Prerequisites
What You Need Before You Begin
This textbook has no formal prerequisites. It is designed to be accessible to students from any discipline who are encountering surveillance studies for the first time, and it builds its technical and theoretical vocabulary from the ground up.
That said, students who arrive with certain background knowledge will find some chapters easier to engage with immediately. The following is an honest account of what will help.
Helpful Background (Not Required)
Introductory social science concepts: Several chapters draw on sociological and political science frameworks -- power, institutions, social stratification, the relationship between the state and civil society. Students who have taken an introductory sociology or political science course will recognize these ideas. Students who have not will find them explained when they first appear, but may want to spend more time with the foundational chapters in Part I.
Basic familiarity with digital technology: This book discusses cookies, IP addresses, encryption, biometric systems, machine learning, and network architecture. No programming or engineering background is required -- every technical concept is explained in context -- but students who have never considered how the internet works at a structural level should plan to read Chapters 11 and 12 slowly and make use of the glossary in the appendices.
High school-level modern history: Parts II and VI reference the Cold War, post-9/11 security policy, the Snowden disclosures, and the rise of China's digital governance infrastructure. Students who have encountered these topics in a general education context will have sufficient background. Appendix C (Primary Sources Guide) provides entry points for students who need to build that context.
Comfort with interdisciplinary thinking: This book draws on sociology, political science, computer science, law, economics, philosophy, media studies, and science and technology studies. No expertise in any single field is required, but students who are accustomed to working within a single disciplinary framework should be prepared to cross boundaries. The reward is a more complete picture. The cost is occasional disorientation, which is a sign of learning.
What You Will Develop Here
By the end of Part I (Chapters 1-5), you will have:
- A precise working definition of surveillance and its relationship to power
- An understanding of the Panopticon as both historical artifact and analytical metaphor
- A framework for analyzing how surveillance systems produce knowledge and shape behavior
- Familiarity with the key theoretical voices in surveillance studies -- Bentham, Foucault, Lyon, Zuboff, Browne, and others
- The vocabulary to distinguish between surveillance, monitoring, dataveillance, and sousveillance
By the end of the book, you will be able to:
- Identify the technical components of any surveillance system and explain how they interact
- Analyze the power relationships embedded in surveillance architectures
- Evaluate the legal and ethical frameworks governing surveillance in multiple jurisdictions
- Assess the differential impact of surveillance on different populations
- Design alternatives that incorporate privacy-by-design principles
- Engage critically with primary sources, empirical studies, and policy documents in the field
What You Do Not Need
You do not need to be a technologist. This is not a computer science textbook. Technical systems are explained in terms of what they do, how they work at a conceptual level, and what social consequences they produce. Students who can program will find optional Python exercises in Appendix G, but these are supplementary.
You do not need legal training. Chapters on privacy law, data protection regulation, and constitutional frameworks explain the relevant legal concepts in accessible terms. Students with legal backgrounds will find additional depth in Appendix E (Legal Frameworks Reference).
You do not need to have a position on surveillance before you start. Many students arrive in this subject with strong intuitions -- surveillance is bad, privacy is good, security requires trade-offs. This book will complicate all of those intuitions. That is the point. The goal is not to tell you what to think about surveillance but to give you the tools to think about it rigorously.
A Note on Emotional Preparation
Some of the material in this book is unsettling. Case studies include the surveillance of civil rights activists by the FBI, the use of biometric systems to control refugee populations, the deployment of stalkerware in domestic abuse, and the algorithmic profiling of children in schools. These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are documented practices, and they are presented because understanding surveillance requires confronting what surveillance systems actually do to real people.
If you find that certain material provokes a strong emotional response, that response is worth examining rather than suppressing. Chapter 5 provides a framework for understanding why the experience of being watched -- or learning the extent to which you are watched -- produces anxiety, anger, or resignation. Those reactions are not obstacles to learning. They are data.