surveillance, tracking, observation, sousveillance, Criminal Justice, democracy, ideology, theology, God

surveillance, total surveillance, sousveillance

privacy-neglectful, privacy-positive, secrecy-positive, total surveillance-compliant

cultural criminology, sensory criminology

automation, industrialisation

machines, humans

nudge theory, picture superiority effect, human agency

This dissertation discusses surveillance by public and private sectors, presenting the concept of a God 2.0 which undermines Criminal Justice’s “innocent until proven guilty”. An understanding of surveillance devices used in Criminal Justice is provided. Citizens often understand surveillance as physical, the literally watched. In digital environments the physical is not everything. The research methods chosen to examine this reality, and why, in the light of thinking on the nature of creativity and thought, are explored. The three-part structure used for the data itself, the background to the participants and their inclusion, and the data-analysis and coding processes employed, are examined. As a necessarily auto-ethnographic work, researcher bias is fully explained. Through the data-analysis and coding processes used, six themes are presented. The three most salient are focussed on. Two suggested future strategies are provided, aimed at leading to a societal partnership in surveillance and tracking via open-source, opendata and citizen-located philosophies. The dissertation concludes with an appeal to Western democratic citizenry to exert its power, by challenging the theology of God 2.0’s 21st century Original Sin, and negotiating a God 2.5.

This Introduction is concerned with explaining the historical background to surveillance and tracking as it stands, presenting the concept of a God 2.0 which has substituted more secular notions of authority. It will also provide an overview and explanation of the structure of this dissertation.

The second decade of the 21st century is a time of post-truth (Coughlan, 2017). Digital environments make facts as malleable as clay on the potter’s wheel, a tool from far more primitive – innocent – moments. Facts are supported, denied, questioned and undermined, using the software of Photoshop and the intervention of what might be termed the sound-bite aesthetic: not only, either, the recorded voice these days. Significantly and more impactfully, at the time of the writing of this dissertation what truly captures headlines are the tweets – pithy, online, 140-character ripostes fired off in Wild West gun-slinger mode – of the most powerful individual in the world, President of the USA, Donald Trump (Macwhirter, 2017). But such post-truth is not the only surface which holds modern Western democracy’s attention, even as – in its very b(l)inding superficiality – all desire to burrow down into deeper debate is skilfully delimited and shrugged off (ibid.; Coughlan, 2017). For the aesthetic of surveillance – its look as well as its gaze; how it is sensed; how it is revealed; how it now serves to inform different versions of societal and individual truth; and how Criminal Justice rapidly becomes an injustice as it loses its capacity to even know where the truth might lie (in both senses of the verb) – has taken just as many forms over the years as more artfully constructed hypotheses of reality’s realness (Sjöholm, 2015: p12).

[…]

Just as privacy and secrecy are deliberately, frequently, and inaccurately conflated (Doctorow, 2013), so equally the aforementioned concepts of safety and security are usually assigned a mutual – that is to say, assumed, unquestioned, and more worryingly unquestionable – interdependence. Without security, safety cannot be seen to exist. Consequently, without a total commitment to an absolutist interpretation of safety’s importance over every other matter, security as the prime fulcrum and mover of debate could not achieve the reach, currency and influence it currently has on Western democratic assumptions.

Thus, as with religion before, so with the security states and others now: it is assumed citizens are guilty and thus must be surveilled, whatever their condition might objectively be. Criminal Justice, a complex interplay between the light of theoretical integrity and the shadow of (un)professional practice, finds its natural home in the corresponding practice of surveillance culture.

[…]

The Conclusion lists the areas covered in the dissertation; underlines the connections already made previously between Criminal Justice systems, their robustness and the wider health of democracy; summarises key arguments made throughout the dissertation; and finishes with an appeal to Western democratic citizenry to exert its rights and obligations: to challenge 21st century Original Sin, and firmly negotiate a God 2.5.

[…]

If society is truly serious about improving the quality of its Criminal Justice system, it needs to improve the quality of its data – not only what it collects but also what it chooses to leave out; not only how it collects but also why it decides it needs to collect in the first place. The quality of such data collection and processing will only improve where democracy improves; and democracy will only improve where citizens become more involved. As Foucault (1983) might suggest, no power, in and by itself, will ever resist its own extension. Citizens, meanwhile, will only become involved when they begin to 60 realise that after at least two decades of creeping Original Sin, they have every right to reclaim their secular innocence once again. It is simply not enough to learn how to live with the shadow of doubt they are assigned. Western democratic citizens who wish to remain so are obliged to remember their primal condition and state: the sacred responsibility to challenge daily the powers-that-be, whose power only exists and is exerted as such because the citizens themselves have preferred to leave it – equally – unchallenged.

See pp 62 to 71 of the dissertation document attached below for the full Bibliography of this paper.

Please see the PDFs linked to below. The first is the dissertation minus the Appendices but including the Bibiography,

The rest include most of the papers formally presented during my International Criminal Justice MA 2016-2017.

Finally, follow-up videos which represent intervening research of my own can be seen at the foot of this page.

These are also available at the #phd2529 Background Review page, with other framing links and materials.