This is a workshop funded by NSF's Science and Society Ethics and Value Studies Program and has the goal of generating cross-disciplinary research programs in the design of ethical standards, best practices, laws, policies, techniques and markets for surveillance infrastructures. A 3 day workshop will bring together a diverse group whose work intersects with surveillance infrastructures. The workshop will be structured to promote collaborative envisioning of new directions for practical research, and new instantiations, in policy and technique, of surveillance infrastructures. The collaboration will extend beyond the workshop itself to produce potentially fundable research proposals as well as publications. To that end, conference participants will be asked to generate collaborative mini-proposals for future research. The most promising of them will be offered seed grants covering travel and lodging expenses for another meeting among those collaborators to produce full, fundable, research proposals. Surveillance refers to processes of identification, tracking, analysis and response which organize social knowledge, social relations, and social power. Surveillance infrastructures infiltrate and mediate everyday life. For example, internet cookies, shopping loyalty cards, and mobile phone numbers all individuate and identify us. These identifiers are used to index databases recording our web surfing activities, our movements, and our purchases. The databases are subjected to statistical analysis in order to produce knowledge of demographic categories, typical patterns, or suspect behavior. This knowledge is then applied back to individuals in the population in order to assign each to a particular niche market or risk group, and to act toward them accordingly. Thus, through surveillance, knowledge is created, categories and types are produced, and individuals are made visible as representatives of those types. The goal of this research project is to discover possible configurations of practices of identification, tracking, monitoring, and response that might produce knowledges that are not domineering or oppressive, but instead may be deployed by the known population itself, in order to make sense of the world from an alternative perspective, to maintain subcultural identity and to articulate that identity with the larger social order. Previous attempts to understand surveillance practices have been hampered by a reliance on privacy as a legal and ideological frame, and by an inability to address the complexity of infrastructure development. This project will overcome these obstacles by articulating theories of identity, cultural rights, the cultural commons, and intellectual property in reference to surveillance infrastructure, and by providing incentives for researchers and activists to work together to generate models of surveillance infrastructures that not only promote equitable access to the mechanisms of knowledge production, but also are economically and politically viable. This project will produce theories and strategies for the ethical design of surveillance infrastructures. This is increasingly essential as surveillance is proposed and implemented as a solution to ever more salient concerns for national and personal security. The project will also generate enduring cross-disciplinary research networks.
