Living in Surveillance Societies Website

A new website for the Living in Surveillance Societies programme - I'll repeat their blurb here. Good stuff. It's good to see a major initiative like this in the field.

The Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS) COST Action is a European research programme designed to increase and deepen knowledge about living and working in the surveillance age, in order to better understand the consequences and impacts of enhanced surveillance, and subsequently to make recommendations about its future governance and practice. The underlying theme of the programme is that technologically mediated surveillance - the systematic and purposeful attention to the lives of individuals or groups utilising new ICTs - is a ubiquitous feature of modern society, with citizens routinely monitored by a range of sophisticated technologies. Yet, despite these developments relatively little is known about the depth of personal surveillance or how our personal information is used.

The LiSS programme is the first international multidisciplinary academic programme to consider issues relating to everyday life in surveillance societies. At it’s heart is a network of academic surveillance experts generating important knowledge for academia, citizens, government, public agencies and private sector. It is also raising awareness of surveillance in society and is contributing to better informed surveillance policy and practice across Europe. The four year programme, which started in April 2009, is administered by COST (European Cooperation in the field of Scientific and Technical Research) and supported by the EU Framework Programme. The programme is facilitating thematic collaborative research in the field of technologically mediated surveillance through a series of active working groups, workshops, seminars, annual conferences, publications, short-term scientific missions and a doctoral school for young researchers in the field. To date, this collaborative venture has attracted over 100 expert participants from 20 European countries.