ON THE ID TRAIL RESEARCHER ATTEMPTS TO SHIFT BALANCE AWAY FROM SURVEILLANCE
posted by:Ian Kerr // 02:00 PM // April 14, 2005 // Surveillance and social sorting
steve mann made quite a "splash" in seattle yesterday at CFP (computer, freedom and privacy) by presenting his views on what he calls "sousveillance", a set of practices which he thinks are necessary as a counter-balance to increasing state and corporate surveillance.
at the end of the first day of the conference, steve and other members of the on the identity trail project led a sousveillance tour of seattle, funded by bell canada.
as a participant on that tour, i experienced first hand the fact that those who engage in surveillance jealously guard their own anonymity, prohibiting the reverse practice of allowing citizens to photograph, record or otherwise capture images of the way they do surveillance. the watchers don't like being watched!!
although i personally disagree with many of steve's own practices and some of his arguments about achieving what he calls "equiveillence" by "shooting back", it was quite compelling to experience the attitudes of those engaged in surveillance and how much insight foucault had on the subject when he wrote discipline and punish .
if you want to read more on steve and how his views were received by david brin and others at CFP, here is an interesting article from the seattle times
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.blogonnymity.com/powerblog/mt-tb.cgi/23
Comments
Ian:
alot of what Steve does is correlates with current trends in what is happening with wearable computing transitioning from research tool to consumer technology.
Our cellphones, as they accumulate more memory, become a sousveillance tool. Equiveillance is a natural consequence of everyone having equipment that can record, then archived, and then found.
Bell Canada has been an early sponser of wearable computing research for many years and has been very good in developing systems that increase transparency.
Whether we agree of disagree with Steve's ideas, they are rooted in empiric observation. The sousveillance tour, was a very strong anthropologic field study, and touches on deep, and complex pschological issues that Migram had raised in the past.
Advertising systems that interact with cellphones will eventually converge with steve's mediated reality ideas, and hence the need to invent systems that firewall protect the subconscious.
ideas on profiling consumers, and targeting marketing systems are evolving for near future marketing in malls: this is converging with the surveillance industrial complex that the ACLU and EFF is concerned about.
The property rights issues is something that intersects the verichip idea as well.
Do we own the things we experience? do we own ourselves? Think about recent book deals that persons sell their names, or life biographies, and find themselves being owned. This is in the realm of the very public person. But are we all becoming public? Like the politician in the Seattle Times article? Are we all in a state of Amber alert loss of privacy cause we are all in a state of perpetual risk?
I think this needs to be contextualized with the new guidlines of protecting ones digital presence and self: I do not think making blogs recomendations anonymous will solve the problem as the EFF has pointed out. This is not addressing the root problem, and only a temporary fix to a larger issue.
If one is not aware of how sensors are being used in ones enviroment, then we are loosing the battle.
Steve Defcon7 lecture touches on these issues and contextualizes how sousveillance is needed, just as language is needed, to defend oneself in the future.
Sousveillance contextualized in contempory society does not make complete sense to our generation: you may get a good sampling of different attitudes to sousveillance by developing a age grouping questionaire: younger persons growing up with text messaging and blogs, see sousveillance differently than the 60+ professional.
If you go to any toy store and image the spy toys, there are many similarities to eyetap devices, and spy systems that are entering our culture.
Posted by: stefanos at April 15, 2005 06:45 AM
Slides from the conference keynote, opening plenary panel (Steve Mann, David Brin, and others)
are in wearcam.org/cfp2005/
Pictures are in http://wearcam.org/cfp2005/cfp2005pictures/
including pictures of the dome sewing party where many well known volunteers such as John Gilmore, Jon Pincus, Deborah Pierce, etc., helped to make 500 maybecameras, one for each conference attendee. Some of the maybecameras had wireless transmitters to send live video offsite, but attendees did not know whether or not they were watching.
For more background information on the maybecamera sousveillance project, see some of the papers published in Leonardo on t
his topic.
Posted by: Steve Mann at April 18, 2005 09:50 PM
