Surveillance is only about security insofar as it's about the security of the system. It's about the security of property, it's about the security of continued accumulation of capital. It's not about our safety in the sense most people think about it - Are you free from want? Are your basic needs met? Surveillance is not geared towards that. Surveillance is geared towards managing people, socially sorting them to fulfill the different roles that the system demands of them.

Sociologist Brendan McQaude explores the rise of interagency intelligence gathering fusion centers in the US - as the post-9/11 surveillance apparatus adapted to decarceral trends by boosting surveillance across society, it created an institutional monitoring network as a tool of social control for the protection of state power and capital.

Brendan is author of Pacifying the Homeland: Intelligence Fusion and Mass Supervision from University of California Press.