ABSTRACT
Many authors have offered valuable metaphors, tropes and images to represent the nature, growth, evolution and workings of the world of security technologies, especially those that perform surveillance objectives: networks, fields of rhizomes, assemblages, constellations, each with their own set of premises and implications. Some underline the existence of cooperative efforts between the separate entities that populate this world; others stress the market and competition dynamics that shape their relationships; others yet mean to compare this largely private world of social control technology to the public objectives, means and responsibilities of the state. This chapter focuses on the objects that lie at the very origins of the devices used for surveillance purposes, the government-university-industry complex of research and development (R&D) funding, management and governance of innovations in security surveillance technology. It looks at it as a knowledge-producing network that includes not only persons, institutions and social groups doing R&D and marketing new products, but also the devices and technologies themselves which, it will be shown, exert sizeable power within the network.
