Negative 1nc

Sousveillance solves – democratization

Sousveillance holds authority accountable and democratizes power

Fernback, 13- Jan Fernback, associate professor, received her doctorate from the University of Colorado, and her MA from Temple University. Professor Fernback consults on various web-related projects and has published studies and commentary on cybercommunity and new technology. (Jan, “Sousveillance: Communities of resistance to the surveillance environment”, Telematics and Informatics Volume 30, Issue 1, February 2013, Science Direct)//Yak
Foucault claimed that, ‘‘where there is power, there is resistance,’’ (1978, p. 95). Resistance to surveillance environments assumes a sinister motivation for watching, or at least a breach of privacy as typified by panoptic or synoptic monitoring. For Koskela (2004) breaches of individual privacy need not cause people to feel shame; rather, resistance is empowering, immodest, and subverting of Foucault’s discipline. Webcams or other types of technologically-enabled exhibitionistic acts can confront surveillance regimes in a type of ‘‘surveillance turned into spectacle’’ (Koskela, 2004, p. 208). When embodied as a means of publicizing institutional power structures, the cultural and political implications of resistance can be seen as empowering for citizens.

While the notion of resistance broadly encompasses multiple dimensions (Sanchez, 2009; Martin et al., 2009; Marx, 2003), this paper locates resistance primarily within the concept of sousveillance, or ‘‘watching from below,’’ a term popularized by University of Toronto computer engineering professor Steve Mann (2004). Sousveillance is a form of inverse surveillance in which citizens monitor the surveillors as a means to challenge the surveillance state. Wearable cameras and wearable computers allow the wearer to observe, record, and disseminate events. Examples include citizen video posted online, watchdog web sites or blogs, recording telephone conversations, or the monitoring of bureaucratic authorities (corporations, military, government). Sousveillance embraces the idea of transparency as an antidote to concentrated power in the hands of surveillors; it empowers individuals to be cast as active producers of ‘‘observed’’ discourses, images, and data rather than as mere victims of panoptic or synoptic surveillance. According to Mann et al. (2003), sousveillance ‘‘focuses on enhancing the ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance’’ (p. 333). The overt visibility of some forms of sousveillance dilute the power and dominance of surveillance by exposing it, forcing the watchers to confront and possibly question their own surveillance activities (Mann et al., 2003). Citizens cannot access surveillance videos, yet citizens can post sousveillance videos. Fundamentally, sousveillance is about exerting control of constant oversight as a potential force for democratization.

In the interest of imagining an ‘‘informed knowledge society’’ responsive to the ideals of individual empowerment, social responsibility and equality, social networking communities are forming to interrogate networked surveillance. As Mann et al. (2003) argue, individuals and small groups are using sousveillance techniques to empower themselves against large, bureaucratic, and institutionalized forms of surveillance. Sousveillance is used by Facebook members to expose the data gathered by Facebook to the larger networked population and sometimes to authorities such as law enforcement. With the introduction of Facebook’s News Feed feature, deemed ‘‘too stalkeresque’’ by users, a resistance effort formed in the Facebook group ‘‘Students Against Facebook News Feed,’’ with membership exceeding 700,000 (Cohen, 2008). In another study about sousveillance efforts within this group, Sanchez (2009, p. 287) writes, ‘‘Where Facebook had become authoritarian and hegemonic, the retaliation was democratic and multilateral.’’ Other groups, such as the Facebook, Respect My Privacy group, the FB: Privacy and Prevention group or the Facebook smartm0b group are examples of sousveillance collectives that use the techniques of transparent resistance to expose the surveillance environment and to openly critique it. Under such a scheme, the Facebook network is able to use the techniques of synoptic surveillance and sousveillance as a means of resistance against panoptic surveillance. To examine sousveillance within Facebook as a response to the perceived surveillance environment, this paper examines writings within several Facebook sousveillance/countersurveillance groups. Major themes are identified and analyzed using a critical orientation that examines structures of socio-cultural dominance that have been institutionally legitimized in a Foucauldian sense. The aim of this analysis is to discover the critical nature of resistance to the surveillance environment through an exploration of the values, assumptions, and institutional practices that underlie both the mechanisms of surveillance within Facebook and the discourses of resistance.

Potential for sousveillance growing now – it’s key to break down power asymmetries

Weiss 9 (Jen, “Critical Issues in Crime and Society : Schools under Surveillance : Cultures of Control in Public Education,” Chapter: “Scan This”, pp. 224-5)//ES

To conclude this chapter I want to address one final response to Baldwin’s increasing security presence—the formation of an after-school poetry and hip-hop club by a small group of Baldwin students in the weeks after the walkout. The decision to convene a poetry and hip-hop club was as much a response to the school’s newfound policies as was the protest described earlier in this chapter. In my view, the club proved a much more radicalizing choice. As poet and essayist Adrienne Rich points out, poetry, in its “rejection of conventional expectations,” is “inherently subversive to dominant and oppressive structures” (2001, 116). I discuss the relationship between writing and resistance at length elsewhere (see Weiss et al., 2008); here I will address one aspect of writing that can be seen as resistance—that of writing as “sousveillance.” “Sousveillance” denotes “surveying from below” or the act of “countersurveillance” and offers a way for us to think about how students and teachers in schools like Baldwin can resist their school’s unjust policies by recording and mediating them. Scholar William G. Staples notes: A citizen’s ability to evade this surveillance is diminishing. To venture into a shopping mall, bank, subway, sometimes even a bathroom is to perform before an unknown audience. Even if this kind of surveillance is relatively “seamless” as I have argued, it may function to undermine our willingness to participate in civic life and to speak our minds as clearly, openly, and imaginatively as we can. (1997, 133) While we can see the effects of surveillance on our civic life, Staples asserts that the forces of active resistance, protest, sabotage, noncooperation, and liberty are also present. “If we accept the premise that much of the exercise of this kind of power takes place in the form of ‘local’ micropractices that are present in our everyday lives, then the sites of opposition are right before us. They are in our own homes, workplaces, schools, and communities” (ibid., 135). In this chapter I have sought to identify a host of micropractices present in student’s everyday lives, however overlooked they may be. The basic premise of “sousveillance” research is “to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it [and] to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority” (Mann et al. 2003, 332). One of the best known examples of “sousveillance” is the videotaping by George Holliday, an average citizen of Los Angeles, of the Rodney King beating and his turning over of that tape to local media outlets. Studies that focus on sousveillance point to the common feeling among surveillance scholars that as surveillance technologies proliferate so too do technologies that can disrupt surveillance techniques and expose power asymmetries (Monahan 2006; Kemple and Huey 2005).

Sousveillance is key to combat authoritarian organizations and democratizing power

Huey, Walby, and Doyle 6 - Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Western Ontario; Associate Professor and Chancellor's Research Chair, University of Winnipeg, Department of Criminal Justice; Associate Professor Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Carleton University (Laura, Kevin, and Aaron, “Cop watching in the downtown eastside”, in T. Monahan (Ed.), “Surveillance and security: Technological politics and power in everyday life”, 2006) KW

Steve Mann coined the term sousveillance to describe such activities. As Mann (n.d.) explains:

Sousviellance (roughly French for undersight) is the opposite of surveillance (roughly French for oversight). But by “sousveillance”, I’m not suggesting that the cameras be mounted on the floor looking up, rather than being on the ceiling looking down like they are no. Rather, I am suggesting that the cameras be mounted on people in low places, rather than upon buildings and establishments in high places. Thus the “under” (sight) means from down under in the hierarchy.

Mann further distinguishes between the two forms of sousveillance: in-band, which arises from within an organization, and out-of-band, which is external to the organization and frequently arises from the perceived failure of surveillance mechanisms within institutions. It is not coincidental that “citizens videotaping police brutality and sending copies to news media” is used as an example of the latter form (Mann n.d.).

Sousveillance is a form of reflectionism, a term referring to the use of technology to mirror and confront bureaucracies and the authoritative organizations such a police agencies. Relctionism employs the tactic of appropriating tools of authoritative organiztions and resituating those tools in a disorienting manner toward undercutting the privilege of the organization, in essence leveling (or attempting to level) the surveillance hierarchy (Mann, Nollman, and Wellman 2003: 333). Mann and colleagues (2003) write, “Reflectionism seeks to increase the equality between surveiller and the person being surveilled (surveillee) including enabling the surveillee to surveil the surveiller.”

Mann’s writings on sousveillance must be situated in the postpanoptic paradigm now coming into effect within the surveillance literature (cf. Boyne 2000). For decades the panopticon metaphor dominated scholarly and lay discussions of surveillance. In the inspection house, as Jeremy Bentham originally called it, jail cells on the six stories would be positioned around a central observation deck within which guards would be watching (or not) from behind blinded windows. The purpose was to render power “visible and unverifiable” so that inmates would not know if they were being monitored and would constantly modify their behavior in accord with institutional standards. Whereas violent forms of social control were bloody and had uncertain normalization effects on those being punished, the panopticon made discipline certain without blood (Lyon 1991: 600). The panoptic for Foucault (1977: 201) has the effect of inducing “in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” so t make the actual exercise of power unnecessary. The process of watching takes place within enclosed spaces, where subject populations are forced under the gaze. Foucault’s appropriation of the panopticon metaphor, however, has not gone uncontested. David Lyon (1991: 608) critiques Foucault’s usage of the panopticon in several ways. First, Discipline and Punish focuses on rational means and says little about resistance. Second, Foucault is guilty of “totalizing the partial,” applying the panoptic metaphor to situations where it does not empirically correspond. Finally, the observer in the inspection house is always the watcher, never the watched (cf. Goodlad 2003). Many surveillance theorists have attempted to extend their analyses past the limitations if the panopticon (Mathiesen 1997; Bauman 1998; Deleue 1992; Deleuze and Guattari 1987; Haggerty and Ericson 2000; Hier 2004; Walby 2005). Mann’s work must be include in this cohort of writers raising questions about the plethora of their relationships between watchers and watched.

For Mann and other proponents, sousveillance is not simply a phenomenon to be described and analyzed but rather a process for rendering institutions democratically accountable and thus something to be promoted within the public sphere. This reading of Mann’s purpose is clear: he sees sousveillance as a potential antidote not only to the problem of terrorism but moreover to the antidemocratic underpinnings that he suggests give rise to terrorism and totalitarianism: “Secrecy, not privacy, may be the true cause of terrorism” (n.d.). In his writings, surveillance (oversight) is depicted as employed exclusively by powerful institutions. The only effective remedy against the potential for institutions to abuse secrecy and thus potentially citizens is through sousveillance (undersight). Without effective undersight, surveillance-based states can become “unstable and tend toward totalitarianism” (Mann n.d.). Thus countersurveillance through the camera is viewed not only as a good thing but as necessary for democracy.

Sousveillance solves – authoritarianism

Sousveillance works – confronting surveillance by surveilling the surveillers

Mann et al. 03 - Prof. in Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto (Steve, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments”, Surveillance and Society, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(3)/sousveillance.pdf)//A-Sharma

Digital technology can build on personal computing to make individuals feel more selfempowered at home, in the community, at school and at work. Mobile, personal, and wearable computing devices allow people to take the personal computing revolution with them. Sousveilling individuals now can invert an organization's gaze and watch the watchers by collecting data on them. The development of wearable computing fits well with contemporary social transformations. While surveillance is a manifestation of the industrial and post-industrial eras of large hierarchical organizations that have efficiently employed technologies in neo-panopticons of social control, there is now a turn from such organizations to “networked societies” (Wellman 1999, 2001; Castells 2000). Rather than being embedded in single communities or work groups, individuals switch among multiple, partial communities, and work teams. They move about, both socially and physically. Where centralized mainframe computers served the needs of large hierarchical organizations, personal computers better fit the needs of people in networked organizations and communities who move with some autonomy among geographically and socially dispersed work teams, friends and activities. Yet personal computers are still rooted to desktops at the office and tabletops at home. They are still wired into computer networks. Wearable, wireless computers better fit the needs of people to be physically mobile as they move between interactions with workmates and community members. As the developed world transforms from small-group to person-to-person interactions, they are a powerful tool for personal empowerment. We describe here an attempt to use newly invented forms of wearable computing (Mann 1997, Mann 2001a) to empower individuals in at least some aspects of their encounters with organizations. These inventions call into question Aldous Huxley's assertion that "technological progress has hurt the Little Man and helped the Big Man" (Huxley 1958:43). We examine how using wearable computing devices can promote personal empowerment in human technology/human interactions (Mann 1997; Fogg 1997). Two key issues are the extent to which organizational surveillance can be challenged, and the ways in which organizations respond to such challenges. We describe and analyze here a set of performances that follow Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodolgical approach to breaching norms (1967). We gain insight into these norms by: (a) deliberately not acquiescing in surveillance, and (b) performing visible and explicit sousveillance. By breaking organizational policies, these performances expose hitherto discreet, implicit, and unquestioned acts of organizational surveillance. More active forms of sousveillance confront surveillance by using wearable computing to surveil the surveillers reflectively, bringing into question the very act of surveillance itself. Because of the mobility of the modern individual, this act is best accomplished by mobile, wearable computers. In the mobile society of the early twenty-first century, Western societies move among milieus. Their personal environments travel with them in the unstable environment of ostensibly neutral public spaces such as streets, sidewalks, shopping malls, etc. (Lefebvre 1991; Wellman 2001). In such milieus, individuals are largely responsible for their own security and integrity. Wearable computing devices afford possibilities for mobile individuals to take their own sousveillance with them. Given this frequent sociophysical mobility, it makes sense to invent forms of wearable computing to situate research devices on the bodies of the surveilled (customer, taxicab passenger, citizen, etc.). The act of holding a mirror up to society, or the social environment, allows for a transformation of surveillance techniques into sousveillance techniques in order to watch the watchers. The goal of the performances reported here is less to understand the nature of surveillance than to engage in dialogues with front-line officials and customer service personnel at the point-of-contact in semi-public and commercial locations. With Gary Marx, we are interested in how “the relationship between the data collector and the subject may condition evaluations, as may the place” (1998: 176). We attempt, as a systems analyst might, to engage our points of contact (managers, clerks, security workers, etc.) without claiming to understand complicated internal hierarchical considerations or politics within large bureaucratic, sometimes multinational, organizations. Instead, the performers instigate situations in order to: (a) gauge the degree to which customer service personnel will try to suppress photography in locations where it is forbidden; (b) (break unstated rules of asymmetric surveillance using new wearable computing inventions (Mann and Niedzviecki 2001). The collecting of digital images, via photographs or videos, is usually prohibited by store personnel because of stated policy, explicit norms, or unconscious norms that are only realized when they are breached. The surveilled become sousveillers who engage social controllers (customs officials, shopkeepers, customer service personnel, security guards, etc.) by using devices that mirror those used by these social controllers. Uncertainty surrounds these performances; no one is ever sure of the outcome of the interaction between device, wearer, and participants. Design factors can influence performances: the wearing of technology can be seen by participants as either empowering or threatening, depending on the type of technology, location, and how it is presented and represented. For example, people who use familiar mobile devices, such as laptop computers and personal digital assistants, are perceived as more socially desirable than those with less familiar devices, such as wearable computers and hands-free mobile phones (Dryer, et al. 1999).

Sousveillance allows constant oversight of state practices -

Fernback, 13 – PhD in Media Studies and Communication (Jan, “Sousveillance: Communities of resistance to the surveillance environment”, Telematics and Informatics, February 2013, Volume 30, Issue 1, pgs. 11-21,http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585312000275#)//gg

Foucault claimed that, ‘‘where there is power, there is resistance,’’ (1978, p. 95). Resistance to surveillance environments assumes a sinister motivation for watching, or at least a breach of privacy as typified by panoptic or synoptic monitoring. For Koskela (2004) breaches of individual privacy need not cause people to feel shame; rather, resistance is empowering, immodest, and subverting of Foucault’s discipline. Webcams or other types of technologically-enabled exhibitionistic acts can confront surveillance regimes in a type of ‘‘surveillance turned into spectacle’’ (Koskela, 2004, p. 208). When embodied as a means of publicizing institutional power structures, the cultural and political implications of resistance can be seen as empowering for citizens.

While the notion of resistance broadly encompasses multiple dimensions (Sanchez, 2009; Martin et al., 2009; Marx, 2003), this paper locates resistance primarily within the concept of sousveillance, or ‘‘watching from below,’’ a term popularized by University of Toronto computer engineering professor Steve Mann (2004). Sousveillance is a form of inverse surveillance in which citizens monitor the surveillors as a means to challenge the surveillance state. Wearable cameras and wearable computers allow the wearer to observe, record, and disseminate events. Examples include citizen video posted online, watchdog web sites or blogs, recording telephone conversations, or the monitoring of bureaucratic authorities (corporations, military, government). Sousveillance embraces the idea of transparency as an antidote to concentrated power in the hands of surveillors; it empowers individuals to be cast as active producers of ‘‘observed’’ discourses, images, and data rather than as mere victims of panoptic or synoptic surveillance. According to Mann et al. (2003), sousveillance ‘‘focuses on enhancing the ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance’’ (p. 333). The overt visibility of some forms of sousveillance dilute the power and dominance of surveillance by exposing it, forcing the watchers to confront and possibly question their own surveillance activities (Mann et al., 2003). Citizens cannot access surveillance videos, yet citizens can post sousveillance videos. Fundamentally, sousveillance is about exerting control of constant oversight as a potential force for democratization.

In the interest of imagining an ‘‘informed knowledge society’’ responsive to the ideals of individual empowerment, social responsibility and equality, social networking communities are forming to interrogate networked surveillance. As Mann et al. (2003) argue, individuals and small groups are using sousveillance techniques to empower themselves against large, bureaucratic, and institutionalized forms of surveillance. Sousveillance is used by Facebook members to expose the data gathered by Facebook to the larger networked population and sometimes to authorities such as law enforcement. With the introduction of Facebook’s News Feed feature, deemed ‘‘too stalkeresque’’ by users, a resistance effort formed in the Facebook group ‘‘Students Against Facebook News Feed,’’ with membership exceeding 700,000 (Cohen, 2008). In another study about sousveillance efforts within this group, Sanchez (2009, p. 287) writes, ‘‘Where Facebook had become authoritarian and hegemonic, the retaliation was democratic and multilateral.’’ Other groups, such as the Facebook, Respect My Privacy group, the FB: Privacy and Prevention group or the Facebook smartm0b group are examples of sousveillance collectives that use the techniques of transparent resistance to expose the surveillance environment and to openly critique it. Under such a scheme, the Facebook network is able to use the techniques of synoptic surveillance and sousveillance as a means of resistance against panoptic surveillance. To examine sousveillance within Facebook as a response to the perceived surveillance environment, this paper examines writings within several Facebook sousveillance/countersurveillance groups. Major themes are identified and analyzed using a critical orientation that examines structures of socio-cultural dominance that have been institutionally legitimized in a Foucauldian sense. The aim of this analysis is to discover the critical nature of resistance to the surveillance environment through an exploration of the values, assumptions, and institutional practices that underlie both the mechanisms of surveillance within Facebook and the discourses of resistance.

Sousveillance is a form of reflectionism that balances the power between the surveiller and the surveillee – undermines the state’s panoptic power

Hawk et all, 8- Byron Hawk is an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina

(Byrn Hawk, David M Rieder, Ollie Oviedo, January 2008, Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools, ProQuest ebrary)//Yak

Sousveillance: Surveilling the Surveillers

Surveillance is everywhere, but often little observed. Organizations have tried to make technology mundane and invisible through its disappearance into the fabric of buildings, objects, and bodies. The creation of pervasive ubiquitous technologies—such as smart floors, toilets, elevators, highway cameras, and light switches—means that intelligence gathering devices for ubiquitous surveillance are also becoming invisible (Mann and Niedzviecki; Marx “The Engineering of Social Control”; Lefebvre).For example, closedcircuit television networks (CCTV) surveill neighborhoods in the name of public safety. This proliferation of small technologies and data conduits has brought new opportunities for observation and data collection, making public surveillance of private space increasingly ubiquitous. All such activity has been surveillance: organizations observing people.

One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and our acquiescence to it is to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority. We call this inverse panopticon “ sousveillance,” from the French words sous (below) and veiller (to watch).With many people in the developed world carrying camera-equipped mobile phones, ordinary people now have ample means for portable, low-cost, easy to use sousveillance. Web sites such as YouTube (www.youtube.com) for videos and Flickr (www.flickr.com) for photographs, make it almost as easy for people to share sousveillance with others, one-to-one, as it is to broadcast to the public. Sousveillance can be a form of tactical media activism. As such, it can be seen as a proven mode of resistance. For example, police agent provocateurs were quickly revealed on YouTube when they infiltrated a demonstration in Montebello, Quebec against the leaders of Canada, Mexico, and the United States (August 2007).When the head of the Quebec police publicly stated that there was no police presence, a sousveillance video showed him to be wrong. When he revised his statement to say that the police provocateurs were peaceful observers, the same video showed them to be masked, wearing police boots, and holding a rock (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St1-WTc1kow).

There are many similar examples, such as the widely-viewed YouTube showing of UCLA police attacking a student in the university library (Fall 2006:http://www.you tube.com/watch?v=AyvrqcxNIFs).Other projects include the “Yes Men”(http://theyes men.org),RTMARC (http://rtmark.com),Next5Minutes.org (http://www.next5minutes .org);in the Critical Art Ensemble’s court battles; and on various Nettime.org lists (Lovink and Schneider).

The sousveillance performances presented in this chapter are very much forms of activism. However, instead of mobile camera phones, the performances use specially created tools of inquiry specific to the form of intervention anticipated. As part of this tradition of challenging institutional control over public life, sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism”(Mann,“‘Reflectionism’ and ‘Diffusionism’”), a philosophy and a procedure of using technology to mirror and confront social ecologies dominated by bureaucratic organizations by holding up a mirror and asking: “Do you like what you see?” It represents a methodology for exploring surveillance—in all its forms—and the dynamic relation between technology and its cultural ecology. Accordingly, reflectionism is a technique for inquiry-in-performance that is directed toward uncovering the panopticon, undercutting its primacy and privilege, and relocating the relationship of the surveillance society within a more traditional “commons” notion of observability (Ostrom).

Reflectionism is especially related to “détournement”: the tactic of appropriating tools of social controllers and resituating these tools in a disorienting manner (Rogers; Ward). It extends the concept of détournement by using the tools against the organization, holding a mirror up to the establishment, and creating a symmetrical self-bureaucratization of the wearer (Mann,“‘Reflectionism’ and ‘Diffusionism’”). In this manner, reflectionism is related to the “Theater of the Absurd”(Bair),and the Situationist movement in art. Reflectionism becomes sousveillance when it is applied to individuals wearing digital tools to observe the organizational observer. Sousveillance focuses on enhancing the ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance, creating a new ecological balance. As a method to map and protect personal space, it resonates with Gary Marx’s proposal to resist surveillance through noncompliance and interference “moves” that block, distort, mask, refuse, and counter-surveil the collection of information (“A Tack in the Shoe”).

Probably the best-known recent example of sousveillance is when Los Angeles resident George Holliday videotaped police officers beating Rodney King after he had been stopped for a traffic violation. The ensuing uproar led to the trial of the officers and serious discussion of curtailing police brutality (Cannon). Taping and broadcasting the police assault on Rodney King was serendipitous and fortuitous sousveillance. Yet planned acts of sousveillance can occur, although they are rarer than organizational surveillance. Examples include customers photographing shopkeepers; taxi passengers photographing cab drivers; citizens photographing police officers who come to their doors; civilians photographing government officials; and individuals beaming satellite shots of occupying troops onto the Internet. In many cases, these acts of sousveillance violate prohibitions stating that ordinary people should not use recording devices to record official acts. For example, many countries, including the United States, have prohibitions against photographing military bases. More often these prohibitions are unstated. For example, although many large stores do not want photographs taken on their premises, it is rare to see a sign prohibiting such photography.

Sousveillance replaces the Panoptic eye with a community based model of empowerment against authoritarian state tactics

Bollier 08 - Author, journalist and expert on the commons; Amherst College (David, “Using Sousveillance to Defend the Commons”, News and Perspectives on the commons, http://bollier.org/blog/using-sousveillance-defend-commons)//A-Sharma

The familiar storyline of science fiction is the evil dystopia – the totalitarian society of the future in which large, faceless government agencies and corporations use sophisticated technologies to pry into every corner of our lives. The goal is to neutralize dissent and shield the exercise of power from accountability. However necessary at times, surveillance is a crude display of power, a unilateral override of the “consent of the governed." Now a countervailing storyline is starting to get some traction in real life: the increasing citizen use of technology to “watch from below.” The practice has been called “sousveillance,” a word that comes the French word “sous” (from below) with the word “viller” (to watch). Instead of Big Brother using a panopticon of surveillance to exercise total, unquestioned control, the commoners are using cheap, portable technologies to monitor and publicize the behavior of Power. The commons is sprouting its own eyes – and its own means of self-defense, political organizing and reclamation of democracy. The concept of sousveillance has been around since at least 1998, when Steve Mann, a professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Toronto, Canada, coined the term. The term has gained greater currency over the past ten years as the cell-phone camera, digital tape recorder, handheld video camera and many other mobile devices have become ubiquitous. The spread of cheap communications technologies is changing the power equation between the surveillers and ordinary citizens. Sousveillance is commonly directed against police as a way to document their (anticipated) abuses. The classic example is the amateur video footage of LA policemen brutalizing Rodney King in 1991. Now that lightweight cameras are everywhere and footage can easily be posted on YouTube and other websites, sousveillance videos have documented police abuse in Malaysia, gay-bashing in Latvia and union-busting in Zimbabwe, as has taken note of “FitWatch” – “the tactic of filming the Met Police Forward Intelligence Teams and sharing photos, badge numbers and names.” In the United States and Canada, there is a network of volunteer organizations called Copwatch that monitor the police and host a user-generated database of police misbehavior. Sousveillance is not just about watching the police. The Web site HollaBackNYC.com invites women to post photos of any man who tries to harass them. In Sierra Leone and Ghana, people used mobile phones to monitor for irregularities and intimidation during elections in 2007. Politicians are increasingly monitored by citizen-videos, a practice that allows citizens to bypass the mainstream press and present their own unvarnished accounts of campaign activities. The most famous example may be the videotape of George Allen, the GOP candidate for Senate in 2004, who had the bad judgment to utter an ethnic slur, maccaca. The sousveillance video arguably tipped the election in favor of Allen’s opponent, James Webb. The British newspaper, The Guardian, once enlisted its readers to help take photos of then-Prime Minister Tony Blair at a time when the Labour Party was trying to insulate him from press coverage. The fascinating thing about sousveillance is how people with power – whether policemen, politicians or corporate officials – get supremely agitated at the idea that anyone would try to photograph, tape or videotape them. They find sousveillance quite threatening. For good reason: their behaviors can now be held to public account. The very possibility that official behaviors might be documented and publicized is unsettling to those who have previously enjoyed an unchallenged right of top-down surveillance against us. A British website, Ideal Government,, recognizes the need for police to protect ordinary citizens from crime and anti-social behavior, but goes on to say: Wouldn’t it be better if….the police accepted or were taught that transparency is mutual; that they should be prepared to accept it if they are conducting themselves correctly; that the police vs. demonstrators encounter was less us v them against a Kafkaesque legal background that no-one understands and more a case of both police and demonstrators conforming to laws that all understand and generally respect. The equalization of power relationships is not the only good thing to flow from sousveillance. It also opens up the possibility of a more community-based management and sanctioning of free-riders, which are familiar aspects of the classic commons paradigm. (See an excellent paper on sousveillance by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman, all professors at the University of Toronto.) An excellent Wikipedia entry notes that an equilibrium between surveillance and sousveillance may have positive effects. “Equiveillance theory” argues that sousveillance may reduce or eliminate the need for surveillance: In this sense it is possible to replace the Panoptic God’s eye view of surveillance with a more community-building ubiquitous personal experience capture. Crimes, for example, might then be solved by way of collaboration among the citizenry rather than through the watching over the citizenry from above. But it is not so black-and-white as this dichotomy. Rather, there is a simple shift in the equiveillant point, as, for example, more camera phones enter widespread use, we might be able, as a society, to be more self-reliant, on our own communities to keep an electronic neighborhood watch. This variation of sousveillance (“personal sousveillance”) has been referred to as “coveillance” by Mann, Nolan and Wellman.I must admit my discomfort at the possibility that all public acts might be subject to recording, whether from the top or down, not to mention private acts. This is not necessarily an advance for humanity. Raw evidence is not necessarily reliable evidence, and one cannot discount the risk of hoaxes. But as a way to hold Power accountable at a time when Power has aggressively fortified itself against accountability through new concentrations of wealth, legal manipulations, advanced technologies and political alliances, sousveillance does serve as a provisional, imperfect antidote. It is customary for innovations that emerge from the commons to be regarded as aberrant epiphenomena before they are finally named and publicly recognized by mainstream authorities (the surveillers), at which point the practices are in fact even more pervasive than suspected. For me, this about sums up the status of sousveillance. It is more widespread than we may imagine. Although I harbor some misgivings, it is liberating to realize that the simple act of transparency – a tactic pioneered by the Freedom of Information Act and open-meetings laws of the 1970s — can be so transformative. Except that now, we don’t need no stinkin’ lawyers or press agents. Sousveillance is decentralized, self-enacting and remarkably powerful.

Sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism” – using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations

Mann et al. 03- Prof. in Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Toronto (Steve, “Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments”, Surveillance and Society, http://www.surveillance-and-society.org/articles1(3)/sousveillance.pdf)//A-Sharma

These disparate observers are reacting to the pervasiveness of surveillance in contemporary western society (Stanley and Steinhardt 2003). Such surveillance is everywhere but often little observed. Organizations have tried to make technology mundane and invisible through its disappearance into the fabric of buildings, objects and bodies. The creation of pervasive ubiquitous technologies—such as smart floors, toilets, elevators, and light switches—means that intelligence gathering devices for ubiquitous surveillance are also becoming invisible (Mann and Niedzviecki 2001; Marx 1995; Lefebvre 1991). This re-placement of technologies and data conduits has brought new opportunities for observation, data collection, and sur/sousveillance, making public surveillance of private space increasingly ubiquitous. All such activity has been surveillance: organizations observing people. One way to challenge and problematize both surveillance and acquiescence to it is to resituate these technologies of control on individuals, offering panoptic technologies to help them observe those in authority. We call this inverse panopticon “sousveillance” from the French words for “sous” (below) and “veiller” to watch. Sousveillance is a form of “reflectionism,” a term invented by Mann (1998) for a philosophy and procedures of using technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic organizations. Reflectionism holds up the mirror and asks the question: “Do you like what you see?” If you do not, then you will know that other approaches by which we integrate society and technology must be considered. Thus, reflectionism is a technique for inquiry-in-performance that is directed: a) toward uncovering the panopticon and undercutting its primacy and privilege; b) relocating the relationship of the surveillance society within a more traditional commons notion of observability. Reflectionism is especially related to "detournement": the tactic of appropriating tools of social controllers and resituating these tools in a disorienting manner (Rogers 1994). It extends the concept of detournement by using the tools against the organization, holding a mirror up to the establishment, and creating a symmetrical self-bureaucratization of the wearer (Mann 1998). In this manner, reflectionism is related to the Theater of the Absurd (Bair 1978), and the Situationist movement in art. Reflectionism becomes sousveillance when it is applied to individuals using tools to observe the organizational observer. Sousveillance focuses on enhancing the ability of people to access and collect data about their surveillance and to neutralize surveillance. As a form of personal space protection, it resonates with Gary Marx’s (2003) proposal to resist surveillance through non-compliance and interference ‘moves’ that block, distort, mask, refuse, and counter-surveil the collection of information. Reflectionism differs from those solutions that seek to regulate surveillance in order to protect privacy (Rhodes, et al. 1999). Reflectionism contends that such regulation is as much pacifier as solution because in a regulatory regime, surveillance information is largely exchanged and controlled by external agents over which individuals have little power. For example, a recent regulatory proposal from the American Civil Liberties Association suggests: surveillance cameras … must be subject to force-of-law rules covering important details like when they will be used, how long images will be stored, and when and with whom they will be shared” (Stanley and Steinhardt 2003: 2). By contrast, reflectionism seeks to increase the equality between surveiller and the person being surveilled (surveillee), including enabling the surveillee to surveil the surveiller. Probably the best-known recent example of sousveillance is when Los Angeles resident George Holliday videotaped police officers beating Rodney King after he had been stopped for a traffic violation. The ensuing uproar led to the trial of the officers (although not their conviction) and serious discussion of curtailing police brutality (Cannon 1999). Taping and broadcasting the police assault on Rodney King was serendipitous and fortuitous sousveillance. Yet planned acts of sousveillance can occur, although they are rarer than organizational surveillance. Examples include: customers photographing shopkeepers; taxi passengers photographing cab drivers; citizens photographing police officers who come to their doors; civilians photographing government officials; residents beaming satellite shots of occupying troops onto the Internet. In many cases, these acts of sousveillance violate stated or prohibitions stating that ordinary people should not use recording devices to record official acts. At times, these prohibitions are stated. For example, many countries prohibit photographing military bases. More often, these prohibitions are unstated. For example, although many large stores do not want photographs taken on their premises, we have never seen a sign prohibiting such photography.