Search Results

This chapter considers the question of whether the Maastricht Treaty's surveillance process is sustainable despite member state noncompliant behaviour. The EU's answer to this question is one of reaffirmation and accommodation. During the summer of 2004, two events occurred that significantly affect the Treaty's budgetary surveillance. First, on June 17 and 18, the EU Intergovernmental Council, consisting of the heads of government of the member states and acceding states, unanimously adopted the draft text of the new European Constitution, Europe's latest grand bargain. Second, a similar reaffirmation occurred on July 13, 2004, when the European Court of Justice issued its judgement upholding the EC's claim that the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers exceeded its authority in declaring the Maastricht Treaty's excessive deficit procedure in ‘abeyance’.

Early Warning Signals of a default or debt crisis are derived by drawing upon the stochastic optimal control model of an optimal and excessive short-term debt developed in chapter 2. Operational benchmarks for optimal foreign debt and a quantitative measure of the maximum debt which will not be defaulted in the event of adverse shocks are established. Insofar as the actual debt exceeds the benchmark, there is an excess debt, the risk of default is increased. Two sets of emerging market countries are considered: one set renegotiated/defaulted and the other set did not. The countries that defaulted/renegotiated had significant excess debt, whereas the countries that did not default/renegotiate did not have significant excess debt. An Early Warning Signal of a debt crisis is the excess debt, and not the level of the debt/GDP ratio per se.

This chapter investigates how surveillance measures can reduce crime. It explains that public-area surveillance falls under the category of situational-crime prevention, which stands apart from these other strategies by its singular focus on the setting or place in which criminal acts take place, as well as its crime-specific focus. The chapter discusses the core assumption of both opportunity and informal social-control models of prevention that criminal opportunities and risks are influenced by environmental conditions in interaction with resident and offender characteristics. Thus, though street lighting, closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras, and some physical design changes to buildings and parks do not constitute a physical barrier to crime, they can act as a catalyst to stimulate crime reduction through a change in the perceptions, attitudes, and behavior of residents and potential offenders.

This chapter explores key policy choices and challenges that U.S. cities face in the use of major forms of public-surveillance approaches such as closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras and improved street lighting to prevent crime in public places. It suggests that not all forms of surveillance are as potentially intrusive, and raises questions about the infringement of civil liberties and other social costs. However, these social costs need to be weighed against any crime-prevention benefits that accrue from the different forms of surveillance.

This chapter describes the main organizations that are concerned directly with Internet governance. It outlines the relevant responsibilities and agendas of the respective organizations, together with their sources of funding and their relationships with each other. Attention is directed mainly at transnational bodies. These include the Internet Society, Internet Architecture Board, Internet Engineering Task Force, World Wide Web Consortium, and Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. The remainder of the chapter describes the various roles played by national governments, alone and in concert, in Internet governance. Using the self-governance ideals of ‘digital libertarianism’ as foil, it delineates the growing influence of governments in the field.

This chapter discusses management/site action planning for habitat management: the process for deciding what you want to achieve, how to achieve it, and how to monitor whether you are achieving it. Topics covered include the format of the management action plan, monitoring and surveillance, and agri-environment schemes and conservation programmes.

This chapter discusses government surveillance. It emphasizes that whatever governments can do for their populations, they can also do against them. One good example is using surveillance systems as instruments of oppression. From here, the discussion shifts to government surveillance in America, Australia, France, Canada, and Great Britain. It then looks at the coalescence of government surveillance. The chapter also introduces the Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA).

This chapter analyzes the ongoing social communication process through which news, observations, and impressions about an individual circulate along that person’s reputational network via chat, gossip sessions, occasions of qualified privilege, and more formal means. In the network interpretation of reputation, the daily ebb and flow of information through the media of various forms of communication and discourse will be deemed the “discursive reputation,” referring to what is said about the person. Reputational networks are activated by social communication. In everyday life, we are surrounded by and awash in chat and gossip, and much of it is about specific persons. Much of what we know about most individuals we claim to know is indirect in this sense, derived from everyday, informal surveillance.

This chapter examines the sciences, politics, and international cooperations that informed Soviet state responses to the Chernobyl disaster and how they produced an image of control over unpredictable and largely unassessed circumstances of risk. More specifically, it investigates the relationship between individual suffering caused by the Chernobyl accident and the technical measures and scales of expertise used to assess radiation-related biological injury in Ukraine. To this end, the chapter considers the work of international scientific networks in patterning initial Soviet remediation strategies and public health responses. It highlights key aspects of the initial Soviet management of the Chernobyl disaster and shows how ambiguities related to the interpretation of radiation-related physical damage subjected post-Chernobyl state interventions and medical surveillance to a variety of competing scientific and political interests. It also considers the so-called Safe Living Concept regarding radiation dose exposure and Soviet-American bioscientific collaboration report on radioactive fallout.

This book explores the paradoxical effects of globalization on young Indians employed in the outsourcing industry: they are reaping the benefits of the corporate search for cut-rate labor but also shouldering the weight of the global restructuring of work. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in India and the United States, the book highlights the cyclical humiliations and joys of life under transnational capitalism by focusing on factors such as managerial styles, workplace culture, and family and social relations. It argues that while Indian workers receive relatively high wages (in India), they are also subject to what Karl Marx called the “dull compulsion of economic relations,” and the forms of discipline and surveillance issuing thereof. It also considers the culture of the economy and the economy of culture: the strictures and structures by which social life and human creativity are hedged.

This chapter introduces the concept of privacy, which is defined as the exercise of a genuine option to withhold information on one's self. The discussion is concerned with the question of why people struggle to protect their privacy. It examines the tensions of privacy and disclosure and looks at the debates over privacy that reflect long-running ethical and political tensions between individual prerogatives and claims of larger social units. It also studies the struggles to draw a line between private and public, as well as the resulting pressures for surveillance systems to connect and exchange. Finally, the chapter discusses privacy protection and the constraints and countercurrents to mass surveillance.

In 1946, the French constitution made colonial subjects in Africa into citizens. Having been content to rule ‘tribes’ via their ‘chiefs’, at that point it had to track individuals entitled to vote and receive social benefits. The new citizens retained their personal status — regulating marriage, filiation, and inheritance — under Islamic law or local ‘customs’ rather than through the civil code. That posed a dilemma for French officials, for the état-civil did not just record life events, but symbolized the integration of all into a single body of citizens. French officials and legislators — including African representatives — could not agree on whether the multiple status regimes necessitated two états-civils or one. In the end, officials were too torn between their recognition of difference among peoples under French rule and their desire for singularity to put in place a consistent policy of identification, registration, and surveillance. They bequeathed the problem to their successors.

Although the purpose of this chapter is to construct an anatomy of transparency, it is essential to address the triangular relationship between transparency, openness, and surveillance. The first question is whether a clear distinction can be drawn between transparency and openness. The second question concerns the relationship between transparency/openness and surveillance. This chapter examines transparency, focusing on directions and varieties of transparency and how they interact with their habitat and with each other. It distinguishes four directions of transparency and maps its varieties. The chapter also emphasizes the importance of examining the habitats within which transparency operates. Finally, it draws some brief conclusions, stressing the implications of the analysis for the measurement of transparency. The aim is to identify different directions and varieties of transparency in relatively neutral terms. Abstracting from the issue of direction, transparency can be analysed by means of a set of three dichotomies: event transparency versus process transparency; transparency in retrospect versus transparency in real time; and nominal transparency versus effective transparency.