Sousveillance

Camera A is engaged in surveillance, while the person wearing camera B on their head is engaged in sousveillance.
Surveillance as compared with sousveillance

Sousveillance (/suːˈveɪləns/ soo-VAY-lənss) is the recording of an activity by a member of the public, rather than a person or organisation in authority, typically by way of small wearable or portable personal technologies.[14] The term, coined by Steve Mann,[15] stems from the contrasting French words sur, meaning "above", and sous, meaning "below", i.e. "surveillance" denotes the "eye-in-the-sky" watching from above, whereas "sousveillance" denotes bringing the means of observation down to human level, either physically (mounting cameras on people rather than on buildings) or hierarchically (ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures).[16][17][23]

While surveillance and sousveillance both usually refer to visual monitoring, they can denote other forms of monitoring such as audio surveillance or sousveillance. With audio (e.g. recording of phone conversations), sousveillance is sometimes referred to as "one party consent".[24]

Undersight (inverse oversight) is sousveillance at high-level, e.g. "citizen undersight" being reciprocal to a congressional oversight committee or the like.[25][26][27]

Inverse surveillance is a subset of sousveillance with an emphasis on "watchful vigilance from underneath" and a form of surveillance inquiry or legal protection involving the recording, monitoring, study, or analysis of surveillance systems, proponents of surveillance, and possibly also recordings of authority figures. Inverse surveillance is typically undertaken by those who are subjected to surveillance, so it can be thought of as a form of ethnography or ethnomethodology (i.e. an analysis of the surveilled from the perspective of a participant in a society under surveillance).[28] Sousveillance typically involves community-based recording from first person perspectives, without necessarily involving any specific political agenda, whereas inverse surveillance is a form of sousveillance that is typically directed at, or used to collect data to analyze or study, surveillance or its proponents (e.g., the actions of police or protestors at a protest rally).[29][30][31]

Sousveillance is not necessarily countersurveillance. Sousveillance can be used to "counter" surveillance or it can be used with surveillance to create a more complete "veillance" ("Surveillance is a half-truth without sousveillance"[32]). The question of "Who watches the watchers" is dealt with more properly under the topic of metaveillance[33] (the veillance of veillance) than sousveillance.

  1. ^ "Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices... Archived 2009-03-25 at the Wayback Machine", by Steve Mann, Jason Nolan and Barry Wellman, in Surveillance & Society 1(3), 2003
  2. ^ a b Sousveillance: Inverse Surveillance in Multimedia Imaging, by Steve Mann, in ACM Multimedia 2004, pp. 620–627
  3. ^ "Keeping a Close Watch", by Kingsley Dennis, Sociology Department, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK, 2008 July 30th, in The Sociological Review
  4. ^ Sousveillance, not just surveillance, in response to terrorism, 2002 March 1st, Metal and Flesh, Volume 6, No. 1
  5. ^ Vol. 31, Issue 2 – April 1998 "Reflectionism' and 'Diffusionism': New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway", in Leonardo, pp. 93–102
  6. ^ "Sousveillance, Media and Strategic Political Communication", by Dr. Vian Bakir, ISBN 978-0-8264-3009-0
  7. ^ Ryan, Mary. "Sousveillance as a Tool in US Civic Polity." In Spaces of Surveillance, pp. 211-227. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2017.
  8. ^ university course on sousveillance Home › Courses › Course Catalog › 290. Surveillance, Sousveillance, Coveillance, and Dataveillance 290. SURVEILLANCE, SOUSVEILLANCE, COVEILLANCE, AND DATAVEILLANCE
  9. ^ International conferences on sousveillance: "Welcome to nginx". Archived from the original on 2012-09-05. Retrieved 2010-08-15. and [1]
  10. ^ WiReD magazine, Clive Thompson, "Establishing Rules in the Videocam Age", 2011 June 28
  11. ^ Reflections on the Vancouver Riots, Vancouver Observer, 2011 June 28
  12. ^ Michael, Katina; Michael, MG (November 2013). "No Limits to Watching?". cacm.acm.org.
  13. ^ Michael, K. (2015). Sousveillance: Implications for Privacy, Security, Trust, and the Law. Consumer Electronics Magazine, IEEE, 4(2), 92-94.
  14. ^ [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13]
  15. ^ Monahan, Torin (2006). Surveillance And Security: Technological Politics And Power in Everyday Life, p.158. ISBN 9780415953931.
  16. ^ Course developed by New York based artist Joy Garnett and taught initially at the City College of New York's Digital and Interdisciplinary Art Practice MFA program (DIAP): "Sousveillance: The Art of Networked Surveillance: Decoding the Social and the Private"[2]
  17. ^ Fernback, Jan. "Sousveillance: Communities of resistance to the surveillance environment." Telematics and Informatics 30.1 (2013): 11-21.
  18. ^ S. Mann; J. Nolan; B. Wellman. (2002). "Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments". Surveillance & Society. 1 (3): 331–355. doi:10.24908/ss.v1i3.3344.
  19. ^ K. Michael and M. G. Michael. Sousveillance and point of view technologies in law enforcement: An overview. 2012.
  20. ^ J. Bradwell and K. Michael. Security workshop brings 'sousveillance' under the microscope. 2012.
  21. ^ S. Mann. Veillance and Reciprocal Transparency: Surveillance versus Sousveillance, AR Glass, Lifeglogging, and Wearable Computing. IEEE ISTAS 2013, Pages 1-12
  22. ^ "MSNBC". MSNBC. 2012-06-04. Archived from the original on 2011-03-05. Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  23. ^ Alternative definitions of both sur- and sous- veillance (the act of watching), in addition to the definition above, include:
    • Surveillance is defined as cameras (or other sensors) affixed to property (real-estate, e.g. land, by way of posts or poles, or buildings), whereas sousveillance is defined as cameras (or other sensors) borne by people.[18][19][20][21]
    • Surveillance is the veillance of the authority (i.e. the veillance that has the capacity to prohibit other veillances), whereas sousveillance is the veillance of plurality (i.e. "crowd veillance" or watching, sensing, or the like, done by non authorities)[4].
    • Sousveillance has also been described as "inverse surveillance",[2][22] based on the word surveillance (from the French sur, "from above", and veiller, "to watch"), and substituting the prefix sous, "from below".
  24. ^ "blogging On the Identity Trail". anonequity.org. 23 September 2020.
  25. ^ CACR (Centre For Applied Cryptographic Research), 8th CACR Information Security Workshop & 2nd Annual Privacy and Security Workshop, The Human Face of Privacy Technology, November 1–2, 2001, The University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Slides and recordings.
  26. ^ "Sousveillance: Wearable Computing and Citizen "Undersight"", h-Plus Magazine, 2009jul10
  27. ^ "When Is "Undersight" Unconstitutional?", Ian Ayres, Yale Law School, The New York Times, January 5, 2011
  28. ^ "Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments, Surveillance & Society 1(3): 331–355" (PDF). Retrieved 2013-11-26.
  29. ^ Sousveillance, direct action and the anti-corporate globalization movement. Elizabeth A. Bradshaw. Critical Criminology, 21(4):447–461, 2013.
  30. ^ Fernback J (2013) Telematics and Informatics 30(1): 11–21
  31. ^ Reilly P (2013) Every little helps? YouTube, sousveillance and the 'anti-Tesco' riot in Stokes Croft. New Media & Society. Epub ahead of print 21 November. DOI:10.1177/1461444813512195.
  32. ^ [Mann, Steve, et al. "Declaration of Veillance (Surveillance is Half-Truth)." in Games Entertainment Media Conference (GEM), 2015 IEEE. IEEE, 2015.]
  33. ^ ["Surveillance (oversight), Sousveillance (undersight), and Metaveillance (seeing sight itself)", IEEE CVPR 2016, pages 1408-1417, http://wearcam.org/kineveillance.pdf]