Short of confiscating phones - which won't work well, because I think most people would rather leave a venue than hand their phone over to the police - there's nothing that can be done to prevent people in a protest making and uploading a huge number of different video recordings of the event.

This is more or less the only practical oversight available to us, and it has the potential to be very powerful. We've already seen it having an effect.

What needs to happen is that alternative/protest/citizen media need to go mainstream, with an editorial layer.

Some of that is framing, some of it is presentation, some of it is money.

The problem with YouTube and LiveLeak is that there's no context, so there's no narrative. You watch someone getting tasered, you watch an IED explosion, you watch some freak weather, you watch someone doing BMX stunts, you watch some cats being stupid, you watch someone getting tasered...

Editorial gets a bad rap from the citizen journalism movement, but it's exactly what's needed to merge hundreds of different clips into a social and political pressure point.