Steve Mann

The Steve Mann reading about surveillance was interesting. He asked at what price do we accept surveillance video. His analysis of video surveillance starts with automatic face recognition. A computer could compare faces to a database and help expose fraud. This may sound like a good safety tool; however, when I thought about it more carefully, it seemed rather scary and obtrusive. Surveillance seems even more intrusive when Steve Mann talks about television channels knowing what TV shows people are watching in their homes. The final straw was learning about cameras capable of seeing through my clothes. Each form of surveillance dove deeper into my personal space and exposed the insecurity around being constantly watched for security reasons.

The most interesting part of the paper is how Steve Mann choose to fight surveillance with surveillance called “Reflectionism.” He developed a WearCam, which are different camera that people would wear. He would then go into different department stores that did not allow video or photographs in the store but have surveillance cameras. He would tell them that the device was for protection just like their surveillance cameras are for protection. It is interesting that he uses their arguments for surveillance against them. Not only did Steve Mann do these tricks, and he asks his readers to also fight against the surveillance. He gives a step by step plan on different ways to confuse surveillance. One of the more interesting experiments is wearing a shirt that looks like it could or could not be a camera. How can department stores kick him out if they do not know that the shirt is a camera? It was very interesting that the same arguments used for video surveillance he used to destroy the safety that is supposed to come from surveillance.

Another argument he used is the unknown person who is filming. We do not know who is behind the video cameras; we do not even know if someone is watching. Just the fact that we are being watched makes us behave differently.

The final twist in the paper is Steve Mann’s idea of “Diffusionism.” He basically says that if people will not listen to “Reflecitonism” we should put surveillance to good use. We should make surveillance available to everyone and shape it to fit our everyday needs. It is interesting that surveillance would be pointless if everyone had access to it. Overall the paper makes me think about what surveillance really is and wear the boundaries should be drawn.