ABSTRACT
The term ‘surveillance society’ is hardly a new one. It already had currency by the mid-1990s. David Lyon, one of the leading surveillance studies scholars, used the term in the subtitle of his 1994 book The electronic eye. 1 Oscar H. Gandy used the term the year before in his book The panoptic sort, 2 and even earlier in the title of an article he published in 1989, 3 the same year in which David Flaherty published his book, Protecting privacy in surveillance societies. 4 Four years before this, in 1985, Gary T. Marx wrote an article for The Los Angeles Times in which he described how the ‘categorial monitoring’ associated with new technologies ‘is creating a society in which everyone, not just those that there is some reason to suspect, is a target for surveillance’. 5
