Browsing by Subject "surveillance"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Negotiated Order: The Fourth Amendment, Telephone Surveillance, and Social Interactions, 1878-1968
    (Information & Culture, 2013) Agur, Colin
    In the US, the words ‘telephone surveillance’ bring to mind contemporary security concerns about smart phone tracking, the NSA warrantless wiretapping scandal, and the telecommunications provisions of the Patriot Act. Yet telephone surveillance is as old as telephony itself, dating back to the nearly simultaneous commercialization of the telephone and phonograph in 1878. First put to use by users, so they would have a written record of business meetings held over the phone, recorders were later put to use by police for surreptitious recording of criminal suspects’ conversations. This article examines telephone surveillance by American law enforcement agencies from the inception of telephone service to the passage of the Federal Wiretap Law in 1968, focusing on the challenges an advancing, proliferating, and shrinking technology posed for Fourth Amendment law. To highlight the technological, institutional and cultural interactions that have shaped Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, the article deploys Jack Balkin’s theory of cultural software and Anslem Strauss’s concept of a negotiated order, and brings together major cases, federal legislation, and evidence of government surveillance. The article shows how telephone surveillance brought the Fourth Amendment into prominence and inspired many of its most contentious debates; the article argues that during the first 90 years of telephone usage in America, laws on search and seizure developed not from constitutional consistency or logic, but as the result of a complex negotiation process involving new media and human agency.
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    Restoring Privacy: A Bipartisan Approach
    (2014-04-01) Sensenbrenner, Jim; Jacobs, Lawrence
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    Seasonal Dynamics of Avian Influenza Viruses in Ring-billed Gulls (Larus delawarensis) in Minnesota
    (2018-06) Froberg, Todd
    Birds within the orders Charadriiformes (shorebirds; gulls) and Anseriformes (waterfowl) are reservoir hosts for low pathogenicity avian influenza viruses (LPAIVs), but their role in the transmission dynamics of highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses (HPAIVs) is unclear. The novel reassortant HPAIV H5N2 that emerged in Minnesota in 2015 was devastating to the poultry industry, resulting in significant financial losses and destruction of millions of domestic poultry. To date, waterfowl have been the predominant focal species for most AIV surveillance and epidemiological studies, yet gulls, in particular, are documented to harbor reassortant AIVs of both North American and Eurasian lineages and are underrepresented in North American surveillance efforts. To address this gap in surveillance, 1346 ring-billed gulls (Larus delawarensis) were sampled during spring and fall migrations and at three breeding sites in 2017 across Minnesota. We found significant seasonal, spatial, and age-cohort dynamics in AIV apparent prevalence within ring-billed gulls in Minnesota. The highest apparent prevalence estimate was 68.36% for juvenile gulls during the Fall migration period. Each season immunologically naïve juveniles consistently had the highest prevalence. Spatial heterogeneity was detected at nesting colony sites; St. Louis County exhibited low prevalence estimates in both adults (0.0%) and juveniles (7.02%), whereas Cass County exhibited the highest prevalence in adults (3.54%) and juveniles (73.07%). No HPAIVs were detected in our sampling efforts, but the high prevalence of LPAIVs, particularly in immunologically naïve birds and all age-cohorts in Fall 2017 warrant further targeted surveillance efforts of ring-billed gulls and other closely related species. Identification of the prevalence of LPAIV H5 and H7 viruses is the highest priority for future research as these variants have the greatest potential for mutating into highly pathogenic forms in poultry.
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    Wearing Out: Digital Precarity In Just-In-Time Retail
    (2018-05) Van Oort, Madison
    Wearing Out: Digital Precarity in Just-in-Time Retail investigates the booming but vastly understudied world of fast fashion. Glance at any list of the world’s wealthiest people, and alongside Bill Gates, you’ll find Amancio Ortega and Stefan Persson, who head multinational retail giants Zara and H&M, both of which are now found in almost every major city in the United States. This sector of retail—known for quickly designing, producing, circulating, and selling tremendous amounts of trendy, cheap clothing—is an increasingly important player in the global market. For my dissertation, I embarked on one of the first ethnographies of the industry: working undercover in two of the world’s largest fast fashion stores in New York City, interviewing dozens of front-line workers and labor activists, and attending corporate conferences. The manuscript advances both sociology of work and critical data studies by providing an on-the-ground account of how big data and surveillance shape the lives of low-status workers in an industry in flux. I argue that fast fashion represents a distinct regime of retail capitalism, in which fast fashion retail companies take advantage of big data and biometric technology to perfect just-in-time production practices in the retail workplace, reaping profits by creating commodities and workers designed to wear out and frequently turn over. This digital precarity, I find, is entangled with broader forms of precariatization, digitization, and policing throughout society, compounding insecurity for already marginalized populations. Finally, my ethnography reveals how collective struggles for racial, gender, and economic justice in and around retail spaces help advance a critical data praxis.