ABSTRACT
This chapter examines financial corporate crime, specifcally the discontinuities and asymmetries in power that condition the differential uses of surveillance and surveillance technologies in the governance of stock market fraud. It studies state and non state control (‘rule at a distance’) (Rose and Miller 1992), the resistance practiced by the powerful economic actors who make up national and international equity trading markets, and the control efforts of regulatory agencies charged with preventing, regulating and enforcing laws to counter stock market crime. At a theoretical level the study critiques the claims of surveillance literatures that technologically mediated surveillance, ‘the new transparency’, renders all social felds visible, and therefore knowable, manageable and governable (Haggerty and Ericson 2000), by documenting and interrogating how code is used by powerful bankers, lawyers, accountants and stock brokers to construct ‘visibility covers’ (Williams 2008: 1; Snider 2009; Braithwaite 2005).
