Watching the Watchers

It's no secret that you are likely to be recorded by security cameras just about anywhere you go in public in a metropolitan area. That's no secret, right? And it's not "the government" watching you on a flat panel display. It's more likely to be your friendly neighborhood retailers. Or the parking garage employees. Or, alright, the government.

One reaction to this realization is never leaving your home again. Seattlest has tried a "live from home" approach and quickly learned that only so many friends, aquaintences, bands, artists, performers, chefs, etc. are going to come over to the house to entertain. Not to mention the whole "earning a living" thing. Another seemingly reasonable reaction is to watch back. At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference this week Steve Mann called it "sousveillance."

The opposite of surveillance -- French for watching from above -- sousveillance refers to watching from below, essentially from beneath the eye in the sky. It's the equivalent of keeping an eye on the eye.

After speaking on his sousveillance concept Mann led a group into the streets of Seattle to put it into practice and was, of course, instantly confronted by employees in The Gap and Nordstrom's as both Wired News and The Seattle Times are reporting. A participant in the experiment writes here.

Steve Mann is a wearable computing pioneer and if that sounds kinda geeky, well, there's no denying that it is. Founding a MIT project makes it very much ok, though. One of his recent gadgets that breaks out of the strict technology realm and into the art world include a wallet that requires an ID to be swiped through it before it will display the carrier's ID.