This article was taken from the January 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
When Mans Adler founded Bambuser, the Stockholm-based service that lets people broadcast live video online from their mobile phones, the idea was to help users share their lives with friends in real time. But that was before the Arab Spring.
When Egypt's political powder keg exploded in January 2011, pro-democracy demonstrators discovered that using Bambuser could beat the secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn't matter if they were arrested and their phone confiscated: the footage was already live.
The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the 90s and 00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping CCTV cameras all over our towns and cities. But now those tools are being democratised, and we are witnessing the birth of something else: sousveillance.
The monitoring of events, not by those above (surveiller in French), but by citizens from below (sous-), "sousveillance" was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the 90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, such as road pot-holes. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They'd ask him to remove the camera. When he wouldn't, they'd escort him away. "I realised that this is the inverse of surveillance," he says.
Granted, omnipresent recording is a double-edged sword: when activists posted videos of the protests in despotic Middle Eastern states, government agents used the footage to identify and target dissidents.
But sousveillance will not go away, and new tools are arriving that will enable citizens to document incidents in new ways. Media critic Dan Gillmor envisions software that stitches together video footage from several people to recreate an event in detail.
Meanwhile, Witness -- a pressure group that supports the use of video for defending human rights -- is working on software that blocks out faces so dissidents can film without endangering those in the viewfinder.
And bearing witness will get easier. Always-on wearable videocams, such as the Looxcie, have hit the market and are on the rise: pop one over your ear like a Bluetooth headset and it'll capture a rolling five-hour buffer of everything you see and do, publishable to Facebook with a single click. Today, we can record everything. All we now need is a social code for doing so.
Explore more: Big Ideas For 2012
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
