In the last decade, the United States has invested considerable resources into an expanded intelligence apparatus that extends from the hyper-secretive federal intelligence community down to the more mundane world of municipal police. This paper investigates the effects of the post-9/11 surveillance surge on state and local policing. It presents original research on interagency intelligence centers New York and New Jersey and deploys Pfaffenberger’s “technological drama” as a process animating the neoliberal constitution of what Bourdieu calls the “bureaucratic field.” Despite seemingly dramatic changes, there exists powerful continuity in the profession of policing. Before or after Snowden, the day-to-day reality of criminal intelligence remains shaped by the immediate demands of investigations and the small politics of interagency rivalries, insulating policing from dramatic reforms and swift change. What reformers see as dysfunction is better understood as a technological drama in the bureaucratic field that paradoxically provides a degree of autonomy and slows the pace of change. This paper builds on and contributes to the tendency within surveillance studies that emphasizes the ways in which human agents and organizational cultures mediate surveillance.
The militarisation of US–African relations has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Left largely unexplored, however, is the question of how this process has involved US-based scholars. This essay examines this process with particular attention to the rapid expansion of military and intelligence research on and in Africa, and, in particular, military and intelligence funding of US Africanists' research including at the major African Studies centres. While the classification of much federal research limits conclusions, it is apparent that military and intelligence priorities are coming to significantly shape the present and future of much research and training.
This chapter summarizes the Chicago Police Department’s adoption of Intelligence-Led Policing (ILP) since the early-2000s as a crime prevention and deterrence strategy. It reviews the use of technology such as police observation devices (cameras), the centralization of the Police Department’s data operations at the Crime Prevention and Information Center, a sophisticated data analytics “fusion center,” and examines changing technologies of surveillance used by the police. The authors discuss the integration of police surveillance with privately-owned and operated camera systems, and explore how systems like facial and license plate recognition software and gunshot prediction technologies are reshaping security and policing in Chicago. The chapter also assesses concerns about privacy and eroded civil rights provoked by the expanding use of ILP techniques and data.
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