by
John
Perivolaris
On
the streets of cities in the United States and Europe
we are witnessing a dramatic proliferation of surveillance
cameras trained on citizens' every move through increasingly
privatised public spaces. For example, the average Londoner
is daily caught on camera 300 times. But, while the citizen
is constantly watched, they are increasingly restricted
from photographing those same spaces. In London, the capital
city with possibly the world’s highest concentration
of CCTV cameras, it is unlikely that one will not be approached
by security guards, police, or plain clothes officers if
one attempts, as I often do, to photograph almost any building,
but particularly corporate offices in the City or Canary
Wharf. This is also true if one attempts to do the same
in the vicinity of residential areas housing the transnational
rich, whose most high-profile representatives are the Russian
oligarchs of Kensington, Holland Park, Knightsbridge, Mayfair,
Belgravia, and Chelsea. Often justified as an anti-terrorist
measure, intrusive surveillance and its attendant restrictions
often merely serve corporate security or that of the rich,
in a displacement of the public realm by capital.
CCTV
Cameras, Borough High Street, London SE1 2007
© John
Perivolaris |
CCTV,
Smithfield,
London, England 2007
© John Perivolaris |
CCTV,
Whitehall,
London 2007
© John
Perivolaris |
London’s
photographers are not alone. The photographer and journalist
Bill Adler reports that a ban on photography in the downtown
area of Silver Spring, Maryland, is being strictly enforced.
However, he observes that the restrictions being imposed
in a public space by the police and security guards there
are not supported by law.
Photography
proves an easy target in a current climate of hysteria
fuelled not only by the fear of terrorism but also what
the journalist Mike Hume has termed `the mood of irrational
paedophile-phobia that grips our culture’.
In
response, there has been widespread anger among photographers
and campaigners. In a pre-emptive move, the British photographer
Simon Taylor started a petition on the Downing Street website
which, between 14 February and 13 July 2007 attracted 68,300
signatures. These supported Taylor’s call on the
then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, to resist the temptation
to grant legal status to de-facto `restrictions regarding
photography in public places’. The petition added
that: `It is a fundamental right of a UK citizen to use
a camera in a public place’.
At
the same time, the New York Times has reported on the
public outcry that has lead city officials to redraft a
proposal that would have obliged photographers, film- or
video-makers there to obtain permits and liability insurance
of $1 million.
These
actions draw attention to the fact that citizens are
swiftly being transformed into suspects. This should
be of universal concern beyond the photographic community.
For example, the British government is currently determined
to enact legislation that would enable it to issue its
citizens with ID cards. These would carry all the holder’s
personal information and would have to be carried at all
times and presented to the authorities when requested,
with no grounds for such a request having to be asserted.
This would mark a reversal of the democratic principle
of the state’s answerability to its citizens, with
surveillance acting to inflate the currency of fear and
paranoia on which Western governments, particularly in
the US and UK, now trade in exchange for their citizens’ acquiescence
to the ever-narrowing restriction of their civil rights.
How
might photographers, artists, activists, along with their
fellow citizens, further respond to the plethora of undemocratic
restrictions to which they are now subjected in the name
of security? Is the right to watch swiftly becoming a
monopoly of the state? Is democratic citizenship also
now a struggle for the right to see as well as to be
seen? Who now has the right to record individuals’ and
groups’ experiences of public spaces?
CCTV
elevador, Bentinck Court Apartments, Sneinton,
Nottingham, England 2008
© John Perivolaris |
One
perversely subversive deconstruction of the state of
surveillance is that of the artist Hasan Elahi, who was
mistakenly detained at Detroit airport in 2002 on suspicion
of being a terrorist. Repeatedly interrogated by the FBI,
Elahi not only proved his innocence by using online records
to trace his movements but decided to make his entire life
an open blog. Elahi continues to prove his innocence with
each of about a hundred photographs he daily posts to his
website and thus forestalls his possible disappearance
to Guantánamo through total visibility. Elahi is
effectively overloading the surveillance systems to which
he is subjected by continuously GPS live-tracking his location
online through a cellphone hacked anklet, photographing,
and providing textual data of the most trivial details
of his daily life online 24 hours a day. The resulting
information overload `floods the market’, in his
words, and devalues the intelligence held on him by the
authorities through an exhaustive process of self-surveillance.
`24
hour CCTV in operation',
Morrisons Supermarket,
Nottingham, England 2007
© John Perivolaris |
Elahi’s response might be associated with the idea
of the `Transparent Society’ developed by the author
David Brin in his 1998 book of the same title. Seeing the
loss of privacy as an inevitable result of the digital
age, Brin believes that the only way of restraining the
authoritarian deployment of surveillance is by embracing
surveillance and making it openly available to all. In
this way, according to Brin, the accountability of surveillance
is ensured.
The
subversiveness of the transparent life Elahi has adopted
also aligns him to a certain extent with the concept of
sousveillance, of which there are several noteworthy proponents.
The term refers to actions that imply a process whereby
surveillance is placed under reverse scrutiny. This is
achieved by ironically mirroring its technologies and strategies
of looking from the point of view of the citizen under
surveillance. The aim of sousveillance interventions is
to make visible the power relations inherent in contemporary
surveillance society by temporarily turning them upside-down:
surveillance, from above, is translated into sousveillance,
from below. The communal online presence and democratic
accessibility of grass-roots sousveillance interventions,
might counter surveillance’s authoritarian corrosion
of a sense of community in a climate of suspicion. Sousveillance
would reconstruct the secretive centralised authority of
surveillance as a distributed power structure that aims
to strike a state of equiveillance through its inherent
accountability and egalitarianism. Equiveillance ideally
implies a democracy where citizen and state have equal
access to the means of watching in and watching over public
space. How might this be achieved to our benefit?
An
international coalition of activists from the arts, sciences,
and technology, including Sousveillance.org have declared
the 24th of December, World Sousveillance Day or Shoot
Back Day. Since 2001 they have used their own cameras
to `shoot back’ at
surveillance cameras in public spaces on the busiest shopping
day of the year, when the highest numbers are probably
under surveillance. Inevitably, they also record their
encounters with security guards who attempt to stop them.
The
inspiration for these interventions is Steve Mann, one
of the sousveillance movement’s most influential
figures. Having coined the term
sousveillance, Mann is a pioneer of the cyborglogging or
glogging technologies deployed by Elahi, whereby the web-posting
of data, whether visual or other, is an autonomous process
that does not need to be consciously triggered by the user.
(Cyborglogs "glogs").
Mann’s
current research at the University of Toronto involves
the development of wearable webcam and webcasting equipment
and software that allows the user to glog 24 hours a
day. Mann
has experimented netcasting his life by wearing a webcam-enabled
helmet and has focused his attention on surveillance
environments and those who enforce the authority of surveillance,
such as security guards and even shop employees, who
oppose his choice to turn his camera on them. As Professor
Ronald Deibert, also of the University of Toronto, has
observed, the result of such a reversal is that `they
lose their anonymous power of surveillance, and it makes
them feel vulnerable’.
(Record
the Lens That Records You). Mann’s suggestion
for the 2002 World Sousveillance Day, as reported by Wired.com (ibid.)
underlined its subversive rationale:
Affix
a dark acrylic rectangle to the front of a sweatshirt,
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 Shrödinger’s Cat:
maybe it is a camera, maybe it isn’t, but its very
existence changes the behaviour of the people nearby.
Similarly, Mann and other activists have further experimented
with wearing fake security MayBeCams modelled on those
used in casinos and department stores.
In
`Cyberglogging
with camera phones: steps towards equiveillanc,
Mann and his co-writers point out that, though it is tempting
to view the relationship between surveillance and sousveillance
`as binary, us-versus-them opposites, [but] we are hoping
to build a system of equiveillance, that is, the possibility
that these two very different social practices might somehow
result in some kind of equilibrium’ (p. 178). In
parallel to Brin’s thoughts, they conclude that `one
of the virtues of equiveillance is an increased reciprocal
transparency in the operations of powerful entities engaged
in surveillance’ (p. 179).
It
is perhaps in the spirit of equiveillance that I would
ask you, dear citizens and photographers, how safe do you
feel under surveillance? Your response might be one small
step towards reclaiming public space through debate. The
resulting dialogue is necessary to ensure democratic freedoms
and to counter the imposition of government policy from
above based on hitherto non-transparent fear-mongering.
John
Perivolaris
john.perivolaris@ntlworld.com
April, 2008
**
 |
John
Perivolaris is an independent documentarian
and fine art photographer. He is currently working
on a project entitled Left Luggage, which explores
migrant identities.
Between 2005 and 2007 he was the Board Chairman
of LOOK 07 and co-organiser,
with Julian Tait, of The Democratic Image Symposium.
Perivolaris is the administrator of the flickr `Surveillance
Mirror’ group,
to which readers are invited to contribute. |
