Where is the “state” in state surveillance? The papers in this session track the variety of ways the state has shaped oversight and intrusion into civilian life, emphasizing the historical processes and transformations involved in that phenomenon and their contingency on time and place. From wiretapping to deportation to anti-gay prying eyes of the Stasi, the state takes multiple forms and is enabled and limited by an equal multiplicity of environments and agents, official and unofficial, from above and below.