Can a reasonable balance between privacy and security be practiced? Infopolitics & Securitization in Policing

• In Event: Hyper-Surveilance and Confinement: Then and Now

Abstract

Whilst there is no question that the present securitization in policing is animated by market politics, traditional political economic contexts limit the ways in which we frame liberty and security. Alternatively we are witnessing unprecedented contestation not per se framed in terms of market regulation and market freedom nor in terms of individualism and socialism (the dimensions of political economy from the 1930s) but rather in the arena of infopolitics, the dimensions of which are the extent to which a population is identifiable, and the extent to which governance becomes secretive. Whilst equilibrium between the privacy and identifiability of civil-society and between the secrecy and transparency of government was carved-out in the decades following World War II, the present mentality of securitization interweaves with an ineluctable will toward the ever greater identifiability of populations and governmental secrecy. This new infopolitics bolsters market-based governance but in doing so limits fundamental rights and liberties.

Author

• John Deukmedjian, University of Windsor