Towards a Virtuous Surveillance Society - Essay Example

The present government will, for example, be interested in the impact on social exclusion and on the modernizing government agenda. They may also question the potential offered for addressing the 'wicked issues' that transcend departmental boundaries. They will almost certainly be interested in costs and the potential for savings. They will be aware of the issues surrounding openness and security. They should have regard for the impact of the electronic services on democratic structures. In spite of potential benefits of information availability and easy access, it allows the state and military agencies to control society and introduce effective surveillance methods to monitor social processes and maintain social order Surveillance is achieved through different channels including business information and personal information.

Companies are increasingly finding that, if they combine their information assets with those of other companies, the combined information resource is considerably more useful to all sides: two and two, in this instance, can make a lot more than four. Put together a social security or tax database with another database of people who owe debts and you have a means of tracking individual debtors over long periods of time and collecting the debt from them when they finally have the money to repay it (a process known as debt surveillance and already being offered by some companies) (Lister 2003).

This is the virtual equivalent of the synergies that merging companies have traditionally sought, and its compelling economics mean that companies in the future are more probably going to be looking for ways to combine their information with others than looking to maintain the conventional barriers between industries (Green 1999). It is inconceivable that the government would launch electronic services in anything other than a partnership with the private sector. It is, therefore, necessary to take the perspective of the IT supply industry into account.

This is an industry looking at a big prospective market. They will be making comparisons with other market sectors and, given the multinational nature of the players in the industry, with developments in other countries (Lievrouw and Livingstone 2005). For the industry, the issues will be associated with the speed of market growth, their likely market share, the level of initial pump-priming investment they will be expected to make, and with their ability to deliver the agenda set by government.

For electronic government, as for most other services, it is possible to identify three main groups of player: the users or recipients of the service, the providers, and the wider society or community within which the service is offered. Each of these, however, may have important sub-groups that need to be taken into account. Before attempting to measure the impact of electronic government, it would, therefore, be necessary to identify the different players, to establish what they will use as benchmarks and points of comparison and to explore what, for them, are the important issues that need to be considered in any assessment of impact (Lister 2003).

Surveillance is achieved through control of circulation of information and news available in the internet and in mass media. Sales of national, regional and local newspapers have been falling in the many countries for a number of years. They were falling before the Internet and the World