EN:

Municipal apps prompt citizens to report incidents of urban disorder and nuisance in a quick and simple manner directly from their mobile devices to the relevant municipal department. Presented as participatory surveillance tools, these apps allow local authorities to crowdsource information on the urban environment directly from citizens. However, these same platforms also enable individual citizens to anonymously report one another for minor criminal offences, such as vandalism, graffiti, public urination, parking violations, or illegal trash dumping. Focusing on FixMyStreet, a municipal app used in Brussels, Belgium, this paper draws on a content analysis of the FixMyStreet reports’ open database to explore how the introduction of participatory surveillance tools can open up spaces for lateral surveillance where citizens surveil each other. We delve into how municipal apps can contribute to the emergence of digital informants—and how this process risks (extralegal) vigilantism, ethnic profiling, privacy infringement, exacerbated neighbours’ feuds, or diminished social cohesion. We then explore the different social and political concerns emerging with the growth of lateral surveillance in urban spaces and make several propositions to ameliorate local authorities’ adoption and handling of municipal apps.

EN:

Monitored ceasefires are thought to be more robust ceasefires, with less noncompliance by conflict parties. Ceasefires monitored with remote sensing technology (RST) such as imaging satellites, uncrewed aerial vehicles, and other camera-equipped assets are widely seen as more effective in deterring conflict party noncompliance. Drawing on insights from surveillance studies, especially from the logics of resistance to surveillance, I argue that the opposite outcome can occur: the use and presence of RST in monitoring may also contribute to new ceasefire noncompliance in the form of new violence. Taking a primarily abductive approach, I theorize how such noncompliance may be produced, identifying four mechanisms. First, the use of RST creates a new class of lower-cost ceasefire violations. Second, the presence of third-party RST incentivizes conflict parties to test the sophistication of monitors’ surveillance. Third, the use of RST by monitors can devalue classical, low-tech monitoring methods. Fourth, the use of RST may inadvertently improve conflict parties’ military abilities. Building on insights from fifty-two interviews and written exchanges with former ceasefire monitors, I demonstrate the presence of these mechanisms in the case of the most technologically advanced ceasefire monitoring mission yet deployed, the Special Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, focusing on the period prior to the Russian invasion of 2022.

EN:

This paper analyzes the relationship between surveillance, violence, and dissent on university campuses in the United States. With a focus on administrative and police responses to pro-Palestinian protesters in particular, I show how surveillance facilitates selective, targeted discipline of students and faculty members expressing pro-Palestinian positions. I explore these dynamics with Colombia University’s police crackdown on protesters; University of California, Los Angeles’s tolerance for terror inflicted by vigilante counterprotesters; and the broader punishment and dismissal of professors voicing criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Considered as a whole, these examples reveal a larger cultural landscape that constructs pro-Palestinian groups as fundamentally dangerous, terrorist, and intolerant. Anti-Palestinian violence should be an expected outcome from such an ideological position. The examples also show how campus surveillance practices have shifted to emphasize anticipatory and reactive modalities. In the anticipatory register, surveillance is mobilized as a counterinsurgency tool for the preemptive interruption of pro-Palestinian speech; in the reactive register, surveillance is deployed to punish and terrorize individuals for their expressions of dissent. The reactive modality effectively folds into the anticipatory one by serving as a warning to others and exerting a chilling effect on future campus protests. I argue that universities extend racialized state violence through their surveillance practices and that they remain key players in the maintenance of the racial order.

EN:

For years, the Russian authoritarian regime has been seeking to expand its surveillance capacity and collect information on the whole population. The arrival of digital services has made it possible to collect vast amounts of data on their users. Since digital services are frequently designed to assist with various mundane tasks, state-affiliated individuals can also use them, sharing a range of personal data. In Russia, a legal framework has been developed to oblige private digital companies to share collected data with investigative and intelligence agencies. Simultaneously, the collected data, including data on the powerful, may not be adequately protected and, therefore, can be hacked and leaked, thus facilitating sousveillance. This paradox is at the centre of this study, which explores it via the example of the Yandex.Eda, a food delivery service, leak and its use by investigative journalism. This paper, drawing on the concepts of authoritarian surveillance assemblage and mundane surveillance, portrays how authoritarian regimes, through the means of law, engage private digital services in the mundane surveillance of the population. Additionally, the paper draws on the concepts of sousveillance and assemblage of resistance to explore how data leaks from mundane digital services collaborating with authoritarian regimes can stimulate investigation into state actors’ corruption through the work of leaktivism and investigative journalism. The paper shows that although high-profile political actors did not appear in the leak, people closely related to them, along with some lower-ranking special services agents, did. This paper argues that precisely because the app has a mundane nature and sharing personal data with it facilitates its use, these actors left some pieces of their personal information there. In turn, this data sharing has contributed to sousveillance over them.

EN:

Most previous studies on online surveillance have been conducted in long-time liberal democracies with limited experiences of explicit and intrusive state surveillance. This article explores the role of the historical legacy of totalitarianism or authoritarianism, embodied in generational experiences, in the formation of imaginaries of, and attitudes toward, contemporary state and corporate surveillance. We propose a theoretical hypothesis of the “surveillance survival paradox”: firsthand experiences of the past (totalitarian/authoritarian) surveillance regime do not lead to a greater fear or criticism of the contemporary regime; rather, it is the opposite. The article presents results from an original mixed-method study combining a quantitative online survey (N=3,221) with focus group and individual interviews (seventy-one participants) conducted among two generations (born in 1946–1953 and 1988–1995) in three European countries with different historical surveillance regimes (Estonia, Portugal, and Sweden). The quantitative analysis reveals significant cross-cultural differences in personal and mediated experiences of surveillance. Inter-generational differences in attitudes toward contemporary surveillance were surprisingly similar across the countries, with the older groups in all countries demonstrating higher tolerance toward online state surveillance, and the younger groups reporting higher acceptance for corporate dataveillance. The qualitative analysis reveals that perceptions of the past surveillance regime as more direct and dangerous overshadow sensitivities toward more abstract and covert risks related to the extended state and corporate surveillance in the contemporary datafied world. The results led us to formulate the “surveillance survival paradox” as a generation-specific, and probably also country- or regime-specific, phenomenon.

EN:

Transparency reports are public documents released by companies such as Google, Facebook, and Verizon that contain extensive information regarding data privacy. For instance, these reports document the number of times a law enforcement agency requests user information from a specific company. Transparency reports exist at the nexus of a complex “digital responsibility” relationship between “Big Tech” firms and governments that want the data they collect. We offer the only known systematic analysis of US requests for user information; we use data from over 250 transparency reports provided by fifteen companies from 2010 to 2022 to document nearly eleven million legal requests, national security requests, location requests, and users affected by requests. We also review evidence from content analysis of reports from technology companies. The results suggest that the US government has grown ever more dependent on these companies over time, with an average 759 percent increase in requests for information. In sum, the changing nature of US law enforcement and national security requests reveals a “responsibility dilemma” for companies providing the most personalized technology services.