Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Since the end of the Cold War's bipolar confrontation in 1991, the security arena has significantly changed from a once well-bounded field, consisting of hierarchically organized state bureaucracies, to a rhizomatic, growing assemblage that merges various kinds of public and private security agencies and activities and is driven by the desire to bring systems together, to combine practices and technologies and integrate them into a larger whole (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). Security has become an important but sensitive issue on political agendas as well as in the public perception. This has resulted in an evolving patchwork of systems, procedures and technologies across multiple sites, public and private, including most urban and international transport infrastructures such as roads, metro systems, rail stations, and sea and air ports. In this entry attention will mostly be focused on key European Union and US examples, although a full survey would also need to engage with, among others, Chinese, Russian, Saudi, and Israeli surveillance practices.One of the results of this transformation is that it has become increasingly unclear who is actually involved in specific security and surveillance tasks. The steadily growing number of surveillance cameras in public streets and places may indicate the globalization of surveillance power. Today, the UK is the world leader in using closed-circuit ... log in or subscribe to read full text