Science Magazine published a piece today about the recent book by Keith Guzik, a sociologist at the University of Colorado Denver, “Making Things Stick: Surveillance Technologies and Mexico’s War on Crime”.
Guzik examines Mexico in order to understand how surveillance technologies impact security policy around the world. We could hardly find a more ‘spot on’ theme for general public policy these days.
With Mexico’s War on Crime as the backdrop, Making Things Stick offers an innovative analysis of how surveillance technologies impact governance in the global society. More than just tools to monitor ordinary people, surveillance technologies are imagined by government officials as a way to reform the national state by focusing on the material things—cellular phones, automobiles, human bodies—that can enable crime. In describing the challenges that the Mexican government has encountered in implementing this novel approach to social control, Keith Guzik presents surveillance technologies as a sign of state weakness rather than strength and as an opportunity for civic engagement rather than retreat.
The book is available under an Open Access license following this link: http://www.luminosoa.org/site/books/detail/12/making-things-stick/. Enjoy the read!
And this is the conclusion of the author, according to Science Mag:
“The failed experiment of the Mexican security programs demonstrates that state surveillance technologies yield neither the secure utopia nor the police state dystopia promised by their supporters and opponents“.
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