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Signs of the Surveillant Assemblage: Privacy Regulation, Urban CCTV, and

Governmentality
Randy Lippert
Social & Legal Studies 2009 18: 505
DOI: 10.1177/0964663909345096
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SIGNS OF THE SURVEILLANT

ASSEMBLAGE: PRIVACY
REGULATION, URBAN CCTV,
AND GOVERNMENTALITY
RANDY LIPPERT
University of Windsor, Canada

ABSTRACT
Signage in urban open-street CCTV arrangements is explored in relation to the strategies and forms of law brought to bear upon it. In the context of privacy regulation,
CCTV signages content reflects deterrence strategies and political subjectification
consistent with liberal governmentality. CCTV signage is evinced to be both an agent
and target of privacy and other forms of law and is therefore shaped and brought into
being by complex webs of legal governance. Rather than befitting panoptic arrangements or merely amplifying CCTVs deterrent effects, CCTV signage signals and serves
as a vital element of the surveillant assemblage. Possessing varied functions, including
features attributed to surveillance cameras, CCTV signage is a material means by which
the surveillance assemblage interfaces with the legal complex and by which urban timespaces are constituted. This analysis moves beyond previous accounts of regulatory
signage and has broad implications for governmentality and surveillance studies.

KEY WORDS
assemblage; CCTV; governmentality; liberalism; panopticon; privacy regulation;
regulatory signage; surveillance

INTRODUCTION

CTV1 SURVEILLANCE

in the public spaces of cities is fast proliferating.

Where communication of CCTVs immediate presence and status is
sought, such arrangements often rely on a vital but neglected technology the CCTV sign. In contrast to new surveillance technologies, such as
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES The Author(s), 2009
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biometric, genetic, and olfactory devices, with their astonishing capacities

and troubling penchants for social sorting and exacerbating inequalities, the
lowly pre-modern sign is easily deemed unworthy of study. When positioned
near or between cameras and those being surveilled, signage in open-street
contexts is usually assumed when considered at all to signal a CCTV
cameras presence in order to amplify its deterrent effects. Yet, closer study of
open-street CCTV configurations begins to reveal this mundane mechanism
relating in complex ways with law and serving as a key element not primarily
of deterrence strategies or panoptic arrangements (see Koskela, 2003), but
instead of the surveillant assemblage (see Haggerty and Ericson, 2000).
This article explores CCTV signage in urban open-street configurations
as a mundane governmental technology (Dean, 1994). By adopting governmentality conceptual tools (see Dean, 1999; Rose, 1999) and drawing on empirical research conducted in four Canadian cities, I seek to shed light on
CCTV surveillance, regulatory signage, and their relations with forms of law.
I argue that CCTV signs content and placement reveal plural rather than
singular governing strategies, a fact that troubles simple assertions about a
deterrent function in relation to conduct in surveilled spaces. Beyond deterrence, CCTV signage is tightly tethered to processes of privacy regulation
and political subjectification informed by liberal governmentality and seeks
to establish certainty about the start and end point of otherwise unruly
CCTV surveillance capacities. Thus, such arrangements often imagine both
a rational choosing subject of deterrence and a liberal citizen concerned with
maintaining privacy in public space. These two strategies are discovered in
varied proportion and on occasion in competition within open-street CCTV
sites. If surveillance is increasingly about combining practices and devices
(Haggerty and Ericson, 2000), the sign is a means of its integration, a joint
that promises to lock elements in place on an ever-changing urban landscape.
CCTV signs are a material tool of assembly, a way of binding disparate plans
of action together, and therefore an element of the emergent surveillance
assemblage. This loosely associated surveillance entity (Lyon, 2007: 95)
entails convergence of previously distinct surveillance arrangements (see
Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). The foregoing analysis foments, consonant
with its signalling of the surveillant assemblage, a decentring of both panoptic
arrangements and the CCTV camera therein as the archetypes of contemporary surveillance. Correspondingly, the findings encourage exploration of
the myriad ways the surveillant assemblage and the legal complex (Rose
and Valverde, 1998) constitute and mutate with one another. While CCTV
signage is a technology, it is also a target of forms of law and is thus shaped
and brought into being by complex webs of legal governance. This analysis
also sheds light on regulatory signage more generally in showing this technology possesses both mental and material aspects and is not forever tethered
to specific governmental rationalities.

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PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON REGULATORY SIGNAGE

From its birth in the late 1980s and through rapid expansion in the 1990s and
2000s, Foucauldian governmentality studies have encouraged detailed empirical inquiry into devices that shape and make the exercise of governmental
powers possible (see Dean, 1994), including those of the legal complex
(Rose and Valverde, 1998). Attention is to be paid to mundane devices with
few apparent secrets as much as to grandiose mechanisms deployed with
considerable fanfare. Both governmental rationalities and technologies are
deemed crucial in rendering governmental practice possible. Yet, rationalities
have received decidedly more empirical study. By attending to one technology, this article is a step towards overcoming this imbalance.
Socio-legal studies more broadly have also tended to neglect regulatory
signage, of which CCTV signs are an exemplar. A keen exception is Hermer
and Hunts (1996) groundbreaking analysis of official graffiti of the everyday. This form of regulation is cogently elucidated, revealing how signs
texts and icons are located in discursive frameworks of governance. The
result is to reveal regulatory signage as a form of governance at a distance
consistent with advanced (or neo-) liberal arrangements (see Rose, 1999)
and hegemonic in effect. Signs and related techniques are implanted in lieu
of more direct intervention by authorities and experts located in the State
(Rose, 1999).
Within the more specialized subfield of surveillance studies (see Lyon,
2007), which overlap with governmentality studies (Lippert, 2008), CCTV
signage is typically noted only as an inadequate means of announcing CCTVs
presence (Gras, 2004) or of rendering the observers observable to the potentially surveilled (Goold, 2002). An exception here is Coles (2004) empirical
study of CCTV signage in private and public spaces in the United Kingdom.
Cole argues CCTV signage increases anxiety about crime and disorder in
society and emphasises the existence of surveillance and thereby amplifies
its effect. Indeed, signage that is out of compliance with the [UK privacy]
code might be said to have greater influence in this respect (p. 432; emphasis
added). Cole implies that non-compliance with privacy law provides more
freedom to threaten punishment and thus deter. Questioning the automatic
functioning of power in panoptic arrangements, which CCTV is deemed to
exemplify, Cole asserts that signage is better understood as a means of exercising simple corporeal power (p. 431).
These two rare works (Hermer and Hunt, 1996; Cole, 2004) lend insight
into regulatory signage as a technology located in broader strategies of
advanced liberal (Rose, 1999) rule and corporeal (or sovereign) power
respectively. Yet, omitted from these insightful accounts of signage is the
seemingly banal but nonetheless crucial assertion that the instantiation of a
single regulatory sign may be implicated in a plurality of strategies, including
those cohering with privacy and other forms of law. It may be that signage
is embedded in a decidedly more complex web of legal as well as non-legal
strategies that require investigation. This article complements but ultimately

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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(4)

moves beyond these works by placing more attention on CCTV signage in

relation to plural purposes, subjectifications, and mutations.
RESEARCH PROCEDURES
Research procedures included locating open-street CCTV sites in four
Canadian cities in the province of Ontario (London, Toronto, Windsor and
Hamilton); collecting and analyzing CCTV program reports, pamphlets, and
web-based documents; examining city sign by-laws; and exploring print
media coverage of open-street CCTV programs from their inception in the
2000s to 2007. This was supplemented with visits to the identified CCTV sites
over a two-year period beginning in January, 2006, during which signs and
visible CCTV cameras were photographed and field notes taken. Besides
their textual and iconic content, signs physical dimensions, location, height,
and proximity to cameras were noted. To better reveal aspects and practices
of governance unavailable through textual analyses (see Williams and Lippert,
2006), 15 open-focused interviews were conducted with open-street CCTV
program operators or designers, municipal government, police and business
improvement association representatives across the four cities, as well as with
a representative of a provincial privacy commission that produces openstreet CCTV guidelines and responds to complaints.2
OPEN-STREET CCTV, PRIVACY REGULATION, AND SIGNAGE
The following section discusses open-street CCTVs emergence and the
centrality of CCTV signage within privacy regulation. Building on this, subsequent sections elaborate signages textual and iconic content in constituting
liberal subjects alongside and in place of deterrence, links with other forms
of law, and mutations. The article concludes by considering CCTV signages
implications for understanding governance and surveillance.
In the past 15 years, open-street CCTV has slowly appeared in Canadian
urban areas. The majority of the approximately 16 CCTV programs, each
seeking to watch one or more city blocks, have emerged with the growth of
night-time, retail alcohol industries in entertainment districts (Lippert,
2007a, 2007b). In Windsor, Ontario, for example, CCTV cameras were introduced with a renewed strategy to extend greater control over an expanding
downtown kiddie bar district and, in particular, to monitor criminal and
anti-social conduct of young adults following early morning closings. Urban
retail strips in Toronto, and other larger Canadian urban centres, have also
experienced introduction of open-street CCTV. To justify inculcation of
open-street CCTV in the four cities studied, police, citizen, and business
representatives in various configurations have cited a widely publicized, but
singular violent criminal incident and a corresponding need to prevent similar
acts. In Toronto, for example, the shooting of 15-year-old Jane Creba in the

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downtown Yonge Street shopping district on Boxing Day during daylight

hours in 2006 became a rallying cry for implementation of CCTV in the area
(Jones, 2008). With this, the low cost of open-street CCTV is also widely
touted to justify its introduction, typically in contrast to the high cost of
additional police patrols.
In Canada, legal regulation of open-street CCTV surveillance occurs primarily via privacy law. Specifically this involves oversight provided by offices
of the federal and provincial privacy commissioners rather than, for example,
regulation via constitutional (i.e. the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms) or criminal law provisions (see Bennett and Bayley, 2005). Privacy
legislation and the office of the privacy commissioner in Ontario are typical
in this regard. Open-street surveillance cameras fall under the Ontario
privacy commissioners mandate in so far as these devices collect personal
information from persons approaching and entering cameras field of view in
public spaces. According to Ontarios municipal privacy legislation, personal
information refers to recorded information about an identifiable individual,
including information relating to an individuals race, age, sex; identifying
fingerprints, numbers or symbols; and educational, criminal, and employment
history (see Ontario Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of
Privacy Act). Thus, some open-street CCTV arrangements are excluded
from privacy regulation, for example, those entailing cameras placed high atop
freeway standards to monitor traffic flow, but which under normal operations
are incapable of collecting the detailed information above.
Ontarios privacy commissioner published Guidelines for Using Video Surveillance Cameras in Public Places in 2001 (IPC, 2001). As with provisions
in Europe (Gras, 2004), a key guideline is to post visible signs at the perimeter of open-street CCTV cameras field of view to announce to anyone
approaching why their personal information will be collected upon entry.
This requirement is significant since it demands CCTV signage be a means
of notifying the citizenry not merely of a surveillance cameras presence
nearby, but also why it is in place, how more information about its purposes
can be gained, and how a complaint can be initiated if necessary. In the
language of privacy regulation, signs are a central component of a notification strategy and a key element of fair information practices (Lyon, 2007:
7).3 In Ontario, in particular, signs became a key locus of intervention
following a complaint in Peterborough (IPC, 2004) and are a major theme in
discussions with public bodies contemplating introduction of open-street
CCTV (Interview 2). Compared to signage, other recommended notification
means (e.g. pamphlets, public consultations, etc.) are either non-existent or so
vague in relation to site-specific CCTV as to be insignificant. Signage is the
only relatively permanent form of site-specific notification of open-street
CCTV surveillance in Canadian cities. Thus, it is appropriate to examine
actual open-street CCTV signage in four Ontario cities where CCTV is
deployed. The textual and iconic contents of open-street CCTV signage in
the downtown cores of Toronto, London, Windsor, and Hamilton are shown
in Box 1.

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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(4)

BOX 1
CCTV signage in Toronto, London, Windsor and Hamilton

Toronto:
Notice: CCTV Cameras are being used in this area.
Surveillance Camera Icon
Personal information is collected by CCTV cameras to promote public
safety and reduce crime. Any questions about this collection can be
directed to the Staff Superindendent, Divisional Policing Command,
40 College Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5G 2J3, 4168082288. TAVIS
(Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy).
London:
You have entered an area that may be monitored by Closed
Circuit Video Cameras.
This program is a community initiative to reduce crime within the
Downtown Area of the City of London. Legal Authority for collection of information is Section 29(1) (g) of the Ontario Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act. If you have any
questions or concerns about this program, please contact the Manager
of Corporate Security, 663 Bathurst Street, London or call 6612459.
[Surveillance Camera Icon]
Windsor:
You have entered an area monitored by closed circuit television
cameras.
This program is a community initiative to reduce crime. Legal authority for collection of information is Section 130 of the Municipal Act. To
report criminal activity call 911. For freedom of information requests
call 311.
Hamilton:
Video Surveillance Area/Endroit Sous Surveillance Video
Surveillance Camera Icon
This area of the City of Hamilton is being monitored by video surveillance for the purpose of Law Enforcement in accordance with the
Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act.
Legal Authority: Section 42: Police Services Act of Ontario, 1997. For
Further Information call: Hamilton Police Services at 9055405606.

The following section analyses this textual (and iconic) content and how
it functions to create liberal subjects alongside and in place of subjects of
deterrence, as well as how signage links with legal and non-legal strategies.

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BEYOND THE PANOPTICON: CCTV SIGNAGE AS POLITICAL

SUBJECTIFICATION
A current debate centres on the adequacy of the well-trodden Foucauldian
panopticon versus a less navigated surveillant assemblage (e.g. Hier, 2004;
Lyon, 2007). CCTV is often portrayed as the contemporary archetype of panoptic surveillance. Yet, in its open-street form manifesting in public urban
spaces, such depictions are inapt. Recall in Michel Foucaults (1977) famous
account of Jeremy Benthams inspection house that the central tower of the
panopticon is visible from the vantage point of occupants of the surrounding
inward-looking and back-illuminated cells. To the cells occupants, whether
the keeper is occupying the central tower at any moment is uncertain, thus
resulting in the panopticons much discussed automatic functioning of
centralized power. Yet, far from any automatic effects from presumed visual
acuity, in open-street CCTV arrangements there is instead reliance on the
CCTV sign.
Panoptic arrangements are asymmetrical; the observer in the central tower
has a distinct advantage. While some information about observers is included
on signage, only a category (staff superindendent) not an individual observers identity at the moment is displayed. CCTV operators and analysts of
images regularly acquire knowledge of subjects gender, age, class, and
ethnicity (gleaned from their dress, gait, height, demeanour, etc.), as well as
patterns of presence at particular locations at specific times of day. These
forms of knowledge are unavailable to casual observers of CCTV signs. The
general restriction of knowledge about (including visibility of) actual observers is evident in CCTV arrangements and CCTV signs fail to convey alternative means of gaining this knowledge. While this arrangement may be akin
to a panopticon, similarities end there.
CCTVs increasing popularity partially lies in its widely perceived benefits,
the most touted of which is deterrence of undesirable conduct. Given this, one
is struck by a total absence of threats of punishment on the CCTV signage
shown in Box 1. These signs display legal authority, but not to threaten
punishment in relation to specific forms of conduct. The legal authority
deployed, which varies across the jurisdiction is as noted earlier: The Ontario
Municipal Act (Windsor), the Ontario Municipal Freedom of Information
and Protection of Privacy Act (London and Hamilton), and the Ontario
Police Services Act (Hamilton). In Toronto no specific legal authority is noted
on signage. Liberal governmentality insists on the symbolic power of law to
demonstrate authority from a distance but in so doing also imagines the
possible scrutiny of the specified legal authorities actions. As a material link
and communication format, CCTV signs are seen to be a means of grafting
a form of political subjectification not onto a panopticon but instead onto a
surveillant assemblage (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000). CCTV signs promise
to serve as a way of shaping subjects conduct in the direction of responsible
citizenship when encountering surveillance that might obliterate privacy.
Liberalism is not merely associated with privacy; privacy is assumed to be

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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 18(4)

the very site of liberal self-fashioning, whether in private or public spaces.

Surveillance is therefore a concern to the extent that CCTV signage presumes
a liberal subject with a capacity to choose to enter a surveilled zone. The
notion of privacy in public spaces is contested to be sure, but signs seek to
suggest that individual privacy is nonetheless possible. The signs studied here
demand liberal subjects work to preserve their privacy when moving through
the downtowns public corridors by actively seeking more detailed knowledge about CCTV programs. For example, in Toronto, any questions about
this collection, can be directed to a specific knowing authority, the answers
to which can then presumably be carefully considered and freely acted upon.
Yet, CCTV signage makes further assumptions about its subjects. The
CCTV signs in the four cities systematically exclude the illiterate, those unable to read English (and, in one instance, French) (e.g. recent immigrants,
foreign tourists, the young), and the uneducated with limited legal knowledge (for example, of a Municipal Act), categories not unrelated to class and
race/ethnicity. Signs demand subjects with visual and literary capabilities.
Those lacking these traits and capacities are expected to automatically relinquish personal information to authorities surveilling public spaces. Rudimentary icons on signage in three of the four cities studied potentially
communicate the presence of cameras (though icons can exclude the visually
impaired) and in this narrow regard overcome the limitations of unilingual
text. However, icons fail to convey details and purposes of CCTV surveillance
practices discussed earlier. An image of the liberal subject much narrower
(cf. Dean, 2007) than all persons wandering through downtown spaces and
coming upon CCTV signage on the street emerges.
While more information about observers might be obtained by those able
to read the signs via a telephone call to the number provided on the CCTV
sign, these calls are not routed to observers, nor revealing of observers
personal information. In Windsor, the CCTV signs display and deploy 311,
a non-emergency, easily recalled number increasingly used by city governments in North America to provide information about municipal services. A
major aim is to divert non-emergency calls from the more well-known and
established 911. As mobile memory devices, 911 and 311 are carried with
the CCTV signs observer and are actionable long after observance. The latter
links the observer to a 311 call centre, a sophisticated communication format
located elsewhere in the city involving 25 personnel. CCTV operations subjected to privacy legislation presuppose a channel to this decidedly more
complex setting, a workplace itself well known for intensive surveillance
(Lyon, 2007). Thus, the legal use of open street CCTV, in this instance, and
the corresponding anticipated demand for insight into its workings, depend
upon surveillance of labour in private space. This reveals the sign as the
material link between two surveillance sites, a nexus reconfirmed whenever
a CCTV signs observer dials 311.
The 311 and other telephone numbers, that potential liberal subjects
reading CCTV signs are to call to make inquiries, tend to be inoperable at
night. In Windsor the 311 is inoperable after 5pm on weekdays and after

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4pm on Saturdays, precisely when, as the downtown is transformed from a

series of offices and retail shopping spaces into an entertainment district,
many young adults would encounter signs. Thus, here signage is less about
threatening the less agreeable and moralized consumers of an emergent retail
alcohol-based economy (see Lippert, 2007b) with punishment should they
transgress while bar hopping at night, and more about encouraging the
liberal subject as an able-bodied adult pedestrian to ask questions to quell
anxiety about losing their privacy during daytime hours. There is a definite
temporal aspect to CCTV signage.
Windsors CCTV signage contrasts its statement about 311 by concluding,
To report criminal activity call 911, thus providing a separate communication avenue for the flow of knowledge, circumventing the need to arrange
access to CCTV images through the private security firm contracted to
monitor the images (see below). It encourages the flow of information about
crime in an urban space by mobilizing the public to report directly to police.
Inclusion of 911 seeks to counteract apathy created by CCTV arrangements
to report crime, the notion that those entering CCTV zones might assume
CCTV monitors will respond and there is no need to report. 911 is a
reminder of the fictional status of a risk-free zone (as is the use of recorded
rather than monitored on signage, as discussed later) and reinforces the
signs message at the outset for any nave observers that the CCTV system
can only reduce crime in the designated area, not eradicate it. The point here,
however, is that CCTV intersects with these other surveillance sites and
actors through the CCTV sign; no other device represents a link between the
two. There is a sense in which the sign anchors this connection, locking it in
place. Thus, the CCTV sign binds disparate surveillance purposes together
but only hints at a truth of the assemblage. For all its sophisticated information technology, an open-street CCTV arrangement subjected to privacy
regulation, enlists significant levels of human labour. One implication of the
city officials, private security monitors, police dispatchers and investigators
on the other end of the flow is that CCTV arrangements are potentially far
more costly than acknowledged in narrow evaluations or by security firms
that market CCTV services to City officials and police services. More significant is that the CCTV signs subjectification reaches beyond passers-by on
the street to agents in other institutional sites.
CCTV signs are found to contain concern or question, suggesting if
CCTV generates vague anxiety with no pre-determined direction, it can be
alleviated by inquiry. These terms displace complaint connoting a morally
charged and targeted grievance defined in law and thus one expected to be
seriously considered by appropriate authorities. Related to this, and noteworthy by its absence from open-street CCTV signs, is a signal to passersby of the possibility and means of filing privacy complaints about CCTV
arrangements. In the advanced (or neo-) liberal regulatory era, legal intervention is to occur only as a last resort (see Hawkins, 2003) following
non-compliance. Intervention by privacy authorities is to be reactive, but
using question and omitting how to file a complaint, CCTV signs seek to

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demoralize the information flow (e.g. via 311) which might spark a reaction.
So limited is active pursuit of identifying non-compliance and communication of the means of forwarding this knowledge, that few privacy complaints
about open-street CCTV are received. The lack of communication about
complaint procedures on CCTV signage in specific areas where it would be
most pertinent helps explain why from 20012007 the Ontario privacy
commission received only one complaint about open-street CCTV and not
a single legal order concerning open-street CCTV signage was issued (Interview 1). An ancillary benefit to privacy authorities, the textual content of
signage enhances their capacity to claim effectiveness in regulating openstreet CCTV (Interview 1).
Consonant with a notion of creating urban time spaces, or chronotopes
(see Valverde, 2006), open-street CCTV signs in the four cities referred to
an area, implying a known limit of CCTVs gaze and precise beginning and
end points of personal information collection. Signs seek to focus CCTV
cameras blurry ill-defined power to discern. The sign seeks to demarcate
urban space for a long moment, or at least until mutations occur, and promises
certainty about where a CCTV zone begins and ends. Constituting a liberal
subject capable of choice in relation to privacy law requires creating this
border. Political subjectification is wholly dependent on establishing an areas
perimeter between where personal information is collected and where it is
not. The very possibility of choice, the question of whether privacy loss
outweighs enhanced security as one approaches a zone, requires an area be
defined with certainty, else there is no choice to make. However, establishing
this border is dependent upon elements quite independent of the CCTV
cameras capacity to identify distant persons. CCTV signs seek to signify
certainty where and when there is little. Since CCTV images are far less categorical than signs placement, texts, and icons imply, the actual perimeter is
both unknown and in flux. What constitutes private information depends on
a wide range of unruly factors. Paramount are the knowledge and experiences of the specific CCTV operator at the moment when images are actively
monitored and of the police investigator sifting through CCTV images at
another site removed in time and space in the case of recorded images (factors
that remain hidden, as noted above, to the potentially surveilled). Varying
features of the surveillant subjects conduct, apparel, and demeanour are also
crucial in this regard (Interview 2).
Of course political subjectification and deterrence often fail in practice.
Some pedestrians with the necessary capacities undoubtedly walk past openstreet CCTV signage without noticing or taking seriously its content. A
private security firms CCTV operator noted during an interview, There is
signage all around the area indicating that this is under 24-hour observation
by [name of company] but whether they see these signs and pay any heed to
them? I doubt it. Yet, political subjectification, deterrence, and compliance
are best seen as site and time specific. This is not to say CCTV signs and
other regulatory signage across sites and times cannot contribute to hegemonic conditions. As Hermer and Hunt (1996: 478) argue, regulatory signage
offers an

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endless possibility for avoidance, displacement, and evasion [that] can serve to
provide conditions that make a dense network of governing liveable so as to
produce a normalization not experienced as unacceptably oppressive. A generalized compliance may be dependent on a relatively relaxed regime.

Hermer and Hunt suggest that a lack of compliance with some signage ultimately enhances the control of (urban) populations. Yet, this broader view
may well obscure CCTV signages role as a key tool for constructing siteand time-specific chronotopes; lost may be the ways CCTV signage striates
the urban in ways that complement exclusion along lines more nuanced than
normalization suggests. These chronotopes include crime hot spots identified using police statistics and sub-realms targeted by entrepreneurial planners
and business organizations for economic revitalization along temporally
specific lines (e.g. a daytime retail shopping strip), time-spaces that can but
do not necessarily overlap, each entailing unique blends of surveillance and
exclusion.

MONITORING, RECORDING, AND LEGAL LIABILITY

Some CCTV signs indicate cameras are monitoring; others indicate recording, and still others in use. While in use is completely ambiguous, monitored implies an inevitability that agents at the end of the visual information
flow will act, if images reveal criminal or anti-social behaviour, by more or
less immediately alerting police. Recorded renders the chronotope knowable over a period for which the images are stored, effectively stretching the
effects of surveillance over a longer period. It implies authorities may not be
(currently) active at the end of the image flow and there is a significant lag
time between the surveilled subjects conduct and consequences (recall that
swiftness of punishment is deemed an element of deterrence). More significantly, recording means less liability, since it avoids suggesting systematic
real-time monitoring of images for criminal victimization and a capacity to
respond. Thus, there is no inference of creating a risk-free area. In this way,
those responsible for CCTV arrangements cannot be held legally responsible for failure to warn potential victims, a possibility well known to the
Toronto Police Service due to the case of Jane Doe, a sexual assault victim
who successfully sued police for failing to notify her of a serial rapist active
in her neighbourhood antecedent to her victimization. An element of a new
trend towards recording images rather than recording and monitoring in
public spaces is for police services to distance themselves from explicit
involvement in open-street CCTV due to its Big Brother image and the
financial burden of providing financing for rapidly changing technology while
at the same time retaining easy access to CCTV images to pursue criminal
prosecutions. Despite this apparent distance, however, police are typically
intimately involved in the development of open-street CCTV systems, including London and Toronto (Interviews 2, 3). The challenge for police here
(as elsewhere) is to enforce criminal law while avoiding liability stemming

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from civil law. Thus, here again signage is laws target rather than only its
agent, further revealing how signage is shaped by complex and contradictory webs of legal governance. In Torontos recent open-street pilot CCTV
program, deterrence is to occur less at the time and place of image capture
and more at a distant time and place. The shift to recording images evinced
in this and other CCTV systems opposes actively monitoring images in
real-time coupled with immediate intervention. This is significant because for
all the attention to risk management in recent years, the CCTV sign plainly
evinces reliance on brute force reactions via criminal law, rather than through
pre-crime (see Zedner, 2007) mechanisms. To the extent there are deterrent
effects, responsibility rests with the criminal justice system. Thus, there is an
effort to move from risk management to a reactive apprehending and punishing of perpetrators, shifting back rather than moving forward; emphasizing
legal punishment over prevention.4
GOVERNING FUNCTION CREEP THROUGH LIBERAL CITIZENS
CCTV signs govern potential surveillant subjects but also CCTV systems
themselves. A chief concern stemming from CCTVs proliferation is function
creep (see Haggerty and Ericson, 2006: 19), the process whereby a technology is used in an alternative or expanded way beyond its originally stated
purpose. CCTV signs can govern function creep to the extent signs display
a CCTV systems purposes. In so doing, signs limit cameras from being used
for other purposes if subjects gain awareness of new functions and their
absence from the text of CCTV signs. The extent to which political subjectification is activated is the extent to which the CCTV sign can limit function
creep through an active liberal citizenrys vigilance. By specifying its purposes
for the eyes of at least some of the public, signs are one mechanism by which
creep could potentially be reduced. One example of function creep in relation to open-street CCTV is public safety, in particular dispatching ambulances if a CCTV monitor notices a person injured on a street (Interview 6).
While this rationale is increasingly used by CCTV advocates and operators,
CCTV signs in only one city (Toronto) include public safety (though ironically Torontos CCTV sites have no real-time monitoring, which the specific
practice above requires).
Open-street CCTV purposes stated in policy in Windsor and London,
include reducing anti-social behaviour and realizing economic revitalization
(City of London, 2004; City of Windsor, 2006). Yet, the focus on vaguely
defined anti-social behaviour is absent from signs. In London the notion that
CCTV can potentially effect downtown economic revitalization was a subject
of some contention when CCTV was originally contemplated (Interview 3).
Not surprisingly effecting revitalization is also absent from CCTV signs.
Municipal officials, police and business supporters apparently doubt the
average pedestrian would agree with the enhanced surveillance-leads-toeconomic revitalization thesis should it be made starkly visible on signage.

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CCTV signage displays legal auspices but not providers of CCTV surveillance. Open street CCTV in two of four cities (London and Windsor) is
managed and at times monitored by contract private security firms that fall
under provincial licensing regimes. No sign in those cities reveals that
CCTV monitoring or recording is conducted by private personnel. Therefore, hidden are firms profit-seeking and related insecurity (e.g. regarding
access to stored CCTV images) that stem from reliance on an especially
exploitable, low-paid, high-turnover, security workforce (see Lippert and
OConnor, 2003). CCTV signs similarly omit mentioning the interests at
work in providing funding for signs, cameras, and information technologies
or, for example, that a private security firm used loss leader marketing techniques that entailed free installation and monitoring of a CCTV system for
one downtown pilot project (Interview 6), which was followed by the firms
receipt of a profitable contract for the permanent, expanded program.
Signage fails to render transparent these broader political economic purposes
of CCTV arrangements.
Through notification of the citizenry, signage is seen to govern CCTV
systems and function creep narrowly, usually subjecting only one stated
purpose found in policy to scrutiny, while systematically sheltering others
from careful consideration by the imagined citizenry. As stated purposes
flow from Council meetings and policy statements to the street they acquire
a marked pragmatism or disappear altogether. Thus, for example, despite
City of Windsor officials promises in 2004 to establish a Surveillance Audit
Committee to respond to citizens inquiries about the systems purposes and
to oversee audits, it has yet to be established. As a result, it made little practical sense to continue to mention the Committee on signage. While initially
noted, reference to it was later blacked out (see below), thereby reducing the
possibility its real absence would be noticed in subsequent years.
MUTATING SIGNAGE
Yet, CCTV signs are themselves subject to function creep, to the extent they
are brought within other governing strategies and their textual and iconic
content is conceived or modified accordingly, again calling into doubt the
notion that CCTV signs serve a singular (deterrent) purpose once erected.
Thus, some CCTV signage acquires other purposes such as serving as an
exquisitely flat and visible canvas for illicit postering or graffiti and tagging
(see Ferrell, 1996). The latter entails the marking of urban territories with
the CCTV sign becoming a communication format of, among others, those
seeking to govern from below (Lippert and Stenson, 2007). In the cities
studied, several CCTV signs had acquired such markings after installation.
The CCTV sign is evinced as a point of assembly in this respect as well.
After arrival of CCTV arrangements, similar systems have been recently
added in Toronto and Windsor. CCTV signage expanded in Windsor to an
abandoned series of semi-urban city blocks slated for redevelopment for a

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new international border-crossing far from downtown, where household

refuse and commercial waste were being illegally dumped and which the City
was responsible for cleaning up at a high cost. The City erected a series of
CCTV signs, unlike those in the entertainment district, that read as follows:
No Dumping [inside a circle with a slash through it]. Illegal Dumpers Subject
to $5000 Fine. Public Dumping Available at the Drop-Off Depot Located at
Central & E.C. Row Open Monday Thru Saturday. Area Monitored by Video
Surveillance. Call 311.

Compared to signs in the downtown entertainment district discussed earlier,

deterrence is decidedly dominant here. A clear choice between a defined
punishment and an alternative (public dumping) is constructed, while the
liberal subject is hailed only through inclusion of Call 311. After more than
a year the cameras that would accompany these signs have yet to be erected.
CCTV signage is not static; it shifts according to changing relations of
governance in specific sites. And it is remarkable how signage has mutated
over only a few years. In Windsor the text of CCTV signage has undergone
three mutations since 2003. CCTV signs initially erected by the private
security company conducting CCTV monitoring with the companys logo
affixed were aimed at deterrence (Interview 5). These were replaced with
municipal CCTV signage indicating questions about the program will be
answered by calling 311, and then with signs that initially indicated that If
you have any questions or concerns about the program, please contact the
Chair of the Surveillance Audit Committee by dialling 311. This phrase was
then blacked out (as noted earlier), whereby the signs text now indicates
(only) that freedom of information requests can be made by calling 311.
One CCTV sign on the citys main street heading south disappeared during
a street revitalization project and remains absent two years later. No mention
of these changes is evident in City of Windsor policy documents or via 311.
Signage also evinces competition between strategies. Several years after
Londons downtown CCTV program commenced and City-erected CCTV
signs were placed several metres above downtown streets, some 50 smaller
CCTV signs at eye level were installed throughout the downtown (Interview
7). These indicate that Video Surveillance is in Effect and display an eye icon
at their centre. These signs have no policy referent and as such are subject to
City sign by-laws that include sight-line and content requirements and which
must be approved accordingly, thus pointing to another way signs are targets
of legal governance. These new signs are not necessarily further amplifying
CCTVs effects beyond existing CCTV signage. Rather, their lower height
(approximately 2m) competes for observers attention and potentially detracts
from existing signs that seek political subjectification. The latter, far fewer in
number and with smaller text, are positioned high above the street. In this
way, privacy law and deterrence compete for CCTV signage space and attention. Coles (2004) comment noted earlier that implies signs non-compliant
with privacy law have greater freedom to threaten punishment is on the
mark, but competition occurs across signage as well.

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CONCLUSION
The foregoing analysis of CCTV signage has implications for understanding
governance and surveillance. The notions that CCTV signage aims primarily
to amplify CCTVs deterrent effects and that signage necessarily increases
anxiety about crime are dubious. Considerable variability in content is seen
across CCTV signage and it often evinces political subjectification without
threats of punishment. Most broadly, this means plural governmental strategies may be active in regulatory signage. A form of liberalism can be evinced
in CCTV signage in the context of privacy law. The foregoing nonetheless
suggests there is little reason to reduce the textual and iconic content and
functions of regulatory signage to this specific governmental rationality.
Regulatory signage may well be about governing at a distance (Hermer and
Hunt, 1996), but it is a technology that can be deployed to render practicable other rationalities or forms of power in specific sites. These forms include
(sovereign) deterrent strategies evident in this context, but also myriad other
rationalities, including pastoralism (e.g. Lippert, 2006). There is no one-toone relationship between a particular kind of sign and a specific rationality of
governance, a notion that troubles analyses that invoke a single rationality to
make intelligible complex arrangements of governance.
A related implication is that signs raise doubts about the assumed mentalmaterial distinction between rationalities and technologies in governmentality
studies (see also Dean, 1994). Thus, regulatory signage is evinced demanding
and aiding mental comprehension and entailing a materiality that anchors
textual and iconic messages of disparate plans of action in time-space. When
they are taken together, these elements reveal the peculiar ways regulatory
signage becomes implicated in establishment of chronotopes. Nonetheless,
in striating the urban in these ways inevitably a given sign can also attract
alternative strategies evinced as textual or iconic mutations or as inscriptions
on competing signage. Thus, a given regulatory sign may be partially reclaimed with graffiti from below, modified from programmatic imaginings
to reflect practicalities of the street, entered into visual competition with
other signage, or simply removed and forgotten.
Regulatory signage is seen to serve as a relatively fixed assembly point
where not only plans of action but also forms of law intersect. In the context
of CCTV this includes privacy law, criminal law, civil law, city by-laws, the
provincial Municipal Act, and the provincial Police Services Act. Here the
sign is seen to enable some forms of law and be the target of others. The sign
temporarily stakes legal claims and permits legal intervention on behalf of
distant authorities into the flow and patterns of life on city streets, but is also
governed by forms of law, however narrowly. The complexity and contingencies of these relations are evident in the single technology studied here,
which is to say, CCTV signs are a means by which the surveillant assemblage
articulates with the legal complex (Rose and Valverde, 1998). The interdependence of technologies of surveillance and legal regulation, especially in
relation to governance, has only begun to be explored.

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In urban open-street CCTV arrangements, not only is the presence of a

human observer frequently in doubt, as in the panopticon, but the very existence of CCTV cameras can remain unnoticed by the potentially observed.
Moreover, CCTV monitors of both the human and video kind are
commonly hidden from view so even if a surveilled subject notices a cameras
location, unless it is seen panning, tilting, or zooming through its tinted orb
affixed high atop a light standard or building typical of open-street CCTV
the cameras operative status will remain uncertain.5 In the cities studied
some CCTV signs were unaccompanied by adjacent operating cameras,
though deterrence was still deemed possible by authorities. Thus, rather than
a functioning/non-functioning dichotomy of open-street CCTV arrangements, when CCTV signage is factored in, a more complex set of arrangements
becomes evident. Some signs accompany working cameras, other signs accompany down cameras, others come with working cameras, but not real-time
human monitoring, others appear with occasional human monitoring of
cameras, and still others are present with no adjacent cameras at all.
Signage is a key to determining whether the panopticon or assemblage
should have primacy. To this end it should be noted that the extent to which
a sign makes clear that one is in a surveillance zone is directly related to a
subjects capacity to choose to be surveilled. The generalizability of the panoptic model to non-prison contexts hangs on the possibility of choosing to
escape. As Lyon (2007: 59) notes: the degree to which surveillance subjects
can walk out of the surveillance site does make a difference. But where does
surveillance begin or end, spatially and temporally? In the sites observed
signs attempt to provide certainty about area perimeters and when they are
monitored, but their success is dubious. If the location of the spatial and
temporal borders of open-street CCTV surveillance are uncertain, the
meanings of imprisonment and escape are equally so. No visible or permanently imaginable prison walls are present, to incarcerate or to scale. A
second factor affecting whether the panoptic model befits CCTV arrangements that Haggerty (2006) identifies is whether surveillance entails a soultraining element. There is less soul-training where deterrence is emphasized
and where political subjectification is present, the liberal citizen seeks less to
train the soul in disciplinary fashion and more to work to preserve the
privacy deemed necessary for soul-fashioning in the first instance. Decentring
the panopticon and acknowledging the complexities of open-street CCTV
arrangements cohere with the surveillant assemblage. Signage remains no less
an element of the surveillant assemblage than CCTV cameras themselves.
Thus, signs of the surveillant assemblage has a double meaning.
To embrace the assemblage over the panopticon and acknowledge the
presence of liberal rationalities alongside deterrent strategies is not to suggest
that inequality stemming from social sorting is absent here. That CCTV
signage often imagines more than one target and in proportions that vary
across signs and CCTV sites begins to reveal its role in social sorting, one
that is potentially independent of the effect of CCTV cameras themselves. In
each contingency, responding to arbitrary surveillance to preserve privacy in

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public spaces begins to be constricted or even halted along with imaginings

of liberal subjects. This leaves passers-by to relinquish private information
and become vulnerable to authorities who can act upon it at a later date in
line with the next new purpose of CCTV, or be directly threatened with
punishment if they ignore a signs command, as would those persons on the
street who are systematically deemed to be subjects undeserving of notification at the outset.
NOTES
Research for this article was aided by Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada grant # 410200562. I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments and Blair Wilkinson for superb research assistance.
1.

2.
3.

4.
5.

CCTV refers to a closed-circuit television system, though most contemporary

open-street camera systems are no longer closed in that images can be transmitted and received via wireless technologies and linked to the Internet. Openstreet refers to the use of CCTV in open, public places such as streets and
parks.
Interviews and print media analysis were conducted in conjunction with a
broader project on urban governance and security in Canadian cities.
Fair information practices are understood to entail several core entitlements
that try to limit data processing and/or make this process accountable and
transparent. Here privacy is typically viewed as the primary interest to be
protected and individual consent is the means to protect it.
To be sure, this is not always a tidy distinction (e.g. Lippert, 2002).
This is especially the case since pan, zoom, and tilt (PZT) cameras movements
are hidden within tinted, shielded orbs and camera technology is becoming
smaller and less visible.

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