Sousveillance
The first International Workshop on Inverse Surveillance, IWIS, took place in 2004,[34] chaired by Dr. Jim Gemmell, (MyLifeBits), Joi Ito, Anastasios Venetsanopoulos, and Steve Mann, among others.
One of the things that brought inverse surveillance to light was the reactions of security guards to electric seeing aids and similar sousveillance practices.
[28] Since the year 2001, December 24 has been World Sousveillance Day with groups of participants in New York City, Toronto, Boston, Florida, Vancouver, Japan, Spain and the United Kingdom.
[35] Sousveillance of a state by its citizens has been credited with addressing many problems such as election fraud or electoral misdeeds, as well as providing good governance.
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.
[37] In 2008, Cambridge researchers (in the MESSAGE project) teamed with bicycle couriers to measure and transmit air pollution indicators as they travel the city.
Classy's Kitchen describes sousveillance as "another way to add further introspection to the commons that keeps society open but still makes the world smaller and safer".
For example, David Ollila, a manufacturer of video camera equipment, was trapped for four hours aboard a Comair plane at JFK Airport in New York City.
For example, police agents provocateur 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).
In Russia, as well as in some other countries where road users trust neither each other nor police, onboard cameras are so ubiquitous that thousands of videos of automobile accidents and near-miss incidents have been uploaded.
[48] Hasan Elahi, a University of Maryland professor, has produced a sousveillance for his entire life, after being detained at an airport because he was erroneously placed on the US terrorist watchlist.
Some of his sousveillance activities include using his cell phone as a tracking device, and publicly posting debit card and other transactions that document his actions.
Well-publicized events involving police-citizen altercations (such as the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri) have increased calls for police to wear body cameras and so capture evidence of the incidents, for their benefit and the criminal justice system as a whole.
[51] Because these body cameras are turned on for every encounter with the public, privacy issues have been brought up with specific emphasis on special victim cases such as rape or domestic violence.
In the era of web-based participatory media and convergence cultures, non-governmental and non-state actors, with their own virtual communities and networks that cut across national borders, use what Bakir (2010)[53] calls the sousveillant assemblage to wield discursive power.
The sousveillant assemblage comprises Haggerty & Ericson's (2000)[54] surveillant assemblage (or loosely linked, unstable, systems of data flows of people's activities, tracked by computers, and data-mined so that we are each reconfigured as (security) risks or (commercial) opportunities, but data-fattened by the proliferation of web-based participatory media and personal sousveillance that we willingly provide online).
These acts of resistance and contestation, in turn, enable civil societies to change old meanings and offer new ones, using a newborn digital agency to create new and contemporary politics of truth.
The permanent potential for sousveillance from so many (as opposed to more formalised exposés at the hands of investigative reporters, a small media elite) raises the likelihood that power abuses will be captured on record which can then be used to hold power-abusers and manipulators to account, providing of course, that there is a functioning legal system and/or public sphere (with mechanisms in place to translate popular demands and moral outrage into real-world change).
The case against police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement has garnered an immense and impassioned following in a very short amount of time.
Yet, the nature of the social change generated is unpredictable and dependent on the sousveillant content, the context of its subsequent sharing, and, of course, the strength of the traditions of deliberation for democratic purposes.
David Brin's 1989 novel Earth portrays citizens equipped with both augmented reality gear ("Tru-Vu Goggles") and cameras exercising reciprocal accountability, with each other and with authority figures, discussing effects on crime and presaging today's "cop cam" developments.
The plot of the 1985 John Crowley short story Snow revolves around a suspended camera recording the whole of a subject's life being sold as a consumer product.
The 2007 novel Halting State by Charles Stross and its sequel Rule 34 depict a 2020s Scotland in which wearable computing has a level of ubiquity similar to that of 2013's cell phones.
The open source science fiction role-playing game Eclipse Phase has sousveillance as a common part of life in the setting, as a result of data storage technology and high-definition digital cameras becoming commonplace and often integrated into any and all objects.
Vernor Vinge's character, Pham Nuwen presciently recognizes the stage of "ubiquitous surveillance" in the collapse-and-rebuild cycle that plagues human planetary civilization in a Deepness in the Sky.
For example, in 2014, a man named Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer in Staten Island after being arrested on suspicion of selling loose cigarettes.
(In an ironic twist, the only person indicted in connection with Garner's death was Orta, who came under police scrutiny and was arrested on an "unrelated" weapons possession charge.
[64] Nevertheless, it can be considered whether this creates a dangerous dependence on private platforms, often ruled by Internet giants (like Google, for YouTube) which have common interests with governments, and who adapt their content through algorithms users don't have control on.
