Ideal for recording police activity
One problem with recording police as they perform official duties is that they seem frequently to confiscate cellphones with cameras and destroy either the phone of the SIM card. Doing this is illegal, but they are the cops, so whom can you call?
What is needed, obviously, is a way to stream the video directly to the cloud so that the police cannot destroy the record. I hadn’t realized it, but this is available now. Clive Thompson reports in Wired:
When Mans Adler founded Bambuser—a Sweden-based service that lets people broadcast live video from their cell phones to the Internet—his idea was simply to help users share their lives with friends in real time. Early this year, however, Adler saw an explosion of use from a political powder keg: Egypt.
During the Arab Spring, pro-democracy activists discovered that Bambuser let them thwart the Egyptian secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn’t matter whether they were arrested and their phone confiscated: The footage had already streamed to the world, where it catalyzed political energy against the Mubarak regime.
“The police thought, if we take all the phones, we can control the information. But they didn’t,” Adler notes. “The message still got out.”
The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping up surveillance cameras all over the place. The fear was that they’d be used as tools of oppression. But now those tools are being democratized, and we are witnessing an emerging culture of “sousveillance.”
Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the ’90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, like electrical-code violations. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They’d ask him to remove the camera—and when he wouldn’t, they’d escort him away or even tackle him.
“I realized, this is the inverse of surveillance,” he said.
Granted, omnipresent recording is a double-edged sword. When activists posted videos of the protests in despotic Middle Eastern states, government agents eagerly downloaded the amateur footage and used it to identify and target dissidents.
But sousveillance will not go away. If anything, it’ll become woven ever more tightly into everyday life, with new tools arriving that let citizens document incidents in surprising new ways. . .
I used to call customer service departments, especially credit card customer service, and tell them “I’m also recording this call to assure quality.” Every time, the response was the same: “Then I can’t speak to you, sir.”
Next question was: “Then will you agree not to record this call, either?”
And the typical reply, of course: “I have no control over that, sir.”
“Sousveillance” is a wonderful trend, and I hope it might finally banish the corporate brand of automatic surveillance as well. The current cost is often not doing business at all.
Anonymous
10 July 2011 at 12:13 pm