I work on a number of ongoing projects for Trilateral. These currently include:
ASSERT - Assessing Security Research: tools and methodologies to measure societal impact
PRISMS - Privacy and Security Mirrors
PHAEDRA - Improving Practical and Helpful cooperation bEtween Data pRotection Authorities
EU Privacy Seals Project (for the EC Joint Research Centre)
Study on Cloud Certification (for DG CONNECT)
I've also done some bits of work on:
ETTIS - European Security Trends and Threats in Society
IRISS - Increasing Resilience in Surveillance Societies
Some other areas of personal research interest are detailed below
Cyberwar, cyber conflict, cyber security
I'm currently working on some research into cyber security.I've been mainly thinking about cyber security in terms of governmentality theory, and also the way that certain policy areas become understood as security issues. I first started looking into this field with the POSTnote on computer crime, and also during the security studies work at Birmingham. There's some early material on this in terms of information warfare in a book chapter with Ces Moore, which has been more developed in a recent paper on Anonymous and the various hacking events in the wake of the wikileaks document releases.My belief is that this is an important area for both surveillance studies and international relations to be aware of.
Spitfires and Surveillance
This is at an early stage, but in some spare time I'm looking at histories of allied aerial photographic reconaissance during world war one and two from a surveillance perspective. I'm trying to figure out what surveillance studies can learn from traditional military history accounts, and what surveillance studies can bring to the study of particular historical forms of surveillance. This is an interesting period, because many of the techniques and technologies developed during the wars prefigure the unmanned aerial vehicle and satellite enabled surveillance of today. I presented on this topic at the Living in Surveillance Societies conference in Barcelona in may 2012, and the response was interested enough to make me want to continue.
Rhetorics of Security - Towards a theory of language, security and surveillance
This is an attempt to draw together different strands of research in security discourse from my work on information security, cyber seccurity, international relations and counter-terrorism security into a wider perspective on the way that security politics involves and uses language. Currently the research identifies a range of tropes that re-occur across security discourses in different fields. I presented on this in Canada last summmer.
The Hauntology of Surveillance.
This is in the really early stages, and is another part of the expanding work on the discourse of surveillance, but this time coming more from the (potential) subjects of surveillance. I'm attempting to analyse the way that surveillance discourse is suffused with 'spooky' supernatural metaphors, and tie this to the ambiguous visibility of surveillance systems, as well as our halting attempts to make sense of the relatively invisible world of information. The recent blog post about surveillance and 'creep' is linked to this. I'm not sure how much this will end up owing to Derrida. It owes a bit more to Ghost Box.
