Ronald Deibert, a University of Toronto associate professor of political science, wants people to grab their cameras and hit the shopping malls Dec. 24 and participate in World Sousveillance Day.
Surveillance means “to view from above.” Sousveillance means “to view from below.”
On the day before Christmas, at noon, local time, all over the world, Deibert wants citizens to “shoot back” at surveillance cameras — not with guns, but with cameras of their own. Participants are to head out, in disguise, to their favorite malls and public spaces, and photograph all the security cameras they find.
Deibert warns that photographing security cameras will quickly cause large men wearing navy blue blazers and two-way radios to place their hands over your camera lens. Photographers may even be escorted off the premises.
Which is exactly the point. Deibert hopes World Sousveillance Day will “raise awareness about the increasing pervasiveness of all forms of surveillance in today’s hypermedia society.”
“A lot of people probably aren’t aware of the extent to which they’re being monitored,” he says.
Deibert chose Christmas Eve because it’s one of the busiest shopping days of the year.
Pointing a camera at a surveillance camera is the brainchild of Steve Mann, an MIT Media Lab graduate who pioneered the wearable networked computer/camera. When he was netcasting his life from a helmet mounted webcam, he got into a number of situations in which the people who controlled the security cameras didn’t like having his camera turned on them.
Mann’s suggestion for World Sousveillance Day? Affix a dark acrylic rectangle to the front of asweatshirt, with the following words clearly visible: “For your protection, a video record of you and your establishment may be transmitted and recorded at remote locations. ALL CRIMINAL ACTS PROSECUTED.” Mann likens this device, which he calls a MaybeCam, to Schrodinger’s Cat: maybe it is a camera, maybe it isn’t, but its very existence changes the behavior of the people nearby.
full article at Record the Lens That Records You.
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