ABSTRACT
Facial Recognition Systems (FRSs) and other data-driven improvements to video surveillance raise concerns about the social changes they bring with them. However, little attention has been paid to how these innovations are implemented and embedded in smaller cities’ surveillance initiatives. This chapter addresses this process by focusing on surveillance workers’ reception of these global trends in a small Argentinian city called Ensenada. Drawing on ethnography I conducted of surveillance as a daily practice in the system's “Control Room”, I analyse how different agencies are assembled to perform “surveillance as a recognition experience”. I then explore surveillance workers’ imaginaries, concerns, and attempts to mediate the (possible) arrival of FRSs. Even if they share widespread ideas on FRSs, ranging from dreams of technocratic solutions to authoritarian dystopias, their location inside a sociotechnical network encourages them to stand for a much more practical discussion on effectiveness, automatisation, morality, and the power effects that reshape surveillant assemblages. FRSs may not pose a major threat to their jobs, but it would surely affect their control over their most valuable asset: their ability to tell who is who in the town and to locate every situation in the right interpretative frame. In places like Ensenada, where global trends are not fully developed yet, human and algorithmic facial recognition will probably continue to display a rich choreography, as depicted by surveillance workers who believe they provide “surveillance with a human face”.
