Ball, Kirstie, David Lyon, and Kevin Haggerty, eds. The Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies. London and New York: Routledge, 2012.
This large collection of essays provides a comprehensive overview of the field of surveillance studies. With fifty contributions written by major figures in the field, it will help to define the study of surveillance for years to come.
Bennett, Colin J. The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.
Bennett studies the large network of “privacy advocates” in the context of the broader politics of surveillance and privacy. He details the diverse roles that such individuals can play, from advocate to researcher to consultant, and outlines the many challenges that they face in trying to challenge the expansion of surveillance.
Cole, Simon A. Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Cole provides a thoughtful account of the historical emergence and contemporary uses of fingerprinting. This book includes early difficulties in persuading authorities to recognize the individualizing potential of fingerprints, the colonial uses of fingerprinting, and more recent questions about accuracy. The concluding chapter looks at how DNA analysis fits into this history of individualizing identification.
Funder, Anna. Stasiland: True Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall. London: Granta, 2003.
This moving memoir dwells on the troubling legacies of the surveillance conducted by the Stasi. Opening the secret archives shed light on the state’s surveillance practices and created opportunities for people to garner often unsettling insights into who among their friends, family, and colleagues was informing on them.
Gilliom, John. Overseers of the Poor: Surveillance, Resistance, and the Limits of Privacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.
An often unsettling study of how poor Appalachian women in the United States are monitored in minute detail by a sophisticated social welfare computer system, this work focuses on everyday coping and resistance by those on social assistance.
Gilliom, John, and Torin Monahan. SuperVision: An Introduction to the Surveillance Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
This compact volume is designed as a general introduction to the study of surveillance. In addition to discussing overt mechanisms of surveillance, such as CCTV cameras and airport security measures, the authors explore the surveillance capabilities of technologies that now infuse our daily lives—cellphones, credit cards, the Internet, GPS, and so on—and examine the larger ethical and political implications of these technologies.
Hier, Sean P. Panoptic Dreams: Streetscape Video Surveillance in Canada. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2010.
This is the most thorough examination of the introduction of surveillance cameras in Canada. The author presents a detailed analysis of the politics surrounding the installation of these cameras in various Canadian cities and municipalities. Questions are raised about the effectiveness of cameras as a crime-fighting tool.
Laidler, Keith. Surveillance Unlimited: How We’ve Become the Most Watched People on Earth. Cambridge, UK: Icon, 2008.
This volume focuses on the situation in Britain, outlining such monitoring tools as state-driven forms of new identification, radio frequency identification (RFID), and surveillance cameras. Laidler considers how citizens concerned about such developments might respond politically and pragmatically.
Lyon, David. Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2007.
Lyon details the diverse range of inquiries currently underway that could be collected under the umbrella of “surveillance studies.” Readers can trace Lyon’s unfolding thought on this topic by reading his books The Electronic Eye (1994) and Surveillance Society (2001).
Marx, Gary T. Undercover: Police Surveillance in America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
This acclaimed study of undercover police practices deals with the practicalities and ethics of these practices. The concluding chapter, titled “The New Surveillance,” is an inevitable point of reference because it anticipated the rise of new forms of electronic surveillance.
Mayer-Schönberger, Viktor. Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
The digital revolution has meant that reams of information that, in other periods, would have disappeared into the mists of history are now maintained on diverse electronic systems for perpetuity. This has consequences for social memory, but it also has political implications since it is increasingly difficult for people to expect that their past actions and statements might be forgotten.
Nippert-Eng, Christena. Islands of Privacy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
The author reports on her interviews of Chicago residents about their views on privacy and secrecy. The main lessons are that privacy remains central to human endeavours and that people will go to great lengths to protect their privacy.
Norris, Clive, and Gary Armstrong. The Maximum Surveillance Society: The Rise of CCTV. Oxford: Berg, 1999.
This volume is one of the first and best analyses of surveillance cameras in England. The authors gained excellent insights by spending extended time in a surveillance control room, observing and recording the various (and often questionable) forms of deviance that the operators both watched and ignored.
O’Harrow, Robert, Jr. No Place to Hide. New York: Free Press, 2005.
O’Harrow, a Washington Post reporter, does an admirable job of personalizing the scope of the information collected for commercial purposes. This book offers particularly unsettling details about the often cynical ways in which major information firms go out of their way to undermine privacy.
Solove, Daniel J. Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff Between Privacy and Security. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
The author explains what it means to protect privacy and whether it is truly necessary to sacrifice privacy for security. He explains how the law protects privacy, examines concerns with new technologies and the failings of our current system, and offers specific remedies.
Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the Advertising Industry Is Defining Your Identity and Your Worth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
Turow examines how online advertisers track Internet users across websites in order to provide advertisements that they hope will shape consumer behaviour. He raises questions about the political implications of how this practice ultimately reduces the range of information to which consumer-citizens are exposed.
Asimov, Isaac. The Foundation Trilogy (1951–53).
This is Asimov’s classic treatment of the power of prediction. Protagonist Hari Seldon seeks to avoid an intergalactic dark age by applying the science of psycho-history, a branch of mathematics that can predict the future by monitoring and analyzing the behaviour of a mass of people equal to the population of the galaxy.
Dick, Philip K. A Scanner Darkly (1977).
Dick provides a cogent critique of the interplay between anonymity, technology, and law enforcement in a dystopic future where an undercover cop wears a “scramble suit” to hide his identity while he hunts for the source of a dangerous new drug.
Eggers, Dave. The Circle (2013).
Twenty-something Mae goes to work for the Circle, a Silicon Valley mashup of online search companies, social media, and other Internet corporations, in which the goal is total transparency, both globally and 24/7. Eggers creates a digital dystopia that touches on the increasing corporate ownership of privacy, with telling Orwellian slogans like “Secrets Are Lies” and “Privacy Is Theft.”
Gibson, William. Neuromancer (1984).
Gibson tells the story of a washed-up computer hacker hired by a mysterious employer to pull off the ultimate hack. Part of the Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive), this seminal cyberpunk classic, which popularized the term cyberspace, examines online communities and spaces and artificial intelligence.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932).
Huxley’s brilliant critique of the consumer society describes a dystopian future in which natural reproduction has been done away with and consumer-citizens are manipulated by the state through the use of hallucinogens and behavioural conditioning. Unlike Orwell’s totalitarian Big Brother, the government of the year 634 AF (After Ford) controls its subjects through consumer surveillance and the destruction of individuality.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949).
Orwell’s classic is still a popular point of reference for discussions of surveillance. Other novels have addressed the prospect of coercive state surveillance, but in introducing the notion of “Big Brother,” this book has resonated like no other.