f'rexample the Rodney King video: this was an example the the people surveilling the State. but it was in the mode of witnessing and recording, not in some kind of preventive sense.
I think the State should be totally open to surveillance by the people. I would feel far safer in, zBs, a police station if I knew that there were IP-addressed CCTV cameras everywhere and that amateurs were randomly accessing them. what if we were an open-source society?
OTOH there is some point surely at which one desires privacy and asserts a civil right to it? the loutish practise of leaving microcameras in women's loos, for example, for the sophomoric amusement of little creeps with nowt better to do, should damn well be illegal imho. would we want our doctor's consulting room or our analyst's couch to be webcammed?
there are two models to which ubiquitous surveillance can lead us. one is the authoritarian model of paranoia and control, citizens being kept under observation by an omnipresent state apparatus, watched from afar by people who themselves are invisible and operate with impunity. the other is the ur-village of our human past, where everyone simply knows everyone's business because we're all living in the same public space and sleeping in the longhouse at night.
this kind of "village surveillance" can have a very civilising effect (as Jacobs points out in her book on American cities). basically most people are less likely to commit offences when they know "someone" is watching. the trouble with the authoritarian state model (which imho is where the whole "security state" trend leads us) is that the watching is asymmetrical, one-sided. the watchers remain hidden and therefore they are more likely to commit offences and abuses, being "invisible".
so it comes down to what we mean by "ubiquitous" -- if it means that Authority has cameras everywhere watching us, but we cannot watch them, then imho this is a bad antidemocratic thing and will inevitably lead to abuse and repression. if it means that there are cameras everywhere and they belong to random people or are public space, accessible by all, then it may not be such a bad thing, though a bit of a culture shock for those of us raised in the interregnum between the original village and the digital village. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
We've seen how people surveilling the State can provide a check on the abuse of power. Another example (of a sort) is the leaking of images from Abu Ghraib via cell-phone cameras.
More systematic surveilling of the State could provide a still more effective check. It seems to me that the strongest principled resistance to this (skipping lightly over the inevitably enormous unprincipled resistance) would be in monitoring intelligence gathering (watching the watchers) and military activity. In these areas, however, delayed access could give much of the benefit of public oversight while undercutting arguments for secrecy. We wouldn't be able to see where the army was deploying today or what they were planning, but would eventually be able to review the camera data in detail, perhaps a week later. (There would be complications regarding legitimately sensitive data, but this should never be an excuse for permanent, opaque secrecy.) Moderately delayed access would still provide accountability.
I like the village surveillance model, because it offers a point of reference based on long-term, widespread human experience. It would be illuminating to consider both what village life has been like and what the similarities and differences might be with various patterns of surveillance management. One can imagine pathologies if the village expands to the world (stalkers from beyond the horizon), but these potential pathologies might be addressed and minimised by controls on the diffusion of data. (Maybe there are cameras in the loos, but the records are encrypted and can only be opened by subpoena.)
Culture shock... Yes, and worse if the new culture is intrinsically intolerable. This issue is rushing toward us and seems poised to cause political and social change of transformative scale. I think it's worth trying to understand what outcomes are both possible and acceptable, to help us decide what is worth trying to achieve. Words and ideas I offer here may be used freely and without attribution.
problem: the Gummint can always afford bigger computers than we can.
I think this is a worthwhile topic. one data point might be the gov't office in (Germany I think?) Euroland which was made totally visible -- a "fishbowl" building where the public could look into any office at any time and see their tax dollars at work. The difference between theory and practise in practise ...
