Full Description
Surveillance and the Dossier delves into how dossiers, both paper-based and digital, have been used by governments both historically and in contemporary times to inflict various forms of violence upon the public, including psychological, physical, and reputational.
This volume establishes dossier creation as the foundational practice of all bureaucracies, despite differences in how it has been weaponized as a technique of power by different systems. In nine case studies, ranging from police dossiers in Nazi Germany to China's Hukou family dossier system, this book examines the evolution of surveillance in societies. Surveillance and society researchers Cristina Plamadeala and Özgün Erdener Topak engage in a diverse yet comprehensive study of this surveillance tool, looking at examples such as dossiers implicating former members of Zimbabwe's Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), dossiers used in Cold War-era Australia to monitor migrants from the Soviet Union, dossiers of colonial Japan's Unit 731, deployed in Manchukuo, in Northeast China, and dossiers mobilized for Canada's World War II conscription program. Deeply relevant and imperative, Surveillance and the Dossier seeks to understand the links between the infliction of state-violence and surveillance.
This book demonstrates that dossiers serve as a valuable platform for understanding the past and present of surveillance societies across governments and countries.
Contents
'Surveillance and the Dossier': Key Issues
Cristina Plamadeala and Ozgun Erdener Topak
Chapter 1: Change and Constancy: Individual and Group-Based Dossiers and their Evolution in German Police Intelligence
Christoph Felix Butz
Chapter 2: China's Household Register: From a "Family Dossier" to a "Surveillance Platform"
Marcella Siqueira Cassiano
Chapter 3: "Let's Pull out Their Files and See": The file and the reconfiguration of Zimbabwe's post-coup surveillance architecture
Allen Munoriyarwa
Chapter 4: The Dossier on Both Sides of the Iron Curtain: Reputation, Denunciation, and the Surveillance of Soviet Migrants in Australia
Ebony Nilsson
Chapter 5: Classify to Kill: Unit 731 and the Japanese Dossier of Settler Colonial Surveillance in Northeast China
Midori Ogasawara
Chapter 6: Surveillance, Intelligence, and Policing in South America: Risks and dangers of automated profile building through OSINTs
Alcides Eduardo dos Reis Peron
Chapter 7: Securitate Files, Dossiers and Fear: Dossierveillance in Communist Romania under Nicolae Ceauşescu (1965-89)
Cristina Plamadeala
Chapter 8: Our Files Are Never Closed: The Use of Private Sector Surveillance Dossiers in the Enforcement of Government Policy in WWII Canada 1943-1945
Scott Thompson
Chapter 9: Cataloging 'Enemies': Soviet Proscription Lists, Card Catalogs, and Kompromat
Olga Velikanova
Afterword on the Dossier: (Some Notes on the Back)
Alexander Monea and Joshua Reeves
