Contemporary aspects of surveillance and control carried out by technical security

Abstract

Private security has developed significantly throughout the world in the past few decades. Technical security has also flourished, bringing new technologies of surveillance and control that became the landmarks of our security everyday life. Various systems of video surveillance, alarm systems, and access control systems have overwhelmed private households, commercial objects as well as almost every public building. The security science, sociology, and philosophy scholars have already accepted and widely used the new term of banopticon, coined by the French scholar Didier Bigo. In actual fact, this term is intended to explain that contemporary technical private security has become a symbol of a new powerful surveillance and control mechanism that functions in a way of keeping the people who have not authorization to enter to a certain secured place out of that place. In some wider scientific contexts, the term banopticon has been different from the terms panopticon and synopticon, used tremendously by scientific scholars for some other aspects of surveillance and control. The term banopticon is interesting because it has been widely associated with the growth and development of private security, especially technical private security. Within this paper, we’ll analyze the meaning and importance of this term in the contemporary private security debates as well as in the contemporary Macedonian private security context. The paper will also point to some human and ethical dilemmas of usage of the technical private security in securing certain persons, objects and places.

Keywords

• private security
• technical security
• surveillance
• control
• banopticon