This interdisciplinary research project, funded by the Science, Technology, and Society Program, seeks to better understand the social consequences of surveillance. The growing prevalence of surveillance, facilitated by increasingly sophisticated information technologies, is well documented. However, the social implications for democratic societies of so much tracking, monitoring, and sorting of individual behavior is less well-understood. At the same time, interest in transparency policies is growing in calls for more transparency of government and corporate practices. Transparency is seen as a remedy for the negative effects of surveillance. This project reframes surveillance and transparency in viewing them both as systems of accountability. Accountability provides a novel lens through which to view the normative structures of these two systems and will be understood to involve: (1) an individual or organization; (2) an account of that individual or organization, focused on a particular domain of activity; and (3) a group, organization, or individual that uses the account to make decisions. Further, surveillance and transparency will be analyzed as sociotechnical systems: the social structures and cultural meanings constitute, and are in turn constituted by, the information technology systems in which they are realized. This framework will guide the creation of five case studies which will provide the basis for analysis and cross-comparison. The five cases cover government, corporate and non-profit organizations. An interdisciplinary team of scholars will analyze the cases and do the cross-case comparisons, yielding both new insights into transparency and new understandings of the social implications of surveillance. These analyses will examine how the rationales for creation of systems gets translated into their actual workings; how IT has an impact on that translation; and how the systems affect underrepresented groups in science and engineering.
