Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology

Gary T. Marx is Professor Emeritus M.I.T. He received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Protest and Prejudice, Undercover: Police Surveillance in America and with C. Fijnaut, Undercover: Police Surveillance in Comparative Perspective.
Additional information : www.garymarx.net

Summary : An overview of the forthcoming Windows book will be offered. The book seeks to show why surveillance is neither good nor bad, but context and comportment make it so. Explanation and evaluation require a common language for the identification and measurement of surveillance's fundamental properties and contexts.

The richness of the empirical must be disentangled and parsed into categories which can be measured. The differentiating characteristics of surveillance processes, structures, means, goals and "personal" data must be considered. We should appreciate (if not necessarily welcome) the ironies, paradoxes, trade-offs and value conflicts which limit the best laid plans. Broader questions raised by the new surveillance and some metamethod moral mandates for researchers will be presented.

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