'Guardian Spirit of the Waters', by Odilon Redon (1878). Wikimedia Commons.
The Guardian and The Telegraph newspapers ran stories this weekend reporting that UK police are planning to use unmanned ‘spy drones’, originally developed for surveillance in military contexts, to monitor antisocial motorists, protesters, agricultural thieves, and fly-tippers. According to the reports, an arms manufacturer is currently developing the so-called Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) – capable of taking high-resolution images from heights of up to 20,000ft – for civilian deployment, and that the drones could be in use by local forces in time for the London Olympics in 2012. For the full reports, see here (Guardian [includes video and comments]) and here (Telegraph).
The first ‘brown bag lunch’ IPS discussion seminar will take place at King’s College London on Thursday 28 January 2010. Co-organised by IdentiNet participant Didier Bigo, discussion will be introduced by a presentation from Andrea Molteni (University of Milan) on the functioning of the concept of the dispositif within the work of Michel Foucault, which will go on to consider its relevance to the analysis of DNA databases, especially within the Italian context (a full abstract is available 
David Barnard-Wills, a delegate at our 2009 public conference (
