ABSTRACT
As an emerging and multidisciplinary field, surveillance studies draws our attention to how people are seen (Lyon 2007: 1). Surveillance is ubiquitous, particularly in the contemporary information age, when both corporations and states make use of new technologies that allow for the rapid collection and flow of data within and across national boundaries (Lyon and Zureik 1996: 4-5; Whitaker 1999: 80-122). As a consequence, while surveillance arguably may be understood as a characteristic of human communities across both time and space, today there is both a qualitative and a quantitative escalation (Lyon 2007: 100). Moreover, while the ubiquity of surveillance was established well before September 11, 2001, the post-9/11 period has allowed for a steep intensification of surveillance processes (Lyon 2003; Todd and Bloch 2003; Zureik and Salter 2005). There is an increasing legitimacy of statesupported and state-promoted surveillance as an acceptable form of maintaining “security” (Ong 2006; Agamben 2005), broadly framed in terms of a post-9/11 model. This security model is ostensibly motivated to protect an innocent public citizenry associated with states of the global North from “terrorists”; and these “terrorists” ostensibly originate from and/or find safe haven in states of the global South, or seek, or have sought via immigration, to enter states of the global North.
