Benjamin Goold

What is covert policing? How do covert surveillance officers use their time? What are their perceptions of the work, its status, rewards and challenges? How are operations planned, authorised, carried out and reviewed? How do officers understand and negotiate the dilemmas involved in carrying out the peculiar demands of their job? Does the existing authorisation regime strike an appropriate balance between the need for police accountability and the protection of civil liberties on the one hand, and operational efficiency and the demands of security on the other?This book provides answers to these questions and more, and presents the first truly ethnographic account of the inner-world of covert policing. This book sheds new light on a largely hidden and poorly understood form of investigation and offers a major contrubution to research on police culture and police practice.

PIN numbers, credit records, photo IDs and biometric measures play a central role in our daily lives. Instead of being mere by-products of public and private surveillance systems, such tokens of trust are now fundamental to surviving in modern society – so much so that our ‘surveillance profiles’ have begun to inform the way in which we think about notions of community and personal identity. In this fascinating volume, Benjamin Goold considers how surveillance is experienced by individuals within both the criminal justice system and the wider community and argues that the convergence of different spheres of surveillance – law enforcement, state security and commercial – has led to a fundamental shift in the way in which individuals are recognized and legitimized in society. Using examples drawn from the US, UK, Canada, Japan and Australia, this book presents a new account of how surveillance is changing the ways in which people respond to crime, their relationship to the state and each other.

PIN numbers, credit records, photo IDs and biometric measures play a central role in our daily lives. Instead of being mere by-products of public and private surveillance systems, such tokens of trust are now fundamental to surviving in modern society – so much so that our ‘surveillance profiles’ have begun to inform the way in which we think about notions of community and personal identity. In this fascinating volume, Benjamin Goold considers how surveillance is experienced by individuals within both the criminal justice system and the wider community and argues that the convergence of different spheres of surveillance – law enforcement, state security and commercial – has led to a fundamental shift in the way in which individuals are recognized and legitimized in society. Using examples drawn from the US, UK, Canada, Japan and Australia, this book presents a new account of how surveillance is changing the ways in which people respond to crime, their relationship to the state and each other.