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8 Comm. L. & Pol'y 1 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/comulp8 and id is 1 raw text is: 






COMMUNICATION LAW AND POLICY
Volume 8                 Winter 2003                Number 1
Copyright © 2003 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.




BEYOND PRIVACY: CONFRONTING
LOCATIONAL SURVEILLANCE
IN WIRELESS COMMUNICATION


DAVID J. PHILLIPS*

        Three imperatives-emergency response, law
        enforcement and marketing-inform the legal, economic
        and technical design of location surveillance in wireless
        systems. Each imperative is pursued by a set of actors in
        a particular historical context. Participants in these
        arenas call upon each other's rhetoric, legal standards
        and technical practice, resulting in a system in which
        real-time tracking of users by system operators is the
        status quo. These data also become available to law
        enforcement agents. Social repercussions include a shift
        in the power of individual and institutional actors to
        create types of places and types of persons. The relation
        of the citizen and the state is also being restructured.
        Privacy is an inadequate legal or philosophical response
        to these trends.

  Emerging wireless telecommunication systems incorporate sur-
veillance capacity, particularly the capacity to track and record indi-
viduals' locations. The interests and practices of the government and
of the telecommunication and marketing industries interact to pro-
duce both the economic foundation and the normative standards for
that surveillance. Three historical forces have shaped, and continue
to shape, the surveillance capacity of telecommunication systems.
These forces may be thought of as imperatives or interests which in-
form design criteria, implementation decisions or patterns of usage.


  *Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas
at Austin. Research for this article was funded, in part, by a grant from the
National Science Foundation.

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