» Rioting with a Telescreen in your Pocket
Camera phones and social media have become powerful tools for holding police accountable. But after the Vancouver riot, Internet vigilantes and the police are collaborating to use these tools to gather evidence and make arrests.* A seemingly lone voice in opposition to this practice is this blog post that identifies it as citizen surveillance in opposition to citizen journalism, where you use mobile devices and social media simply to document.
She points out that, like other cases of Internet vigilantism, it takes on a mob mentality and isn’t necessarily being practiced only in a desire for justice. The personal decision to cooperate with law enforcement rather than critically monitor police could become a public embrace of security values. And there are the slippery slopes, particularly if the surveillance were available to private-sector employers:
- protesters of authoritarian regimes
- people who drive badly
- Pride Parade marchers
- 4/20 Day participants
As this is just a blog post, she doesn’t make the ethical argument explicitly, but I’d like to see a philosophy paper follow this up. Do we want to live in a society where people help the police like this regularly? Do we want this to be a social media norm? And what does it mean if this practice gets exported to countries where people have more to fear from the police.
In the comments, she lays the responsibility for the riots where it belongs:
I think our city needs to rethink the intensity of a sports culture that leads to this kind of extreme reaction.
* Being present in a riot violates the law against unlawful assembly, which means everyone who took a photo is guilty as well.
I have yet to read one analysis of the riot that doesn’t seek to locate blame as far away from the author and the author’s context as possible. TSN hockey analyst Bob McKenzie blamed “left-wing loons and anarchists”. People from Vancouver are blaming people from the suburbs*. The teetotal blame the drunks, and people who don’t like sports blame “sports culture”. Every year in North America, four cities win major sports championships, and four cities lose major sports championships. Usually the most those eight cities have to clean up is litter from a parade. Vancouver held its shit together pretty well in the face of last year’s Olympics, and I don’t think that can be entirely put down to the police presence.
McKenzie’s pretty clearly off his nut, but obviously the booze has something to do with it, and obviously it wouldn’t have happened if the Canucks hadn’t played. But people watch sports and drink all the time without rioting. Damned if I have a good explanation for what happened, but I’d like to read one that isn’t some combination of facile identification of preconditions, relocating blame away from the author and his context, or straight-up blaming others.
Right on about the surveillance stuff, though. Just ask this guy, except he’s dead now.
*And from far away that seems like it might be unsubtle code for something racial.
s.
17 Jun 11 at 9:10 am
[...] at UVic, has come up with better arguments to back up the unease that some of us are feeling about citizen surveillance in the Vancouver riot: besides the purely technical problem of it being sloppy police work, social [...]
Big Brother and Little Brother are Watching You at MentalPolyphonics
20 Jun 11 at 9:47 am