Blogathon 2009 – Why document surveillance cameras? “Greening” our democracy

This blog post is part of Blogathon 2009, in which I am blogging for 24 hours straight in order to raise money for the Vancouver Public Space Network, an entirely volunteer-run organization who do advocacy and education on the public realm in my home of Vancouver, British Columbia. Please consider supporting by sponsoring me with a pledge, leaving a comment or contacting me to contribute a guest post.

Richard Smith is a professor at the Simon Fraser University School of Communication, and Director of the Centre for Policy Research On Science and Technology.

My students and I keep track of the surveillance cameras in our neighbourhood (see our map in Flickr).

You might wonder why we do this. We are not – for the most part – afraid of them invading our privacy and our documentation efforts aren’t part of some sort of resistance effort. We know that most of them are either broken or unattended and that they have grainy out of focus images. Even when they do work properly, they only capture something that most people are quite willing to have seen: themselves as they walk around the city. So why bother keeping track of them?

We do it because we think that by documenting the cameras we can provoke discussion of what they are and why they are in our midst. You would be amazed how many people don’t even notice them, or don’t know what they are when they see them, or believe they are some sort of state/government/police initiative (few cameras in Vancouver are put up by government, beyond a few traffic cameras… so far).

The lack of awareness, or misunderstanding of their function, could be construed to mean that they are benign or meaningless. We don’t think so. We think they are corrosive of our civil rights and we need to regard them as a kind of “pollution” that should be strictly controlled.

Environmental pollution is toxic and controlled because the earth can’t cope – naturally – with the byproducts of many industrial processes. In a similar way, surveillance cameras are a civil process with a nasty byproduct – an un-reciprocal gaze. Lack of reciprocity – the inability to question, confront, or challenge someone – is a corrosive substance in a democracy. We’ve known this for centuries, and that’s why one of the foundations of a free society is the right to challenge your accusers in an open trial. Surveillance cameras permit none of that and each of us, whether we are doing anything wrong or not, is a little bit more diminished when we are watched by something that can’t be “watched back.”

By documenting the cameras, and talking about the cameras, we hope to a) bring some general dialogue about surveillance cameras and why and where they are used in our society, and b) simulate a little bit of “reciprocity” by subjecting them to the same gaze that we feel every time we walk under their lenses.

Join us, and the Vancouver Public Space Network Surveillance Working Group, as we continue snapping cameras and putting their location, capabilities, and ownership on our web site.