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Surveillance Studies Network (SSN) is a registered charitable company focused on studying surveillance in all its forms and distributing scholarly information. The organization is registered in the UK but welcomes members and supporters globally. SSN owns and operates the journal *Surveillance and Society* and functions as a clearing house for social science and policy research concerning surveillance. The network publishes the international, interdisciplinary, open access, peer-reviewed journal of Surveillance Studies. SSN hosts an international conference in Europe every two years, supplemented by two workshops held in other regions during the intervening years.

The structure of SSN demonstrates a commitment to establishing and disseminating academic authority within the field of surveillance studies, evidenced by its operation of a peer-reviewed journal and organizing international scholarly events. The model involves creating a central hub that facilitates research and knowledge sharing across borders through dual mechanisms: periodic large conferences and intermediate workshops. This pattern suggests an effort to build an established epistemic community around surveillance scholarship. A key implication is the intentional structuring of academic interaction—the bi-annual conference/workshop cycle—which creates temporal rhythms for scholarly engagement, potentially reinforcing specific narratives or methodologies favored within the discipline. The operation as a clearing house positions SSN as a gatekeeper for policy and research consultation, meaning its selection of which research and consultancy streams receive focus carries significant weight regarding the direction of surveillance discourse. The underlying assumption is that rigorous, interdisciplinary, open-access scholarship is necessary to govern understanding of surveillance, implying that knowledge dissemination itself is an act of shaping reality. What mechanisms ensure that this central organization remains truly neutral in its role as a clearing house, and how does the scheduling of events influence the prioritization of specific research questions over others?