SADDAM, YOUTUBE, AND THE CITIZEN SURVEILLANCE EFFECT

By Mark Sommer and - - Reprint | | Print |

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ARCATA, CALIFORNIA, Feb 2 2007 (IPS) - The flip side of the ubiquitous spy camera tracking our every movement in department stores, government offices, and corporate headquarters is \’\’inverse surveillance\’\’, the private citizen\’s new-found ability to invade the privacy of public figures who have so long and with such impunity invaded their privacy, writes Mark Sommer, who hosts the internationally-syndicated radio programme, \’\’A World of Possibilities\’\’ (www.aworldofpossibilities.com) and directs the Mainstream Media Project. In this analysis, Sommer writes that nearly universal access to portable audio and video recording devices can now catch a politician\’s random moment of indiscretion or conspiratorial whisper and disseminate it to a global public to the everlasting embarrassment of the subject of scrutiny. What does this radical transparency do to leadership itself when, taken out of context, almost any act can appear incriminating? On the one hand, micro cameras and recording devices in the hands of ordinary people give them the power of a citizen\’s arrest with a potential impact that extends far beyond throwing someone in jail. In that sense, it is an essential counterweight to ever greater concentration of power and surveillance in the hands of elites, a levelling device that places public figures on notice that they can never be assured that malfeasance will not be discovered and tried in the court of public exposure. It\’s a power whose potency even those wielding it may not yet fully realise.

In so doing, it upstaged the carefully choreographed efforts of Iraqi and American officials to invest the judicial process with an aura of legitimacy. What both Saddam loyalists and Islamic extremists had been unable to accomplish in years of exhortation, a few-minute YouTube home video achieved in a matter of hours, enshrining the dictator in enduring martyrdom in the eyes of the faithful and producing shame and revulsion even among those who felt Saddam deserved his fate.

Ever since a home video camera recording of African-American cab driver Rodney King’s brutal beating at the hands of Los Angeles police in 1992 and the acquittal of three police officers triggered four days of rioting, 55 deaths, and 2,400 injuries, politicians, police, and sports and entertainment figures have become wary not only of photojournalists but of the ubiquitous eyes of digital and cell phone cameras in the hands of ordinary citizens.

The flip side of the ubiquitous spy camera tracking our every movement in department stores, government offices, and corporate headquarters is ”inverse surveillance”, the private citizen’s new-found ability to invade the privacy of public figures who have so long and with such impunity invaded their privacy. Nearly universal access to portable audio and video recording devices can now catch a politician’s random moment of indiscretion or conspiratorial whisper, immortalise it on film or audio, and disseminate it to a global public to the subject’s everlasting embarrassment.

How does this new capability in the hands of people with no special journalistic training or ethics alter the balance of power and privacy between elites and publics? How will it influence the behaviour of public figures, who can never again be certain that their public acts or private behavior is not being recorded and won’t later be splayed across the mainstream media? How does the lack of public privacy, what might be called ”the glass house effect”, influence the craft of professional journalism and the decisions newsroom editors make about what to cover and how?

Just as hundreds of millions of handguns and Kalashnikovs have levelled the playing field between police and criminals, ragtag insurgents, and the world’s mightiest army, the weapon of potential public exposure on a grand scale places every leader, dictator, or democrat in perpetual jeopardy. What does this radical transparency do to leadership itself when, taken out of context, almost any act can appear incriminating?

Nor is the evidence itself certain to be authentic. The 1994 film ”Forest Gump” utilised special effects like chroma key, warping, morphing, and rotoscoping to enable Tom Hanks to be digitally painted into actual historical scenes alongside presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. More than a decade later such techniques enable video evidence to be fabricated not just by studio engineers but by amateur camera buffs. Given these capabilities and the means to disseminate them worldwide via YouTube and other unfiltered digital broadcasting networks, how can we detect the difference between fact and fabrication?

On the one hand, micro cameras and recording devices in the hands of ordinary people give them the power of a citizen’s arrest with a potential impact that extends far beyond throwing someone in jail. In that sense, it is an essential counterweight to ever greater concentration of power and surveillance in the hands of elites, a levelling device that places public figures on notice that they can never be assured that malfeasance will not be discovered and tried in the court of public exposure. It’s a power whose potency even those wielding it may not yet fully realise. Did the clandestine cameraman who videoed the execution of Saddam Hussein have any idea how the display of his video clip on YouTube would influence global politics and the way Saddam — and American-directed systems of justice abroad — would be viewed by observers the world over for years to come? Can we expect random individuals to exercise good judgment in the use and dissemination of such explosive materials when professional media routinely transgress their self-expressed journalistic values?

What can we learn from the unauthorised broadcast of Saddam’s execution and similar events about how to make best use of these new-found powers of witnessing and recording in an era when we can no longer be sure what and what isn’t being documented, what is and isn’t real? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)