The Globalization of Surveillance [Hardcover]

Video surveillance, public records, fingerprints, hidden microphones, RFID chips: in contemporary societies the intrusive techniques of surveillance used in daily life have increased dramatically. The “war against terror” has only exacerbated this trend, creating a world that is closer than one might have imagined to that envisaged by George Orwell in 1984.

How have we reached this situation? Why have democratic societies accepted that their rights and freedoms should be taken away, a little at a time, by increasingly sophisticated mechanisms of surveillance?
From the anthropometry of the 19th Century to the Patriot Act, through an analysis of military theory and the Echelon Project, Armand Mattelart constructs a genealogy of this new power of control and examines its globalising dynamic.

This book provides an essential wake-up call at a time when democratic societies are becoming less and less vigilant against the dangers of proliferating systems of surveillance.Introduction
I Disciplining / Managing
1 - Surveillance: delinquency as a political observatory
2 - Punishing: the apprehended multitude
3 - Managing Mass Society: the lessons of total war
II Hegemonizing / Pacifying
4 - The Cold War and the religion of national security
5 - Civic action or the reappropriation of the national security doctrine
6 - Counterinsurgency, the crossroads of expeditionary forces
7 - The internationalisation of torture
III Securitizing / Insecuritizing
8 - The new domestic order
9 - War without end: the techno-security paradigm
10 - The European Police Area
11 - The traceability of bodies and goods
Epilogue
A tightly packed and critical history of the global rise of security, surveillance and suspicion.
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