Video Activism and the ambiguities of counter-surveillance

Abstract

This paper examines the use of visual technologies by political activists in protest situations to monitor police conduct. Using interview data with Australian video activists, this paper seeks to understand the motivations, techniques and outcomes of video activism, and its relationship to counter-surveillance and police accountability. Our data also indicated that there have been significant transformations in the organization and deployment of counter-surveillance methods since 2000, when there were large-scale protests against the World Economic Forum meeting in Melbourne accompanied by a coordinated campaign that sought to document police misconduct. The paper identifies and examines two inter-related aspects of this: the act of filming and the process of dissemination of this footage. It is noted that technological changes over the last decade have led to a proliferation of visual recording technologies, particularly mobile phone cameras, which have stimulated a corresponding proliferation of images. Analogous innovations in internet communications have stimulated a coterminous proliferation of potential outlets for images Video footage provides activists with a valuable tool for safety and publicity. Nevertheless, we argue, video activism can have unintended consequences, including exposure to legal risks and the amplification of official surveillance. Activists are also often unable to control the political effects of their footage or the purposes to which it is used. We conclude by assessing the impact that transformations in both protest organization and media technologies might have for counter-surveillance techniques based on visual surveillance.

Racialization as a Way of Seeing: The Limits of Counter-Surveillance and Police Reform

“…Despite widespread public and press discourse of the reform and punitive justice potential of video evidence of state violence, scholars have complicated the democratic and counter-hegemonic claims of counter-surveillance practices (Monahan 2006) by identifying the ambiguities of the outcomes of visual data (Wilson and Serisier 2010), the re-creation of power asymmetries between anti-police brutality activists and the communities they intend to help (Huey, Walby and Doyle 2006) as well as between researchers of marginalized communities and their subjects (Kemple and Huey 2005). Brucato (2015) deepens these critiques by illuminating the ways in which the discourse of visual objectivity undergirds both repressive and resistive regimes of surveillance.…”

Policing on camera

“…Accordingly, Stephanie Simon (2012) describes the post-9/11 security environment as involving a police coordinated "war on photography". Wilson and Serisier (2010) characterize this game of revelation and avoidance between police and citizen journalists or social activists as a "surveillance arms race", where the police develop measures to prevent citizens from recording them, and citizens develop counter-efforts to record the police without being fined or arrested.…”

The New Transparency: Police Violence in the Context of Ubiquitous Surveillance

“…Cop watching has come to describe two kinds of activities. Cop watching has always referred to organized, intentional documentation of police by community groups; but it increasingly also describes the incidental, happenstance documentation by independent civilians (Huey, Walby, & Doyle, 2006;Toch, 2012;Wilson & Serisier, 2010). The modern ideal of transparency would suggest that making visible the administration of the law would protect civilians from its excesses, because transgressions would be subjected to accountability-or otherwise administrators would lose legitimacy.…”