User:Lieven Van Speybroeck/essays/trimester2

Some rough ideas...

Starting from this trimester's theme and linking back to the essay of last trimester, I would like to look at privacy and surveillance systems in a context of poverty and slavery.

• Michelle Turan: "intrusion" of the domestic space -> epitome of privacy violation

-> homeless: absence of private space, constant surveillance, boundaries of public/private space

• John Gilliam: Overseers of the Poor

-> Welfare organisations and their surveillance systems

In Overseers of the Poor, John Gilliom confronts the everyday politics of surveillance by exploring the worlds and words of those who know it best-the watched. Arguing that the current public conversation about surveillance and privacy rights is rife with political and conceptual failings, Gilliom goes beyond the critics and analysts to add fresh voices, insights, and perspectives.

This powerful book lets us in on the conversations of low-income mothers from Appalachian Ohio as they talk about the welfare bureaucracy and its remarkably advanced surveillance system. In their struggle to care for their families, these women are monitored and assessed through a vast network of supercomputers, caseworkers, fraud control agents, and even grocers and neighbors.

In-depth interviews show that these women focus less on the right to privacy than on a critique of surveillance that lays bare the personal and political conflicts with which they live. And, while they have little interest in conventional forms of politics, we see widespread patterns of everyday resistance as they subvert the surveillance regime when they feel it prevents them from being good parents. Ultimately, Overseers of the Poor demonstrates the need to reconceive not just our understanding of the surveillance-privacy debate but also the broader realms of language, participation, and the politics of rights.

We all know that our lives are being watched more than ever before. As we struggle to understand and confront this new order, Gilliom argues, we need to spend less time talking about privacy rights, legislatures, and courts of law and more time talking about power, domination, and the ongoing struggles of everyday people.

• Michele E. Gilman: Welfare, Privacy and Feminism

Feminism has long been concerned with privacy. Second-wave feminists assailed the divide between the public and the private spheres that trapped women in the home, excluded them from the workforce, and subjected them to domestic abuse. Second-wave feminists also argued in favor of a sphere of privacy that would allow women to make reproductive choices without state interference. These were powerful critiques of existing power structures, but they tended to overlook the experiences of poor women. As a condition of receiving welfare benefits, poor women have been subjected to drug tests, and they continue to face unannounced home inspections by government officials, fingerprinting, and restrictions on their reproductive choices. These formal welfare requirements overlay routinized surveillance of poor women, who must comply with extreme verification requirements to establish eligibility, travel to scattered offices to procure needed approvals, reappear in person at welfare offices at regular intervals to prove their ongoing eligibility, and answer intrusive questions about their child rearing and intimate relationships. Thus, while many Americans are uneasy about their privacy in a time of technological transformation, the harms poor women face from privacy deprivations go far beyond unease. This essay describes the privacy invasions experienced by welfare mothers and how the law has shaped their rights to privacy. It then explores how second-wave feminism considered privacy as experienced by poor women, and it analyzes whether third-wave feminism is up to the task of better securing privacy rights for poor women. The conclusion suggests a feminist advocacy strategy that would include the voices of poor women within a new conception of privacy.

• Christian Parenti: The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America, from Slavery to the War on Terror

Parenti sees modern surveillance as originating in the times of slavery, as a means of identifying and denying true identity to blacks as a class. Presenting some of the means used to search for runaway slaves, Parenti suggests that these attempts to describe truants were a form of forced identification. But this is truly stretching the issue - a physical description of a person, a sketchy one at that, in no way violates privacy. However, the use of tin identity tags and badges in the late 18th century was indeed the first step toward establishing identity cards, which did mark their holders as slaves.

• Geosurveillance and data-mining as a new form of slavery

-> Nancy Obermeyer: Thoughts on Volunteered (Geo)Slavery