Computer Vision in Security Politics

Security is reordered as it is reimagined by evolving forms of technological ‘seeing’. Are there in-built ways of seeing in new visual security technologies? If so, how do they see security relations? Can we use such seeing to investigate or critique security politics?
Questions about CV and security are themes in three different of my research projects –  Postdoc, Fellowship, UNDO.
 
Security politics takes place across scales, from the high politics of inter-state enmity, through the determination of what issues a state or community regards as security, to the myriads miniscule political decisions that make up security implementation – who gets to pass, who gets detained or asked a question by security personnel, what is the police looking at and for, which utterances are regarded as protected democratic debate and which are regarded with suspicion. Across these scales, computer vision technologies play different roles. Especially at the everyday level, computational vision and recognition technologies become important.
 
Three aspects of how computational infrastructures make sense of security struck me as especially interesting meeting points between security and computer vision: