Note that if you plan to attend this free public debate on Thursday, I just learnt that you must register for it. Here are further details from the registration page:
Public Debate
‘Surveillance, Politics and Civil Society’Featuring Shami Chakrabarti, Directory of Liberty, Professor Clive Norris, University of Sheffield, Anna Minton, Writer/Journalist and David ‘Panda’ Mery, Writer/Activist
Chair: Professor Dr David Murakami Wood, Queen's University, Canada
Thursday 15th April 2010 at 7pm - 8:30pm, Oliver Thompson Lecture Theatre, City University London**
** Despite the event being free to members of the public, individuals MUST register in advance to guarantee a space in the auditorium.
Surveillance has become a topic of central importance for citizens, academics and governments alike as new space-time transcending monitoring technologies flood the market, pre-emptive, at-a-distance governance becomes the new logic of contemporary institutions, organisations seek to streamline and better administer their everyday practices, individuals perform and search for meaning within the spaces created by surveillance processes and the world becomes overlaid by a dense series of increasingly interconnected electronic flows. Several important questions are raised by these developments: how, for example, should relations between citizen and state, citizen and commerce and among citizens themselves be understood? In what ways might Human Rights principles be threatened by global flows and exchanges of data? How are concepts like personhood, identity, trust and privacy being transformed and shaped through surveillant practices? How might such developments be challenged and struggled over? What implications does national security policy have for individually situated notions of human security?
‘Surveillance, Politics and Civil Society’ seeks to address such questions by drawing on the views of a number of high profile, expert speakers and input from members of the audience. In particular, the session will explore what the role of civil society should and can be in regulating surveillance growth and expansion. Topics of debate will include: whether or not the state has become more authoritarian via its data collection practices and activities; what issues are raised by surveillance cultures embedding themselves into the everyday fabric of social life and social organisation; whether there are constitutional tools available to citizens to challenge surveillance protocols and processes, and a host of other related subject matter.
The event will be followed by a short wine reception, kindly sponsored by the Centre for Law, Justice and Journalism, City University London.
Details of other events this week, on hostile reconnaissance, police monitoring and privacy were posted earlier in Surveillance, hostile reconnaissance and legal observation.