LiSS Conference 3 will take place at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya in Barcelona between 29th May and 1st June 2012. The conference theme for the 2012 event will be ‘the state of surveillance’. Here the intention is to explore two aspects of living in surveillance societies. First, to examine the roles played by the state in facilitating and maintaining everyday technologically mediated surveillance. This would include the provision of surveillance systems, normalisation processes and the regulation and governance of surveillance. Second, the intention is to assess the state-of-the-art, both in terms of theoretical and empirical developments in surveillance studies and of state-of-the-art surveillance systems and practices.