Surveillance Capitalism and Platform Policing: The Surveillant Assemblage-as-a-Service
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Abstract
Based on empirical research on training webinars, interviews, and promotional material from Vigilant Solutions, this paper investigates the surveillance regime enabled by platform policing: the implementation of cloud-based platforms, designed and run by private corporations, that provide mass surveillance-driven simulations for a range of police operations, including predictive policing, targeted surveillance, and tactical and strategic governance. Building on Amoore’s (2016) work on “cloud geographies,” this paper argues that the platform model embodied by Vigilant Solutions involves multivalent processes of de- and reterritorialization in which new technological and datalogical spaces are formed and these erode older societal boundaries of private, public, and state. Specifically, Vigilant Solutions leverages its multi-sided platform business model through the deterritorializing, cloud-based concatenations of surveillant technologies. It then argues that the resultant reterritorialized cloud space, which is accessible through its Vigilant Investigative Centre (VIC) platform, fuses mass surveillance data from diverse private, public, and state sources in a simulated geography. Further, the VIC furnishes to law enforcement an array of data analytics that exploits this cloud geography to enable a boundary-crossing surveillance regime of association analysis and proximal suspicion.
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