[tt] PhysOrg: Watching Big Brother

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Watching Big Brother
http://www.physorg.com/printnews.php?newsid=123340689

Just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not watching you.
Exactly who is being watched, who's doing the watching and how
paranoid society at large should be are just a few of the questions
that will be the focus of a new $2.5-million collaborative research
project involving University of Alberta sociologist and
criminologist Kevin Haggerty.
The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting, a seven-year
project, was announced today as a Major Collaborative Research
Initiative supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
"The starting assumption is that transparency surveillance has
become the dominant organizational practice of contemporary
society," said Haggerty. "Closed-circuit TV, dataveillance, e-mail
tracking, cameras, satellite, all of these tools essentially make
people and processes transparent to other groups and other
institutions."
The researchers are interested in the processes and social
implications of the rise of transparency.
The new project will examine the history, key characteristics and
consequences of the new transparency. The areas of focus will
include the role of technology companies in fostering surveillance;
networking sites like Facebook; surveillance in conflict zones;
inappropriate surveillance and, in Haggerty's case, post-9/11
developments, including profiling and surveillance at events like
the Olympics.
"I want to look at how surveillance has become one of the key ways
in which we are trying to respond to terrorist threats and the
implications of that for movement, borders, globalization, marginal
types of populations and those sorts of things," he said. "Muslim
groups are the classic example, but any number of groups have become
profile targets."
One of the main themes of the research will be to look at the
concept of 'social sorting,' first introduced by project leader
David Lyon, sociology professor at Queen's University.
"Surveillance practices are essentially used to sort us, people,
into different categories and, depending on where we fit into those
categories, we get different levels of service, different levels of
access, different levels of institutional response," said Haggerty.
"All of that is contingent on making us known in particular ways,
what are our consumption patterns, what is our level of access,
what's our password, all of that."
"The idea is that surveillance is part of the process of sorting
people into these categories and then changing their levels of
service, rights and responsibilities."
Furthermore, Haggerty says the study promises to not only explore
how people are not aware of their own potential transparency, but
the larger issue of where today's privacy draws a line in the sand.
"Do you need a realm of privacy in order for democracy to function?
Technology is moving so fast and making our lives so increasingly
transparent that we start to ask, 'At what spot do we reach a
tipping point where we surrender our privacy completely?'"
Haggerty will be collaborating with a global group of researchers,
including Elia Zureik, Laureen Snider and Art Cockfield at Queen's
University; Kirstie Ball at the Open University, UK; Colin Bennett
at the University of Victoria; and Andrew Clement at the University
of Toronto. Researchers from a number of other countries will
collaborate on the project, while representatives from industry and
government will act in an advisory capacity.

Source: University of Alberta