Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
Who watches the watchers?
A new system monitors the operators of CCTV as they are on the job watching live surveillance footage. An intrusive irony.
Archive for the ‘article’ Category
Monday, March 16th, 2009
New surveillance cameras can “predict” crime before it happens.
“The cameras can alert operators to suspicious behaviour, such as loitering and unusually slow walking. Anyone spotted could then have to explain their behaviour to a police officer.”
Minority Report?
convicted by camera
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009A farmer in Virginia had a camera pointed at his property by game wardens, and was convicted of accidental trapping caught on film. This has brought the awareness of surveillance and privacy to even rural areas, where I think most people would much less expect it.
The farmer’s attorney noted on appeal, “As noted by other courts, hidden video surveillance invokes images of the ‘Orwellian state’ and is regarded by society as more egregious than other kinds of intrusions.”
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
flickr.com/photos/surveillance
I read an article last summer about a journalist’s experience in Rangoon, Burma (Myanmar). About the military government’s stifling of entertainment industry, and the effect on its people. What stuck with me was the “ghost” presence effect that the government’s surveillance program has created on the streets. Here’s an excerpt:
“In a 1977 book called Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault discussed the social effects of surveillance, using a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1787, called the Panopticon, as a model. The cells are arranged in a circle around a central observation tower, so that one person inside the tower can see into every cell at all times, but the prisoners, while able to see the tower, never really know whether there is a person in there watching them, or not. The observer can see out, but the observed can’t see in.
Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers.
This was why there was no visible military presence in the city. It wasn’t necessary. The people controlled themselves.”
Full article by Scott Carrier.
