colin Bennett and Kevin Haggerty, Taylor & Francis 2011
Mega-events have become occasions for experiments in monitoring people and places. As such, they have become important moments in the development and dispersal of surveillance, as the infrastructure established for mega-events are often marketed as security solutions for the more routine monitoring of people and place. Mega-events, then, now serve as focal points for the proliferation of security and surveillance. They are microcosms of larger trends and processes, through which – as the contributors to this volume demonstrate – we can observe the complex ways that security and surveillance are now implicated in unique confluences of technology, institutional motivations, and public-private security arrangements. As the exceptional conditions of the mega-event become the norm, Security Games: Surveillance and Control at Mega-Events therefore provides the glimpse of a possible future that is more intensively and extensively monitored.
The research workshop The Expanding Surveillance Net: Ten Years after 9/11 is an outcome of IRSP III.
The Surveillance Studies Centre
c/o David Murakami Wood
Department of Criminology
University of Ottawa
Canada