Pinkerton's National Detective Agency and the Information Work of the Nineteenth-Century Surveillance State

A private security contractor for business and government, Allan Pinkerton acted centrally in early chapters of the history of the security state. The operative and the report, Pinkerton's principal surveillance technologies, are analyzed here in relation to each other and in their historical development as information technology, drawing on Pinkerton's fictionalized accounts of cases, secret reports, and other agency documents. Pinkerton management was consistently preoccupied with strict compliance of operatives, their deployment in a network, and the regular submission of reports. This study suggests that information can lead to uncertainty and that the surveillance state was and is compartmentalized, entrepreneurial, and other-than-public.