Surveillance as Social Sorting Surveillance happens to us all, every day, as we walk beneath street cameras, swipe cards, surf the Net. Agencies are using increasingly sophisticated computer systems – especially searchable databases – to keep tabs on us at home, work, and play. Once the word surveillance was reserved for police activities and intelligence gathering; now it is an unavoidable feature of everyday life. Surveillance as Social Sorting proposes that surveillance is not simply a contemporary threat to individual freedoms, but that, more insidiously, it is a powerful means of creating and reinforcing long-term social differences. As practiced today, it is actually a form of social sorting – a means of verifying identities but also of assessing risks and assigning worth. Questions of how categories are constructed therefore become significant ethical and political questions. Bringing together contributions from North America and Europe, Surveillance as Social Sorting offers an innovative approach to the interaction between societies and their technologies. It looks at a number of examples in depth and will be an appropriate source of reference for a wide variety of courses. David Lyon is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario. Surveillance as Social Sorting Privacy, risk, and digital discrimination Edited by David Lyon London and New York First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2003 David Lyon All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-99488-4 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0–415–27873–2 (pbk) ISBN 0–415–27872–4 (hbk) Contents List of contributors vii Preface and acknowledgements xiii Introduction 1 DAVID LYON PART I Orientations 11 1 Surveillance as social sorting: computer codes and mobile bodies 13 DAVID LYON 2 Theorizing surveillance: the case of the workplace 31 ELIA ZUREIK 3 Biometrics and the body as information: normative issues of the socio-technical coding of the body 57 IRMA VAN DER PLOEG PART II Verifying identities: constituting life-chances 75 4 Electronic identity cards and social classification 77 FELIX STALDER AND DAVID LYON 5 Surveillance creep in the genetic age 94 DOROTHY NELKIN AND LORI ANDREWS vi Contents 6 “Racial” categories and health risks: epidemiological surveillance among Canadian First Nations 111 JENNIFER POUDRIER PART III Regulating mobilities: places and spaces 135 7 Privacy and the phenetic urge: geodemographics and the changing spatiality of local practice 137 DAVID PHILLIPS AND MICHAEL CURRY 8 People and place: patterns of individual identification within intelligent transportation systems 153 COLIN BENNETT, CHARLES RAAB, AND PRISCILLA REGAN 9 Netscapes of power: convergence, network design, walled gardens, and other strategies of control in the information age 176 DWAYNE WINSECK PART IV Targeting trouble: social divisions 199 10 Categorizing the workers: electronic surveillance and social ordering in the call center 201 KIRSTIE BALL 11 Private security and surveillance: from the “dossier society” to database networks 226 GREG MARQUIS 12 From personal to digital: CCTV, the panopticon, and the technological mediation of suspicion and social control 249 CLIVE NORRIS Index 282 Contributors Lori Andrews is Distinguished Professor, Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Director, Institute for Science, Law, and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Kirstie Ball is Lecturer in Organizational Management, Department of Commerce, University of Birmingham. She is the author of a number of theoretical and empirical papers on surveillance in organizations including those published in Organization Studies, and Ethics and Information Technology, and is joint editor (with David Lyon, Clive Norris, Steven Graham, and David Wood) of Surveillance in Society, an on-line journal and web-based study resource. She has spoken nationally and internation- ally on surveillance practice at work, and has appeared in the national media in relation to this issue. She also writes on new managerialism (with Damian Hodgson and Chris Carter); discourse and the body in organizations (with Damian Hodgson); and human resource information systems. Colin Bennett received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from the University of Wales, and his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since 1986 he has taught in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria, where he is now Professor. From 1999 to 2000, he was a fellow with the Harvard Information Infra- structure Project, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His research interests have focused on the comparative analysis of information privacy protection policies at the domestic and international levels. He has published Regulating Privacy: Data Protection and Public Policy in Europe and the United States (1992); Visions of Privacy: Policy Choices for the Digital Age (1999); and multiple articles in a variety of international journals. He is currently involved in an interdisciplinary and international research project (funded by the National Science Foundation) which examines the relation of emergent geographic information technologies to changing patterns of individual identification. viii Contributors Michael Curry is a Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His areas of interest are the social and cultural implications of the development of geographic information technologies, such as geographic information systems, and the geographical implications of the development of information technologies. He is the author of two books, The Work in the World: Geographical Practice and the Written Word (1996) and Digital Places: Living with Geographic Information Technologies (1998), and a number of articles and book chapters. His current work concerns the relationship between conceptualizations of place and of privacy. E-mail: [email protected]. Website: http: //baja.sscnet.ucla.edu/~curry/. David Lyon is Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, where he is also Director of the Surveillance Project (http: //qsilver.queensu.ca/sociology/Surveillance/intro.htm). He works in the sociology of technology, of religion, and social theory. His books include The Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society (1994), Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (2001) and, co-edited with Elia Zureik, Computers, Surveillance and Privacy (1996). Greg Marquis obtained his Ph.D. from Queen’s University in 1987 and teaches Canadian and criminal justice history at the University of New Brunswick Saint John. Author of Policing Canada’s Century: A History of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (1993) and In Armageddon’s Shadow: The Civil War and Canada’s Maritime Provinces (1998, 2000), his work has appeared in Acadiensis, the Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, Histoire sociale/Social History, the Canadian Journal of Criminology, Criminal Justice History and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. His current research is twentieth-century Canadian alcohol policy. E-mail: [email protected] Dorothy Nelkin holds a University Professorship at New York University, teaching in the Department of Sociology and the School of Law. Her research in science studies focuses on the relationship between science and the public as expressed in disputes, the media and popular culture, public attitudes, and institutional responses to scientific information. Formerly on the faculty of Cornell University, she has had visiting appointments at University College in London, the École Polytechnique in Paris, and MIT. Her books include: Controversy: Politics of Technical Decisions (1992), The Creation Controversy (1982), Workers at Risk (1984), Selling Science (1995), Dangerous Diagnostics (with L. Tancredi) (1989, 1994), The DNA Mystique (with S. Lindee) (1995), and Body Bazaar: The Market for Human Tissue in the Biotechnology Age (with L. Andrews) (2001). Contributors ix Clive Norris is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield. He has written extensively on the sociology of policing and surveillance. In 1998 he completed another, two-year, ESRC-funded study entitled CCTV and Social Control. He is joint editor with Gary Armstrong and Jade Moran of Surveillance, Closed Circuit Television and Social Control (1998), and co-author with Gary Armstrong of The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV (1999). His most recent book, with Clive Coleman, is Introducing Criminology (2000). He is currently working on a three-year European Commission funded project, entitled Urbaneye, comparing the use of CCTV in seven European countries. David Phillips