Watching the police is not illegal — thankfully that policy is not widespread (yet). While I can see that kind of law spreading, I do not anticipate surviving the scrutiny of attention a supreme court challenge would bring. I am also an optimist.

@Tim

This is a really exciting piece – great work!

Regarding #10. While Jesse Rosenfeld’s beating wasn’t captured on camera he has certainly endeavoured to put himself on camera as much as possible since the summit. I know he pitched The Globe and Mail an article responding to this horrid piece against alternative media by banshee queen and police stenographer Christie Blatchford – I’d like to see the Globe atone for her horrible coverage of activism/journalism during the summit.

Anyways, bring on the distributed sensors!

Watching the police is not illegal — thankfully that policy is not widespread (yet). While I can see that kind of law spreading, I do not anticipate surviving the scrutiny of attention a supreme court challenge would bring. I am also an optimist.

@Tim

This is a really exciting piece – great work!

Regarding #10. While Jesse Rosenfeld’s beating wasn’t captured on camera he has certainly endeavoured to put himself on camera as much as possible since the summit. I know he pitched The Globe and Mail an article responding to this horrid piece against alternative media by banshee queen and police stenographer Christie Blatchford – I’d like to see the Globe atone for her horrible coverage of activism/journalism during the summit.

Anyways, bring on the distributed sensors!

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5965LB200…

If citizen surveillance is “illegal use of a communications facility”, then the law understand technology not as a two-edged tool, but a weapon. Without delving too deeply into the Foucault, I’ll just say that in the knowledge infrastructure, power regimes have a lot of force to bend information to their will. This is disturbingly anti-democratic, because it means that if a picture is evidence, and the police by default aren’t the criminals, then a lot of people in the streets are going to be wearing masks. The panopticon may look everywhere, but who is it looking for?

The media’s knowledge infrastructure, as Tim’s pointed out, was that they had the cameras, they were on the ground, and they could get the images to the people. This informed a certain strategy, of “privileged witness”. But also another strategy, of “right place, right time.” I think it’s amazing that if you look at the era-making news photographs, the photographers will always say that the action happened, they just happened to be standing in a place where they could click the shutter. This leads me to think that there are any number of photographs that haven’t been captured, because there wasn’t anyone standing there.

You can’t out camera-phone a camera-phone, so now anybody can be a “privileged witness”, in “the right place at the right time”. And so the privilege is gone. This means there are a lot more people standing around waiting to click the shutter, and yet we’re still missing “important photos”. So, the field is flooded, everyone’s a camera, and we’re still not seeing what needs to be seen.

“Ubiquity” is the word on everyone’s lips, because it sounds a lot like “mass movement”, and it also represents the new technology. But what does ubiquity really get us?

Now, it would be a huge can of worms to open the question of “what are we trying to do with the images” here. The easy answer something along the lines of “witnesses mean better behavior”. I don’t personally think that is true. But even if it was true in principle, ubiquitous surveillance doesn’t stop crime. Crimes will be missed, there will be gaps, and eventually you end up with so many video feeds, no one can observe them all. And from the perspective of the street, cops just don’t care. Has any cop been named, or disciplined at all, regardless of the images captured?

In my experience, what people in the streets need is knowledge. Not raw data, but an infrastructure of knowledge. This could take the form of orders (“Go here”) or status report (“Adam is at X and Y”). But at a protest, there’s no time to sift information, study it, and decide on a course of action. The strategy is what needs to be ubiquitous, and the knowledge infrastructure needs to be directed. A lot less “mass”, a lot more “movement”.