The Culture of Surveillance Revisited: Total Information Awareness and the New Privacy Landscape

Staples, William G.

Publication

The Culture of Surveillance Revisited: Total Information Awareness and the New Privacy Landscape

Staples, William G.

Abstract

Three things: 1) I expect, as we have already seen in fact, a shift in the scope and quality of social monitoring we can likely expect in the post 9/11 period. I would suggest that the attacks of September 11 have provided an extraordinary opportunity for the state to extend its "governability (Foucault 1991) of the popula tion through a new set of surveillance and control mechanisms; 2) I would argue that the only way that the state is going to implement this kind of large scale, integrated, digitized system of surveillance of the populace is through the cooperation of both corporate capital and, by extension, the populace itself; and 3) I would like to call attention to how a new digital surveillance system will work to constitute our virtual identities as both consumers and citizens.