One of the most pervasive justifications for copyright protection is that it may incentivise creation and dissemination of socially useful works.1 That ubiquitous claim finds its most eloquent expression in the United States of America’s intellectual property clause2 and it has been quite prominent in the areas of copyright duration3 and the defences to infringement.4 The pivot on which the economic case for copyright rotates is the public goods characteristics of intellectual productions. Goods are public if they can be exploited concurrently without diminishing their utility to each user;5 a situation which potentially provokes free-riding behaviour. Simplified to its barest essence, ‘free-riding’ denotes employing resources without contributing towards the cost of their production6 and it may impede creation and dissemination of copyright works. Thus, for example, in the absence of copyright protection, users may avoid the cost of creating or preparing and marketing new works for publication by reproducing existing material. The market failure7 that is often associated with public goods is alleviated by conferring exclusive rights on authors for a defined period.8

About two decades ago the Federal Circuit threw open the doors of the US Patent Office to business method patent applicants. State Street announced that methods that yield a useful, concrete, and tangible result would be eligible for patent protection.1 This decision roughly coincided with the birth of e-commerce and an explosion of business method patents in the USA. About a decade ago the Supreme Court stepped back from State Street by installing screens that blocked applicants from patenting business methods claimed as abstract ideas. Bilski2 characterized claims to a method of hedging against energy price fluctuation risk as abstract, and therefore not eligible for patent protection.3 All nine justices supported this result, but their opinions revealed a significant split on the question of whether any patents on business methods should be permitted. Three justices joined Justice Stevens who called for categorical exclusion of business methods from the patent system.4 Three other justices joined Justice Kennedy who praised business inventions from this new “Information Age” and fretted that overly strong screens to eligibility established during the “Industrial Age” were no longer appropriate.5 While recognizing the method at hand was claimed too abstractly to be patent eligible, these justices seemed confident that the future would bring forth many business method inventions deserving of patents.6 The ninth justice, Justice Scalia, found the middle ground; he did not join the portion of Kennedy’s opinion discussing the Information Age.7 Nor did he join Stevens by embracing a categorical exclusion of business methods.8

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has received global attention since 2017 due to China’s massive crackdown on Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in the region. Since 2017–2018, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s crackdown on Uyghur and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang has become unprecedented in its scope and intensity. Reports on the CCP’s highly repressive strategies in that region led to a formal expression of concern by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination in August 20181 and several legislative hearings in the United States.2 In 2020, the United States imposed sanctions on three officials, including Chen Quanguo, who are in charge of the Xinjiang’s recent development and a major economic and paramilitary organization, the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (known as bingtuan), accusing it of “facilitating widespread abuses against Uighur Muslims.”3

Black resistance movements are among the most surveilled social movements in American history. From slave insurrections to Jim Crow and Black Lives Matter mobilizations, the government and its accomplices have long worked to monitor and control these movements. This chapter explores the history of Black surveillance and control, elaborating on the impact new technologies and shifting demographics have had on Black resistance movements and their strategies to counter this surveillance and control.

As David Hillman and Ulrika Maud note, ‘the body has always been a contested site’.1 This chapter applies Sara Ahmed’s position that the racialisation of bodies occurs through a differentiation between bodies on the grounds of Otherness, and argues that the period between 1780 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 witnessed a distinctive chapter in the racialisation of British women.2 Racialisation is, as Ahmed asserts, a process that takes place in time and space, and which has ‘multiple histories’.3 Surveillance likewise can be understood as a process as much as an act, and is ‘historically present not just in technology or statecraft, but also in society and culture’.4 During this ‘long’ nineteenth century between 1780 and 1914, the long-standing idea that women were biologically distinct from men became, for the first time, legitimised by science and the Victorian state, and women’s physical bodies themselves became platforms for surveillance. In a period which has been recognised by many as a turning point for overt information collection, women became almost literal information objects.5

Asian Americans play a prominent role in the state surveillance story, because Asian Americans play an ambiguous role in both international relations and domestic race relations.4 Although people of Asian descent have been arriving in the Americas since before the Civil War – Asian soldiers fighting on both sides of the internecine conflict – Asian immigrants and their American-born descendants, whatever their formal status and however assimilated, have been portrayed as “sojourners” only temporarily resident in the United States and likely to return to a homeland to which they have remained stealthily loyal.5 The persistent theme has been that Asians are inassimilable into American society, whether by biology, culture, or their own collective choices. The assumption that it is contradictory to be both Asian and American has been used, explicitly and implicitly, to justify discrimination against Asian Americans.

The goals of independent India of achieving the constitutional promise of an egalitarian society have largely been led by an emphatic endorsement of the right to equality on one hand, and the implementation of positive discrimination measures, such as caste-based reservations in public employment and education, on the other. The idea of redistributive justice was a common theme often visited in the Constituent Assembly Debates.1 India shares a long history of social and economic oppression with most other countries in the developing world. While the markers for such oppression are often race and socio-economic status, or both, in most parts of the world, in India, caste and tribal identity remain the most important vectors for discriminatory practices and structural inequities.2

Since 2001, the British state has increased its powers of surveillance for the purposes of countering terrorism. Much of this has been through expansions of the powers of police and security services to engage in covert surveillance and access the personal data of those suspected of involvement in terrorism. Alongside this, however, the last decade has also seen the development of more diffuse practices of monitoring and surveillance as part of efforts to identify and provide support to those deemed ‘vulnerable’ to being drawn into terrorism. Under Prevent, the UK government’s strategy for preventing violent extremism (PVE),1 much of the responsibility was initially placed on the police and on the communities identified as having particularly high levels of vulnerability, which in practice meant Britain’s Muslim communities.2 Subsequently, however, responsibility for PVE has increasingly been shifted onto a broad swathe of professionals engaged in the delivery of public services, including social workers, youth workers, health-care workers, prison staff, school teachers, and college and university lecturers.3

We are living in times of deep turmoil and rapid change. Over the past few decades, inequality has increased within and between countries.1 Simultaneously, new developments in digital technology have spread throughout the world, reconfiguring power relations and the rhythms of everyday life. Transnational technology corporations and powerful nation states have been the primary beneficiaries of the digital revolution, and their domination of digital technology concentrates power and wealth into their hands. The United States dominates the global tech economy, an evolution of American empire.2 Computers, wired together across the Internet, have drastically expanded the capacity to spy on and assess individuals, groups, and populations.

In 1953, a man holding the position of “Indian Councillor” at Sarnia Indian Reserve #45 stood up. Government officials had been sent to his reserve to speak to the “Indians” and explain to them how being given the right to vote in elections, and the ability to purchase alcohol legally under Canadian law, would “help” his band properly develop into good “civilized” Canadian citizens. Having listened, he responded simply: “We were the first settlers on this continent. Then, the whites came and made us Indians.”1 This short statement eloquently summarizes two centuries of surveillance-focused law and social policy targeting First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada. It expresses two key components of Canadian/British Imperialism; first, the creation and enforcement of an imposed and unwanted racial category of “Indian,” and second, the construction and assertion of an expected “education,” and cultural development, tied to this racial identity.

This chapter reveals how the concept of policing and surveillance of urban spaces has extended to K–12 schools. Comparing the initial intent of the use of police officers in schools to the ways in which police are deployed in the present day, empirical evidence shows that the espoused intent of improving the relationships between law enforcement and youth has quickly evolved into increased criminalization and incarceration of young, school-aged children for noncriminal activity, especially in K–12 schools where a majority of the student body is Black or Hispanic and White students are absent or in the minority. While policymakers have used random mass shootings, perpetrated almost exclusively by young, White males who attend suburban schools, as a major reason for increased hiring of police officers to patrol the schoolhouse, the ill-effects of the use of school resource officers (SROs) plague majority Black and Hispanic schools.

South Africa’s long legacy of racism and colonial exploitation continues to echo throughout the post-apartheid era. For centuries, European conquerors marshaled surveillance as a means to control people of color. This began with the requirements for passes to track and control the movements, settlements, and labor of Africans. Over time, surveillance technologies evolved alongside complex shifts in power, culture, and the political economy.

From the first hours of the US colonial conquest in August 1898, the Philippines served as the site of a social experiment in the use of police surveillance as an instrument of state power. During the decade of pacification that followed, the US army plunged into a crucible of counterinsurgency, forming its first field intelligence unit, the Division of Military Information, which combined voracious data gathering with rapid dissemination of tactical intelligence. At this periphery of empire, freed from the constraints of courts, constitution, and civil society, the US imperial regime fused new technologies from America’s first information revolution to fashion what was arguably the world’s first full “surveillance state.”

In March 2017, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) passed a law allowing for the denial of entry or residence to foreign nationals who support Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against the state of Israel or its settlements.1 Proponents of BDS are part of a now global nonviolent movement of civil society (non-state) actors challenging the government of Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. Reflecting that the movement also has supporters within Israel, less than three weeks later it was revealed that Israel’s then Minister of Strategic Affairs, Gilad Erdan, also sought to expand his ministry’s collection of information on activists who support BDS to include Israeli citizens as well as foreigners.2 Governmental development of such a database on citizens was questionable both on grounds of extant Israeli law and the protection of privacy rights. However, this practice stands as a telling example of how the BDS movement has moved to the front line of Israel’s contemporary surveillance efforts.