Ambiguous ambitions with counter-surveillance
The following is a blog post from Peter Ullrich & Philipp Knopp, whose article “Protesters’ Reactions to Video Surveillance of Demonstrations” appears in the 16.2 issue of Surveillance & Society.
///
When we arrived at the point where almost every person was carrying a camera almost all of the time, many social movement activists became quite optimistic about the potential strength of this tool against police misconduct, seeing the “new visibility” of the police as the key to a new accountability. A symptom of this tendency is the sheer number of apps and websites dealing with cop watching (not to mention the load on YouTube).
On the other hand, many activists, especially those at the more radical end of the scale, have been skeptical about, if not actively hostile towards, the growing numbers of people making recordings at protest events. An obvious reason is that not only the police are being filmed. There also exists a distinct possibility of unwanted information, be it regarding breeches of the law on the part of the protestors or simply personal identity, making its way into the hands of the authorities and/or the public sphere. It was recognized in these circles that counter-surveillance by the public was more than just a counterweight to police power.
“Counter-surveillance is not necessarily an effective counter-weight against state control.”
Another such ambiguity, if not a full-fledged paradox, was found in our study on video surveillance of protest in Austria. A lawyer representing an activist accused of violence against the police suggested that coverage of protest events be dramatically increased, as this would have provided evidence proving his client’s innocence. Activists being both critical of the police and arguing for more surveillance?
Some scholars, like Gary Marx, David Lyon or Dean Wilson, are aware of such ambiguities. Their empirical studies and theoretical reasoning has shown that every move made by one side seems to be met by a countermove from the other. Data, once recorded, can be used to serve a myriad of ends, many of which are unforeseeable at the time of collection. How can activists be so optimistic on the one hand, whilst on the other we know that the rhizome of the “surveillant assemblage” is steadily growing and deepening?
It is for this reason we began to pose the questions: How do protesters (re)act in this ambivalent social space? How do they resolve the inherent contradictions of protest (wanting to be seen, but without being surveilled)?
Our key finding is that attempts to outweigh surveillance by diverse counter-surveillance measures can indeed have unintended effects on several dimensions, one of which is strengthening of the surveillance society by fueling a spiral of surveillance and counter surveillance. Furthermore, we argue that the practices, themes and identities of protest movements in general cannot be understood without taking into account the (power) relation to the police and especially police surveillance. Therefore, we developed the analytical concept of protesters’ “security cultures” to highlight the unintended surveillance/counter-surveillance effects, which influence protesters’ acting and thinking so deeply.
In the end, our results lead us to conclude that counter-surveillance is not necessarily an effective counter-weight against state control.
