Military surveillance

Military surveillance offers a crucial entry point into the study of surveillance. Historically, the importance of military organizations in state formation meant that many techniques of surveillance that would later migrate into the civilian sphere would bear the imprint of military origins. Moreover, military campaigns were instrumental in developing forms of discipline, communication and surveillance that were to have far-reaching implications for whole societies. Thus, both technologically and organizationally, military models and innovations informed new forms of social, commercial and industrial organization that mobilized principles of surveillance, coordination and control. More recently, scholars have argued that since the post Cold War era societies of the Global North have entered a state of perpetual war preparedness. Moreover, the post-war consolidation of a military-industrial complex in the US has stimulated a multitude of technological innovations with surveillance application. In recent times, technological advancement propelled by military surveillance fantasies have envisaged digitized battle and ‘virtuous war’ where casualties are eliminated and hostile forces rapidly subdued through superior command of information and high-tech weaponry. The blending and blurring of such fantasies through entertainment and media networks and into domestic policing domains has raised considerable concern about the dehumanizing consequences of remote killing, and the social implications of the militarization of everyday life.