References: Sousveillance and Activism, Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center, Harvard University, describes camera phones and personal safety.
It has often been said that the true causes of terrorism are oppression, bad foreign policy, and secrecy, rather than privacy. (In fact some have even gone so far as to say that they've felt more frightened of the soldiers of their own armed forces than of the so-called ``terrorists''.)
Secret organizations often run open-loop, without the normal feedback mechanisms that provide important checks and balances. Feedback is the simple process of observability-controllability like we find in a home thermostat. When the homeland gets too hot, the thermostat provides the checks and balances needed to shut off the furnace. But the secret burners under the political pressure cookers have no thermostat --- nothing to keep them in a state of equilibrium or balance. Rather than short-cycling on and off regularly, they run for longer and longer but more drastic cycles called ``revolutions'' or other more major forms of unrest, disaster, or carnage.
It is not privacy that is the cause of the problem. It is not the unphotographed, unfingerprinted, unsurveilled citizens who are to blame, but, rather, it is the larger pressure cooking machinery that needs to be questioned.
Blaming terrorism on individual citizens is like blaming the blown up boiler on the first few molecules of steam that escape through the first rupture in the pressure cooker.
Instead of putting each molecule under surveillance to see which are the first to ``step out of line'', we should really be looking at the secret stove that operates witout scrutiny.
But these same police and military forces have their own surveillance networks, police photographers, police videographers, and covert surveillance infrastructure. Such one sided (biased) ``evidence'' is perhaps worse than no ``evidence'' at all.
Such is the case in a department store, where video surveillance cameras are often totally concealed or ``conspicuously concealed'' in large smoked plexiglass domes of wine-dark opacity, so that an otherwise hidden camera creates a highly visible uncertainty. Often dozens of domes are used to conceal only a few cameras, with most of the domes being empty. Such domes call to mind a gambling casino or department store, where video surveillance is used extensively, yet photography or videography by individual persons is strictly prohibited. Casinos, department stores, customs offices, and other places having such monopolistic Witnessing policy fall under the following definition of totalitarian regime:
In one of the earliest critiques of the ID card proposal (January 1986) Professor Geoffrey de Q Walker, now dean of law at Queensland University, observed: One of the fundamental contrasts between free democratic societies and totalitarian systems is that the totalitarian government [or other totalitarian organization] relies on secrecy for the regime but high surveillance and disclosure for all other groups, whereas in the civic culture of liberal democracy, the position is approximately the reverse.---Simon Davies
(http://wearcam.org/envirotech/simon_davies_opposition_to_id_card_schemes.htm)
Totalitarian regimes are often the cause of terrorism, or at the very least, often have a higher incidence of terrorism than less oppressive regimes. Thus increasing ``security'' may actually increase terrorism, rather than reduce it.
I derive the term ``sousveillance'' from surveillance, which is defined by Merriam-Webster (summarized) as follows:
sur.veillance French, from surveiller to watch over, from sur- + veiller to watch, from vigil vig.il from Latin, wakefulness, watch, from vigil awake, watchful; akin to Latin vigEre to be vigorous, vegEre to enliven 2 : the act of keeping awake at times when sleep is customary; 3 : an act or period of watching or surveillance : WATCHThus, loosely speaking, sousveillance is watchful vigilance from underneath.
Thus the ``under'' (sight) means from down under in the hierarchy, rather than physically as in ``underneath'' the floor.
Let me begin by giving some trivial but illustrative simple examples of various kinds of sousveillance:
Certainly the benefits of sousveillance are obvious:
Examples of inband sousveillance (which I call "subveillance") include:
Of course if governments and corporations collude to form a (possibly corrupt) ``covernment'' (corporations plus government), the effectiveness of such sousveillance may be diminished. Likewise if the media is ``bought-out'' by corporations, or unduly influenced by police and government, the effectiveness of such out-of-band sousveillance is also compromised, because it then becomes, to some extent, less out-of-band (and thus not much more effective than inband sousveillance).
Conversely, organizations that embrace, and even encourage sousveillance tend to enjoy greater stability. For example, governments that encourage freedom of a truly independent plurality of the press, tend to enjoy reduced terrorism.
Another common criticism is that by simply shooting low-level clerks in department stores, we don't get to the true perpetrators of surveillance in higher places. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shooting at low level clerks creates a problem they can't deal with. The clerks then get their managers. The managers see the problem, and very quickly the matter escalates to head-office. The quickest way to get to speak with a manager is to photograph the low-level clerks. You get to speak to a manager much faster than if you merely ask to speak to a manager (in which case they often lie and claim that the manager is not present, or is in a meeting).