More Immanent Surveillance…
By: Stephen CollierI ran rather accidentally into two further examples of attempts to create what might be called “immanent surveillance systems” — in other words, systems that are engineered to produce information about themselves as they function, or in which the parts are self-surveilling. Both are Berkeley based. One is a project by a graduate student named R.J. Honicky in the computer science department. His dissertation project, as he describes it, is to build “a societal scale, distributed scientific instrument by integrating evironmental sensors (such as carbon monoxide) into location aware cell phones.” The basic idea is that sensors on cell phones would record environmental data and send it back via SMS (along with a geographic marker) to a centralized database. His thinking lies at an interesting conjuncture of surveillance and data management, on the one hand, and what he calls “participatory urbanism” on the other.
The other morsel was from Kris Pister, a professor of electrical engineering working on dust sensors. Here is a rather old article on the concept of using dust sensors to create energy-aware buildings. Pister also consults with a company called Dust Networks that is a (self-proclaimed, anyway) “leader in the wireless sensor networking market.” The applications include energy efficiency and, as one might imagine, defense and security.