The Dilemmas of Surveillance Profiling: The Case of the United States

Abstract

1 Introduction to the Thesis and the Importance of the Topic The sorting and the categorization of individuals and groups by their capacity and inclination to risky behavior or level of dangerousness has been and remains an essential function of security apparatus of the state and a vital component in state security. Practices of this kind became even more important in the age of international terror. The western world and specifically the United States has been the primary target of international terror suffering numerous terrorist attacks including the 9/11 attacks that became thedefining moment of how security functions in themodern world. While what we call "western world" is dominantly defined by liberal democratic political order, many of its societies and specifically the US is also defined by atechnology-enabled environment that scholarship characterizes as "surveillance society" (Gandy 1989, Lyon 2001, Lyon & Bauman 2012). Withintechnology-enabled environments the technologization of security was inevitable (Ceyhan 2008), and the 9/11 generated even more intense and enhanced efforts ofspeeding this process up (Lyon 2004, Ball and Webster 2003). In the post 9/11 US war on terror, specifically surveillance technologies became central to security policies (Ceyhan 2006) as universal security enablers...