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)."

Comments

Given Recent Events..

[dagoalieman]

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. :)

.

Bad Date

[talonyx]

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.

I don't understand...

[mikey504]

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.

document police brutality, sexual harassment

[wagadog]

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.

As a followup...

[Tsar]

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.

Re:As a followup...

[Tsar]

It's not about harassing Wal-Mart guards,

That's good, because he's just harassing salespeople from the looks of things.

1) Why exactly don't they want me videotaping them, but they can videotape me?

Because it's their store, and they're responsible to the owner to make sure that, though anyone can come in and freely handle millions of dollars' worth of goods that doesn't (yet) belong to them, the employees won't let too much of it walk out unpaid for. Just because someone works in a place that uses video security doesn't mean they want, or deserve, to see themselves on a 'gotcha!' website.

And conversely, if this fellow posts his videotape of Sears employees, does that make it okay for Sears employees to post whatever tape they have of him, or of any of us?

2) In what other ways am I being watched/monitored/tracked? Should I care? (GPS enabled cell phones, anyone? M$Passport anyone?)

He could make a better case for this by attacking these issues directly, rather than claiming that storecams are akin to terrorism. Now more than ever, that sort of rhetoric will lose credibility for his 'cause' quicker than anything.

3) How much is enough rights to give up for the sake of security?

Store cameras aren't about giving up rights, any more than my home security system limits your freedom of movement. If you don't want to go in, just don't go in. Our society is free to bankrupt companies with unpopular business practices simply by denying them our trade. Simple, isn't it? But before you ask how we get everyone to boycott Wal-Mart, let me suggest that nobody really cares that they're videotaping. In December 2001, it's just not that big an issue.

Someday we may have to accept the fact that if nobody else seems concerned about our cause, it may indicate that our cause is only important to us, and not that everyone else is an idiot.

Re: 2-way peepholes vs. 2-way mirrors

[Tsar]

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?

Re:I know I'll get modded down here.

[Junior J. Junior III]

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.