ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we explore the historical development, especially in Europe, of electronic surveillance technologies starting with a special focus on computer-mediated surveillance since the end of World War II. We analyse how surveillance technology and surveillance practices of governments and corporations have co-evolved over time. We do that by distinguishing different historical periods. 1 In the first section, we deal with the origins of surveillance and argue that surveillance is an integral element of human societies, and even became a crucial success factor for modern industrial societies. We then analyse how the development of computing machinery and surveillance practices have reinforced each other. After briefly touching upon mechanical computing machinery and its impact on census and rationalization, we focus on various trends in the computer mainframe era (1950–85) that implicitly or explicitly contributed to an automatization and sophistication of mass data collection that needed further rationalization but with a growing potential for surveillance. Video surveillance, one of the iconic technologies of the emerging surveillance society, is discussed in the next section, where we highlight the different factors that shaped the use of video surveillance in the UK and elsewhere in Europe since the early 1990s. In the last section, we explore the widespread use of surveillance technologies by all kinds of governmental, corporate and private actors in the networked world of the early 21st century. We put a special focus in this section on the instrumentalization of surveillance in the fight against international terrorism and organized crime.
