ICON S Conference 17 – 19 June 2016 Humboldt University Berlin

Adam Shinar: The Real Case Against Police
Militarization
The closing decades of the 20 th century have seen
a rapid increase in police militarization, the phenomenon
by which civilian police forces adopt military behavior,
norms, tactics, and equipment. Militarization has
been critiqued on instrumental grounds, but the real
case against militarization lies in its treating citizens
as threats, and the police’s capacity to normalize this
status through the projection of symbolic power. Police
militarization undermines and erodes the delicate relationship
between government and its constituents in a
democratic society. The hallmark of that relationship is
one of sovereignty of the people. Police militarization,
precisely because it operates outside the social contract,
makes citizens into subjects, and turns policing
into occupation.
110 ALGORITHMIC GOVERNMENT
The development of algorithmic government (AG),
where big data is enlisted in a new project of government
based on prediction of patterns, presents
numerous challenges. This focus here is on how the
practice of AG may undermine and then transcend
many of fundamental attributes of citizenship presently
appearing as part of the bargain between the government
– governed. While many of these are anchored
in ideas of privacy, and indeed selfhood, they spill over
into wider conceptions of community, citizenship and
the individual and indeed the whole idea of the liberal
state. There are important themes here relating
to cyber security and data management, surveillance,
privacy and new applications of rights. How can formal
government be reconfigured in an age of total information?
Might democracy itself be superseded by big
data? The challenges that the “internet of things” offers
to understandings of privacy are of particular interest
as are papers offering new theoretical insights.
Participants John Morison
Rónán Kennedy
Paul McCusker
Name of Chair John Morison
Room DOR24 1.502
Concurring panels 158
John Morison: Algorithmic Governmentality and
the Challenge to Democracy
There is a new world of total information, gained
from mining the huge data sets provided by enormous
ranges of existing sources and, increasingly,
the internet of things. Drawing upon a governmentality
approach, the paper examines how algorithmic
government (AG) creates a new world of governable
subjects. Far from being classical citizens, they are
instead made up as temporary aggregates of infrapersonal
data. The knowledge that AG thus creates is
not given meaning by political or other frameworks of
reference. Instead it appears ineluctably from the data.
AG is something that is not comprehensible naturally:
there is no self or relationship with the natural world
as presently understood by us. At the same time, AG
offers a false emancipation by appearing to be, by its
very nature, all-inclusive – ultimately “democratic”. This
paper develops the new agenda that this revolution in
data presents to constitutional lawyers, particularly in
the context of democracy.
Rónán Kennedy: E-Regulation, Trade Secrets,
and Defeat Devices: Any Low-Emissions Car You
Want, Provided it is a Black Box
The ‘Digital Age’ may offer new opportunities for
transparency, giving regulators and consumers better
access to the information that is needed for better
policy and purchasing decisions. However, recent controversies
regarding deliberate embedding of software