The Extractive Power of Automated Surveillance

Abstract Experts in Open-Source Intelligence ( osint ) and “Development Security Operations” (Dev-Sec-Ops) increasingly use automated tools to monitor databases, survey “targets” and identify cybersecurity threats. While the information they seek is usually freely available online, finding and extracting it requires special expertise. The extractive power of automated machines accelerates in this way the ubiquity of synoptic surveillance, while raising new ethical considerations that often obscure heuristic definitions between benevolent and malicious monitoring practices. Based on ethnographic research with osint and DevSecOps practitioners in the UK I identify this process analytically as an “authoritarian conundrum.” I argue that reliance on automatic data extraction thus redefines power relations online and discuss its potentially despotic effects.