Headshot photo of Bryce Newell

I am an information studies, surveillance studies, and law-and-technology scholar. Through my research, I try to understand the legal, ethical, and social implications of surveillance and information technologies in society, including issues of privacy and data protection, technology regulation, information behavior, law enforcement and criminal procedure, irregular immigration, and border enforcement. I have also dabbled as a documentary filmmaker.

My most recent book, Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras (University of California Press, 2021), was the winner of the Surveillance Studies Network’s 2022 Book Award for best academic monograph on surveillance published in 2021.

Formally, I am an Associate Professor in the School of Journalism and Communication (SOJC) at the University of Oregon. I am also Director of the SOJC’s undergraduate Honors Program and am affiliated with the UO Center for Cyber Security and Privacy (CCSP) and the New Media and Culture Certificate (NMCC) program for graduate students. Beyond UO, I am a board member and Co-Director of the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN), the key academic organization for surveillance studies scholars around the world, and Dialogue Editor for the SSN’s academic journal, Surveillance & Society. I earned my PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington and my JD (law degree) from the University of California, Davis School of Law. At UO, I teach courses on media law, internet law and regulation, data ethics and justice, information policy, and cybercrime. My institutional page is available here.

I was home-schooled throughout my entire K-12 education, working intermittently after school hours in a machine shop, at a grocery store, and for a small concrete-raising company to pay for concert tickets, CDs, and lift tickets. In college, I studied graphic design, photography, journalism, and video and film production. During that time, I worked on several film projects, including interning (for pay) as an electrician on the film Dark Matter, winner of the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, where I helped light scenes for the likes of Meryl Streep and Aidan Quinn. I worked for several years as a video editor, producer, and cinematographer at a small video production studio in Salt Lake City, producing television commercials, music videos, corporate training videos, and one season of a cable television show. At that point, I decided to switch gears and become a lawyer and applied to law school. During my time at UC Davis School of Law, I worked as a law clerk/legal intern for Geldards (a law firm in Cardiff, Wales, UK), the Civil Division of the US Attorney’s Office in Sacramento, California, and for Horan Lloyd (a law firm on California’s lovely central coast) where also I returned for several short stints after passing the bar exam. Although I enjoyed law school and legal research, I quickly realized I didn’t want to be a practicing lawyer. Motivated by my growing interest in research, I applied to PhD programs and completed my PhD in Information Science at the University of Washington’s Information School in Seattle while also producing a documentary film about migrant deaths along the US-Mexico border. Along the way, my wife and I have had some wonderful children, and my favorite pastime of all is traveling and enjoying the world with them.

Cover of "Police Visibility" (book)My research has been published in high-impact peer-reviewed social science journals (such as New Media & Society, Government Information Quarterly, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIS&T), The Information Society, Law & Social Inquiry, Surveillance & Society, First Monday, and Journal of Criminal Justice); law reviews (including Indiana Law Journal, North Carolina Law Review, Hastings Law Journal, UC Irvine Law Review, and BYU Law Review); peer-reviewed, archival conference proceedings; and as chapters in several edited books. I have also edited three books:

Prior to coming to the University of Oregon, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Kentucky’s School of Information Science (with a joint appointment in Sociology) and, before that, a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) within the Law School at Tilburg University (in the Netherlands). I have also held additional temporary research positions with Utrecht University (2022-23) and Tilburg University (2018; 2019). I am licensed to practice law in California (currently inactive), and was a 2013 Google Policy Fellow, hosted by the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law (Ottawa, Ontario).

My documentary and video production work has been exhibited at museums in the United States, Germany, and the Netherlands, and has been screened at film festivals and on university campuses across the United States. I have discussed my research on NPR (All Things Considered) and written about body-worn cameras for The Conversation and Slate. My research has been cited in a variety of academic journals as well as the New York Times Magazine.

Surveillance cameras located at the US-Mexico border.
Surveillance cameras located at the US-Mexico border. © 2014, Bryce Newell.

Recent news and updates:

  • I’m co-organizing two academic conferences this fall: Beyond Data Protection (Utrecht, The Netherlands, Sept. 21-22) and the Oregon Surveillance Studies Workshop (Eugene, Oregon, USA, Oct. 13-14).
  • My new paper with Martin Koen, “Painting the Narrative: Police Body-Worn Cameras, Report Writing, and the Techno-Regulation of Policework,” has now been published in First Monday at https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v28i7.13243 [July 2023].
  • Eleni Kosta and I have a new book chapter, “Apples, Oranges, and Time Machines: Regulating Police Use of Body-Worn Cameras in Europe and the United States,” out now in Privacy, Technology, and the Criminal Process (Routledge) [link to book] [July 2023].
  • I workshopped my paper, “Regulating the US Consumer Data Market: Comparing the Material Scope of US Consumer Data Privacy Laws and the GDPR” (with Nadezhda Purtova, Young Eun Moon, and Hugh J. Paterson III) at the 2023 Privacy Law Scholars Conference (PLSC). The paper has been accepted for publication in the University of Pennsylvania Journal of International Law, forthcoming in vol. 45 [June 2023].
  • Vince Hyunh-Watkins and I presented our paper, “Abstracting Injustice: Abrogating Democratic Governance through Code and the Algorithm” at the Data Justice Conference 2023, held in Cardiff, Wales, UK (ours was a virtual presentation) [June 2023].
  • My book, Police Visibility: Privacy, Surveillance, and the False Promise of Body-Worn Cameras” was awarded the 2022 Book Award for best academic monograph on surveillance published in 2021 by the Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) [May 2023].
  • Keith Spiller and I edited a Dialogue section for Surveillance & Society on “Surveillance in Conflict and Crisis.” Read our editorial introduction here [March 2023].
  • The version of record for my paper, “The Pennybridge Pioneers: Understanding Internal Stakeholder Perceptions of Body-Worn Camera Implementation” (with Martin Koen and Melinda Roberts), has now been published in the Journal of Crime and Justice [March 2023].
  • My paper, “Surveillance as Information Practice,” has now been published in the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) [January 2023] [link].