BigMother.dk

A lot of people are still occupied with privacy allthough the most Orwells’que of all, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, has called off privacy as a social norm. Actually I expect the privacy movement to grow stronger as a more hip opposition, underground phenomena given the mainstream victory of tracking and monitoring I have discussed on this blog.

As a sort of example of that counter movement one of more ingenious DIY’ers have created a display only viewable with polarized glasses? Funny and clever!

Wired features a nice little series of examples of surveillance as art. Very interesting:

Is there such a thing as citizen-friendly surveillance? Designers, filmmakers and architects are making art out of the technology that watches over us. Mindful of Google Earth, camera phones, over-the-counter spy gear, reality TV, terrorist-conscious politicians and security-obsessed corporations, these interactive auteurs put their own spin on a surveillance-saturated global culture. Is New Voyeurism the next genre?

Christian Möller’s ‘Mojo’

Via Anders

Update: Wired with another argument for the illusionary in sticking to old standards for privacy. Access to vast amounts of data and the possibility to socialize online means the end of control over your data. Quite trivial actually. But triviality has never been a corrective for emotions.

We’ve witnessed at lot of activity lately on the perpetual privacy issue. This time brought about by the initiative by the Facebook designers to allow for more systematic monitoring of the activities of other community members. Big deal I’m tempted to say knowing that some people take their social web life very serious. But I do find it utterly naive to cry for privacy on the web when great parts of this information infrastructure’s success stems from delivering access to information on everything. It seems like common sense that using the web widely might have consequences later on when the web is increasingly used to check people’s credentials and nature as this fresh piece from New Scientist describes. Yesterday I fell over these quotations by Paul B. Hartzog on Many2Many, which captures my feeling quite precisely:

[A]s David Brin points out in The Transparent Society, privacy advocates are typically hypocritical in that they want privacy for themselves and transparency for everyone else. Luckily, transparency doesn’t work that way. If surveillance, then sousveillance. If you can watch me, then I demand the right to watch you. The consequence of privacy is that only the powerful will be able to watch others. In other words, the powerful will have privacy and the powerless won’t. Think about it. When is the last time you were able to see a company’s credit rating before you engaged with them? They do it to you all the time… Privacy is an experience that people have which is not only illusory, but serves the interests of those powerful players who can, and do, violate privacy all the time.

Fighting over privacy on the web feel a bit like the music and movie businesses making a fuzz of loosing a few percentages of their bizarrely enormous revenues due to new rules of the web. Times changes and put wealth and fame into changing hands. Most demands of privacy is so asymmetrical and contextual that it simply seem ridiculous. So far the value of digital payment, mobile phone roaming and web surfing totally overshadows matters of privacy. Add to that, new democratic possibilities to monitor and report lying politicians, reporters creating their facts or companies committing serious social harm over the web with the speed of light. Of course it’s concerning when powerful surveillance measures are coupled with incompetent political paranoia and a legal system put on hold as in parts of the western world, but please put things in perspectives. And referring to old norms like the music-movie industry is futile. Learn to deal with a new reality pragmatically and trust the general rationality and innovation of humans. If privacy becomes a general issue, enough will revolt in an appropriate matter and restore an overall sense of fairness.

Hurry up to get your own surveillance resistance t-shirt. The t-shirt maker Klaus Industries is offering these bold statements for you civil rights activists and soundly alert out there.

Sad they do not come in anti-surveillance fabrics shielding your torso from the penetrating eyes of Big Brother.

Via Cool Hunting

Update Witness have launched a forum on how to establish a successful footage sharing web portal after the discussion featuring af WorldChanging. Go and contribute if you have any good ideas, experience or technical knowledge.

Explorations always happens in jumps. Today I stumbled upon a whole bunch of surveillance niceties (again due to WorldChanging) which I will try to present briefly.

First, in an ‘old’ and quite extensive article at WorldChanging, Jamais Cascio proposes Participatory Panopticon as the more likely non-big Brother future of surveillance:

“… in the world of the participatory panopticon, this constant surveillance is done by the citizens themselves, and is done by choice. It’s not imposed on us by a malevolent bureaucracy or faceless corporations. The participatory panopticon will be the emergent result of myriad independent rational decisions, a bottom-up version of the constantly watched society… if the question is “who watches the watchmen?” the answer is “all of us.”

This view is pretty close to the whole point of BigMother (and what I sometimes refer to as counter surveillance). The article contains numerous valuable links and references, although it sometimes slips into more geekish gadget-futurism.

Second, there’s the term ‘sousveillance’ (watching over from beneath) which beautifully captures some of my personal discont with the Big Brother monopoly. The term is semi-academic and seemingly quite developed. According the site devoted sousveillance:

“There are 2 main definitions, which are approximately equivalent, but each capture slightly different aspects of sousveillance:

1. Inverse surveillance: to watch from below;
2. Personal experience capture: recording of an activity by a participant in the activity. There is already a certain legal precedent for audio sousveillance, e.g. “one-party” recording of telephone conversations enjoys greater legal protection than recording by a person who is not a party to the conversation. In most states, audio surveillance is illegal, but audio sousveillance is legal.”

Also this page is a rich source of references and ideas. I’m not done with it.

Lastly, Peter Gabriel’s (yes, the musician) Witness Media Archive program, dedicated promotion of human right by helping the violated to document the offenses with pictures. Witness have created a web site with filmed or photographed abuses and train people in using this medium. The next step is to allow easy upload and distribution of for instance camera phone footage, which will bring even more leverage to the abused. Even if not CareWare in it’s strict sense, this service truly photo sharing with a sense. Read an interview with Gabriel in Business Week

The British newspaper The Guardian has initiated a swarm surveillance campaign against politicians up for election, especially targeting the always spin-sleek Tony Blair, under the catchy name ‘The Blair watch project’.

As a response to the latest move from the master of spin, British PM Tony Blair, and his staff’s new strategy to avoid unplanned press mediated exposure by misdirecting journalists, the British newspaper The Guardian has organized a large-scale mobile phone surveillance campaign targeting prominent politicians. The Guardian simply asks citizens to document the whereabouts of politicians by means of cameras in mobile phones and a blog to upload the pictures. Although the Guardian’s initiative is probably rather symbolically spectacular than of any practical consequences for the outcome of the British election, it is a good example of what we can expect in the near future in terms of civil counter- and swarm-surveillance, i.e. surveillance turned against powerful institutions or companies often by loosely organized citizens or grass roots. Imagine the same means deployed by consumers against ethically dubious companies (coming up!), by a population against invasive military operations or by citizens to politically highlight social problems or systematic injustice. Link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/blairwatchproject/