Sex offender geosurveillance

Microsoft have just proudly announced that an application of their software is being used in geosurveillance of sex offenders in North Carolina.

This public facing site was designed to keep families and communities safe by allowing citizens to know when offenders move into their neighborhoods and where those offenders live. In addition to searching for all offenders within a geographic region, citizens can can track specific offenders and can sign up to receive e-mail alerts when an offender registers to an address in their community.

Scull replies

As anticipated, Andrew Scull has replied to the letters defending Foucault’s History of Madness. He begins by attacking Colin Gordon:

Sir, – As a devout Foucaldian, Colin Gordon has long been in the habit of trying to manoeuvre disputes about the substance of Michel Foucault’s scholarship into the safer harbour of squabbles about particular quotations. Years ago, for example, he attacked Erik Midelfort, the eminent historian of madness and witchcraft in early modern Germany, in this fashion, ignoring the devastating critique Midelfort had offered of Foucault’s claims about the treatment of the mad in the Middle Ages, and instead making a huge fuss about the meaning of the ambiguous sentence “Les fous avaient alors une existence facilement errante”.

This is the famous line stating that the mad had “an easy, wandering existence.”