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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."
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record ... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Does this make sense to anyone?
Taking pictures of cameras taking pictures of you is not keeping a record of your own actions.
Further, unless he's alleging that video will be doctored, the record that is kept of him, privacy issues aside, is just that. How is taking pictures of the devices recording YOU going to prevent them from improperly keeping an accurate photographic record of your own actions. Again, whether they SHOULD be keeping record of your actions is beside the point for this specific question.
All these are - wallets that require someone else to swipe their ID to see your ID, etc. - are just publicity stunts to get people thinking about privacy. Great. People should be thinking about it. But then they jump from the likes of the GAP in a mall to government (???), and apparently liken a lowly employee in the mechanics of either someone who should themselves have to give up personal information for simply asking for identification for whatever purpose (again, the extent that it is appropriate is beside the point).
Seems a little wrongheaded to me.
To say nothing of the fact that almost all malls are private property.
Mann asked the guard why, if the Mont Blanc cameras were recording him, he couldn't, in turn, record the cameras.
Why should a random private mall employee have a philosophical privacy and surveillance discussion with some self-righteous, cynical privacy advocate. Who, by the way, expects exactly what happened, i.e., worthless responses, to happen?
But sure to please and amuse countless slashdotters, I'm sure. (Yeah. Because confusing near-minimum wage mall security is really hard.)
Oh, if only world politics worked this way.
U.S: We wish to disarm Iraq.
Iraq: Bzzt. We're sorry, but in order to disarm our weapons, you must disarm your weapons too.
Mann quoted Simon Davies of Privacy International, a London-based nonprofit that monitors civil liberties issues: "The totalitarian regime is the regime that would like to know everything about everyone but reveal nothing about itself," Mann said.
Good luck getting inspectors into places in the US.
If only there were someone with a camera with enough balls/stupidity/both to try that out? Michael Moore anyone?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Gee, that's tough to do.
At the Gap, photographers were told they couldn't take pictures because the Gap didn't want competitors to study and copy its clothing displays.
Good laugh. All they need to do it walk in and LOOK at it. Duh.
in any event, I don't think malls are the best place to start - I think public cameras, being monitored by government agencies, or cameras placed in locations where we live would be a more justified target. Malls have a right to protect their assets from shoplifters. On the other hand, I'd argue that a property manager or government agency doesn't necessarily have the right to watch me as I come and go, who I'm with, or anything else of that nature.
Ok, this is either the art of looking at sauce, the art of looking under tables, or the art of spying on Dr. Seuss.
From Wikipedia: Sousveillance refers both to inverse surveillance, as well as to the recording of an activity from the perspective of a participant in the activity (i.e. personal experience capture).
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
The relationship then of authority to civilian is one of dominance and subordination. The ideas presented at the conference are attempting to redefine that relationship.
This is my last post.
[6th Estate]
used a smoked-glass oval guard tower to induce discipline and good behavior
Sounds an awful lot like Las Vegas casinos to me.
...
Oh wait, you say it was designed for a prision. Oh, I suppose that makes sense too.
There are 10 types of people in the world. Those that understand this sig, and those that beat up people who do.
More then a few of them were quite effective, ex-military and reservists that enjoyed providing protection, whether it was to people, goods or property. They weren't morons incapable of rational or deep philosophical conversations. They just ended up where they ended up and felt comfortable where they were.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
...that give privacy advocates a bad name. He's not a professor, he's a performance artist.
Who watches the watchers watching the watchers?
These kind of publicity stunts annoy me because they're devoid of any real solutions. Stores need cameras to catch shoplifters and prevent petty crimes. Is Mann advocating that these cameras be removed? No - he's just saying we should be "aware" of all the surveillance. Okay, fine, we're aware, but what's your specific solution? Oh, you don't have one? Then go away.
Tristan Yates
It sounds like a bunch of people who are trying to make a good point are basically just making life more difficult for the new generation of blue collar workers who staff service industries and who consider their days blessed if they can get through them uneventfully. Especially middle-layer managers of mall chains, whose job description is basically to make problems go away as quickly as possible before somebody notices.
Then again, when I was slinging burgers as a youth, somebody creating a scene would have been a welcome distraction. Still, I think their point is well-meant but poorly-executed. Most retail chains are going to disallow photography inside the retail space for a number of reasons, most of which your typical manager is utterly ignorant. So the fact that stores were ushering them out is irrelevent. If they were taking pictures of the color of the walls or the brand name of the urinal cakes, they should have expected a similar response.
A cute idea that, like most of these kinds of demonstrations, ultimately makes transparent that the people engaging in these kinds of stunts aren't that bright. I'm all in favor of privacy advocacy but this kind of stuff ... well, at best it raises awareness, at worse it paints privacy advocates as misguided loonies. I question whether or not the stunt is worth the tradeoff, especially since it doesn't really prove or demonstrate anything other than the obvious fact that private retail spaces typically disallow photography of any kind on their grounds.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
At Nordstrom, an undercover security guard who looked like Baby Spice and sported a badge identifying her as Agent No. 1, summoned a manager who told Mann that customers would be disturbed by the handheld cameras.
Illogically, she didn't have a problem with participants pointing their conference bag domes around the store to take photos, just with the handheld cameras.
The author needs to read his own article before calling this illogical. She was concerned with customer comfort, and people often don't like to see folks taking pictures in a place where they're trying on clothes. Her logic is perfectly consistent in that she knows that the bag domes go virtually unnoticed by the customer, whereas the handhelds don't.
Also, what does the "Baby Spice" dig contribute here, other than letting everyone know how immature the author is?
RTFA be damned, I stopped reading at this point.
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?
Actually, there is a pretty strong reason to prevent taking photos of security devices. That is, preventing intrusion. The first thing a thief does when entering a monitored area is to somehow fool the security - and it's much harder if the security devices are unknown. Yes, security through obscurity - the obscurity being just one of elements of the system, not the only one - is more efficient. A well planned robbery would require detailed plans of the building, with focus on the security devices. Obviously the management wants to prevent that. ...although, in the era of miniature cameras that can be easily hidden in a handbag etc, taking photos in a way not visible to the shop security is quite easy...
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i worked on a project sort of like this with a collective in chicago. we mapped and documented surveillance camera's in chicago's loop (downtown) area. our site is up at http://open-loop.org/.
we had some issues with security guards asking us not to tape, but mostly restricted our documentation to public areas (cameras monitoring public space), so it wasn't as much of an issue.
the surveillance camera players have some more camera maps on their site
and probably my favorite application of this idea is the institute for applied autonomy's i-see , which allows users to map a "path of least surveillance" through nyc.
Just saying, you find all types...
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Is a great ideer. I should at least be able to record who recorded my ID.
So when I get my creditcard bill, I can see that Greg Pinpolowsky wanted to see my ID when I bought my last computer. However I think the shops would dislike of this, private persons "gathering" personal information is generaly disliked, since few would trust them not to misuse it.
Corporate bodies however, who are actually in a position to misuse personal information, are generaly trusted.
In Soviet Russia the system is watched over by you!
Say what you will about the paranoia of all these sousveillance nuts, but don't pretend that it doesn't serve a valid purpose. For instance, remember all those RNC convention protestors who got arrested last year? And those sworn affidavits from cops saying that those kids had been kicking and screaming, resisting arrest and so forth? Yeah, those cops were making shit up.
I wonder why this hasn't gotten wider play. Are we now entirely unsurprised when cops perjure themselves? Had it not been for some paranoid kids with camcorders, a lot of people would have been unjustly imprisoned. I mean, more than they already were.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
getting paid to be a nutbag off tax payers' and students' dime.
Thats the best kind of professor, or would you rather he brought a bible(or accepted textbook) to class and read directly from that. So what hes doing right now is 'worthless' other then perhaps he actually did he job as a professor and caused people to think, in this case about their privacy.
This has to be proof of a low UID getting a free ride from the mods, I don't mean to attack personally. Just because you can't see the value in something doesn't mean its devoid of value.
Also the professor was a Canadian so leave your tax payers arugment out of, we canucks are used to paying the government for useless shit doesn't seem to bother us as much.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
"Mann sported his signature camera eyewear, while some of the other participants wore CFP conference bags around their necks. The bags had a dark plastic dome stitched on one side -- modeled after store surveillance domes -- which they pointed randomly at passersby, unnerving them."
No kidding this was unnerving. Whenever anybody displays behavior ooutside the norm and tries forcing themselves upon passerbys it's always unnerving, Mann et al are not special in this case. I'm guessing the large group of pale, nerdy looking people would be unnerving enough, the plastic bubbles were merely icing on the cake.
Steve Mann isn't a nutjob -- he's essentially been a Cyborg for a while, now. He's one of the pioneers in this area, and some of his work is truly pathbreaking (such as the Eyetap device).
His idea is that if others insist on recording all your actions, it's probably best that you record all your actions as well -- that's not so bad, when you consider the way folks can and do get framed in real life.
Someone has to watch the watchers, or at the very least make sure that the watchers aren't making things up. I see that as a laudable goal.
Much like the example, I walked around a store, and looked up at random video cameras throughout the store. This so freaked out the store manager on duty that she called the police, and not one, not two, but THREE cops showed up to deal with me.
Now, I could be wrong, but I think that it is a little extream to have the cops come out after you just for looking at the camera's in a store. I am also in charge of the security cameras at my college, and if someone started looking up at them, I would think "They must be interested in security cameras" and if they photographed them, I would wonder why, but for goodness sake...
I may get flaimed for this, but I think that America is turning more and more into a police state. The more we want protection, the happier we are to give up our rights and thank the person we are giving them to.
Being Steve Mann and being a nutjob aren't exclusive.
Yes, he's been a cyborg for a while. Yes, he's done some groundbreaking first-steps type work.
But I've seen interviews with this guy, he goes everywhere with his funky head gear and attitude. He has been having that same exact conversation with every security guard he can get to look at him -- it's always "if you can record me why can't I record you -- and BTW, you're on the web". It always ends up with the security guard sending him on his way. He does this in airports for crying out loud.
Heck, I've seen interviews with his damned parents, and as much as they've accepted what he does, they think in ways he's a bit of a nutter.
Do I think there needs to be someone who is out there pushing these boundaries? Absolutely. Do I think he's also a bit fo a nutjob? You betcha! Do I accept that he's a 'cyborg'? Only in the loosest possible terms.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Of course some would say the real purpose of art is to provoke, and this certainly passes the test on that front. In a Post 9/11 era world it's amazing the surveillance-surveillance wasn't halted on possible terrorism suspicions.
I have a nice cell phone I can no longer bring to work because it contains a digital camera. The Gym where I work out prohibits camera cell phones as well and not just in the locker rooms, but the Gym area, which ironically is on complete view from the street with floor to ceiling windows.
I have friends who like to snap pictures of random individuals and then deride these strangers later for their looks, clothing, or activity -- "Look at this Bozo." There are people who don't like to have their pictures taken for just this reason, with digital photography costing next to nothing these days it is happening more and more. In the past such people were just being paranoid, today they are being realistic -- not that it really should mater if someone you don't know is making fun of your clothes behind your back.
I guess I'm a bit conflicted about all this. I would like to be able to take my pictures anytime anywhere I would like, but I understand why some people would have a problem with it. Storeowners don't typically like people behaving in ways that discourage patronage. Someone clicking away uninvitedly at you while you shop kind of has this feel.
I would support stores having to clearly mark possible surveillance equipment, whether real or not. I would also support public access to government surveillance equipment that monitors public areas.
As for what I can do with my camera on private property, perhaps the privacy issue lies with the storeowners and not the camera wielding performance artists.
Letter To Iran
Looked like Baby Spice?
This thread is useless without pictures!
No offense, but it sounds like you're saying "if you don't know exactly how to fix something, you shouldn't even mention it's broken".
I guess I should stop sending bug reports in, then.
http://epresence.tv/mediaContent/website_archived. aspx?dir=Open~Source~and~Free~Software:~Concepts,~ Controversies~and~Solutions~(May~9-11,~2004)
Scroll to the bottom of the page to find his talk in the list.
Cheers,
Richard
As an engineering student at the University of Toronto ("Toike Oike! Toike Oike! Ollum te chollum te chay!" etc.) I shudder everytime I read anything along the lines of "Mann, a University of Toronto professor...". To my knowledge he hasn't taught a class in two years, and hasn't taught anything besides a postgrad seminar based on his own book - moreover his published work is repetitive and focused on his personal goal of becoming a cyborg. His lab is very small in proportion to his media profile and commercially (rather than research) -oriented.
In general this makes me feel badly for some of the truly excellent professors UofT has doing pioneering research in a wide range of fields. They tend to labour in anonymity because their work (in many cases with wider implications than Mann's) is less understandable to the general public and keeps them sufficiently busy to preclude field trips to Seattle malls. I sincerely hope this stunt wasn't in any way funded by his UofT salary.
In David Brin's "Earth" (science fantasy, but a good read anyway) a percentage of the citizens commonly walked around wearing small cameras, recording/transmitting live everything they saw. In the book these citizens were complete assholes, trying to force everyone else to conform with their narrow moral views, but in our world it could also be used to record the actions of authorities and use those transmitted recordings to keep abuses in check. Which is why at some point I'm sure you'll see legislation banning these devices from use in public places, as even bulkier camcorders are tripping up authority-types who like to break the law and lie in court to cover their asses (RNC being the last big example I can think of). No way, no how is the government going to allow the citizens to surveil *them* with the ease that it surveils *us*.
Mark my words - you heard it hear first, on Slashdot. The legislation will come up, and it will be passed. I give it six, seven years at most.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
. . . in a mall.
I do not like them on a wall.
I do not like surveillance cam.
I do not like them Steven Mann.
There's a book by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C Clarke about a new (cheap) technology which allows everyone to monitor everyone else. How it does it is relatively unimportant (wormholes), but sitting in your home in London you could watch a couple in their bedroom in Tokyo, and the latter have no way of knowing, and no way of stopping it (other than making sure it is totally dark).
Great power to the government... but also power to everyone else since people can watch the goverment as well as the government watching them.
Then they figure out how to send the holes back in time, so not only can you watch anyone anywhere, but also anyone at any point in the past. Government and business coverups become almost impossible (as does cheating on your partner or taking a private shower).
Is a 'fair' situation where nobody has any privacy at all better or worse than an imbalanced one where big organisations have privacy and private citizens have only some?
I'm a number, not a free man!
Your first point, about "forcing" people to think, has some validity -- there can be times when it's appropriate to force people to think, perhaps because some injustice is taking place which needs to be called to people's attention, but there may be other times when such forcing may be less justifiable.
However, that has little to do with the pledge of allegiance issue which you raise. The issue there is that the pledge is something that is supposed to be shared by all US citizens, and even more pertinently, said by children under the direction of teachers in public schools. In that situation, significant coercion is being applied, on multiple levels, to children to have them say "under god", no matter what their beliefs on the matter, or, for that matter, the beliefs of their parents. Their only alternative, to refuse to say it, is likely to be a socially costly exercise -- the sort of thing that is going to raise people to have strong, even radical feelings on the matter.
This is precisely one of the reasons behind the principle of separation of church and state. You don't want to apply coercion to your own citizens on matters of deep personal belief -- it's only going to get you in trouble.
For 62 years from the time it was written, the pledge was something which could be shared by all citizens, until Congress stepped in and hijacked it in the name of religion. In so doing, they expressly violated the Constitutional clause which reads "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". Congress could get away with that because it happened during the McCarthy era, when religion was seen as a bastion against communism, which was associated with atheism.
Today, there's no excuse for it, and even those of religious faith should recognize that it's not in their own interests to impose such a thing on their fellow citizens. If they refuse to acknowledge that, they are merely setting up an "us against them" situation, and relying on their majority status to be able to have their way. Such people should be ashamed of themselves, especially considering that most of them are Christians, since they are certainly not following the spirit of Jesus Christ on this matter.
Before everyone yells at them and tell them to take off their tinfoil hat, let me clear something up.
I think that many people have a rightful distrust of those in authority, because often those in power tend to abuse that power to stay in power.
For instance- Let's say that you're pulled over by the police. They have their cameras recording your every action. If you had complete 100% trust in your government, there would be no need to film the police doing their job, since they're already filming it for you. But all too often they abuse that power and selectively lose/find recordings. If an officer unlawfully beat someone, do you think the recording would ever be used in that person's favor? Not likely, since it wouldn't be in the police department's best interest to share that information.
This is about more than just videotapes. This is about keeping the balance of power in the citizens' favor, the way it should be. Remember, the US is supposed to have a government run by the people, under the citizens' supervision. The citizens control and monitor the government, it's not the other way around.
Do you people have some kind of alarm that goes off when ever someone mentions "low UID", is it like the bat signal?
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
At Nordstrom, an undercover security guard who looked like Baby Spice and sported a badge identifying her as Agent No. 1, summoned a manager who told Mann that customers would be disturbed by the handheld cameras.
I live in Seattle, so if someone could kindly tell me which mall this was I can go investigate this matter further.
During the Repubican convention/military garrison last year, police arrested over a thousand people on all sorts of charges. Those arrested on the whole alleged lying on the parts of the police who swore out the complaints. Here's the followup, and it illustrates the point of sousveillance beautifully.
.html
-Remember that all protestors of the prez are subjected to HEAVY intimidation through the use of video cameras.
From the front page of the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/12/nyregion/12vid eo
Videos Challenge Accounts of Convention Unrest
By JIM DWYER
Published: April 12, 2005
Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.
"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."
Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.
During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.
A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.
For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.
Among them was Alexander Dunlop, who said he was arrested while going to pick up sushi.
Last week, he discovered that there were two versions of the same police tape: the one that was to be used as evidence in his trial had been edited at two spots, removing images that showed Mr. Dunlop behaving peacefully. When a volunteer film archivist found a more complete version of the tape and gave it to Mr. Dunlop's lawyer, prosecutors immediately dropped the charges and said that a technician had cut the material by mistake.
Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."
So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not provide details.
Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of explicit violence.
Throughout the co