Read more to access the summary of the research findings and background documents related to the GPD international survey on privacy and surveillance. Read more about @title...

The report describes Britain as a "surveillance society," where there are up to 4.2m CCTV cameras--about one for every 14 people--and increased monitoring of work, travel and telecommunications.

Fears that the UK would "sleep-walk into a surveillance society" have become a reality, the government's information commissioner Richard Thomas has said.

Researchers highlight "dataveillance", the use of credit card, mobile phone and loyalty card information. Read more about @title...

Several Queen's University GPD investigators have written to the Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, and the Subcommittee on the Review of the Anti-terrorism Act. The letter, dated 18 October 2006, urges lawmakers to implement the necessary legislation to promote the recommendations of the Commission's report as soon as possible, and states, in part, that Read more about @title...

Location: Mackintosh Corry Hall, Room D528 Time: 12:30 - 2:00 pm

Abstract

Employment and labour are definitely married to the economic realm, but under the auspices of neoliberal work regimes one's position in the market is permanently uncertain; individuals must take responsibility for their own precarity. To meet the demands of new economic shifts, many firms are looking for a more thorough measure of an individual's capacity to be a productive member of the team. Indeed, where particular techniques of workplace surveillance (e.g., keystroke monitoring, video surveillance, call monitoring, etc.) centers on the labour process, pre-employment screening increasingly focuses on the worker rather than the work itself. Read more about @title...

Abstract

Surveillance of low-income women in the United States is nothing new. From techniques of reproductive sterilization to methods of industrial psychology, the canaries in the coal mine of technological "progress" have routinely been the poor and oppressed. So what is new about surveillance technologies in the welfare office? In this paper, I offer evidence that women receiving public benefits in a small city in upstate New York perceive significant, troubling, and ongoing changes. Over three years of participatory research with women living in transitional housing, I learned that welfare administration technologies play a considerable role in reproducing power assymetries and constructing manageable subjects for neoliberal governance regimes. These "technologies of citizenship," in addition to providing new forms of discipline and control, offer sites of political learning to low-income women, teaching lessons about their comparative social worth, competence, and opportunities. Rather than being "information" or "technology poor," as much public policy argues, most low-income women have in fact had too much interaction and too intimate a relationship with information technologies. In this paper, I explore some of those intimate interactions, their impacts on welfare recipients' understandings of their citizenship, and suggest a kind of education for critical technological citizenship—Popular Technology—that turn these experiences into resources for—rather than barriers to—learning and engagement. Read more about @title...

Call for Papers

Surveillance and Society online journal "Smart Borders and Mobilities: Spaces, Zones, Enclosures" Edited by Louise Amoore, Stephen Marmura , and Mark Salter Deadline for submissions: 1st March 2007 Publication date: September 2007

The border has been called the fundamental political institution, delineating between inside/outside, us/them, safe/dangerous, known/unknown. With the increased ability of state and commercial agents to overcome and reinvent traditional sovereign lines, borders are instantiated throughout society not simply at border posts but also at airports, in databases, through international call centers, and with identity documents. Cross-border data-flows may complicate realities already identified as problematic within information-based societies. Surveillance practices in public spaces, border zones, and the workplace may become both more nuanced and more intrusive, as we see with anti-globalization protests, Schengen border zones, and in low-wage non-unionized labour shops. The tracking and identification of specific individuals or groups by government agencies may be intensified. Consumers may be increasingly subjected to "foreign" marketing and advertising strategies not legally sanctioned within their own societies. Citizens may have data transmitted and analyzed far from the point of origin or of collection in the cases of passenger profiling or the more general war on terror. Wider and wider risk groups are being surveilled in ways that circumvent or restructure borders. Read more about @title...

The aim of the conference is to present and discuss methods and approaches to assess the social and political impacts of surveillance technologies. Moreover, the academic perspective shall be extended by integrating international art projects on surveillance in the programme. The conference will be held November 30th to December 1st 2006 in Berlin at the Technical University and will include experts in different disciplines, artists and members of the public. Read more about @title...

The Globalization of Personal Data (GPD) project , funded by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, invites you to submit a proposal for a paper based on the findings of an international public opinion survey on surveillance and privacy. The paper will be presented during a workshop at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario on 17-18 November 2006. The public opinion survey was carried out under the auspices of the GPD project and covers nine countries. Read more about @title...