ABSTRACT
Many different political and historical tensions shape the contours of surveillance practice. Nevertheless, two factors occur consistently in these developments. First, global corporations or national governments control significant portions of the surveillance infrastructure. Second, the dichotomy of security versus privacy occurs again and again as a discursive device to frame the stakes and implications of surveillance. These two organizing structures contribute to the development of surveillance systems that are always more or less useful for large organizations to control and manage large populations. To counteract this trend, to encourage the development of surveillance practices that are small scale, grass-roots, and local, and to grasp the social and political implications of such practices, policymakers should look to legal theories of common carriage and intellectual commons. Sociologists and system designers should look to the processes by which identity and place arise out of communication and situated interaction.
