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8 Comm. L. & Pol'y 1 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/comulp8 and id is 1 raw text is: COMMUNICATION LAW AND POLICY Volume 8 Winter 2003 Number 1 Copyright © 2003 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. BEYOND PRIVACY: CONFRONTING LOCATIONAL SURVEILLANCE IN WIRELESS COMMUNICATION DAVID J. PHILLIPS* Three imperatives-emergency response, law enforcement and marketing-inform the legal, economic and technical design of location surveillance in wireless systems. Each imperative is pursued by a set of actors in a particular historical context. Participants in these arenas call upon each other's rhetoric, legal standards and technical practice, resulting in a system in which real-time tracking of users by system operators is the status quo. These data also become available to law enforcement agents. Social repercussions include a shift in the power of individual and institutional actors to create types of places and types of persons. The relation of the citizen and the state is also being restructured. Privacy is an inadequate legal or philosophical response to these trends. Emerging wireless telecommunication systems incorporate sur- veillance capacity, particularly the capacity to track and record indi- viduals' locations. The interests and practices of the government and of the telecommunication and marketing industries interact to pro- duce both the economic foundation and the normative standards for that surveillance. Three historical forces have shaped, and continue to shape, the surveillance capacity of telecommunication systems. These forces may be thought of as imperatives or interests which in- form design criteria, implementation decisions or patterns of usage. *Assistant Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. Research for this article was funded, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation.