'Surveillance deputies: When ordinary people surveil for the state' by Sarah Brayne, Sarah Lageson and Karen Levy in (2023) 57(4) Law & Society Review 462-488 comments
The state has long relied on ordinary civilians to do surveillance work, but recent advances in networked technologies are expanding mechanisms for surveillance and social control. In this article, we analyze the phenomenon in which private individuals conduct surveillance on behalf of the state, often using private sector technologies to do so. We develop the concept of surveillance deputies to describe when ordinary people, rather than state actors, use their labor and economic resources to engage in such activity. Although surveillance deputies themselves are not new, their participation in everyday surveillance deputy work has rapidly increased under unique economic and technological conditions of our digital age. Drawing upon contemporary empirical examples, we hypothesize four conditions that contribute to surveillance deputization and strengthen its effects: (1) when interests between the state and civilians converge; (2) when law institutionalizes surveillance deputization or fails to clarify its boundaries; (3) when technological offerings expand personal surveillance capabilities; and (4) when unequal groups use surveillance to gain power or leverage resistance. In developing these hypotheses, we bridge research in law and society, sociology, surveillance studies, and science and technology studies and suggest avenues for future empirical investigation.
In 2020, Amazon announced that over 10 million users had joined its “Neighbors” app (Huseman, 2021). The app is integrated into the company's home surveillance devices, including the popular “Ring” doorbell camera—a video-enabled device that enables users to view, speak with, and record their front door area as well as the people who visit it. When a person purchases and installs a Ring doorbell, they are automatically enrolled in the Neighbors app, which enables users to post videos of “suspicious” activities and crimes (including the theft of Amazon packages from their doorsteps; Molla, 2020) and to view similar content posted by other users within five miles of their location. Although these “surveillance as a service” devices are marketed to, purchased, and installed by civilians, the state regularly seeks access to their data (West, 2019). The content collected by Ring cameras is shared directly with more than 2000 police departments across the United States through a combination of subpoenas, warrants, court orders and memorandums of understanding between municipalities or homeowners' associations and local law enforcement agencies (Lyons, 2021). Most often, that content is shared with the state by users who volunteer it to police (Gilliard, 2021; Haskins, 2021). Ring and Neighbors thus represents a convergence of interests among consumers, the state, and one of the largest and most powerful technology companies. Homeowners can protect their property; police have access to previously difficult-to-reach surveillance content; Amazon profits.
Ring exemplifies the phenomenon of what we term surveillance deputization: when ordinary people use their labor and economic resources to engage in surveillance activities on behalf of the state. Our analysis of the historical development and contemporary forms of surveillance deputization demonstrate that the phenomenon shows no signs of abating, as states continue to implore people to watch and report on one another. Despite its prevalence, sociolegal scholarship has rarely examined surveillance deputization as a coherent phenomenon, and it remains an underspecified mechanism of state power. The case of surveillance deputization illustrates broader forces at play, including neoliberal privatization of state functions, the cultivation of risk and fear, and the interplay between law, technology, and privacy. It also sheds new light on core themes and debates in law and society literature, including legal consciousness, legal mobilization, and legal ambiguity—concepts which consider how ordinary people make sense of ambiguous and rapidly changing legal and quasi-legal contexts. Therefore, we articulate a theoretical framework of surveillance deputization rooted in a law and society approach, describing how it functions, what motivates participation, its implications, and how it intersects with state and corporate interests. We offer four hypotheses about its dynamics and implications: (1) the interest convergence hypothesis; (2) the legal institutionalization hypothesis; (3) the technological mediation hypothesis; and (4) the social stratification hypothesis.
Our hypotheses draw upon several key themes in the law and society literature. First, surveillance deputization represents a case in which ordinary people must contend with both an ambiguous legal environment and a new suite of technological capabilities. Future law and society scholarship might continue to examine this interplay between lay people's understanding of law and legal rights as they implement new tools that in turn support functions typically relegated to the state. Our hypotheses also invoke concepts of legal mobilization, when both private companies and private individuals actively leverage surveillance to obtain quasi-legal outcomes or aid in legal processes, exposing unclear meanings of the law in the digital, platformed age. Finally, our analysis directly engages law and society scholarship with studies of technology. As we show, the networked, data-intensive technologies that have become the infrastructure of everyday life—like smartphones, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, software, and digital platforms—are both intensifying and transforming these practices (Ferguson, 2017; Murakami Wood & Monahan, 2019). Our analysis shows how these new devices and capabilities benefit the interests of both the user and the state; they allow more expansive and invasive surveillance capabilities as technology evolves; they allow governments to evade privacy-protective legal constraints; and, while they have the potential to further marginalize vulnerable groups, they can potentially be used to turn the lens back on the state itself.
Although this article focuses on surveillance deputization, we hope the framework and empirical hypotheses detailed below spurs sociolegal work on questions of how the law deals with technological change, how ordinary people make sense of and contribute to the workings of the legal system, and continuities and changes in the practice of policing and in legal institutions. We begin with a brief social history of surveillance deputization, then explain our analytic and theoretical approach, including the literatures we draw from and the empirical examples we provide. We then move to a discussion of our four hypotheses, laying the groundwork for testable propositions in future empirical work. We close by encouraging scholars to continue to examine whether and how the acceleration of surveillance deputization augments the scope of state surveillance, intensifies the effects of surveillance on marginalized populations, and opens opportunities for collective resistance.
