Muralha digital: entre a promessa de transparência e a prática da opacidade

Abstract

This dissertation investigates transparency and accountability in Curitiba’s Digital Wall project, a system integrating over 2,000 cameras with facial recognition and artificial intelligence. Adopting a Science, Technology and Society (STS) perspective, the research mobilizes Norberto Bobbio’s principle of republican publicity to assess whether technological enhancement serves public interest or deepens opaque social control. The qualitative methodology articulates bibliographic review on surveillance (Bentham, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyon, Zuboff, Han) and systematic investigation of three official municipal portals, through criteria in three dimensions: ontological (what it is), economic-financial (costs), and procedural-guarantor (operations). Results reveal systematic opacity, with absence of information about extension, costs, contracts, and data safeguards. The investigation identifies informational fragmentation configuring “structured ignorance” operating through “technical code” materialized in portal architecture. This opacity renders technical democracy impossible by concentrating knowledge in technocratic spheres, blocking citizen participation in surveillance decisions. The research concludes that without minimal cognoscibility about surveillance systems, democratic exercise erodes, revealing tension between “smart cities” promise and expropriation of collective capacity for self-determination regarding infrastructures affecting fundamental rights.