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World Sousveillance Day
Sousveillance Cyborg writes: "Sousveillance is inverse surveillance, and a worldwide community of cyborgs is promoting sousveillance as a way toward more privacy and less secrecy.
Today is World Sousveillance Day (WSD).
See http://wearcam.org/wsd.htm. Transmitting live from around the world at noon (moving with time zone)."
I certainly would not be doing this in an airport.
:)
For that matter, shooting photographs of security stuff in general may be a bad idea. You could easily get arrested for such stuff, even if it is an invasion of privacy.
But, as always there's an alternate.. there's the middle finger.
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We don't need no Net Explorer We don't need no Thought control
I think Dec. 24 is one of the worst days they could have chosen to do this. Why?
Just about anybody that celebrates Christmas is busy on Christmas Eve. Mom's gotta clean the house, Dad's gotta find a Turboman actionfigure for Young Jimmy, Highly Paid IT Businessman is busy partying, Joe Homeless is busy begging.
The only people that are going to have no problem doing this on Dec. 24 are people that don't celebrate Christmas at all. Typically these would include various racial groups which the US has declared war on right now....
So, would it be a great idea to have lots of people that (dumb) Yankees would consider to look like terrorists running around, taking pictures of things and getting security all riled up?
I think this WSD should be on a more relaxed time of year. Maybe some time in April or something.
Those who are able to arrange things so they are rarely watched.
The point was that if they want people to participate in this, they should give them some advance notice. I would have gone out and done this, but since I didn't find out about it until 5 hours after it had started, I can't.
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Maybe I have a limited imagination, but I have trouble seeing how exactly the average citizen can "use" these cameras. It is likely that if we did find a way to use cameras which don't belong to us that we would be prosecuted for it.
What I can imagine, though, is a scenario where once the system is in place, the scope of its use is gradually increased until it is being used not only in ways that are unacceptable, but also in ways we were specifically told it wouldn't be in the beginning.
An example of this would be the "anti-terrorist" cameras installed all over London. These are now being used to detect and prosecute all sorts of lesser crimes. Of course, many people don't have a problem with that, but you have to be extremely careful where the lower bound gets set. Is that a nudie magazine in your pocket, visible in frames 237-512 when you crossed Market Street?
Maybe you can't imagine any activites/liberties you presently indulge in which the government might eventually decide are nonsat, but my paranoia meter jumps a couple of clicks every time this stuff makes the news.
So, here we another installment of the Citizens Against the [supposed] Big Brother, a "watchdog" group of paranoiaphiles dedicated to overthrowing whoever-it-is we're at odds with. The group promotes reverse surveillance (sousveillance!) and encourages people to generally reverse monitor various monolithic entities though such *coughing* ingenious methods as using the 1-800 how's-my-driving numbers, etc. While I'm sure that there are legitament reasons for "sousveillance," this is little more than another group of schizoid people who are convinced that every time you use an ATM, you're selling out to the Antichrist, and that yes, in fact, your neighbor's satellite dish actually is just a device that the FBI is using to watch your every move in your house.
Give me a break, this type of paranoia is so vogue it's disgusting. There are real threats to civil liberties, but "sousveillance" isn't going to counteract them. Though the group claims they're turning the wheels of democracy, they would be more appropriately observed to be a factional group.
Even if they're right, nobody in the paranoid realm has ever given me a good answer to the question, "Why should the government even care what you're doing?" If you pay your taxes, walk the dog, and tune into Must-See-TV on Thursdays, you're in line with the rest of society, and the government could really care less what you're doing. Even if you *gasp* use Linux or program computers, the government really isn't interested at all in what brand of toothpaste you buy from the grocery store.
In related thoughts, there needs to be a Godwin's Law for 1984 references, such that a reference to "Big Brother" or other Orwellian terminology immediately invalidates what you're saying.
If you're gathering evidence that relies on tone of voice to document wrongdoing there's nothing like a tape recorder. And if you're gathering evidence that relies on gesture and facial expression to document wrongdoing there's nothing like a pinhole camera.
In fact, digital video cameras is how the human rights abuses of the Taliban were first documented by RAWA .
But pick your battles, carefully, kids. This isn't a contest to see who can be the most annoying to security people who are doing their jobs honorably.
I think wearcam.org should send someone down the street knocking on people's doors, asking why their peepholes only work one way.
Come on, guys. It's simple economics. If a store wants to reduce losses due to theft, they install cameras. Or they install domes that look like cameras. If you're going to be insulted about that, why aren't you insulted that you can't leave without going through the registers, or that they lock the door after hours, or that the "Employees Only" areas are only for employees? Why not require retailers to move their entire stock outside under a large awning, and turn their backs to us to show how much they trust their customers?
Come on, dude, you're living in a paranoiac techno-Robin-Hood fantasy that would have been only moderately tolerated even before 9/11. Now, your implication that the security guys in Wal-Mart are worse than the terrorists who blew up WTC, makes your opinion worth less than sludge.
Yes, you can get a limited view (10 or so) of a room through the distal end of a peephole, but it is essentially a one-way device.
In a similar manner, you can see through a one-way mirror by reducing ambient light as much as possible and placing a high-powered light flush against the surface of the mirror. See, if the guy at wearcam.org had constructed such a setup, with a rubber-gasketed camera and flash which he used to take pictures of the folk watching us in department-store dressing rooms, and filled a website with those photos (preferably alongside statements, denials, and changes of policy from the stores in question), then he'd be performing what would arguably be a public service.
As it is, he's filming camera domes as if they were UFO's and salespeople as if they were MIB's. For all his bravado, he isn't coming close to anything like a controversy.
Is this how I'm supposed to burn karma?
All true, the question is "how much?"
How much surveilence is too much? How much privacy is too little? Is there a real benefit to this surveilence or am I "subject #23"
I have a name and I have a history, you can learn these things from me by asking. If I choose to invite you into that level of closeness/community with me, I will share these things. My objection is simply that I want to have some say/control over how much data is gathered and how it is used.
One of the big issues here is when is surveilence de-humanizing. In a small town, folks can know each others business and though there are busibodies, they are usually ignored by the population at large. Now we are dealing with semi-legal entities which want to know our business. A corporation is a piece of paper which is recognized by the courts as having standing as a 'person' humans in service of this 'person' want to watch us suspiciously.
I will live with people and I will submit to a certain ammount of friendly inquiry into my life. I'm not all that interested in being suspected of $NefariousThings and watched like the criminal I am suspected of being.
"The conduct of neither [party], if strictly examined, will be irreproachable." -Elizabeth Bennet
Yeah, we should wait until Big Brother *exists* before we start doing something about it. Because raising the issues of freedom and rights only makes sense *after* you have been oppressed.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!