Obscuring The Surveillance Camera State

It was a couple months ago now that neocrat Joe Lieberman called for a wider use of surveillance cameras in the United States, a news item you might have missed in the lazy, hazy days of summer, when most of you were killing the days fishing genetic mutants at the lake, harvesting virtual gold in a cool dark basement while pounding Red Bulls or bracing the home for yet another blast of tropical hurricane hell. “The Brits have got something smart going in England.” The Brits definitely do have “something going on,” though whether it’s admirable or not depends on what side of the camera you’re on. According to some estimates, “the United Kingdom is monitored by over four million CCTV cameras, some with a facial recognition capacity, with practically all town centers under surveillance.” While Orwellian is a much over used adjective in this overly paranoid and hysterical age, I think it fits here, for one camera for every fifteen persons is pretty fucking crazy. It almost makes you want to rent a nice quiet place above an antique shop in order to get away from it all …

Some (check David Brin’s The Transparent Society) believe that losses in privacy would be beneficial to a society since total transparency could expose elite wrongdoing as well. While I’m sure that notion comes from a noble place, X amount of years living of this planet teeming with
badly wired robots makes the likelihood of that being put into practice extremely unlikely. For example, at the recent Security and Prosperity Partnership talks, who do you think the cameras were trained on? The powerless protesting rabble out front or the backroom North American elites arguing about whether or not an Illuminati pyramid or a beaver wearing a sombrero should be prominently featured on the
Amero?

To me, the creeping increase in cameras is not only an offence to dignity and autonomy, but also to common sense. I don’t trust the government to do the right thing with my meager tax dollars, so why should I trust them with a database of my images buying a Taquito at 7-11 or lollygagging about on the street corner with my bros? And if my most stoned and paranoid friends are right and the New World Order police state is just a false flag dirty bomb away, the cameras used to nab those no-good-hoodie-wearing thugs that snatched granny’s Oxy’s outside the pharmacy today will be used to keep your microchipped ass in line while the Committee of 300 eat roasted babies at a Babylonian Mystery bisexual sex orgy tomorrow, so here’s some ideas on how to fuck that shit up.

Smash Them

Now this one appeals to the juvenile delinquent in me. Not only do you get to break shit, but you’re also fighting the fascist surveillance state! It also apparently appeals to distinguished academics like U of C professor – and author of some killer books – Mike Davis:

I think that we need to propagandize and fight for the idea of a universal insurrection against surveillance state, against the erosion of civil liberties. We need to encourage people and find every way possible in which to resist, subvert and destroy the apparatus of surveillance and control … I think we need a strategy to support each other; we should vandalize and subvert the surveillance state and the middle class that supports it.

But shit, I’m not sixteen years old anymore – Christ I’m not even twenty-five – and I can’t help but feel for every camera that gets smashed a dozen are going to replace it, like some kind of panoptical hydra, and ultimately as much as it may temporarily disrupt things the only ones that are going to benefit from it are the state and surveillance camera companies, but damn, it would be fun … not like I’m encouraging it or anything …

Fool Them

As any methed-out up-for-weeks Subway robbing thug knows a good disguise can help keep the panopticon from making a positive ID, although I don’t think most of us want to walk around with a hoodie pulled over our heads or a bandanna covering our face all day, unless you’re an aspiring gang member I guess. A novelty-store fake nose and mustache would be much weirder and funnier – to me anyway, depending on what mind state I was accessing at time – and would work just as well.

Or would it? According to this article, CryptoMetric’s surveillance technology “is actually independent of disguises. It’s based on the underlying bone structure of the person, so we’re not looking for beards, what we’re looking for is location, width of the nose, where the nostrils are located, where the corners of the eyes are located, where the corners of the lips are located, the relative position of the ears, and all of these positions versus one another.” Shit. Well there goes that tactic.

Maybe what could be used to prevent your image from being picked up by the cameras would be some kind of near-future sci-fi tech that would project another face overtop of yours, maybe your whole body? A cyberpunk equivalent of those sprays you can buy to photo block speed cameras? Sure. Why not? You could sell it on the internet and make a killing.

Mindfuck Them

And this one appeals to the surrealist prankster in me. Sousveillance is defined as “the recording or monitoring of real or apparent authority figures by others, particularly those who are generally the subject of surveillance.” The term was coined by Steve Mann, an interesting character himself, who has made his body a scene of cyborg exploration and performance over the last few decades. Apparently those behind the camera – security guards, police, shopkeepers etc. – don’t like it when the camera is focused back on them. They get pissed off. I laugh. A win-win as far as I’m concerned. While such antics may not do more than annoy the hell out of Big Brother, sometimes that’s better than nothing. And who knows, maybe something will loosen in the brains of those on the “other side” and they’ll question why they’re selling out their brothers and sisters for thirty virtual commerce transactions … well, you can always hope.

Overthrow Them

I found a few instances of people organizing protests against the encroachment of security cameras, but to be honest, most protests in their current form are nothing more than state-approved safety-valve dispersions of psychic and emotional energy that actually reinforce the power of the state. But that’s a rant for another day.

In this chapter from Antisurveillance Brian Martin argues that ultimately one has to go beyond just subverting the manifestations of a system based on power and control, one has to change the system itself. “Since surveillance is central to the existence of the state, reform is hardly enough. The radical solution is to abolish the state. The alternative is communities organized around self-management …” I generally agree. But the main obstacle of such radical reform comes from the citizens themselves. According to a recent Angus-Reid poll 71 percent of Americans support having public surveillance cameras. So in order to for any real subversion of the security state to happen, some mass brain-change is going to have to go down.

It always seems to come to this, doesn’t it?

Funny, that.

The Monkey Wrench is a column about the dark side of technology and how to subvert it.