Advanced technologies are embraced by people and governments the world over as a primary means for providing security. From metal detectors housed at school entrances to crime analysis software installed in police computers, investment in security technologies reflects a faith in technological devices to provide safety from diverse threats. While ubiquitous in society, little is known about how security technologies affect people?s relation to the law. In other words, do pedestrians who walk on streets or immigrants who send remittances home comply with the regulations security technologies enforce? How their relationship to regulation and authority is more broadly affected?
This project investigates this question by examining REPUVE (Registro Público Vehicular), a federally-run vehicle registration program in Mexico that aims to reduce motor vehicle crime by adhering a radio-frequency identification (RFID) device to every vehicle in the country. To understand how REPUVE affects people's relation to the law, the principal investigator (PI) will conduct field research in Mexico. This includes interviewing employees at Neology, the manufacturer of REPUVE's RFID devices; members of the Executive Secretary of the National Public Security System (SNSP), the government agency overseeing the program; car dealers and insurance providers, who are responsible for registering users and distributing the RFID devices; and car owners. Observations will also be conducted at toll booths throughout the country, where sensors are mounted to read the RFID devices.
This project aims to contribute to social science analyses of privacy and security. It will train undergraduate students in qualitative research methods. The research draws its importance from addressing a central question concerning the heightened resort to security technologies in contemporary society as well as focusing on Mexico, a country that beyond experiencing heightened insecurity in recent years has traditionally not figured centrally in socio-legal and science and technology studies.
During a term in office that will be remembered for an aggressive campaign against organized crime, Mexican President Felipe Hinojosa Calderón (2006-2012) launched the Public Registry of Vehicles (REPUVE), an electronic vehicle registration program that would place a RFID tag onto every motor vehicle in the country in order to prevent crimes involving automobiles. The program promised a technologically-sophisticated response to insecurity that mirrors efforts by government authorities across the globe to fight crime with technology. This research activity examined the operation of the REPUVE and Mexicans’ experiences with it in order to understand the power of surveillance technologies to stop crime. Using reports from the news media, the government, and technology firms, a survey administered to 98 residents in rural and urban Mexico, observations of the REPUVE program in practice, and interviews with car owners, car dealers, car manufacturers, and REPUVE program administrators at the state and federal levels, this project offers a different picture of surveillance technologies from that usually depicted in the popular press and academic community. First is the logic of surveillance programs. While surveillance is usually thought of in terms of "subject monitoring", authorities in Mexico are not so much interested in watching over people as they are in gaining a grip upon the things—cars, cell phones, etc.—that underlie the commission of crime. In addition, law enforcement officers in Mexico are often corrupt, the data that the state has on people and things are often inaccurate, and multiple agencies are often tasked with the same job, all of which makes governance challenging. Monitoring vehicles through surveillance technologies thus serves as a way for authorities to increase its oversight over the state itself. This work refers to this monitoring activity targeting both material things and state agencies as prohesion in order to distinguish it from subject-centered forms of surveillance. Second is the inherent weakness of surveillance technologies. Although the REPUVE program was designed to have all of the nearly 25 million vehicles circulating in the country registered, inspected, and monitored through the application of RFID tags by 2012, fewer than half of Mexico’s 32 states were actually applying tags onto vehicles by that time. The reasons for the program’s struggles are multiple. Ordinary people refused to register for the program. Businesses pushed back against the regulations. The technologies failed to work in the manner expected. Resources were insufficient to successfully implement the programs on the scale desired. And political intrigue influenced elected officials’ willingness to follow the federal government’s lead on security programs. This resistance to the REPUVE left its survival in considerable doubt, and this weakness counters the omnipotent image of surveillance technologies often presented in the press and academy. Third is the manner in which the weakness of surveillance technologies influences their operation. While the automobile registry does not work in the way it was imagined, it operates in a modified form due to the political acumen of program administrators to respond to the resistance they encountered. Administrators made numerous alterations to the REPUVE to get it off the ground, including allowing customs offices at the US-Mexico border to charge for the inspection of vehicles, an allowance at odds with the registry’s claim of being costless; integrating the program with existing infrastructures of toll collection in different states; and neglecting to fine automobile manufacturers and importers in violation of the REPUVE law. These accommodations in turn influence how people understand the law. In the state of Sonora, for instance, where the program was adopted in conjunction with a toll collection program, residents understand the REPUVE’s RFID tag as a device that will allow them to travel freely within the state. In the state of Zacatecas, meanwhile, residents understand the program as a measure against car thefts and their participation as a civic duty to assist the government in its crime fight. This study of security surveillance technology leaves substantial room for skepticism about surveillance technologies as a solution to insecurity. In Mexico, programs such as the REPUVE are viewed with suspicion, and the programs themselves struggle to survive, hobbled by a lack of resources and political obstacles. Meanwhile, crime has not appreciably decreased. Thus, this project helps demonstrate the need for an alternative contemporary political program that moves beyond security and surveillance technologies to address crime.
