Inverse Surveillance
Description
From the Wikipedia:
"Inverse surveillance is a proper subset of Sousveillance with a particular 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 and their actions. Inverse surveillance is typically an activity undertaken by those who are generally the subject of surveillance" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance)
Discussion
Marina Hyde in the Guardian, after the G20 controversy on Ian Tomlinson's death (april 2009):
"we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of sousveillance, the term coined by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann, and it emphasises "watchful vigilance from underneath", by citizens, of those who survey and control them.
Not that turning our cameras on those who train theirs on us is without risk. Indeed, one might judge it fairly miraculous that the man was not forcibly disarmed of his camera phone, given that it is now illegal to photograph police who may be engaged in activity connected to counterterrorism. And as we know, everything from escorting Beyoncé to parking on a double yellow while you nip in to Greggs for an iced bun can now be justified with that blight of a modern excuse - "security reasons".
Yet it will by now have dawned on even the most dimwitted Met officer that it is increasingly impossible for them to control the flow of information about their activities - to kettle it, if you will - no matter how big their army of press officers putting out misleading information in the immediate aftermath of any event may be.
Did the Met genuinely think they could prevent the emergence of a far more joined-up picture of Tomlinson's passage through the City of London that afternoon, much as they thought they could suppress the details about Jean Charles de Menezes's tragic final journey? If so, their naivety is staggering.
Yet it's odd how often it has been the little ways in which the state attempts to keep tabs on our behaviour - tracking devices on wheelie bins and the like - that have most alienated those who previously bowed to authority. Also captured on film and published yesterday was an amusingly British act of defiance - a pyjama-clad householder blocking dustmen into his road by standing in their path, after they had declined to empty his neighbour's bin of five pebbles.
As Tomlinson's death shows, though, it's not all Victor Meldrew-meets-Passport-to-Pimlico larks. Indeed it is something of a shame that certain elements of society have only recently woken up to the possibility that the police might not be the faultless, justice-dispensing force of establishment myth, and only because - in the cases of De Menezes and Tomlinson - they have seen it with their own eyes, or at least enough of it to provoke a suspicion that was hitherto absent." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/11/police-surveillance-marina-hyde)
More Information
See also: Hierarchical Sousveillance