Monitoring Laws
Profiling and Identity in the World State

Explores the historical origins and emerging technologies of government profiling and examines law's role in contemporary technological environments.

Jake Goldenfein (Author)

9781108445337, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 March 2022

198 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 1.1 cm, 0.3 kg

'You are being observed, monitored and profiled in more areas of life than you know. In this brilliant book, Jake Goldenfein explains the history and theory of the laws of monitoring, and provides a roadmap to the future. If you want to understand how we got to this point, and what's at stake in a panoptical society, then you need to read this book.' Dan Hunter, Executive Dean, Queensland University of Technology

Our world and the people within it are increasingly interpreted and classified by automated systems. At the same time, automated classifications influence what happens in the physical world. These entanglements change what it means to interact with governance, and shift what elements of our identity are knowable and meaningful. In this cyber-physical world, or 'world state', what is the role for law? Specifically, how should law address the claim that computational systems know us better than we know ourselves? Monitoring Laws traces the history of government profiling from the invention of photography through to emerging applications of computer vision for personality and behavioral analysis. It asks what dimensions of profiling have provoked legal intervention in the past, and what is different about contemporary profiling that requires updating our legal tools. This work should be read by anyone interested in how computation is changing society and governance, and what it is about people that law should protect in a computational world.

1. Monitoring laws
2. The image and institutional identity
3. Images and biometrics: privacy and stigmatization
4. Dossiers, behavioural data, and secret speculation
5. Data subject rights and the importance of access
6. Automation, actuarial identity, and law enforcement informatics
7. Algorithmic accountability and the statistical legal subject
8. From image to computer vision: identity in the world state
9. Person, place, and contest in the world state
10. Law and legal automation in the world state
Index.

Subject Areas: Computer security [UR], Law & society [LAQ], Systems of law [LAF], Jurisprudence & general issues [LA], Political control & freedoms [JPV], Ethical issues: scientific & technological developments [JFMG], Globalization [JFFS], Information theory [GPF]