Lawful government surveillance can include surveillance of the whole society by a census, labor department surveys of employment trends, surveillance as part of lawful Internet tracking, or law-enforcement surveillance via warrant access. Examples of unlawful surveillance include warrantless mass surveillance of communications, revealed by Edward Snowden (Figure 9.1).

Relationship to Other Domains

Individuals don't know they are being surveilled by the government and are just being themselves in the me and my identity domain. The data collected in government surveillance are not usually sold to data brokers, but governments buy data from data brokers to support filling out surveillance profiles.

What Is Surveillance?

Wright et al. defines surveillance as “[t] he purposeful routine, systemic and focused attention paid to personal details, for the sake of control, entitlement, management, influence or protection.”

Theorists musing about the cultural grounding of surveillance point to roots in the Western tradition that come from the “all-seeing eye” at the heart of Judeo-Christian beliefs. The all-seeing eye creates a “fear of getting caught,” and this fear is internalized by citizens as they navigate the world. If behavior can be seen, then it can be controlled to create order. This is a privileging of vision that is rooted in the Enlightenment tradition.

It is worth noting that surveillance differs from registration and enrollment discussed earlier in a range of contexts in that there is no enrollment process where individuals “sign up” and thus know that there is an entry in a database about them that will be used when they interact with the system in the future. With surveillance, individuals are tracked and their activity over time is linked together in databases.

What Are the Power Dynamics of Surveillance?

Surveillance is something that institutions do to individuals. This creates an inherent power asymmetry. Surveillance studies often reference a discussion of the panopticon design envisioned by Jeremy Bentham in 1791 and published in 1834. Modern prisons were not yet built and his diagram was a theoretical design. Simone Brown in Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness compares Bentham's drawing of the panopticon with that of the plan of the slave ship Brookes published in 1788 that was a literal prison at sea for carrying 609 people.