Is big brother watching you ... through your web cam?

Someone watches me as I use the Atm. They watch me while I’m walking down the street, when I stop to get gas, whilst shop, when I’m dining at a restaurant and while I’m at work. They screen my emails, phone calls and text messages and track the web sites I visit. Who are these people? They are my employers, business owners, secret intelligence agencies and our Government who are always keeping an eye on us and watching.

The example may seem a little dramatised, however I’m sure we can all agree that this scenario isn’t exactly out of the ordinary and in actuality is normal for our times. Surveillance is something that we have all become accustomed to and believe this intrusion of privacy to be a necessary evil for our protection and safety. But you wouldn’t expect this kind of surveillance (or spying to be more precise) from your teachers’ right?

Seems far fetched and hard to believe but in the lower Marion school district of Philadelphia this was exactly the case! Mac notebooks were loaned to high school students that enabled teachers to spy on students in their homes through the webcam device which could be turned on by staff of the school. Maybe I’m being dramatic but this has really made me paranoid! The first thought that popped into my mind was “Big Brother is watching you.” My second thought got me thinking that maybe our society isn’t that different from ones shown in films like Eagle eye and Resident Evil where corporations and smart technologies go rogue to spy on their citizens! To be completely honest if this was headlined in the news tomorrow I’m not sure I would be completely surprised. So in the mean time folks cover up those webcam’s because you never know who could be watching on the other side.

Viva la Resistance?

The main issue I take with the likes of Kingsley’s article on the "Psycho-Civilized Society" and Foucault’s adoption of the panopticon metaphor is the lack of weight given to the possibility for resistance. Sure, technologies of surveillance have become increasingly sophisticated in the 21^st century, but so too have our methods for subverting them. A data entry worker who has their productivity monitored according to the number of keystrokes they enter per hour may periodically hold down one key for a few minutes in order to achieve an artificially high reading, while shoplifters have circumvented security tag detectors through the use of booster bags, for example.

On a related note, I was surprised during this week's lecture by some people’s apparent acceptance of employers using their employees’ Facebook pages as evidence to justify disciplinary action in certain situations. Where do we draw the line? Surely it’s a slippery slope that we don’t want to start down, for what initially begins as the use of Facebook for investigating legitimate cases of underperformance may progress into its use for finding an excuse to unfairly dismiss an employee disliked by management.

Another class member’s suggestion that it’s only fair that employees can conversely surveil their employer’s pages also sparked my interest, for it seems that this is already taking place. For example, the blog post What Does Your Facebook Profile Say About You? refers to the potentially damaging act of a senior executive posting snaps of a lavish holiday during a period of cost cutting and job losses. The key difference here, of course, is power. I’m pretty sure that hitting my boss up about his hypocritical vacationing (we’re all affected by the recession?) is a sure-fire way to bump me up the redundancy list.

So what does count as effective resistance? The widespread availability and affordability of prosumer camcorders, video capable mobile phones and other communication technologies has given rise to forms of ‘counter-surveillance’, whereby the traditional surveillers become the surveilled. For example, volunteer-based Cop Watch groups in Canada and the United States film instances of police misconduct and abuse for the purpose of ‘policing the police’ (an example of what Steve Mann terms “sousveillance”). The case of Rodney King is an infamous example of how such methods can level the surveillance hierarchy and hold authoritative organisations at least partially accountable for their actions.

However, Gary Marx reminds us that we shouldn’t be too quick to extol the virtues of the “democratisation of surveillance”, which has ultimately fed greater suspicion, anxiety and defensiveness within society. Not to mention ill-appointed resource consumption. An occurrence of ‘counter-counter-surveillance’ springs to mind, where police in Eugene, Oregon spied on a Cop Watch press conference using videotaping technology. Note the descriptor, press conference. I think most of us can think of better uses of police time and resources! Yet, with the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook (and applications which claim to reveal who has been viewing your profile), the ludicrous cycle of monitoring each other monitoring each other seems set to continue in multiple facets of our lives.