A2 Sousveillance

PermutationInstitutions Necessary
Combining legal reform and critical surveillance studies is
necessary to make meaningful political change.
Cohen 15 [Julie, professor at Georgetown University. Studying Law
Studying Surveillance, Surveillance and Society. Vol. 13 Is. 1]
Relative to legal scholarship, work in Surveillance Studies is more likely to
build from a solid foundation in contemporary social theory. Even so, such
work often reflects both an insufficient grasp of the complexity of the legal
system in action and lack of interest in the ways that legal and regulatory
actors understand, conduct, and contest surveillance. By this I dont mean to
suggest that Surveillance Studies scholars need law degrees, but only to
point out what ought to be obvious but often isnt: legal processes are social
processes, too, and in overlooking these processes, Surveillance Studies
scholars also engage in a form of black-boxing that treats law as monolithic
and surveillance and government as interchangeable. Legal actors engage in
a variety of discursive and normative strategies by which institutions and
resources are mobilized around surveillance, and understanding those
strategies is essential to the development of an archaeology of surveillance
practices. Work in Surveillance Studies also favors a type of theoretical jargon
that can seem impenetrable and, more importantly, unrewarding to those in
law and policy communities. As Ive written elsewhere (Cohen 2012a: 29),
[t]oo many such works find power everywhere and hope nowhere, and seem
to offer well-meaning policy makers little more than a prescription for
despair. Returning to the topics already discussed, let us consider some
ways in which Surveillance Studies might benefit from dialogue with law. Let
us return first to the problem of digitally-enhanced surveillance by law
enforcementthe problem of the high-resolution mosaic. As discussed in the
section above, works by Surveillance Studies scholars exploring issues of
mobility and control offer profound insights into the ways in which continual
observation shapes spaces and subjectivitiesthe precise questions about
which, as we have already seen, judges and legal scholars alike are skeptical.
Such works reveal the extent to which pervasive surveillance of public spaces
is emerging as a new and powerful mode of ordering the public and social life
of civil society. They offer rich food for thoughtbut not for action.
Networked surveillance is increasingly a fact of contemporary public life, and
totalizing theories about its power dont take us very far toward gaining
regulatory traction on it. That enterprise is, moreover, essential even if it
entails an inevitable quantum of self-delusion. Acknowledgment of pervasive
social shaping by networked surveillance need not preclude legal protection
for socially-shaped subjects, but that project requires attention to detail. To
put the point a different way, the networked democratic society and the
totalitarian state may be points on a continuum rather than binary opposites,
but the fact that the continuum exists is still worth something. If so, one
needs tools for assessment and differentiation that Surveillance Studies does

not seem to provide. As an example of this sort of approach within legal

scholarship, consider a recent article by legal scholars Danielle Citron and
David Gray (2013), which proposes that courts and legislators undertake
what they term a technology-centered approach to regulating surveillance.
They would have courts and legislators ask whether particular technologies
facilitate total surveillance and, if so, act to put in place comprehensive
procedures for approving and overseeing their use. From a Surveillance
Studies perspective, this approach lacks theoretical purity because its
technology-specific focus appears to ignore the fact that total surveillance
also can emerge via the fusion of data streams originating from various
sources. But the proposal is pragmatic; it does not so much ignore that risk as
bracket it while pursuing the narrower goal of gaining a regulatory foothold
within the data streams. And because it focuses on the data streams
themselves, it is administrable in a way that schemes based on linear
timelines and artificial distinctions between different types of surveillance are
not. One can envision both courts and legislatures implementing the Citron
and Gray proposal in a way that enables far better oversight of what law
enforcement is doing.

PermutationIntersectionality
For counter surveillance to be effective, it must include a
flexible pedagogy that evaluates contextual, relational
and ethical dimensions of power.
Fernandez & Huey 2009 (Luis and Laura, Northern Arizona Univ. &
Univ. of Western Ontario, Is Resistance Futile? Thoughts on Resisting
Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 6:3)
It is also important to understand the different types of actors who may
engage in surveillance, since the social and power location of the actor will
inevitably impact the type of dynamic that unfolds. We know from numerous
studies that surveillance, as defined above, can originate from different
locations. Rather than categorize the different types of surveillance
techniques, then, it is more useful to enumerate the different types of actors
who may engage in surveilling a subject. Surveillance can originate at several
different levels, as has been pointed out before. Some of the possible actors
include the state, employers in various institutions (private and public),
corporations (collecting data on clients), or individual and interpersonal
actors (such as spouses, lovers, neighbours, and so on). Key to this crude
typology is the implicit understanding that power dynamics will likely vary
depending on the location of origination, thus producing different dialectics.
In some instances, we may document conflicts between corporations and
their clients, resulting in a power dynamic different from the surveillance by a
state actor of political protestors. In other words, our analysis of surveillance
should be predicated on the origins and actors involved. If the above logic is
correct, then it follows that studying surveillance (and resistance) is going to
be situational, contextual, and historically specific. Lets now turn to a quick
examination of resistance. As a central theme in the surveillance literature, it
is sticking that resistance, as a concept, remains under theorized. In part, this
may be due to the generalized nature of the concept, which can cover vast
territories of divergent human action. Thus, like surveillance, it is probably
useful to start not with all-encompassing definition, but with an
understanding that resistance too will be contextual, relational, and
dependent on the power dynamics of a given situation. Possible actors
engaged in the resistance of surveillance, then, could include individuals,
groups, institutions, networks, and the state itself (e.g., states versus states).
But the nature of resistance tactics, technologies, and techniques will evolve
in a direct response to a power struggles.

PermutationMiddle Ground
Understanding transparency and secrecy as antipodes is
to reductive, rather we should have a blending of the two.
Birchall 11 [Clare, professor of cultural studies at the University of Kent.
Introduction to Secrecy and Transparency: The Politics of Opacity and
Openness, Theory, Culture & Socieity. Is. 7-8 Vol. 28]
To take this last area, Jacques Derridas work on the secret can help us think
through the problems of a democracy committed to an idea of total
transparency. Transparency cannot easily accommodate those who want to
be exempt from its project, those who want to remain not merely private, but
singular (which Derrida equates with the secret when discussing the limits of
democracy [Derrida with Ferraris, 2001]). Because of this intolerance for
singularity, transparency risks looking less like an agent of democ- racy and
freedom and more like a tool of totalitarianism. Derrida writes: If a right to
the secret is not maintained, we are in a totalitarian space (Derrida with
Ferraris, 2001: 59). From this perspective, secrecy functions as a constitutive
element of transparency, while transparency defines itself as a reaction
against secrecy. A regime that embraces transparency will only ever be able
to go so far before it tips over into totalitarianism because of its parallels with
surveillance, particularly when extended to citizens. Resisting the call to be
transparent to the state is, then, automatically registered as a sign of guilt.
But if the regime doesnt go far enough, if it shrinks back from applying
transparency to its own actions, the regime meets the charge of
totalitarianism coming the other way (for acting covertly, autono- mously and
without an explicit mandate).4 Hence an infinite hesitation, a radical
undecidability, within any democracy that counts transparency among its
operating principles. Hence too the prospect of a debate between
transparency and secrecy that will never be concluded, because far from
being inimical to each other, they are symbiotic.
This is why the stakes of that debate are so routinely misunderstood. Its not
a question of reframing the supposed opposition between transparency and
secrecy in ever wider perspectives, because such reframing assumes that the
terms can be made to yield to interpretive mastery. (This introduction and the
context it provides might not be immune to this charge.) Nor should we give
in to the fantasy that there is a beyond of transparency, a beyond of
secrecy, or a beyond of their mutual dependence. The undecidability might
be unbearable, might tempt us to come down on the side of secrecy or on
the side of transparency, yet the more intelligent response is not to seek to
resolve the tension so much as to inhabit it strategically. Just as Derrida has
analysed the Nietzschean and Freudian Jenseits, and the intractable logic of
the pas au-dela' , so we need to find dif- ferent ways of staying with the
aporia of transparency-as-secrecy.

The same goes for secrecy-as-transparency. The aporia becomes clear if we

restate the condition of the democratic subject outlined above. Without a
right to secrecy, the subject in a democracy ^ a liberal democracy committed to transparency ^ will find herself deprived of that which confers her
singularity upon her, where the singularity of the subject constitutes democracys primary unit. And yet the subject who, in her singularity, regards her
right to secrecy as absolute ^ as she should, as she must ^ will thereby
jeopardize her right to belong to the social bond construed now as the
democracy of individual subjects rather than the democracy of individual
subjects. The right to be counted among democracys subjects involves a
minimal coming into the transparent light of that social bond, even as every
step towards it marks a step away from the singularity, the singular
possession of the singular secret, that licensed that very movement. The singular, democratic subject is charged with maintaining an absolute secret that
is incorruptible, while holding it out for it to be corrupted, to have its secrecy
dissolved in the light of the common forum, this being the price to pay for
belonging to the democracy that recognized her singularity in the first place.
The subject of democracy is fated to vacillate endlessly between the shadows
and the light.

Cede the Political

Their method cant create institutional change- the AFF is
DA and the perm solves- AFF is a better strategy
Monahan 6 (Torin, Professor of Communication Studies at The University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4
(DECEMBER 2006), p 13, PDF)
While each of the four counter-surveillance interventions covered so far seeks
to raise public awareness and to mobilize for social change, none of them are
completely successful at moving their critique from the individual to the
institutional plane. The SCP come closest to doing this, but so far their plays
remain too isolated and discrete to effect long-term change. This deficiency
may be in part because activists construct surveillance problems in
individualized and abstracted terms in order to make them somewhat
tractable and receptive to intervention. The challenge lies in ratcheting-up
the unit of analysis to the institutional level so that lasting change can be
effected. The desired outcomes might take the form of better regulation and
oversight of surveillance and/or meaningful democratic participation in the
process of setting surveillance policies, for instance. In the long run, as the
next section will argue, the oppositional framing of surveillance versus
counter-surveillance may be counterproductive for achieving these goals.

No Alternative Solvency
Counter Surveillance does not remove individuals from
the gaze of the state and ultimately expands state power.
Monahan 2006 (Torin, Prof. @ UNC Chapel Hill, Counter Surveillance as
Political Intervention? Social Semiotics 16:4)
While each of the four counter-surveillance interventions covered so far seeks
to raise public awareness and to mobilize for social change, none of them are
completely successful at moving their critique from the individual to the
institutional plane. The SCP come closest to doing this, but so far their plays
remain too isolated and discrete to effect long-term change. This deficiency
may be in part because activists construct surveillance problems in
individualized and abstracted terms in order to make them somewhat
tractable and receptive to intervention. The challenge lies in ratcheting-up
the unit of analysis to the institutional level so that lasting change can be
effected. The desired outcomes might take the form of better regulation and
oversight of surveillance and/or meaningful democratic participation in the
process of setting surveillance policies, for instance. In the long run, as the
next section will argue, the oppositional framing of surveillance versus
counter-surveillance may be counter- productive for achieving these goals.

We can never be sure that counter surveillance will

actually stop larger structures of power or global
capitalism.
Monahan 2006 (Torin, Prof. @ UNC Chapel Hill, Counter Surveillance as
Political Intervention? Social Semiotics 16:4)
I would build upon these observations to say that the conflicts between
surveillance and counter-surveillance practices today represent a larger
struggle over the control of spaces and bodies. It is doubtful that police or
security forces are intentionally manipulating spaces and bodies with
surveillance and other strategies because they explicitly wish to neutralize
democratic opportunities; in fact, they most likely believe that their actions of
social control are preserving democracy by safeguarding the status quo
(Monahan 2006b). Be that as it may, such activities advance neoliberal
agendas by eliminating spaces for political action and debate, spaces where
effective alternatives to economic globalization could emerge and gain
legitimacy if they were not disciplined by police and corporate actions.
Therefore, it should not be seen as a coincidence that the demise of public
spaces is occurring at the same time that spatial and temporal boundaries
are being erased to facilitate the expansion of global capital. The two go hand
in hand. Whereas one can readily critique Hardt and Negri for their attribution
of agency to capitalism or to the amorphous force of Empire, their systemic
viewpoint is worth preserving in what has become a contemporary landscape
of social fragmentation, polarization, and privatization. Dominant and
subordinate groups serve as asymmetrical refractions of each other in

emerging global regimes. Surveillance and counter-surveillance are two sets

of overlapping practices selectively mobilized by many parties in this conflict,
but the overall effect is unknown.

Counter measures can spiral into a surveillance arms race

which overwhelms action or discussion on any issue
neutralizing political effectiveness.
Wilson & Serisier 2010 (Dean and Tanya, Prof. @ Monash Univ.
Australia & Prof. @ U. of Sydney, Video Activism and the Ambiguities of
Counter Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 8:2)
The constant interplay of move and counter-move between police and video
activists activates ascending spirals of surveillance and counter-surveillance,
what Marx has termed a surveillance arms race (2007b, 299). Thus while the
safety of protestors and the witnessing and documenting of misconduct
remain powerful drivers of video activism, an increasingly frequent rationale
of video activism is to counter the escalating visual surveillance of protest
events undertaken by police. One video activist remarked: I think it is [video]
important as well to counter the incredible levels of surveillance that police
put on protests. They have really sophisticated surveillance on protests, like
camera positioned in key strategic areas and telephoto lenses with small
digital cameras right on hot spots. So we need to have our cameras there as
well because you see in cases which have happened in the past evidence the
police collect, somehow all of the footage of events which incriminate the
police go missing while all the evidence that might incriminate protestors of
certain things comes to light (McEwan interview). This transformation also
appears to accompany a diminishing of the power of the image in relation to
protests. As one video activist with fifteen years experience videoing protests
remarked at one point it was very powerful to have even just a portable
camera there, that was the new thing...eventually they realised it was better
to just have their own cameras there, so I gradually saw the collaboration of
more and more police cameras (Jacobs interview). Situations where police
are armed with cameras facing protestors armed with cameras can reach
heights of absurdity, as the same videographer suggested so you video them
videoing you and it just gets sillier and sillier. We know youre looking at us
and its that sort of projection of power through the process of surveillance
and sort of static (Jacobs interview). Such counter moves on the part of
police potentially lead to a Kafkaesque situation where counter countersurveillance promotes a spiral of surveillance enmeshed within layers of
neutralization. The surveillance spiral ends in a cancelling out, a form of
surveillance gridlock, where the act of monitoring has eclipsed both action
and control.

Counter-surveillance will fail to hold the state accountable

within the current social order legislative instruments
only restrict dissent and images are recontextualized in
favor of the state
Wilson and Serisier, 10 [Dean, Monash University. Tanya, University
of Sydney. Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance,
Surveillance & Society 8(2). P 171-172]
In protest situations the law becomes an instrument mobilized by all parties
to execute moves and countermoves. Peter Manning has suggested that the
law serves as a mystification device or canopy to cover selectively,
legitimate, and rationalize police conduct (1997, 94). In protest situations police
regularly invoke the power of legal statute to rationalize blocking moves
aimed at video activists. Video activists have been threatened with several
pieces of legislation that have been mobilized to curtail filming and threaten
video activists with the prospect of criminal proceedings. Dale Mills gives the following
example: In New South Wales at least its an offence under some circumstances to audio record a conversation without
the other persons permission, and of course most video has audio on it, and so that has raised the question as to whether
for example if were recording a conversation between a protestor and a police officer, and neither of them know that
theyre being recorded has raised the question as to whether thats legal. On more than one occasion weve had police
officers come up to us and say you need to turn the video off now, because youre breaching the Surveillance Devices Act,
thats a recording deviceand weve said but were not recording anyone, and the police officer said well Im speaking to
you and youre recording me (Mills interview). Another videographer was threatened with prosecution under recent
counterterrorism laws, and was informed that the facility he was videoing (a large power station) was categorized as key

Such inventive redeployments of law equate with the

soft-line social control outlined by Fernandez, where a wide range of
legislative instruments often diverted a significant distance from their
intended purpose - are marshalled to restrict dissent (2009, 90-91). Video activists
infrastructure (McEwan interview).

also strategically engage the law, and the surveillance of police has significant evidentiary validation, particularly as it
may be utilized to file complaints against police misconduct. For Dale Mills, founder of Sydney Copwatch, the purpose of
monitoring police at protest actions is: essentially to do the job that the superior officers should be doing, and that is to
make a complaint about police misbehaviour, to highlight the question with police misbehaviour, and to offer the video as
solid evidence. People can easily challenge oral evidence, a bit more difficult to challenge photographic evidence but

However, there was a consensus amongst all

participants that, at least in the current regulatory system, complaints
against police behaviour at protests were highly unlikely to succeed
irrespective of the presence of video footage. It was suggested that there is a
lack of accountability because the police investigate themselves, and the
Ombudsmans Office endorse whatever the police do (Mills interview). The
possibility of seeking official redress is limited in a number of ways. Masking
video is very good (Mills interview).

moves (Marx 2003) may foreclose the usefulness of footage for official exposure of police misconduct. Complaints to the
New South Wales Ombudsman, for example, have been returned on the basis that without a name or number it is
impossible to ascertain the police involved. As police frequently refuse to give their name on request and just as
frequently fail to wear identifying badges in protest situations they are capable of neutralizing the official visibility of the

Moreover, such images are inserted and recontextualized in

official contexts within which police interpretations occupy a privileged,
though not unassailable, position. Surveillance images are always subject to
interpretation, and in the domain of official inquiry and legal proceedings
police are positioned to supply the official definition of the situation (Doyle
2006, 211). The structural space of those undertaking surveillance is
therefore of considerable consequence, as it is not inevitably coupled with
the power of interpretation. This perhaps explains the pervasive cynicism
activists camera.4

based on experience expressed by all participants regarding the capacity of

counter-surveillance to render police officially accountable.

Sousveillances dependence on accessing mainstream

media empties counter-surveillance of its radical political
content
Wilson and Serisier, 10 [Dean, Monash University. Tanya, University
of Sydney. Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance,
Surveillance & Society 8(2). P 174]
those interviewed
were acutely aware that there was always the potential for it to become a
poisoned chalice. Attitudes towards the mainstream media thus remain
deeply ambivalent. One videographer, for example, questioned the continued salience of the Rodney King
Nevertheless if accessing the mainstream media remains a holy grail of video activism,

video as a foundational motif of video activism, suggesting it was a mistake totake the Rodney King example, of like
this spectacular video equals this social outcome. I think those really spectacular videos are definitely the exception

comments indicate the limitations of feeding footage into

mainstream media. As Lawrence (2000) suggests such media penetration requires a particular constellation of
(Lowenthal interview). Such

dynamics. Moreover while witness video may be of interest to mainstream media, particularly where it is seen to coalesce

the images are

constrained within mainstream media framing. The demands of
newsworthiness can decontextualize footage or lead to it being freighted with
meanings that distort the original intentions of those filming. Videographer Andrew
with newsworthy priorities of policing organizational deviance (Ericson, Baranek and Chan 1987),

Lowenthal suggested footage of police violence could accumulate diverse meanings, dependent upon media framing and
audience positions. He noted that obviously some people would be like Oh give that hippie a good whacking, thats what
they need and then other people might be thats beyond the bounds of what police powers should be, and it should be

Additionally, the broadcast of police violence can also

stimulate internal disorganization in protest movements. Lowenthal also recollected one
limited(Lowenthal interview).

incident where footage was broadcast of police brutality that far from solidifying the organization of protest, had a chilling
effect leading some within the protest movement to conclude oh my god these people [police] are really, really violent
and Im afraid of them. I dont want to go out and protest, and in some ways thats actually what the police were saying as

The intense interest of the mainstream media in conflict

and violence in covering protest events has been well documented (Waddington
well (Lowenthal interview).

1992). Earlier studies of media coverage of protest emphasized ideological framing in which the police are assumed to be

While contemporary
media ecology renders coverage considerably more multifaceted and
conditional (Cottle 2008), our interview participants nevertheless felt
substantial pressure to offer up visual images of violence if they wanted to
access major media outlets. As a videographer involved in an environmental protest action reported they
in the right, capable only of restrained reaction to provocation (Waddington 1992, 178).

[the media] were only really interested in the footage which involved conflicts and specifically conflict with the police

Such
pressure can create internal contradictions for videographers, where they find
themselves concurrently trying to prevent violence through observation while
also aspiring to capture it. As one video activist remarked so youre there as a camera person to try and
prevent biffo but you really want biffo to get it on telly (Davi interview). The hazard of the mainstream
medias preoccupation with violence was clearly articulated: there are two
issues. Theres the issue around which the protest and the activism is
happening and then theres the issue of police accountability and often we
capture stuff which shows police behaving badly and the issue were trying to
get attention for gets ignored for the police stuff (McEwan interview). Protest
movements have on occasion successfully articulated wider political issues
thats all they were asking for. And that wasnt something we really wanted to highlight (McEwan interview).

through media strategies such as theatrical spectacle (Craig 2002; Scalmer

2002), but such strategies are potentially undermined by a visual archive of
violence that activates the time-worn media frame of violent protest a
media frame in which the substantive issue of protest is, in Murdocks phrase,
emptied of its radical political content (1981, 210).

The proliferation of content diminishes the power of

counter-surveillance
Wilson and Serisier, 10 [Dean, Monash University. Tanya, University
of Sydney. Video Activism and the Ambiguities of Counter-Surveillance,
Surveillance & Society 8(2). P 176-177]
The move from dedicated video activist to a situation where everyone is a video activist was neatly summarized by one
participant who suggested that the way were moving is towards raising the idea that everyone is a Copwatcher, certainly

despite such
optimism about the future of the technology there are clearly drawbacks
involved in the circulation of such a plethora of images. Video activist Louise Morris
everyone with a pair of eyes, everyone with a camera or video (Mills interview). Nevertheless,

revealed her ambivalence to this phenomenon: now all the activists are taking videos everyone now has a camera and
theyre not doing the activismwere so mediated now that we like to film everything its proof we were there, proof we
did it and then everyones got access to the YouTubes of the world and Engage Media and that mob are actually
facilitating anyone with a camera, a computer with an editing software to throw it up there. I think its less specialized
which is greatIts

just also those moments you turn up to actions and you realize
that 50 percent of the people are actually there to film it, and then youve got
this massively reducing pool of people who are actually on the doing side of
things. As Morriss comments make clear, the increasing access to portable video technology such as mobile phones
and digital cameras must be understood in relation to the corresponding increase in internet-related technology. In
particular the rise of YouTube has significantly impacted upon the practice of video activism. Launched in June 2005,
YouTube offered a simple platform for the uploading of video using standard browser software and providing URLs and

For some
activists the proliferation of user generated content has diminished the power
of the image, as one proposed the proliferation of media cheapens it, it
means images are not so powerful or they have to be more full-on to grab
anyone (Davi interview). Such observations indeed recall Baudrillards argument
that the explosion of information in a media-immersed society presaged the
erasure of meaning as he suggested information devours its own
contentsinstead of causing communication, it exhausts itself in the act of
staging communication (1983, 97-98). The availability of open publishing has led some activists to question
HTML code that facilitated the embedding of links into other websites (Burgess and Green 2009).

the ongoing relevance of dedicated alternative media sites. For some the very idea of activist media seemed somewhat
remote and even anachronistic in the new media environment. Cameras are everywhere and everyone can post a video
onlineI dont really see the need like I used to (Davi interview). Also, because of the availability of technology and the
capacity of anyone who has got a home computer (Davi interview) to do editing there is little necessity for the kind of
distinct organization that was present at G20 protests. Others who had been involved in video activism since the 1990s
revealed similar sentiments: I think that technology has changed a bit and I think that back then Indymedia was probably
the only website that would allow for open publishing, so open publishing was quite rare ten years ago, and Indymedia
was actually a pioneer in that. Now with open publishing being everywhere, I dont know that that model really works
anymoreI think it feels a bit more disjointed and maybe theres something about power in numbers. I dont know I feel

the
inclination to generate endless content without context was sharply criticized
by some. For those wishing to move beyond witness video in order to produce
compelling narrative documentaries that contextualize events, the
consequence has been an overwhelming cascade of low quality soundbite
footage that says little about the overall objectives and issues with which
that that video activist movement has waned a little bit (Prickett interview). As in the case of Morris,

social movements aspire to engage.

The generation of profligate images is evident not only on

YouTube but seeps into dedicated alternative media sites. As Marian Prickett, an independent filmmaker and video activist,
suggested and its not actually about telling a narrative or theres not a lot of thought given to artistry, its just Ive got to
capture this event now, but just an observation really, and its a shame because I think that those narratives can be really
powerful (Prickett interview). Robbie McEwan, a veteran videographer of numerous protests since the late 1990s,
remarked the tendency, not just in the activists world but across society now, is to produce video, publish it on the web
and expect people to watch it and its a complete fantasy. So we actually need to make video that presents our ideas and
is good and engaging and satisfying to watchrather than just generating tons and tons and tons of stuff and having
people constantly reinventing the wheel and working in isolation (McEwan interview).

Alternative Causes Backlash

Resistance is futilethe surveillance apparatus
anticipates countermeasures and will prevent the
alternative.
Lee 14 [Ashlin, School of Social Science at University of Tasmania. A
Question of Momentum: Critical Reflections on Individual Options for
Surveillance Resistance, Revista Teknokultura, 11 (2), 425-440. ]
However, in suggesting these surveillance neutralisation devices, Marx
(2009) also notes the potential for methods of resistance to be overcome or
nullified through appropriate counter- measures taken by the surveillance
system or authority. These countermeasures are a function of the momentum
of the surveillance system, as momentum dictates the available resources a
system has towards its interests. It is for this reason that any individual act of
resistance is likely to be easily countered by global surveillance systems
individuals simply lack the ability to confront and neutralise this momentum.
Now consider Marxs typology in this light. His first method of resistance,
discovering and raising awareness, is irrelevant as the details of such
surveillance systems are already available, and public awareness is at an all
time high. These programs still continue. Methods such as refusing
surveillance, explaining and con- testing surveillance, and co-operating with
surveillance do not actively seek to change the circumstances or
vulnerabilities of the individual to data collection and are not of interest here.
This leaves a set of neutralisation techniques that focus on making changes
to the indi- vidual's circumstances, including avoiding or breaking
surveillance devices, blocking access to personal data, distorting data
capture, switching the captured data, and piggy backing onto ac - cepted or
unwatched objects or measures. These behaviours represent confrontational
forms of resistance in that they directly challenge the socio-material forms of
order that allow surveil- lance to occur. All of these methods are possible for
individuals. Personal data may be encrypted to prevent access, and the
Internet may be accessed through secure private net- works, or routed
through services such as TOR that disrupt monitoring (See TOR 2014). This
achieves forms of blocking or masking. An individual may choose to enter
false data volun- tarily, acting as a means of distorting. A user might access
the Internet on someone else's computer or use a friends phone, switching
the data collected. Individuals are therefore not without options.
But these options are easily countered by global surveillance systems. The
technological momentum, and therefore prior investment and development in
global surveillance, means that many of the measures suggested have
already been countered by those conducting surveil- lance. For example,
many standard encryption measures, network equipments, and digital
devices have vulnerabilities which state authorities are often aware of and

exploit at will (Menn, 2013; Riley, 2014; Der Spiegel, 2013). When these
approaches do not suffice, state authorities have designed and constructed
network infrastructure and hardware to allow direct access to the fibre optic
or copper lines themselves (Aron, 2013). Privacy services like TOR have been
penetrated by state security services and their encryption protocols broken
(Goodin, 2013). Distortion and switching as a form of resistance are also
misleading, as they ignore how services like PRISM rely on databases of
previously entered information in addition to real time data collection. Entire
datasets of personal information are already in the possession of
governments and private corporations already (Lyon, 2001). A sudden change
in behaviour or shift in the data collected in real time doesn't change prior
knowledge, and the analytical and comparative potential of these datasets
persists. Data collected and circulated within these databases is notoriously
difficult to remove, and is often outside the awareness and means of
individuals themselves (Lyon, 2002). Finally in many cases those conducting
surveillance have enormous ranges of extra techniques for collecting
personal information. Security organisa- tions in the service of nation states
and private companies have a range of covert and exotic measures for data
collection (Der Spiegel, 2013), and consumer level surveillance is often built
into the many digital infrastructure, networks, and standards that consumers
use (Prid- more, 2012). Companies and authorities have also been
extraordinarily successful in "seducing" users away from resistance to
complicity (Lyon, 2007, p. 102). What this suggests is that for individuals
confrontational measures of resistance are limited, and that any mean- ingful
shift in the material realities of data collection is difficult.

The Rodney King beatings show that police and other

state actors become even more violent when counter
surveillance is used against them.
Monahan 2006 (Torin, Prof. @ UNC Chapel Hill, Counter Surveillance as
Political Intervention? Social Semiotics 16:4)
Examples of this problematic, if not dialectical, relationship between
surveillance and counter-surveillance practitioners abound. After the beating
of Rodney King in Los Angeles was captured on videotape in 1991, this did
not necessarily catalyze correctives to actions of police brutality, nor did it
motivate greater police engagement with urban communities. Instead, police
have seemingly used this event to distance themselves further from and
maintain antagonistic relationships with communities (Klein 1997; Monahan
2002) while learning from the blow-up that they must exert greater control
over the conditions where brutality occurs. This enhanced and learned control
can be seen in the torture case of Haitian worker Abner Louima by the New
York City Police in 1997. Louima was beaten in a vehicle on the way to the
70th Precinct station house and was then sodomized with the stick from a
toilet plunger in the police restrooms (Mazelis 1997; Jeffries 2002). Regardless

of the fact that the story did finally emerge, the police officers obviously
exercised extreme caution in regulating the places of abuse (i.e. in a police
vehicle and in a police restroom), and one can speculate that this level of
control was a response to their fear of being under surveillance, and thus
held accountable, for their actions.

Counter Surveillance only makes the police more violent

and capitalism more secretive.
Monahan 2006 (Torin, Prof. @ UNC Chapel Hill, Counter Surveillance as
Political Intervention? Social Semiotics 16:4)
Another example of the dance of surveillance and counter-surveillance can be
witnessed in the confrontations occurring at globalization protests throughout
the world. Activists have been quite savvy in videotaping and photographing
police and security forces as a technique not only for deterring abuse, but
also for documenting and disseminating any instances of excessive force.
According to accounts by World Trade Organization protesters, the police, in
turn, now zero-in on individuals with video recorders and arrest them (or
confiscate their equipment) as a first line of defense in what has become a
war over the control of media representations (Fernandez 2005). Similarly,
vibrant Independent Media Centers are now routinely set up at protest
locations, allowing activists to produce and edit video, audio, photographic,
and textual news stories and then disseminate them over the Internet,
serving as an outlet for alternative interpretations of the issues under protest
(Breyman 2003). As was witnessed in the beating of independent media
personnel and destruction of an Indymedia center by police during the 2001
G8 protests in Genoa, Italy (Independent Media Center Network 2001; Juris
2005), those with institutional interests and power are learning to infiltrate
subversive counter-surveillance collectives and vitiate their potential for
destabilizing the dominant system. A final telling example of the learning
potential of institutions was the subsequent 2002 G8 meeting held in
Kananaskis, which is a remote and difficult to access mountain resort in
Alberta, Canada. Rather than contend with widespread public protests and a
potential repeat of the police violence in Genoa (marked by the close-range
shooting and death of a protester), the mountain meeting exerted the most
extreme control over the limited avenues available for public participation:
both reporters and members of the public were excluded, and a no-fly-zone
was enforced around the resort.

Counter Surveillance subjects activists to more intense

violence from the state.
Wilson & Serisier 2010 (Dean and Tanya, Prof. @ Monash Univ.
Australia & Prof. @ U. of Sydney, Video Activism and the Ambiguities of
Counter Surveillance, Surveillance and Society 8:2)

Hardt and Negri (2004) have suggested that innovative tactics of resistance
spur state agents to implement new modes of control to neutralize
challenges to state power. This is evident in the ironic situation of video
activists, whose efforts to secure safety through imaging renders them
exceptionally visible to police. The monitoring of police in turn kindles
counter-neutralization tactics, in particular strategic incapacitation (Gillham
& Noakes 2007) that aims to neutralize visual monitoring either through
direct physical force or through spatial strategies of containment. Getting
beaten up was one of the foremost hazards of video activism, and those
interviewed reported that individuals armed with video and digital cameras
were commonly targeted by police at protest actions. One activist suggested
police do target people like that at protests, Ive seen it. People with
megaphones, people with cameras they get taken down pretty quickly
(Jacobs interview), while another recollected that quite a few people have
ended up with a black eye and a bruised head (Morris interview). Yes we saw
this during APEC in particular, it wasnt again just not Copwatchers but
members of the commercial media, there was that infamous video Paula
Bronstein for example who was thrown to the ground during APEC, but again
other members of the commercial media who either had police officers block
their filming, or told to turn around and not to film, several of us were
threatened with arrest, there was one undercover police officer who tried to
snatch a camera from my hand, and so it definitely brings attention to
yourself yeah (Mills interview). Spatial strategies of isolation and containment
are an additional counter-neutralization move engaged by police. Fernandez,
drawing upon Foucaults notion of disciplinary diagrams, argues that police
deploy two disciplinary diagrams: the leprosy model and the plague model
(2009, 170). In the plague model, space is divided into a grid and subjected
to surveillance and regular inspection. In the leprosy model, lepers are
expelled from communal space so that sickness is excluded (Elden 2003,
242). Video activists are clearly perceived as lepers, and are subject to
processes of containment and ejection from spaces of protest. Morris
identifies a definite strategy of make sure youve identified who the camera
people in the protest group are, sideline them, dont give them any good
footage and dont give them anything that will turn up in court (Morris
interview). While another video activist suggested some police will act
against you for being the teller of the truth so you can get targeted, camera
can get trashed and your tapes ripped out or personally removed from a
protest because you are documenting it (Jacobs interview).

Alternative Excludes Women and People of

Color
Counter Surveillance technology can be used for cyber
stalking, gender violence and racial exclusion.
Gates and Magnet 2007 (Kelly & Shoshana, Dept. of Comm @ SDSU &
Univ. of Illinois @ Urbana, Communication Research and the study of
Surveillance, Communication Review 10:277)
As the case of cyberstalking suggests, supervisory strategies and their
attendant technologies encode systemic forms of inequality, including
violence against women. The ease with which new communications
technologies may be used for cyberstalking underscores the close relationship between new technologies and their social context. Another major
contribution of communications scholarship to surveillance stud- ies is the
attention critical scholars have paid to this relationship, includ- ing
connections between new information technologies and the reproduction of
social inequalities.10 For example, Suren Lalvani (1996) has theorized the
ways in which new technologies codify discriminatory practices of looking.
Through his analysis of the production of photographic typesincluding the
bour- geois subject, the criminal object, the primitive other, and the ideal
workerLalvani documents the importance of photography to the growth of
surveillance infrastructure. In particular, Lalvanis examination of the role of
photography in the production of the laboring body demonstrates that the
technology was essential to the development of Taylorism and the scientific
management of workers. Photography made it possible to cap- ture
movement and simulate realism in ways that allowed for the produc- tion of a
highly regulated, surveillant apparatus of employee control. Lalvani shows
how the photographic medium built on existing inequali- ties to provide the
conditions for the surveillance of working class sub- jects. The development
of photography as a new communications technology was aided by its
adoption to surveillance practices in the ser- vice of capitalism. While
desirable patrons are targeted by marketing techniques that privilege good
consumers, other surveillance techniques render margin- alized communities
disproportionately vulnerable to policing practices. New surveillance
technologies are regularly tested on marginalized communities that are
unable to resist their intrusion. A new form of sur- veillance technology known
as a one-way voice intercom system recently made its U.S. debut in Faircliff, a
low-income housing complex in Washington, DC. Planners hope that the
securitization of this low- income community will encourage wealthy
condominium owners to purchase property on the neighboring streets.
Staffed by security per- sonnel sitting behind surveillance cameras, the
system allows monitors to speak to tenants but does not permit tenants to
reply. The anonymous system has already been abused. In one case, a
teenage girl who refused to move fast enough when ordered was told Get

[her] fat ass off the corner (Jamieson, 2006). This new communications
technology is again used to police bodies deemed out of place, even as
those bodies are held static by income disparities and the difficulty of finding
afford- able housing. As the Faircliff case suggests, more research needs to be
done on how surveillance practices encode and help reproduce existing forms
of structural inequality.

Counter surveillance assumes equal economic and

political footing that is inaccessible to the poor turns their
method
Monahan 6 (Torin, Professor of Communication Studies at The University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, SOCIAL SEMIOTICS VOLUME 16 NUMBER 4
(DECEMBER 2006), p 11, PDF)
Manns rather unforgiving denouncement of individuals working in stores,
however, reveals certain assumptions about the problems of modern
surveillance. First, by criticizing employees as being puppets who blindly
accept their companies explanations for surveillance and comply with
company policies, Mann implies that all individuals are rational actors with
equal social and economic footing. Thus, if low-income employees elect not
to fight the system like he does, then they must be either ignorant or weakwilled, or both. Second, by calling store clerks and security guards
representatives of totalitarian surveillance regimes, Mann conflates
individuals with the institutions of which they are a part, effectively
sidestepping the important but more difficult problem of changing
institutional relations, structures, or logics. Both these assumptions lead to
the conclusion that one can contend with the problem of rampant
surveillance by intervening on the level of the individual and by educating
people about their complicity with the systems. Unfortunately, the fact that
people have very real dependencies upon their jobs or that vast
asymmetrical power differentials separate workers from the systems they
work within (and perhaps from the activists as well) become unimportant
issues once the critique of surveillance is abstracted and individualized in this
way.