House Rules: An Examination of Spatial Surveillance and Social Control in Las Vegas (Short Title)

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As a result of this chronology, it is evident that the upper tiers of casino hotel resorts on the Strip have fashioned an elaborate system of coordinated visual control and data collection. The fact that both the casino hotel resort security departments and the various biometric software developers utilize local and federal databases of both criminal and non-criminal records exemplifies this. Bill Couple this with the reality that casino hotel resorts share pertinent information with other resorts under the same ownership, not to mention their ever expanding corporate ownership, and the true extent of the Strip’s spatial surveillance comes to light.93 Thus, the casino hotel resorts’ breadth of panoptic social control has transcended traditional boundaries of private- versus public-sector jurisdiction. In pursuit of social and financial safety, security/surveillance alliances have been fashioned between various institutions in both the private- and public-sector, as well.94

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Cooper offered further testimony that Las Vegas resorts share information with other resorts under the same ownership, “The information is shared with New York-New York and all of the other MGM Mirage casinos.” 94 Cooper has acknowledged that MGM Mirage’s Corporate Security collaborates with such organizations as the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, among others. Tom Catalanotti would not state if the Stratosphere employed FRS, but claimed that, among other databases, the technology could utilize DMV and criminal records from specific states.

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