Slashdot Mirror
Sousveillance in Seattle - Watching the Watchers
Eh-Wire writes "At the recent ACM Conference on Computers, Freedom and Privacy, Steve Mann - cyborg numero uno - led a troop of conference attendees on a surveillance camera hunt and digital capture. Their antics confounded rent-a-cops in a downtown Seattle shopping mall who had difficulty with the concept of having their surveillance cameras surveilled."
This seems like such nonsense..what is the point of videotaping or photographing the cameras? How does videotaping a camera that is videotaping you deliver on the following quote from the article? ... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions.???
o .html?
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record
Now actually taping your ACTIONS makes perfect sense if you are going to be doing something that is potentially dangerous or you expect to have a brush with the law. The New York Times just had an article on how a bunch of "amateur" video tapes of the Republican Convention protests have shown that the NYPD have either doctored evidence or simply lied about what protesters did when they were arrested.
Among other incidents, the amateur video shows defendents who were charged with resisting arrest in no way putting up a fight when arrested.
link to article http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12vide
------ How can making people laugh lead to bad karma?
Yeah, what he was doing didn't have much to do with recording himself. Yeah, it was a pretty pointless excercise. Yeah, it was hypocritical even.
But his point above is valid. He should be able to make a record of his own actions.
Historical point: Last summer there were lots of protestors running around in New York during the Republican Convention. The NY Police effeciently rounded them up and took them away, often on charges of disruption, resisting arrest and whatever else they could think of. But the protestors were smart. They had their own people out there recording the whole thing on Tape. When the cases came to court, they played it back. The protestors were not disrupting anything. They obeyed the police. they didn't resist. 90% of the cases were dropped or thrown out. Did the police bring out their own tapes of what happened? No. The citizens made recordings of themselves (and their friends) and it was very helpfull, specifically against those that were supposed to be serveiling them "fairly".
This goes to Manns point. Those serveiling you may not necessarily use that in your best interest when it does not suite them to do so. It is up to you to do that. And who knows, if you record them, you might see them doing something they shouldn't, like false arrest.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Yep its pretty frightening to know that such things may be going on more often than we know.
0 5/ 04/14/1349256
Here is a link to the story of how the lawyers discovered the edited nature of the "evidence".
URL:http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=
"Doctor, it's not the voices I hear in MY head, but the voices I hear in YOUR head that really frighten me."