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The New Transparency: Police Violence in the Context of Ubiquitous Surveillance

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Media and Communication 3(3):39-55

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Media and surveillance scholars often comment on the purported empowering quality of transparency, which they expect participatory media to promote. From its Enlightenment origins, transparency is related to accountability and legitimacy: its increase is believed to promote these. It has earned a position as an unassailed, prime normative value in contemporary liberal and social democracies. Though still valued, transparency is undergoing change in an era of ubiquitous surveillance. Publics still anticipate governmental and corporate self-disclosure and for such entities to operate visibly; but increasingly, deliberate and incidental surveillance by a range of sources, both institutional and informal, documents the activities of such authorities. More often, civilians participate in producing or amplifying transparency. This article explores this new transparency through a study of U.S. police, focusing on the discourse of police accountability activists and cop watchers to describe how their work adapts traditional notions of transparency. Recognizing the resilience of the police institution despite the new visibility of its violence, the article challenges the presumption that increased transparency will promote institutional reform or crisis. It concludes with a critical comment on prominent expectations that promoting the visibility of police can protect publics and ensure police accountability. This conclusion has implications for other forms of the new transparency, including whistleblowing (e.g., Edward Snowden) and leaking (e.g., WikiLeaks).

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Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 39

Media and Communication (ISSN: 2183-2439)

2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55

Doi: 10.17645/mac.v3i3.292

Article

The New Transparency: Police Violence in the Context of Ubiquitous

Surveillance

Ben Brucato

Center for Humanistic Inquiry, Amherst College, Amherst, MA, 01002, USA; E-Mail: ben@benbrucato.com

Submitted: 13 April 2015 | In Revised Form: 21 July 2015 | Accepted: 10 August 2015 |

Published: 20 October 2015

Abstract

Media and surveillance scholars often comment on the purported empowering quality of transp arency, which they ex-

pect participatory media to promote. From its Enlightenment origins, transparency is related to accountability and legit-

imacy: its increase is believed to promote these. It has earned a position as an unassailed, prime normative value in

contemporary liberal and social democracies. Though still valued, transparency is undergoing change in an era of ubiq-

uitous surveillance. Publics still anticipate governmental and corporate self-disclosure and for such entities to operate

visibly; but increasingly, deliberate and incidental surveillance by a range of sources, both institutional and informal,

documents the activities of such authorities. More often, civilians participate in producing or amplifying transparency.

This article explores this new transparency through a study of U.S. police, focusing on the discourse of police accounta-

bility activists and cop watchers to describe how their work adapts traditional notions of transparency. Recognizing the

resilience of the police institution despite the new visibility of its violence, the article challenges the presumption that

increased transparency will promote institutional reform or crisis. It concludes with a critical comment on prominent

expectations that promoting the visibility of police can protect publics and ensure police accountability. This conclusion

has implications for other forms of the new transparency, including whistleblowing (e.g., Edward Snowden) and leaking

(e.g., WikiLeaks).

Keywords

accountability; Jeremy Bentham; cop watch; legitimacy; media participation; police; Jean Jacques Rousseau;

sousveillance; surveillance; transparency

Issue

This article is part of the special issue "Surveillance: Critical Analysis and Current Challenges", edited by James Schwoch

(Northwestern University, USA), John Laprise (Independent Researcher) and Ivory Mills (Northwestern University, USA).

tion 4.0 International License (CC BY).

1. Transparency, Then and Now

If I were to mobilize a common trope, describing trans-

parency as a “contested term,” it would exaggerate the

extent to which the word is used with much care or re-

flexivity. In fact, transparency is a ubiquitous term but

is rarely qualified or operationalized; there is a near-

absence of contention over its meaning though its sig-

nificance is rarely clear. This article historicizes con-

temporary accountability practices, with an extended

case study of police accountability activism, showing

the intellectual and practical connections from these

practices to a political concept rooted in Enlightenment

political thought. Transparency is also an unassailed

and treasured concept, despite its being taken for

granted (Birchall, 2011b; Han, 2012). By raising key fea-

tures of the historical and ideological origins of the

concept, the article suggests transparency’s inextrica-

ble connections to a degraded form of democracy and

harbors widely maligned presumptions about infor-

mation, knowledge, and their connection to political

action.

By placing media studies in conversation with the

emerging field of surveillance studies, this article

demonstrates how the two can contribute to one an-

other. Like the concept of transparency, an enduring

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 40

challenge in each field of inquiry is the presumption

that participation in producing media artifacts has self-

evidently positive normative value and that it has cer-

tain political efficacy. Which politics undergird the posi-

tion that amateur journalism and participatory media

are inherently empowering to publics? Through the use

of political theory, this article contributes an answer,

one that probes the origins of transparency for guidance

and elucidates concerns central in these fields today.

Johnson and Regan (2014) take transparency to

mean “a practice that is explicitly targeted to achieve

accountability” (p. 1). From its modern normative ori-

gins, transparency is visibility combined with some

standard of moral regulation that holds individuals or

organizations to account. Surveillance adds strategic

watching in order to produce that visibility, making

available its objects to those agents of a defined regu-

latory scheme, often performed by or for those with

comparatively greater power or authority than those

being watched. Political transparency inverts the sur-

veillant gaze, as governments and their agents are

made visible to their publics, most often via self-

disclosure, and has its origins in practical development

of Enlightenment ideals in the construction of modern

democratic states (Birchall, 2011b). Hood (2006) claims

transparency is “quasi-religious” in nature, not because

it suggests the unmediated visibility of an omniscient

god—though it certainly connotes this—but because it

represents the pinnacle of righteousness in secular

democracies. One behaves transparently in public,

among fellow citizens, to be held accountable for

speech and action.

In this first section, I begin with the Enlightenment

origins of the concept of transparency as it relates to

its use in discourse about policing’s new visibility. My

argument is that policing’s new visibility suggests a par-

ticular history of transparency, provided below and

framing the case study that follows. Andrew J. Gold-

smith (2010) first applied John B. Thompson’s (2005)

conception of the new visibility to police. In the follow-

ing section, I provide a case study of cop watching. Cop

watching emerged in the 1990s as an organized politi-

cal movement by activists who deliberately recorded

police stops in order to document and deter police vio-

lence. In this century, cop watching has become in-

creasingly incidental, performed by individuals more

often than organizations. People increasingly have a

digital camera with them at all times, for instance as a

feature on their smart phones. More importantly, po-

lice accountability activists promote serendipitous cop

watching by civilians, seizing upon already widespread

participation in the documentation of everyday life.

This case study reveals that the new visibility has

adapted the Enlightenment normative and political

ideal for transparency, such that the kind of visibility

they produce has become identified with political

transparency. New activities (e.g., participatory media)

and related technologies have become central to how

transparency is enabled and produced in many con-

temporary societies. The new transparency

identifies

the ocular visibility provided by digital technologies

with the Enlightenment concept, and strengthens its

ideological connection to expectations for accountabil-

ity and legitimacy.

Similar changes in transparency are occurring else-

where in contemporary discursive and political activity.

I close with comment on how transparency is every-

where being reasserted through these activities. In the

next section, this history of modern transparency is

conceptually bounded by its relevance to the case

study. In this regard, I aim to find in the origins of the

ideal of transparency the logics that enable the pre-

sent. More importantly, the case illustrates ways the

practice of transparency has changed, specifically by

emphasizing the broad public participation in produc-

ing transparency, rather relying on the self-disclosure

and publicity of political officials and functionaries.

1.1. The Enlightenment Origins of Transparency

Though he never used the term, Jean-Jacques Rous-

seau believed transparency was the pre-civilization

condition of the state of nature (Hood, 2006). Nothing

in human nature had changed, but in the lost state of

nature, people “found their security in the ease with

which they could see through one another and this ad-

vantage, of which we no longer feel the value, pre-

vented their having many vices” (Rousseau, 1913, p.

132, emphasis added). This seeing through articulates a

literal meaning of transparency. For Rousseau, the

opaqueness of citizens within the modern city repre-

sented a threat to social order. Though Rousseau con-

sidered transparent relations among citizens as an in-

trinsic virtue and opaque relations as an intrinsic vice,

he also valued transparency as an instrumental good,

as a social condition that is necessary for civic coopera-

tion (Hill, 2006).

Visibility is a precondition for social regulation, en-

abling virtue and the potential for guarding against

vice. In the political realm, visibility entailed publicity.

Rousseau held that public servants ought to perform

“in the eyes of the public,” and “to permit no office-

holder to move about incognitio” (in Hood, 2006, p. 7).

Here we find in publicity the roots of the contemporary

conception of political transparency as a condition

where political officials, organizations, and policies are

publicly visible in order to be held to account. Public

I am not the first to use this term. The Surveillance Studies

Centre at Queen’s University has had a multi-year research ini-

tiative called The New Transparency. I intend no association,

neither practically nor conceptually. I use this term to associate

John B. Thompson’s (2005) concept of the new visibility with

the political concept of transparency.

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 41

visibility was an assurance against an accumulation of

vices among individuals, and this applied just as well to

public officials. In moral relations, if transparency is in-

strumental, a means rather than an end, then account-

ability is its end. On the other hand, if political trans-

parency is a means, then legitimacy is its end. This

legitimacy is—partly, though necessarily—earned

through visibly displaying reliable accountability. Fun-

damental to the Enlightenment project of the demo-

cratic state was “to make power visible—to illuminate

it” (Andersson, 2008, p. 1). Though early modern states

abandoned Rousseau’s insistence on direct, participa-

tory republicanism, his desire for transparency by way

of publicity was influential. For instance, Kant’s adapta-

tion of Rousseau argued that popular acceptance legit-

imates governance (Davis, 1991), and so political

transparency came to be a means of achieving a

properly representative government (Birchall, 2011b;

Heald, 2006). Transparency was a means of reconciling

the “vertical inequality” between law-makers and citi-

zens (Machin, 2012).

Just as important since its inception was the mod-

ern state’s deep dependence on surveillance (Torpey,

2000). Jeremy Bentham coined the term transparency

and with the maxim that “the more strictly we are

watched, the better we behave” (in Hood, 2006, p. 9).

This at least nominally applied to public officials, but it

practically applied to citizens. While Rousseau’s desire

was for citizens to self-disclose to one another, Ben-

tham’s intention was additionally to maintain social se-

curity by compelling their disclosure to the state.

Bahmueller explained that for Bentham, “The persons

and objects of that [social] world must be weighed and

counted, marked out and identified, subjected to the

brightness of the public light, the better to be seen by

the public eye. Only then could they be controlled and

security made possible…” (in Hood, 2006, p. 8). When

transparency—as moral regulation—merges with the

state, it takes on this police function and as a matter of

existential demand. Nicholas de La Mare’s “police sci-

ence” in his Traité de la Police in 1713 articulated

strategies for the prevention of disorder that empha-

sized street lighting and open spaces, optimizing public

view and surveillance (Hood, 2006). This early ap-

proach to policy shows a technocratic orientation to

transparency, where the visibility of citizens was made

a function of the built environment. Nonetheless, for

Bentham, transparency of public officials was to be as-

sured through reporting practices and was intended to

make officials just as subjected to the public as prison-

Johnson and Regan (2014) explain that surveillance and

transparency are rarely studied under the same lens. That

transparency emerges as a discourse with Bentham has a par-

ticular irony after Michel Foucault (1979) appropriated Ben-

tham’s panopticon, where this prison model functions as a

metaphor for the modern societies.

ers were in his panopticon. Importantly, the motivation

for this ubiquitous transparency was not the assurance

of democracy, but of security. Bentham provides a par-

ticular reference point in the genealogy of the related-

ness of transparency and surveillance, particularly by

virtue of their nexus in the state. As I argue below, the

new transparency is partly defined by the extent to

which transparency and surveillance have become in-

separable.

As the modern state developed, political transpar-

ency was seen as a prerequisite for or even an assur-

ance of accountability of officials or bureaucracies.

Here, it became a result of rules being publicized, pro-

cedures being predictable, and the self-disclosure of in-

stitutionally empowered actors demonstrating con-

formity to these standards (Hood, 2006; Tyler, 2006).

Since transparency was seen to enable accountability,

its successful performance would allow for legitimacy

to be reproduced. David Beetham’s (1991) influential

account of legitimacy explains legitimacy rests on con-

formity to known rules. Legitimacy, then, requires

transparency because rules must be displayed, seen,

and understood by publics, and that understanding

should result in a perceived coherence between insti-

tutional standards and community norms (Levi et al.,

2009). These rules rely on broadly shared beliefs or

norms, and legitimation is formally expressed through

public consent, demonstrated through widespread,

voluntary submission to the rule of law and its en-

forcement, and demonstrated by trust in representa-

tives and agents of government. For instance, Sir Rob-

ert Peel’s influential principles for policing in 1829

emphasized the role of public consent to be policed

through willing cooperation (Chrismas, 2013; Tyler &

Fagan, 2008).

Transparency was core to the idealization of the so-

cial pact in modern states. The rule of law demands le-

gitimate governments follow the rules that govern its

institutions with the same reliability with which the

governed are expected to conform to the rules that

govern publics (Tyler, 2006). In democratic societies,

legitimacy is important because it fosters self-restraint

by the dominant and governing institutions, as well as

cooperation and compliance by the governed (Tyler &

Fagan, 2008). This is conditioned on appearances, not

simply promises (Tyler, 2006). The performances of in-

stitutions must be transparent in that they visibly

demonstrate accountability to agreed-upon standards.

Without this visibility, institutions cannot be legitimat-

ed, and without such legitimacy, they cannot success-

fully administrate democratic societies. Accountability

is not automatic, though the need for legitimacy en-

sures it. The transparent state by revealing its account-

ability processes function reliably may only then pro-

duce the consent of the governed. Even still, this is a

necessary but insufficient condition (Machin, 2012).

According to this model, when legitimacy is absent in-

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 42

stitutions crumble in the face of social unrest, or rely

on the successful use of violent force to suppress upris-

ings. The axiom of this model is that without legitima-

cy, either democracy or governments fail.

While the criticisms of the model are well known

(e.g., O'Kane, 1993), it profoundly influenced the con-

stitution of representative democracies. Moreover, the

ideal of transparency has inspired—and continues to—

social movements to strengthen democratic citizen-

ship. Such movements should be expected in some

measure as a consequence of the degraded status of

the citizen relative to the very structures and functions

of political institutions fostered by this model.

The following will explain how this modern concep-

tion of transparency has been preserved, adapted, and

is even amplified within the new transparency, an out-

come both of the performances of a surveillance socie-

ty, and the mythos of what Byung-Chul Han (2012) has

called transparenzgesellschaft, or the “transparency

society.”

1.2. Transparency in Transition

If transparency relies on visibility, then the means by

which persons are made apparent is crucial. During the

latter half of the twentieth century, and especially

since, these means have undergone significant transi-

tion, and so then transparency is in transition. David

Lyon (2001) recognizes, like Rousseau, that “disappear-

ing bodies is a basic problem of modernity” but this

problem “has been accentuated with the growth and

pervasiveness of communication and information

technologies” (p. 15). Surveillance societies are those

that “depend on bureaucratic administration and some

kinds of information technology” (Lyon, 2007, p. 11)

and have turned to deliberate, routine protocols and

techniques “to make distant bodies reappear” (Lyon,

2001, p. 15). Surveillance is now fundamental to the

production of visibility.

Transparency not only connotes public visibility, but

functions through it. Imaging technologies have be-

come crucial in what is publicly visible, and information

and communication technologies have changed the

form and scale of the dissemination of images

(Thompson, 2005). Without these technologies, visibil-

ity is often bidirectional: one available to be seen can

see the watcher (Lyon, 2001). Police and surveillance in

early modern states relied on techniques more than on

technologies for making the public visible for regulato-

ry purposes (Ellul, 1964; Neocleous, 2000; Torpey,

2000). Surveillance etymologically suggests a compara-

tively powerful entity watching over the actions of

subordinated persons (Mann, Nolan, & Wellman,

2003). Imaging technologies enable this kind of over-

sight, and are approaching ubiquity in the Global North

(Lyon, 2007). The extent to which photographic and

video surveillance has come to inform the connotation

of surveillance indicates broad recognition that many

experience surveillance when the watcher is potential-

ly—and often is—hidden to those being watched

(Koskela, 2003). Not only is visibility mediated, but the

watchers and the watched negotiate with imaging

technologies to modulate their visibility, often, though

not always, producing a hidden, remote watcher

(Marx, 2009).

The broadly shared experience of being watched

has been normalized, such that publics have internal-

ized the surveillant gaze of the state (Foucault, 1979;

Marx, 2006). Complying with laws and social norms is

partly a result of feeling one is being watched even if

the watchers are not apparent. This is the most fun-

damental aspect of the panopticon metaphor, that

publics subconsciously recognize the possibility of be-

ing watched at any moment (Lyon, 2006). Panoptic

surveillance is an attempt at an efficient solution to

when total transparency is infeasible, one intended to

manufacture voluntary submission to regulation. A

powerful criticism suggests that surveillance regimes

are not so totalizing in consequence as the panopticon

metaphor suggests, as watchers carefully select among

various publics key populations to monitor and regu-

late (Hier, Walby, & Greenberg, 2006; Norris &

Armstrong, 1999). This suggests that surveillance has

not resulted in the ubiquity that the ideal for transpar-

ency would advocate. The ideal of transparency would

suggest the surveillant gaze is too discriminatory, and is

in need of “democratization” (Hier, 2003).

Surveillance for over a century, and increasingly

over the past decades, has involved imaging technolo-

gies that produce durable, archivable artifacts: docu-

mentations. Not only are watchers able to be hidden to

those they surveil, but the visual field is also no longer

bound by spatial and temporal co-presence of watcher

and watched (Thompson, 2005). Being ephemerally vis-

ible is insufficient; transparency now requires a record,

and that record must also be archived and available to

be accessed. Negotiations over who can see what,

how, and when have been the primary substance of

discourse about and political contentions over infor-

mation transparency (Turilli & Floridi, 2009). New

technologies have allowed for hidden and remote

viewing of the documentations thereof. Though the

ideal of information transparency would call for docu-

mentations to be universally available, their distribu-

tion has been historically determined or filtered by vir-

tue of political-economic power, discussed further in

the next section.

The methods of making bodies visible are various,

but the effect of such surveillance is to render the body

as an object of classification and record (Bruno, 2011;

Crary, 1992; Sekula, 1978). Powerful institutions and

the privileged actors therein have access to technolo-

gies, techniques, and institutions that enable control

over the visible body for the purposes of direction, pro-

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 43

tection, and administration (Lyon, 2001). Deviant and

criminal activities are made visible and archived as a

result of surveillance in ways it could not have other-

wise without imaging and database technologies. Pho-

tographic and video surveillance regularly produces ev-

idence used to incarcerate. Those in surveillance

societies are familiar with the success of surveillance in

making people subject to the disciplinary functions of

the criminal justice system. Yet, everyday life also pro-

vides experience of the success of surveillance tech-

niques in providing security, productively directing be-

haviors, and delivering benefits—and occasionally risks

unique to surveillance activity, such as what has been

named “identity theft.”

For the Enlightenment democratic ideal, bidirec-

tional transparency was essential. The state and its pop-

ulace required for their security both to render the pub-

lic visible and on popular submission to surveillance. Just

as important, the public was meant to watch state ac-

tors as a check on their authority. Because states have

economic and technical resources to procure and con-

trol surveillance technologies, and because they are le-

gally enabled to use them, this bidirectionality exists

mostly in principle, rarely in practice. People in surveil-

lance societies have a wealth of experience of the in-

equity in distribution of surveillance capacities. As we

will see below, the unequal distribution of surveillance

capabilities is often blamed for inequities in surveil-

lance power. If the public could produce the visibility of

state actors with similar ease and at the same scale,

then the modern democratic ideal would be made pos-

sible by virtue of the enabling technologies.

1.3. The Neoliberalization of Political Transparency

In the Enlightenment model of transparency, self-

disclosure and self-restraint is key. Monitoring from

outside of institutions was always normatively encour-

aged, but new technical means are fundamental to the

new transparency, in a society that permits no shad-

ows, nothing hidden from view. Visibility produces

awareness of official action (Andersson, 2008), and this

awareness is seen as an essential foundation for mean-

ingful participation in holding the powerful to account

(Mulgan, 2003). Today, the ocular visibility suggested

by transparency is much less metaphorical. The new

transparency signifies a deliberate, emphatic reasser-

tion of political transparency through two important

transitions. The first transition is the informatization of

visibility. Physical appearance is no longer the primary

means of visibility; it is also produced through the cir-

culation of media content. More crucially, this content

is identified with information. Second, the relationship

between publics and the state has changed in that

transparency is no longer exclusive to self-disclosure by

state agents. Birchall explains that transparency now

extends beyond voluntary self-disclosure by state ac-

tors aspiring to the modern ideal, and now “has taken

on the identity of a political movement with moral im-

peratives” (2011b, p. 62). Recognizing that “transpar-

ency as a cultural ideal of modernity” has failed

(Teurlings & Stauff, 2014, p. 4), civilians increasingly

participate in producing transparent relations, partly

through participatory media, in order to realize this ide-

al. This movement includes advocacy for open govern-

ment initiatives by state actors and non-governmental

organizations, but also on “the guerrilla fringes of the

transparency movement” (Birchall, 2011b, p. 78) are or-

ganizations like WikiLeaks and cop watching organiza-

tions discussed below. In the following subsections, I

detail each of these two transitions.

1.3.1. Exhibits as Information

Discussions of transparency, particularly in policy are-

nas, frequently focus on information transparency and

open government initiatives. The technical and organi-

zational activities of realizing broadly shared support

for such initiatives have produced a wealth of case

studies and in turn debates over causes for failures and

about best practices. Though often aimed at producing

practical advice, Birchall (2011a) finds these studies can

reveal and even criticize the liberal ideological under-

pinnings of political transparency and the ways in

which the concept has undergone neoliberalization.

The reassertion of transparency appears while trust

in governments is failing (Birchall, 2011b, p. 66). In or-

der to rebuild trust,

transparency paradoxically offers

a particularly neoliberal option of private oversight,

one without granting any real political power to pub-

lics. Instead, transparency allows members of publics

to exert their consumer power in addition to the au-

thority of the ballot vote. In its contemporary ideal,

transparency allows the expansion of choices, and for

selection to be made by individuals through unhindered

access to rich information. As Garsten and Montoya

explain, this depicts a “neoliberal ethos of governance”

through promoting “individualism, entrepreneurship,

voluntary forms of regulation and formalized types of

accountability” (in Birchall, 2011b, p. 65).

Governments are expected to be “open,” and the

criterion of openness is information transparency

(Curtin & Meijer, 2006). In the Open-Source Manifesto,

author and former Whole Earther, Robert David Steele

connects demands for open government with open-

source software and other “open” models of produc-

tion. The maxim for “open everything”: “Demand

transparency and truth from every person, every or-

ganization, every government. Consider this the mod-

ern information-era equivalent of the Golden Rule”

(Steele, 2012, p. 56). This recalls transparency as the

Trust is often treated as an indicator of legitimacy in empirical

research, see Levi, Sacks, Audrey, & Tyler, 2009.

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 44

Enlightenment’s secular alternative to religious moral

codes. Here we see not only a new credo, but one with

a particular Enlightenment legacy being adapted to a

new sociotechnical condition. This is not without prec-

edent. Three decades ago, Langdon Winner (1986) cri-

tiqued the treatment of information as self-evidently

and positively valuable, calling it “mythinformation.” In

the 1970s and 1980s, the “computer romantics” asso-

ciated with the Whole Earth movement advanced a

techno-utopian view of the promise of information

technology to assure participatory democracy, elimi-

nate toil, and assure environmental sustainability. It is

this very contingent named and critiqued in Winner’s

essay, in which he describes mythinformation as

grounded in four key assumptions: first, people are be-

reft of information; second, information is knowledge;

third, knowledge is power; and finally, increasing access

to information enhances democracy and equalizes social

power. What is unique to the contemporary moment is

evinced in calls for open government, which demon-

strate political transparency is now also a response to

“neoliberal audit culture” (Birchall, 2011b, p. 65).

The new transparency encourages beliefs in images

speaking for themselves, in cameras as mechanically

objective witnesses, and in information as self-evident.

Together, the articulation of these beliefs function as a

realist narrative (Harris, 2011). The view of mechanical

objectivity has deep historical precedent. The first

cameras were said to provide “a release from the ‘ar-

tistic aids’ that always threatened to make interpreta-

tion a personal, subjective feature of depiction.” This

mechanical objectivity was “defined by its moralized

and automatic status beyond the reach of the artist’s

hand…boosters of mechanical objectivity…were auto-

matic and as such did not pass through the dreaded

dark glass of interpretation” (Galison, 1999).

Technologies that produce indexical images (e.g.,

photographic cameras) were originally idealized as

tools that aided in observation that could communicate

“truthful inferences about the world.” Crary argues

that the camera only briefly maintained this status,

which quickly became seen as “a model for procedures

and forces that conceal, invert, and mystify truth”

(Crary, 1992, p. 29). The new transparency, however,

radically repels such cynicism about images, invoking

the spokesmen from the Enlightenment who distrusted

the corruptible and biased minds of humans and fa-

vored the mechanical objectivity of the camera

(Galison, 1999). The modern models of mind and per-

ception that see human consciousness as a mirror of

the world—“to look means to see, or that to see means

to understand” (Burnett, 1995, p. 3)—is reasserted

through the new transparency.

A special kind of objectivity is earned by virtue of

qualities of new media technologies that produce the

new transparency. Yesil explains:

Camera phones… play a significant role in… docu-

menting the misconduct of others, and functioning

as tools of surveillance. They reorganize visual doc-

umentation and the construction of truth and reali-

ty, especially through the emphasis placed on users,

and raw, unedited footage. They are generally con-

ceptualized as instruments that we can believe in as

neutral recorders of truth and reality, and stand as

symbols of neutral vision and transparency mostly

because they serve as ‘nonhuman witnesses’ in the

sense that human capacities are irrelevant to their

operation. As such these devices have begun to oc-

cupy a central position within the matrix of visual

documentation and the construction of truth and

reality. (Yesil, 2011, p. 285)

The discourse of the new transparency establishes that

mediation occurs not as a result of imaging, infor-

mation, and communication technologies, but by virtue

of political interference with or suppression of content.

Though traditional norms guiding journalists and media

industries have promoted transparency, in that an “es-

sential function of the media in liberal democracies is

to legitimate power by holding it to account”

(Schlosberg, 2013, p. 213), this ideal has been under-

mined by political-economic influence. Political-

economic approaches to media emphasize economic

interests that filter or manipulate content that would

otherwise be unproblematic for audiences to common-

ly receive, absent any need for interpretation, as mere

information. Criticism of consolidated media ownership

and normative claims that favor pluralization suggest

the decentralization of and participation in production

and distribution afforded by convergence culture and

the network society have inherent democratizing po-

tentials (Bagdikian, 2004; Castells, 2010; Jenkins, 2008;

McChesney, 1997). The problem from such perspec-

tives has to do with ownership and control. The propa-

ganda model of Herman and Chomsky (2002) stresses

media ownership as fundamental to the content that

circulates. The historically concentrated ownership of

media by elites aided hegemony and the production of

the consent of the governed. Removing the manipula-

tion of communication by hegemonic powers results in

content that is stripped down to mere objective infor-

mation. This perspective has been criticized as a “hy-

podermic” model of media, where content is “injected”

into viewers (Croteau & Hoynes, 2000).

Openness and sharing, and technologies like social

media and clouds, all contribute to information being

seemingly liberated from traditional political-economic

filters. Documentations travel far, often not fully under

control by those responsible for their origination, and

“images literally flee from organized control” (Koskela,

2006, p. 164). Beyond this liberation of information

from elite control, as Byung-Chul Han (2012) explains,

what is made visible in the transparency society is now

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 45

beyond need for interpretation. What is made visible is

objective, pure information, and it is computed via

pure machinic logics. In fact, the demand for transpar-

ency is invoked most emphatically in conjunction with

norms expressing the inherent freedom of information

that must be preserved, not infringed upon. Televisibil-

ity flattens time and space, makes activities persistent-

ly visible, archivable, retrievable. Transparency today

denies the occurrence of mediation by rejecting tem-

poral significance. Rather than mediated, transparent

images are immediated, in terms of their instantaneity.

Temporal actions are subordinated to predictable,

timeless access, for ease in monitoring and control.

Televisible images are produced, instantly available,

stored, accessed, and circulated. Transparency now

represents unmediated contact because images be-

come mere information. It permits neither gaps in in-

formation nor gaps in one’s field of vision.

1.3.2. Media Participation and Neoliberal Citizenship

Just when images are simplified as information, the

governed are homogenized into a single mass public.

The new transparency amends Rousseau’s general will

with Habermas’s public sphere. In the modern bour-

geois conception of the public,

“private persons” assembled to discuss matters of

“public concern” or “common interest”…These pub-

lics aimed to mediate between “society” and the

state by holding the state accountable to “society”

via “publicity.” At first this meant requiring that in-

formation about state functioning be made accessi-

ble so that state activities would be subject to criti-

cal scrutiny and the force of “public opinion.” Later

it meant transmitting the considered “general in-

terest” of “bourgeois society” to the state… (Fraser,

1993, p. 4)

For Habermas, “the full utopian potential of the bour-

geois conception of the public sphere was never real-

ized in practice” (Fraser, 1993, p. 5). A stratified society

produced conditions for exclusion from the public

sphere and unequal authority within it. With the explo-

sion of the mass media, the increasing scale of indus-

trial production, and the growth of conspicuous con-

sumption, critics like Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey,

and Walter Lippmann saw the potential of the public

sphere in crisis. They saw, according to Aronowitz, that

“knowledge of public events had become impossibly

fragmented, everyday life had become increasingly pri-

vatized, and, perhaps most importantly, the whole so-

ciety had become absorbed in an orgy of consumption”

(Aronowitz, 1993, pp. 75-76). Informatization provides

a resolution, cohering the public once again. The new

transparency now sees the instrumental conditions

available to realize the full utopian potential of McLu-

han’s (1965) global village, and media participation is a

primary means of civic participation in this space. This

ideal model of global citizenship is founded in the coin-

cidence of neoliberalism and informationism (Neubauer,

2011).

Transparency connotes unmediated visibility. In the

new transparency, key mediating qualities historically

recognized as fundamental to indexical and moving

images are eclipsed by emphasizing the qualities of

new digital technologies. Incidental or serendipitous

recording by civilians and the ubiquity of surveillance

cameras removes the mediating effects of editorial se-

lection (Schwartz, 2009; Yesil, 2011). In the past, state

and corporate institutions had greater capacity to en-

gage in surveillance, but consumer-grade cameras and

social media technologies have made available similar

capacities to civilians. The smart phone with its video

capability and data-connection permits incidental re-

cording of activities both everyday and anomalous

(Yesil, 2011). As Birchall explains, “the availability of

technologies of surveillance and information exchange

ensures we can be both objects and agents of intelli-

gence” (Birchall, 2011a, p. 11). As costs for consumer

electronics have lowered, the threshold to acquire im-

aging surveillance technologies have increasingly ena-

bled sousveillance, the watching by publics of those

with institutional authority. In this way, the modern

panopticon is joined by the synopticon, where the

many are now—or once again, as in Rousseau’s state of

nature—able to watch the few (Mathiesen, 1997). Syn-

optic technologies, Yesil claims, promote visibility in a

“‘viewer society’ where individuals are not only subject

to surveillance by government agencies, state institu-

tions, corporations, etc. but also become surveillers

themselves as they ‘watch’ the few and scrutinize them

through mass media and television” (Yesil, 2011, p.

285). Increasingly, little is left out of the frame, all

shadows have light cast into them—or “night vision”-

enabled cameras pointed at them. Mobile technologies

and other comparatively inexpensive technologies, like

digital editing software, lower the financial barriers to

entry into media production. Social media platforms

function as distribution channels, so barriers to distrib-

ute content are also lower (Jenkins, 2008; Yesil, 2011).

Viral circulation of content by users of social media and

similar platforms makes up for the filtering effects of

editorial staffs and the powerful interests that per-

suade them. These qualities are prioritized by advo-

cates for the democratizing or liberating qualities of

new technologies, once again reasserting the camera

as an objective witness, now in the hands of billions of

users worldwide. Larry Diamond calls these “liberation

technologies” and “accountability technologies”, be-

cause they “provide efficient and powerful tools for

transparency and monitoring” (Diamond & Plattner,

2012, p. 10). “Individuals use their camera phones not

only for personal communication,” Yesil (2011) ex-

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 46

plains, “but also for documenting the misconduct of

others, which leads to the description of such socio-

technological practices as enablers of inverse surveil-

lance that empower ordinary individuals to watch the

authorities from below” (p. 285). This sousveillance is

claimed to afford the expansion of political, social, and

economic freedom (Diamond & Plattner, 2012).

Given new technological affordances to produce

exhibits, today “the lines between reader and reporter,

news and opinion, and information and action have all

become blurred” (Diamond & Plattner, 2012, p. x). As

such, media users are now simultaneously producers

and consumers, or “prosumers” (Jenkins, 2008), who

participate in the production of transparency. Anthony

and Thomas (2010) explain “participatory media tech-

nologies that allow for the creation and distribution of

user-generated content overturn traditional notions of

all-powerful news media that define and restrict a

largely passive audience” (p. 1283). Policymakers and

scholars frequently express belief that such digital tools

have profound political impacts, and emphasize the

role played by access to alternative and independent

sources of information enabled by unfiltered access to

the internet (Etling, Faris, & Palfrey, 2010). That the

“arena for political commentary and competition is

more fast-paced, more decentralized, and more open

to new voices and social entrepreneurs than ever be-

fore,” is taken as evidence that the ease and efficiency

in generating and dispersing a diversity of media con-

tent is inherently democratizing (Diamond & Plattner,

2012, p. x). As the digital divide in surveillance technol-

ogy is closing (Mann et al., 2003, p. 335), a singular

public is both enabled and expected to be media

prosumers as a key performance of their citizenship

(Dean, 2008).

When institutions themselves are deemed inappro-

priately transparent, civilians increasingly—enabled by

cheap and abundant digital technologies—monitor in-

stitutions and official actors. Watchdog media checks

and augments information provided by the self-

disclosure of officials and institutions. More recently,

civilians are active as watchdogs of their own sort, not

only as intentional, planned activity, but also through

incidental, happenstance documentation of official

conduct (Anthony & Thomas, 2010). Civilians monitor

wildlife, air and water quality, and produce similar en-

vironmental indices (Jalbert, Kinchy, & Perry, 2014;

Kinchy, Jalbert, & Lyons, 2014; Kinchy & Perry, 2012;

Ottinger, 2010). This activity is done as a form of re-

dundancy, to quantitatively improve extant data or en-

hance quality of knowledge thus produced through

repetition. This activity may be done where extant data

is deemed deficient, either of poor quality or limited in

quantity, to fill in gaps of knowledge otherwise left in-

complete in quality or coverage. Finally, it can be un-

dertaken when existing monitoring is deemed negli-

gent, an oversight. In the new transparency, anything

that escapes view is a source of risk or danger by virtue

of its invisibility. Civilian voluntarism increasingly sup-

plements or replaces activity historically in the purview

of governments. This may be done, as we might ex-

pect, when there is a breakdown in trust among publics

for the institutions that are or would usually be tasked

with such surveillance. Redundant monitoring is espe-

cially indicative of this lack of trust. But it is also activity

promoted by neoliberalization, as government agen-

cies scale back due to funding and other cuts. Civilian

monitoring steps in where government surveillance is

deficient, negligent, or underfunded. In such a situa-

tion, the production of transparency by civilians devel-

ops a quality of civic participation, and in democratic

societies, this confers a positive normative quality to

the activities of monitoring (Dean, 2008). To produce

transparency is to be a good citizen.

Since the new transparency ascribes absolute, posi-

tive value to visibility, the technologies and techniques

that render bodies visible to surveillance produce pow-

er, and presumably with symmetry. This discourse

frames imaging, communication, and information

technologies as plastic, amenable to serving and em-

powering any interests. Surveillance activity is not ex-

clusive to powerful institutions and actors who derive

authority from these. The new transparency encour-

ages a view of surveillance that is neutral, one where

watching from below is productive of new powers for

those outside the traditionally recognized structures of

authority. Despite reliable substantiation for expecta-

tions that these new capabilities foster consequential

political participation, the pervading doctrine of the

new transparency allows such expectations to persist

in absence of a demand for evidence supporting them.

Even the most hopeful advocates for liberation tech-

nology (see, e.g., Diamond & Plattner, 2012) recognize

the limited or equivocal evidence supporting their de-

scriptions of these technologies as such. Here, the qua-

si-religious, doctrinal quality of the new transparency is

revealed: it is, at its core, a faith rooted in history, ritu-

ally reproduced through insistence upon its efficacy

and popular use predicated on this efficacy.

2. The New Transparency of Police

The prior section details the intellectual origins and so-

cial shaping of a concept that figures centrally in dis-

course about of policing’s new visibility (Brucato, 2015;

Goldsmith, 2010; Thompson, 2005). Transparency re-

lies on a visibility produced by surveillance. During the

past century, the use of camera surveillance became

crucial to the maintenance of order just as citizens

were increasingly tasked with producing transparent

relations. In this section, I explain these two changes

coincide with the new transparency of police. Using a

situational analysis (Clarke, 2005), my research began

by archiving videos documenting police violence, profil-

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 47

ing organizations that circulated these on social media,

and building situational maps that identified key

themes in pertinent discourse. My primary objective

was to explain the proliferation of these videos. After

years of studying discourses involving them, the theme

of transparency was found to clearly pervade discus-

sion of these videos and of policing’s visibility (Boyatzis,

1998). I established an archive including scholarly re-

search, public press articles, online and social media

posts by activists, and supplemented these with origi-

nal data from interviews and field notes. From this ar-

chive, I have selected and provided below key content

that establishes the role played by modern notions of

transparency and the discursive work in contemporary

political contentions about police violence that are mod-

ifying these notions to develop the new transparency.

2.1. A New Era of Police Visibility

In 1991, the beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Po-

lice Department (LAPD) officers was incidentally and

covertly video recorded. Its release exposed the brutal-

ity of policing beyond the communities that chronically

experience such violence (Skolnick & Fyfe, 1993). The

video, which Mann and colleagues refer to as “proba-

bly the best-known recent example of sousveillance”

(Mann et al., 2003, p. 333), made visible what the

Christopher Commission later determined was routine

police practice by the LAPD. This genetic moment in

the history of incidental video documentation of police

violence demonstrates the discourse of the new trans-

parency. Los Angeles attorney and former State De-

partment official, Warren Christopher, headed an in-

dependent investigation into a pattern of civil rights

violations and violence by the LAPD. He wrote this

Commission

owes its existence to the George Holliday videotape

of the Rodney King incident. Whether there even

would have been a Los Angeles Police Department

investigation without the video is doubtful, since

the efforts of King’s brother, Paul, to file a com-

plaint were frustrated, and the report of the in-

volved officers was falsified. Even if there had been

an investigation, our case-by-case review of the

handling of 700 complaints indicates that without

the Holliday videotape the complaint might have

been adjudged to be “not sustained,” because the

officers’ version conflicted with the account by King

and his two passengers, who typically would have

been viewed as not “independent.” (Independent

Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department,

1991, p. ii)

Yesil (2011) explains the lasting significance of the

Rodney King video, writing it “has served as one of the

first and most widely-viewed examples of the power of

mobile recorded image. The message of the Rodney

King tape was that no person, institution or organiza-

tion was immune from being monitored” (p. 280). The

tape’s power, she argues, was earned through its con-

tents being widely disseminated and generating unprec-

edented public awareness about police violence. Re-

sponding to the Rodney King controversy, Skolnick and

Fyfe (1993) argued that, “in the absence of videotapes

or other objective recording of gratuitous violence, bru-

tality rarely causes public controversy and is extremely

difficult to prove” (p. 19). Here, not only is video objec-

tive, able to “prove” what happened, but public contro-

versy is conditioned on this particular mode of exhibi-

tion. Crucial for the new transparency is that the value

of this video remains even though the officers who

brutalized King were exonerated in criminal court.

At the turn of the century, Regina Lawrence (2000)

claimed that “most instances of police use of force are

spontaneous, and the vast majority do not occur in the

glare of television lights” (p. 14). Just a decade later,

Diamond explained “incidents of police brutality have

been filmed on cellphone cameras and posted to

YouTube and other sites, after which bloggers have

called outraged public attention to them” (Diamond &

Plattner, 2012, p. 10). Now, Goldsmith (2010) explains,

“video is the new reality” with “policing’s new visibil-

ity.” Jeffries (2011) argues, “cell phone surveillance”

has “‘turned on its head’ the idea that the citizen-

police officer relationship is an asymmetrical one” (p.

74). In just a decade, the game has seemingly changed,

and the new technologies (e.g., mobile phones, mi-

croblogging and other social media) that produce and

distribute this surveillance are credited for having

changed the power dynamics in political culture. Dis-

guising or hiding illegal or other offensive behavior is

not as fully within the command of officers and agen-

cies as they had been in the past. While acknowledging

he is unclear about how this visibility will offer it, Gold-

smith (2010) nonetheless finds it “highly probable that

the new capacities for surveillance of policing inherent

in these technologies may increase the police’s ac-

countability to the public” (p. 915).

Yesil (2011) claims that the use of cellphones to

document the misconduct of others leads “to the de-

scription of such socio-technological practices as ena-

blers of inverse surveillance that empower ordinary in-

dividuals to watch the authorities from below” (p. 285).

Each new video documenting police brutality is said to

produce “ruptures” in the “social fabric” because they

bring up past injustices, as with the beating of Rodney

King (Anthony & Thomas, 2010, p. 1292). In 2009, doz-

ens of witnesses watched BART (Bay Area Rapid Trans-

it) Police Officer Johannes Mehserle shoot Oscar Grant

in the back, killing him while another officer restrained

him, prone on a train platform in Oakland, California.

The incident was video recorded by several of these

witnesses. Since then, dozens of beatings and killings

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 48

by police have been documented by civilians on their

cell phones, including Eric Garner being choked and

suffocated by New York Police Department Officer

Daniel Pantaleo in July 2014; Charly “Africa” Leundeu

Keunang being shot and killed by a LAPD Sgt. Chand

Syed and Officers Francisco Martinez and Daniel Torres

in February 2015; and Walter Scott being shot and

killed by North Charleston Police Officer Michael T.

Slager in April 2015.

According to the discourse of the new transparency

of police, the ability for civilians to produce policing’s

visibility empowers them in ways previously never im-

agined. These powers emerge from the mechanically

objective qualities of cameras and the self-evident—

even scientific—qualities of the media they produce.

New popular abilities to make truthful claims backed

by documentation and to thereby hold officials ac-

countable are importantly joined by a protective pow-

er: to prevent police violence from being used against

other community members or oneself (Brucato, 2015).

This preventative power, provided by the visibility

cameras produce, recalls Bentham’s claim that behav-

ior improves when people are strictly observed.

2.2. Cop Watching

This case is provided to demonstrate how the dis-

course of transparency functions in contemporary po-

litical contention. Regardless of the validity of the En-

lightenment ideal for transparency in adequately

describing the actual functioning of contemporary de-

mocracies, this conception lives on in the discourse and

political activities of advocates for transparency. The

following case study focuses especially on particular

groups of such advocates: self-described “police ac-

countability” activists who video record police and ad-

vocate that civilians also engage in such documenta-

tion. Cop watching has come to describe two kinds of

activities. Cop watching has always referred to orga-

nized, intentional documentation of police by commu-

nity groups; but it increasingly also describes the inci-

dental, happenstance documentation by independent

civilians (Huey, Walby, & Doyle, 2006; Toch, 2012;

Wilson & Serisier, 2010). The modern ideal of transpar-

ency would suggest that making visible the administra-

tion of the law would protect civilians from its excess-

es, because transgressions would be subjected to

accountability—or otherwise administrators would lose

legitimacy. In my original interviews with them and in

their public statements, cop watchers describe their

motivations for making policing more visible. Like Pete

Eyre, a co-founder of the organization Cop Block, who

says “I’m a definitely a big advocate of transparency”

(WeAreChange, 2013), these police accountability ac-

tivists leverage what they see as the police’s need for

legitimacy to promote accountability.

On August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri, while on

duty a white police officer, Darren Wilson, shot and

killed Michael Brown, an unarmed, 18-year-old Black

man. While this incident captured the attention and in-

spired the mobilization of existing activists and organi-

zations across the country, it also produced a sponta-

neous uprising in Ferguson that continued for months.

David Whitt lives in the housing project where Brown

was killed. Despite not having an activist history, he

became active daily in political agitation in his commu-

nity. Whitt was both protesting the killing, but also en-

gaging in efforts to constructively respond to what he

saw as a pattern of excessive force, and particularly

against people of color. He founded the Canfield

Watchmen, who engaged in daily cop watch “patrols”

to record police stops. With the support of a crowd-

funded campaign by We Copwatch, the Canfield

Watchmen distributed over one hundred wearable

video cameras to area residents for them to serendipi-

tously record police stops on an individual basis.

Cop watchers see their activities as preventing the

invisibility of police violence. Like Rousseau, they see

opacity as a vice itself and one that encourages further

unethical behavior, often with brutal or deadly conse-

quences. Video keeps individual officers honest. Those

who transgress can be targeted as on this basis by cop

watchers. Pete Eyre of the police accountability organi-

zation, Cop Block, claims because “it’s individuals who

act…it’s individuals who are responsible for their ac-

tions” (personal communication, February 17, 2015).

Here we see transparency functioning in its modern

normative sense: enabling the mutual regulation of in-

dividual behavior.

Community organizer and independent journalist,

Gregory Malandrucco, articulates that camera surveil-

lance enables the kind of bi-directional transparency

Bentham preferred:

Today, video captures not only civilians acting be-

yond the bounds of legality against the state and its

laws, but also egregious instances of police officers

breaking the very laws they are sworn to uphold.

Technology presents us with the unforeseen poten-

tial to hold public officials accountable for their ac-

tions in swift and certain terms, as equal members

of society… (Malandrucco, 2012)

Civilian participation in media production places civil-

ians on more equal footing with police and other state

actors. This view demonstrates in action the idea that

this kind of transparency works to legitimate vertical

inequalities in representative democracies. More im-

portantly, if officials, functionaries, and other agents of

the state are insufficiently visible, individual citizens can

now offer the corrective. Jeffries writes that “using a cell

phone camera to monitor police work is a relatively easy

way to participate in the democratic process. Doing so

gives people a sense of efficacy; that they can impact

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 49

what the government does” (Jeffries, 2011, p. 74).

Given the new transparency, the content of these

videos is self-evident and objective, prior to or even

forbidding any interpretation. Eyre presents transpar-

ency as a technically-enabled quality: “If I say ‘Hey, this

just happened,’ they don’t have to try to determine if

I’m being factual or not.” Because “the lens of the

camera is objective,” he says, “People don’t have to

know me, or trust me… They can just look at the vid-

eo.” (WeAreChange, 2013).

Cop watchers see themselves not only as participat-

ing in viewing the articulation of state power, but also

as producing new popular power. The belief that popu-

lar media production and circulation can produce pow-

er is grounded in three claims. The first is because it

circumvents filtering effects enabled by the political

economic power of the mass media. Matt Agorist of

The Free Thought Project claim that unfiltered content

generation and circulation is “changing the world.”

“Technology and the internet,” he writes, “is giving

way to amateur reporters putting out unfiltered and

unedited news. This is the future, this is how REAL

change is brought about; not from fat cats in nice suits

lying to you” (Agorist, 2014). As Eyre explains:

We live in a time now with technology, where we

can go around the would-be censors that really

thrive on the control and access to information. To-

day with the internet and other technologies we can

really bypass those gatekeepers and support each

other…(personal communication, February 17, 2015)

Second, media produced by civilians shapes the agenda

in political forums and in mass media reporting. Grant

A. Mincy of Center for a Stateless Society claims “new

technology, independent media and good old human

communication” have provoked increased attention by

mainstream news outlets that are following agenda-

setting happening at the grassroots. “We are connect-

ed, we talk, we control the public arena and we make

stories go viral,” he explains. “In the face of increased

violence folks are taking to social media to spread news

and directly confront state power” (Mincy, 2013). Final-

ly, because of the supposed civilizing quality of transpar-

ency, cameras provide their users with protective pow-

er. Wendy McElroy (2010) claims “cameras have

become the most effective weapon that ordinary people

have to protect against and to expose police abuse.”

2.3. Exhibiting Unaccountability

Sen (2010) applies the modern triad of transparency,

accountability, and legitimacy to police, explaining that

in a democratic society police are accountable to the

people, and also have “a proximate responsibility to

the law of the land which expresses the will of the

people” (p. 1). He further maintains that “the police

should be transparent in its activities. Most of the po-

lice activities should be open to scrutiny and subject to

reports to regular outside bodies” (Sen, 2010, p. 9).

Prenzler and Ronken (2001) reviewed several dec-

ades of research throughout the Anglophone world to

systematically review predominating models of police

accountability. Initial police accountability included ac-

countability to law and to elected officials, to which

was later added internal investigations and review by

external agencies. Cop watchers may advocate using

video footage to ensure greater accountability through

such processes. However, they add to or replace these

processes by promoting the withdrawal of police legit-

imacy by publics.

Cop watching, Jeffries (2011) contends, “has intro-

duced an element of accountability that heretofore has

been absent” (p. 74). By filming police, “unknown cam-

eramen and women lived out high democratic ideals”

through this mode of bearing witness (Meyer, 2015).

Acknowledging “that civilian-held cameras are [not]

always effective at securing a conviction,” Meyer

(2015) cites the example of Eric Garner, killed by New

York Police Department Officer Daniel Pantaleo in Stat-

en Island on July 17, 2014. The killing of Garner was

video recorded, but no officers were indicted by the

Richmond County Grand Jury. Nonetheless, as in the

Rodney King incident, the significance of video is that

we know. After all, in the new transparency, to see is to

know (Han, 2012). According to contemporary perspec-

tives that venerate transparency, political problems are

a result of a deficient or incomplete set of information

to be solved through accumulating more and better in-

formation (see Winner, 1986).

According to the discourse of the new transparen-

cy, once police-civilian interactions are made visible,

accountability is the likely or certain outcome. In his

report on police repression of Occupy Wall Street pro-

tests, Harmon Leon (2011) wrote that “cell phones and

social media are the great equalizers in keeping law en-

forcement accountable.” Similarly, Carlos Miller (2014)

of the advocacy group, Photography Is Not A Crime!,

explains that “justice prevails every once in a while,”

but “only because it was all caught on video.” Howev-

er, if accountability is not reliably demonstrated, many

cop watchers believe this will undermine the police in-

stitution by causing a crisis of legitimacy. They agree

with journalists like Matt Taibbi (2014), who claims that

as a result of the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson

and Eric Garner in New York, “the police suddenly have a

legitimacy problem in this country.” Friedersdorf (2014)

contends that “the police continue to lose the trust of

the public, due largely to documented instances of bad

behavior by fellow officers, as well as law enforcement’s

longstanding inability to police themselves.”

Meyer (2015) acknowledges a poor model for jus-

tice requires police accountability “rely on someone

always standing nearby with a smartphone. But the

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 50

process of ascertaining the truth of the world has to

start somewhere.” Many cop watchers are not only

aimed at holding individual officers responsible for

transgressions. For Eyre, filming is also desirable

to make clear a pattern of unaccountability that’s

built into the so-called justice system. The idea that

it’s just a few rogue people that are doing some-

thing is not true…. If people see this as a pattern

then….[this will undermine] the legitimacy that they

grant to these institutions, or their own willingness

to call them and utilize them, or deferment to

them, or even the funding of their apparatus… (per-

sonal communication, February 17, 2015)

Through accumulation of videos, these will allow the

public to see the depicted incidents are not isolated or

exceptional, but instead form a pattern revealing the

normal function of police. If publics routinely see vide-

os followed by a failure to demonstrate institutional

accountability, they would retract the legitimacy they

grant to these institutions. “That’s ultimately to me

what’s necessary to have a change” explains Eyre (per-

sonal communication, February 17, 2015).

As Rojek, Alpert and Smith (2012) observe, sousveil-

lance media documenting policing activity “provide the

public with a snapshot of what the police do” (p. 302).

Lersch and Mieczkowski (2005) explain videocameras

and media attention may foment distrust and fear of

police. This exposure could create the impression that

police violence is increasing, when in fact “violent po-

lice behavior has a long history, dating back to the early

years of law enforcement” (Lersch & Mieczkowski,

2005, p. 553).

Because “cell phone camera surveil-

lance of police officers is exposing behavior that some

police officers have gotten away with for years”

(Jeffries, 2011, p. 73), routine problems of policing are

now subject to popular oversight.

When transparency fails to produce accountability,

when it does not fulfill the promise of protection, the

modern transparency-accountability-legitimacy triad

would suggest that legitimacy is certain to fail. Many

cop watchers wish to undermine the legitimacy of the

police institution, so they believe making its essential

violence visible will result in a withdrawal of legitimacy,

and this alone will force change. This is why these cop

watchers choose media circulation as their primary ac-

tivity, rather than more traditional means of communi-

ty organizing to issue demands to or to directly con-

front governmental institutions. The battle is over

legitimacy, and transparency is the tactic of choice.

3. The Resilience of Police

Despite the increased visibility of policing (Goldsmith,

For a detailed history, see Brucato (2014).

2010), declining violent crime rates (Truman & Planty,

2012) and increased officer safety (Center for Officer

Safety & Wellness, 2014), officer use-of-force incidence

does not appear to be waning (Alpert & Dunham, 2000,

2004, 2010). Furthermore, officers are equipped with

more weaponry to use (Kraska & Kappeler, 1997) in

more striated continuums of force (Walker, 2005). In

the past decade, police have killed thousands of Ameri-

cans, and yet only 54 police have been criminally

charged for the killings (Kindy & Kelly, 2015). Of those

cases that are resolved, less than a third were convict-

ed. These police were sentenced to serve about three

years in jail or prison, on average. Oscar Grant’s killer,

former Officer Johannes Mehserle, served just over a

year and a half in jail. The rapid growth in police moni-

toring should leave us skeptical over claims made re-

garding its political efficacy. Police know they are now

visible, and yet the police institution and its use of vio-

lence do not appear to be changing in any fundamental

way—certainly not in the ways most cop watchers ex-

pect. For all the talk about the popular empowerment

caused by cheap imaging and communication technol-

ogies, the police institution remains resilient.

Though transparency is widely believed to produce

the possibility of accountability (Mulgan, 2003), and is

therefore productive of popular power (Birchall,

2011b), this expectation is frustrated by the actual out-

comes of documenting police violence. The very prolif-

eration of such media speaks to the limitations of visi-

bility as a protective power. Roger Holliday was hidden

in his apartment while LAPD officers beat Rodney King

at night in 1991. However, the more recent 2008 vid-

eo-recorded beating of Michael Cephus showed the

close proximity of several citizens filming police during

daylight as one officer struck Cephus so hard with a ba-

ton that the officer lost his grip on it and it rolled

across the street. Hurst Texas Police Department Of-

ficer Disraeli Arnold taunted a cameraperson as he bru-

talized and threatened to kill an already restrained 17-

year old, Andrew Rodriguez, in 2012. After kneeing Ro-

driguez in the head and shouting “Move and die!” he

marched him, handcuffed, past the camera and shout-

ed—without prompting—his badge number into the

camera. Following the killing of Michael Brown, months

of sustained protests in Ferguson, Missouri, sporadic

related protests throughout the United States, Presi-

dent Barack Obama signed a bill to fund the adoption

of 50,000 on-officer wearable cameras (Brucato, 2015).

Rather than demonstrating accountability, publics were

offered more transparency.

Cop watching exemplifies the adaptation of modern

transparency to contemporary conditions. The new

transparency retains qualities from its Enlightenment

origins, and renews its conceptual and practical con-

nections to accountability and legitimacy. Emphasizing

transparency’s connection to ocular visibility, now visi-

bility paradoxically benefits from its mediation, be-

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 51

cause it allows for televisibility and archivability while

simultaneously maintaining its objectivity. The af-

fordances of new technologies allow for both access

and instantaneity. Mediation only retains its positive

qualities that allow for transcending the limits of time

and distance, providing an archivable object with its

own persistent access, but also lending direct access to

what really happened. Since documentations are not

edited or filtered by editorial staffs working for multi-

national megacorporations, raw footage gives ampli-

fied access to what Szarkowski (2007) calls “the thing

itself.” With streaming video and Tweeted photo-

graphs, this can happen instantaneously. Time is sus-

pended, and so images are no longer the embodiment

of an afterlife, but rather a sign that the metaphors of

life and death do not apply to media. Everything is

now. Transparency is presence.

The new transparency undergirds the political

strategies not only of most activists and other civil so-

ciety groups focusing on police violence, but it also mo-

tivates considerable political activity on matters of cru-

cial social and environmental importance. Not only do

civilians watch police, but they document many aspects

of the built and natural environment, both their friends

and governmental institutions. Most of all, civilians

champion the courage of whistleblowers; WikiLeaks

and Edward Snowden have revealed to the world the

extensive functions and seemingly shocking outcomes

of the military and security apparatus, and the leakers

are lauded as heroes.

In his influential conceptualization of “the new visi-

bility,” Thompson argues, “mediated visibility is not

just a vehicle through which aspects of social and polit-

ical life are brought to the attention of others: it has

become a principal means by which social and political

struggles are articulated and carried out” (Thompson,

2005, p. 49). He explains this new visibility is a “double-

edged sword.” When cameras are ubiquitous and the

internet lowers thresholds to reach audiences, both

the governed and the governing are exposed. Yet clear-

ly, both edges of this blade do not always cut the same

or as deeply.

What might explain the excitement over WikiLeaks,

cop watching, and similar struggles for visibility? Set-

ting aside for a moment common concerns about pri-

vacy, might it be that many civilians find in surveillance

the possibility of alleviating anxieties by returning to

what Rousseau saw as our lost state of nature? New

technological affordance allow us to see through one

another, to make actions apparent in public so people

can be held to popular account. But this ideal does not

square with current political realities. We might meet

the precondition of transparency, the means treasured

today as in the early modern period; but the ends of

this ideal—a democracy governed through broad par-

ticipation by all publics, where the powerful are held to

account—is far from a reality. Perhaps this footage

provides not a transparent lens into reality, but a mir-

ror reflecting back on its viewers. As Žižek (2011) wrote

about WikiLeaks, the shame these disclosures produce

is not only directed toward public officials and func-

tionaries, but also back at ourselves “for tolerating

such power over us.” More importantly, this shame “is

made more shameful by being publicised.” This, of

course, is simply a restatement of the transparency-

accountability-legitimacy model: that there is no au-

thority except that which persists with public consent.

Videos documenting police violence in the United

States most often depict Blacks being brutalized, often

by white officers, and this squares with long-established

patterns in police outcomes (Brucato, 2014). Though

public disapproval of police agencies may increase af-

ter publicized incidents involving charges of brutality,

this disapproval does not become entrenched, espe-

cially not among whites (Weitzer, 2002). Not only is

there a strong majority approval of police in the United

States, this approval is not impacted among whites

even when they believe police are brutal and racist

(Thompson & Lee, 2004). In keeping with Sir Robert

Peel’s belief that the public consent and trust are nec-

essary for successful policing, criminological research-

ers presume its necessity despite so rarely finding it

(Reiner, 2010), especially among those populations

most intensively policed—Blacks living in segregated

urban neighborhoods (Kane, 2005).

The United States is not comprised by a single, ho-

mogeneous mass public that together grants its con-

sent to public institutions—neither is any other con-

temporary liberal-democratic nation, for that matter.

Rather the United States was historically and is cur-

rently deeply divided along the color line. Joel Olson

(2004) referred to the United States as a “white de-

mocracy” on the grounds that it has two practical polit-

ical orders: democracy for white citizens and tyranny

for everyone else. This division has always been crucial

to the police mandate (Brucato, 2014). While some

documented incidents of police brutality have prompt-

ed uprisings, these have been few in number, unsus-

tained, and resulted in little more than nominal com-

mitments by public officials to improved police

accountability. The rebellions in Ferguson in 2014 and

in Baltimore in 2015 were exceptional on many

grounds. Importantly, mostly poor, Black nonactivists

populated both uprisings, and they remained militantly

active in the streets for weeks. Police were shown on

amateur video and mainstream media using military

vehicles, weapons, armor, and other equipment to

suppress both rebellions. When a defined segment of

the fragmented U.S. population then demonstrated a

persistent lack of consent to the brutal policing that is

an ambient presence in their lives, police suppressed

this rebellion using military weapons and tactics and in

full view of broader publics.

The new transparency casts new technologies as

Media and Communication, 2015, Volume 3, Issue 3, Pages 39-55 52

enablers of a “global village,” allowing a universal hu-

manity to transcend sociospatial divisions, of which the

color line is but one indicator. The persistence of this

presumption not only avoids the inability for publics to

efficaciously act on the basis of such a capacity. This

presumption also reinforces what Cheliotis (2010) calls

“narcissistic sensibilities and practices, either by pre-

suming that the included already possess a kind-

heartedness in wait only for specific directions, or by

framing ‘others’ as human only insofar as their stories

reflect our own emotional world” (p. 172). The trans-

parency-accountability-legitimacy model presumes an

undivided public, perhaps permitting some inequality

within it, but not capable of accounting for the categor-

ical exclusion or domination of an entire population.

The new transparency is grounded in the mistaken

idea that documentations are self-evident, and that

this divided population would make the same sense of

videos documenting police violence. As Butler (1993)

argued with reference to the Rodney King case, not on-

ly are U.S. populations racialized, but, in part because

of this, the visible is itself a racially contested terrain.

Transparency casts video as capable of speaking for it-

self. When partisans expect video to function this way,

they neglect the political task of engaging in public

speech that would provide an antiracist, counterhege-

monic interpretation against the dominant reading that

interprets police as providers of security and those

most intensively policed—people of color, and espe-

cially young Black men—as threats to the social order.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Crina Archer, Langdon Winner, and Nancy D.

Campbell for crucial comments on earlier drafts. Thank

you to three anonymous reviewers and the editors for

close reading and helpful commentary. I appreciate the

assistance of Jennifer Mann in finalizing the copy. This

research was partly conducted while supported by the

Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Fellowship at

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Conflict of Interests

The author declares no conflict of interests.

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About the Author

Dr. Ben Brucato

Ben Brucato is an interdisciplinary scholar and political theorist, working at intersections of media,

technology, surveillance, policing, and race. Currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Human-

istic Inquiry at Amherst College, he works on the Mattering Lives project. Brucato earned his Ph.D. in

Science & Technology Studies from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Conceptualización de la violencia policial a partir de las prácticas de defensores/as de derechos humanos / Conceptualization of Police Violence based on the Practices of Human Rights Defenders

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2024

Tamara Jorquera-Álvarez

Presento una investigación dirigida a comprender los discursos y prácticas en torno a la violencia policial de defensores/as de derechos humanos en Chile. Mediante metodología etnográfica (2020-2022), trabajé con defensores/as de una institución estatal, una organización de sociedad civil que apoya a víctimas y otra que monitorea protestas, realizando 16 entrevistas, revisión de documentos y observación en actividades cotidianas. El análisis etnográfico integrado estuvo orientado a comprender cómo los discursos y prácticas mantienen y promueven determinadas relaciones sociales. La investigación permitió identificar prácticas dirigidas hacia el Estado, la sociedad y hacia las propias organizaciones. El sentido de estas prácticas resistentes confluye en tres ámbitos entrelazados que caracterizan esta violencia institucional: su invisibilización, naturalización e impunidad. Concluyo que la denuncia y la educación para impulsar cambios culturales trazan caminos para enfrentar las causas de los abusos policiales, asociadas al rol productivo de la policía en un orden racializado y de clase.

Synoptic Prudentialism: The police, social media, and bureaucratic resistance

Article

Full-text available

Apr 2021

In the current article, we examine police officer perceptions of risk when using (often official police) social media sites. We argue that for police it is not the ‘few observing the many’ model of panoptic surveillance that matters most; rather, it is the synoptic gaze of the ‘many observing the few.’ We propose a new concept, that of synoptic prudentialism, which we argue involves an individual’s or organization’s reflexive actions and adjustments in response to an acute awareness of ubiquitous social surveillance. Interviews with officers serving in rural areas of an Atlantic Canadian province reveal expressions of vulnerability in relation to potentially antagonist audiences online. From the perspective of front-line officers who express a desire to use social media more informally to connect with online audiences, bureaucratic procedures and other formal regulations governing official police social media use constrains the potential to harness the synoptic gaze in productive ways. © 2021. Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers canadiens de sociologie.

On the Impossibility of Ethical Surveillance

Article

Full-text available

Jan 2022

Torin Monahan

On the Impossibility of Ethical Surveillance

Preprint

Full-text available

Jun 2022

Torin Monahan

Building upon critical surveillance studies and communication scholarship, this chapter explores some of the pressing ethical issues with contemporary surveillance systems, particularly those systems that draw upon big data analytics or are embedded in algorithmic functions. Given the tight historical entwinement of surveillance, racial subjugation, and capitalist expropriation, I argue that ethical surveillance is an impossibility. Efforts to chart more “caring,” ethical pathways for surveillance cannot escape this tainted history and may do even further damage by fostering misplaced belief in the potential of reform. The notion of ethical surveillance, in other words, may serve as a mirage that drives scholars and policymakers continually forward in search of better technological formations while postponing a true reckoning with the logics of domination infusing all surveillance encounters.

Viewing Violent Policing Videos Contributes to Trauma Symptoms for Black Americans

Article

Full-text available

Nov 2023

Objective: This research investigates how watching videos of police violence and experiences with police contributes to health disparities in well-being that disproportionately negatively affect Black Americans. Method: A large-scale survey of Americans (n = 1,240; nBlack American = 286, nWhite American = 954) examined the impact of negative experiences with police and watching violent policing videos as distal (i.e., external) stressors that contribute to symptoms of trauma. The proximal (i.e., internal) stressor of worrying about being stereotyped as criminal by police was also examined. Results: Those who identified as Black were more likely to report negative experiences with police, exposure to violent policing videos, and greater worry about being stereotyped as criminal by police than those who identified as White. The three stressors were, in turn, associated with experiencing trauma symptoms. Conclusions: Exposure to violent policing videos is disproportionately associated with well-being for Black Americans, even when accounting for direct experiences with police. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering vicarious trauma in therapeutic settings and have implications for dissemination of these videos through media channels.

Painting the narrative: Police body-worn cameras, report writing, and the techno-regulation of policework

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2023

Police body-worn cameras (BWCs) have emerged in response to calls for greater police transparency and accountability. Leveraged as techno-regulatory tools with the potential to influence officer behavior, BWCs may also afford officers opportunities to review video footage prior to writing incident reports, which has implications for how police-public interactions are documented in official records. In this study of BWC adoption by a police agency in the United States, we examine how officers’ ideological perspectives on BWCs, technological limitations, and policy-related concerns influenced their decisions about whether and how to review video as part of their report writing practice. In conclusion, we argue that police practitioners and policy-makers should provide clearer policy guidance to officers about how BWC footage should be used in the report writing process and that police administrators, policy-makers, and researchers should directly consider the role that technology might play in regulating officer behavior, even in unintended ways.

Educators and synoptic prudentialism: Educator reflections on educator training, student surveillance and using technology for student outreach

Article

Jun 2023
CAN REV SOCIOL

Surveillance plays several interrelated and essential roles in contemporary education. In the current article, we explore the understandings and experiences of educators related to surveillance; especially the 'vertical' surveillance 'from below' students themselves direct towards educators both inside and outside of the classroom (referred to as 'sousveillance'). We also explore the prudential 'intrapersonal' and reflexive surveillance undertaken by educators to align and adjust to the expectations of educator professionalization, including during educator training, especially in terms of their social media use and under a context of synoptic prudentialism in schools. Synoptic prudentialism refers to the reflexive actions and adjustments by individuals and organizations in response to an acute awareness of widespread social surveillance-the many watching the few. Educators noted risks posed by surveillance, including sources of potential harm, both personal and professional. Findings reveal that, reinforced by the legal scare stories encountered during educator training programs, educators feel overwhelmingly vulnerable to the potential sousveillance of students, and are receiving little advice beyond the requirement to 'be careful'. We explore educators' privacy management strategies in response, for example, in response to concerns over students capturing videos in the classroom where situations may be taken out of context. This prudential framework, moreover, may also be inhibiting educators' ability to conduct outreach with students to detect and respond to online mediated conflict and harm.

Restoring trust through transparency: Examining the effects of transparency strategies on police crisis communication in Mainland China

Article

Jun 2023
PUBLIC RELAT REV

Qi Zheng

Zwischen Ermächtigung und Überwachung. Protestkulturen in mediatisierten Öffentlichkeiten

Chapter

Full-text available

Feb 2021

Philipp Knopp

Die sozialwissenschaftliche Debatte um die Mediatisierung von Öffentlichkeit fokussierte sich bisher entweder auf Kontrollaspekte oder ihren partizipativen Charakter. Der Beitrag argumentiert, dass jenseits von Vereinseitigungen die Ambivalenzen der digitalen Medien offengelegt werden müssen. Dazu wird auf einen Sichtbarkeitsbegriff zurückgegriffen, der an die komplementären Arbeiten von Hannah Arendt und Michel Foucault anschließt und sowohl Kontrolle als auch demokratische Ermächtigung fassen kann. Die Wirkung dieser Ambivalenzen veranschaulicht der Beitrag anhand dreier Protestkulturen.

A megfigyelés kölcsönösségével („sousveillance”, „citizen journalism” és rendőri testkamerák) kapcsolatos rendőrvezetői attitűdök

Article

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Nov 2022

Klára Héder

A 21. század digitális környezetében a „megfigyelés társadalma”, vagy más néven a „felügyeleti társadalom” (surveillance society) az eddig élesen elkülönülő megfigyelői és megfigyelti szerepek plauzibilis átjárhatóságát hozta. A modern technikák által nyújtott digitális adatgyűjtési és képalkotási lehetőségek diverzifikálják egy eseményről képfelvétel készítésére képes személyek – s ezzel lényegében a megfigyelők és megfigyeltek – körét is. Az új informatikai lehetőségek széles körben való elterjedése, az egyre olcsóbb, hatékonyabb és könnyebben használható felvevőeszközök, valamint a felhasználók számára könnyedén elérhető videómegosztó oldalak robbanásszerű bővülése az 1990-es évektől számottevően megemelte a magánszemélyek által készített fotók, hírértékű felvételek mennyiségét és jelentőségét. Ahogy George Floyd vagy Kyle Rittenhouse esete is mutatja, az egyre hangsúlyosabbá váló állampolgári felvételkészítés és tartalommegosztás (citizen journalism) egyre fontosabb szerepet játszik a közvélemény formálásában, az események elemzésében a rendőri intézkedések kapcsán is. Jelen munka rendőri vezetőkkel készített félig strukturált interjúk alapján mutatja be a kérdéskörrel kapcsolatos szakmai és magánjellegű vélekedéseket, a különféle képrögzítési, megfigyelési és tartalommegosztási kérdésekkel, testkamerákkal és fedélzeti kamerákkal kapcsolatos rendőrvezetői attitűdöket.

Soft Surveillence: A Growth of Mandatory Volunteerism in Collecting Personal Information — “Hey Buddy Can You Spare a DNA?”

Article

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Jan 2006

Gary T. Marx

Supplementing the Panoptic Paradigm: Surveillance, Moral Governance, and CCTV

Chapter

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Jun 2006

Kevin Walby

Cop watch: Spectators, social media, and police reform.

Book

Jan 2012

Hans Toch

Cultures of Vision: Images, Media, and the Imaginary

Book

Dec 1995

Ron Burnett

Understanding media: The extensions of man

Book

Jan 1964

Marshall McLuhan

Transparency and accountability in science and politics: The awareness principle

Book

Jul 2008

Kjell Andersson

This book challenges the role of scientists in policy making and the idea of deliberative democracy. The author argues that awareness must increase among both politicians and the citizens who elect them. We must revitalise the decision-making processes in representative democracy. The book proposes new institutional structures.

What is Volunteer Water Monitoring Good for? Fracking and the Plural Logics of Participatory Science

Article

Aug 2014

Rousseau’s theory of human association: Transparent and opaque communities

Book

Jan 2006

Greg Hill

The book explores the characteristic features and political consequences of social interaction when the parties' intentions are transparent, and when they are opaque. The author develops a theory of association and uses it to elucidate, assess and extend Rousseau's views of human nature, civil society, the market economy and the republican state.

Cop Watching in the Downtown Eastside: Exploring the Use of (Counter) Surveillance as a Tool of Resistance

Chapter

Jun 2006

Accountability in a house of mirrors

Chapter

Jan 2014

D.G. Johnson

Surveillance and transparency are both significant and increasingly pervasive activities in neoliberal societies. Surveillance is taken up as a means to achieving security and efficiency; transparency is seen as a mechanism for ensuring compliance or promoting informed consumerism and informed citizenship. Indeed, transparency is often seen as the antidote to the threats and fears of surveillance. This book adopts a novel approach in examining surveillance practices and transparency practices together as parallel systems of accountability. It presents the house of mirrors as a new framework for understanding surveillance and transparency practices instrumented with information technology. The volume centers around five case studies: Campaign Finance Disclosure, Secure Flight, American Red Cross, Google, and Facebook. A series of themed chapters draw on the material and provide cross-case analysis. The volume ends with a chapter on policy implications.

The New Transparency: Police Violence in the Context of Ubiquitous Surveillance

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