Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy, book talk and discussion w/ Kelly Gates, April 22nd 5pm UK time
Dear colleagues, With apologies for cross-posting. The Emergent Nonfiction Lab (part of the Counter Evidentiary Futures project) at the University of Salford welcomes Professor Kelly Gates (Associate Professor, Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego) for this online talk and discussion on her new book Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy. https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/targeted-corporations-and-the-police-surveill... "Video cameras are everywhere: attached to buildings, drones, and dashboards; embedded in smartphones, laptops, and doorbells; worn on police uniforms and sunglasses. In Targeted, Kelly Gates argues that the resulting avalanche of video has transformed the landscape of policing and security in the twenty-first century. Video production, analysis, and archival management are now central to the ways police power is exercised, criminal law enforced, and spaces of human habitation securitized. Gates examines the primacy of video in four key areas of policing and security: the field of digital multimedia forensics, private video surveillance infrastructure development, police body-worn camera systems, and video analytics for automated surveillance (Video AI). Case studies of two companies illustrate the role of corporations in these far-reaching media-technological changes. Target Corporation has integrated its retail security operations with law enforcement, expanding its surveillance beyond its stores and parking lots and into the criminal legal system. Axon Enterprise is leveraging the growing volume of police body-cam video to build a large-scale proprietary platform for policing. Targeted reveals the role of video infrastructure development in the increasingly entangled relationship between the modern police and the modern corporation, in the long wake and ruins of neoliberalism." Kelly Gates is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, as well as the editor of International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Vol. 6: Media Studies Futures and The New Media of Surveillance. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Surveillance & Society, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Social Semiotics. Best, Patrick -- Dr. Patrick Brian Smith Assistant Professor and University Fellow School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology University of Salford
Other scenarios: A French hobbyist, Sammy Azdoufal, turned a *PlayStation controller hack into a nightmare,* accidentally hijacking 7,000 Romo robot vacuums worldwide. Using DJI's *flawed cloud permissions,* he accessed live camera feeds, microphones, and home maps from strangers' devices. DJI patched it swiftly, *paid him $30K as a bounty,* and promised audits, but the breach underscores how AI-driven IoT gadgets *amplify single-point failures* into mass surveillance. In this era, hacks explode via interconnected clouds and AI processing. A minor permission glitch lets one experimenter pivot *from local control to commanding thousands of devices,* turning vacuums into unwitting spies. Accidental or not, *scale is the killer:* AI's real-time data crunching on cameras and mics means *one bug equals global takeover,* echoing Roomba photo leaks and Ring intrusions; *vulnerabilities* that law enforcement must now probe as *potential cybercrimes* under frameworks like India's IT Act. The peril is clear: *smart homes become surveillance states* when AI prioritizes features over fortresses. Weak cloud auth, unpatched firmware, and opaque vendor practices invite chaos—accidental today, *malicious tomorrow* by state actors or criminals. In India, with rising smart device adoption amid data localization laws, this *signals regulatory gaps;* without mandatory audits and zero-trust models, every gadget risks turning citizens into *unwitting data donors.* True *safeguards demand AI-native defenses:* self-healing code via machine learning anomaly detection, blockchain-verified permissions, and *hardware root-of-trust chips* that isolate cams/mics by default. AI tools must *evolve to audit themselves* — flagging risks pre-deploy via simulated attacks—while regulations enforce *"privacy-by-design."* On Tue, 10 Mar 2026, 01:57 Patrick Smith via Air-L, <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
With apologies for cross-posting.
The Emergent Nonfiction Lab (part of the Counter Evidentiary Futures project) at the University of Salford welcomes Professor Kelly Gates (Associate Professor, Communication and Science Studies, UC San Diego) for this online talk and discussion on her new book Targeted: Corporations and the Police Surveillance Economy.
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/targeted-corporations-and-the-police-surveill...
"Video cameras are everywhere: attached to buildings, drones, and dashboards; embedded in smartphones, laptops, and doorbells; worn on police uniforms and sunglasses. In Targeted, Kelly Gates argues that the resulting avalanche of video has transformed the landscape of policing and security in the twenty-first century. Video production, analysis, and archival management are now central to the ways police power is exercised, criminal law enforced, and spaces of human habitation securitized.
Gates examines the primacy of video in four key areas of policing and security: the field of digital multimedia forensics, private video surveillance infrastructure development, police body-worn camera systems, and video analytics for automated surveillance (Video AI). Case studies of two companies illustrate the role of corporations in these far-reaching media-technological changes. Target Corporation has integrated its retail security operations with law enforcement, expanding its surveillance beyond its stores and parking lots and into the criminal legal system. Axon Enterprise is leveraging the growing volume of police body-cam video to build a large-scale proprietary platform for policing.
Targeted reveals the role of video infrastructure development in the increasingly entangled relationship between the modern police and the modern corporation, in the long wake and ruins of neoliberalism."
Kelly Gates is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance, as well as the editor of International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, Vol. 6: Media Studies Futures and The New Media of Surveillance. Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including Surveillance & Society, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, and Social Semiotics.
Best, Patrick -- Dr. Patrick Brian Smith Assistant Professor and University Fellow School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology University of Salford _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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participants (2)
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Patrick Smith -
Rakesh Biswas