Combating crime is a complex task with cultural, political, and legal dimensions. In technologically advanced societies, surveillance technology can be used to aid law enforcement. A few examples of such tools are drones, cameras, and wiretaps to mention a few. As such tools become more commonplace, the need to address associated issues increase which relate to cultural, political, and legal dimensions and different stakeholders. Hence, the purpose of this thesis is to discern the impact of informatics research on surveillance technology and map out similarities and discrepancies between views of social media users, researchers, and professionals within law enforcement. The thesis impose a heuristic perspective and stem from both positivist and interpretivist tradition. The Panopticon metaphor and Panopticism are used as a theoretical lens, mainly to discuss and contextualize the findings. Data was from Twitter and Scopus by using scripts and by conducting an interview with law enforcement staff in Sweden. A total of 88 989 tweets and 4 874 research papers were retrieved. These were analyzed using topic modeling which assigned a dominant topic to each tweet and research paper. The interview was thematized using both the literature review and the topic modeling findings for guiding framework. The findings showed that there were seven topics found within the Scopus dataset and four topics within the Twitter dataset. It was found that privacy was one of the least mentioned aspects in all three datasets and that law enforcement personnel see it as closely related with efficiency. Military applications and usage were found in both research papers and tweets and law enforcement staff use a variety of ICT in their daily work. Based on the findings, it seems as though surveillance technology today can suitably be characterized as being bi-directional, both in the form of sousveillance and surveillance which relates to the Deleuzian perspectives on Panopticon. It was concluded that concrete implementations of surveillance technology attracted the most attention compared to more abstract themes such as ethics and privacy. But in all both datasets, specific ICT was addressed from a critical perspective. Similarly, law enforcement personnel viewed privacy and integrity from the organization’s perspective and highlighted rules and regulation. For future work, sentiment analysis is suggested to supplement topic modeling as well as imposing a longitudinal approach or adding additional social media sources.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-117864 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Karlsson, Kalle |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för informatik (IK) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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