>From: Roger Clarke <[log in to unmask]>
>[In particular, I'd missed the fact that, in the now grossly un-free 
>UK, sous-veillance is actually illegal....

Roger, and the rest of you on this list, if sous-veillance
is illegal, so is surveillance.

In fact, you might have noticed that even outside the UK, police are
going around vandalizing surveillance systems owned by others:
http://www.philly.com/dailynews/local/20090403_Police_narcotics_units__reshuffled_.html
  [...]
  The Daily News also has interviewed 14 store owners who said that Cujdik
  and fellow officers destroyed or cut the wires to surveillance cameras
  during raids.
  The store owners said that after the wires were cut, cigarettes, batteries,
  cell phones, food and drinks were taken from the stores.
  Some store owners said that they watched as the officers smoked cigars that
  they had taken from the shelves or slurped refrigerated energy drinks.
  The officers also confiscated cash from the stores - a routine practice in
  drug raids - but didn't record the full amount on police property receipts,
  the shop owners allege.
  A video of one of the raids obtained by the Daily News can be seen on
  philly.com. Cujdik and fellow squad members are seen using a bread knife,
  pliers, milk crates and their hands to disable the surveillance system of
  store owner Jose Duran.
  [...]
  The officers arrested the store owners, including Duran, for selling
  small plastic bags that police consider drug paraphernalia.

Meanwhile sousveillance is becoming widespread:

   The flowering inverse surveillance society can end the myth of
   faultless policing that survived 1,000 deaths in custody
          Marina Hyde
          The Guardian, Saturday 11 April 2009

   ...key footage of the minutes leading up to the death of Ian
   Tomlinson during the G20 protests in London.... 

   If there is anything to feel optimistic about today, perhaps it is the
   hope that we are witnessing the flowering of an effective inverse
   surveillance society. Inverse surveillance is a branch of
   sousveillance... "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".

See also,
http://poliphilo.livejournal.com/616165.html

Surveillance is when the authorities point their cameras at us and sousveillance is when we point our cameras back at them.  As the surveillance state bulks up, so does the sousveillance resistance- and its largely due to that nifty little device- the camera phone. Thanks to sousveillance the Metropolitan police are not going to get away with their account of the death of Ian Tomlinson in the G20 demonstration. According to the the story they first put out, Mr Tomlinson- not a protestor but a newspaper vendor walking back to his lodgings-  slipped and fell under a hail of bottles from protesters- and the police did their best to protect him. But according to the record of a camera phone belonging- nice touch this, positively Shakespearean- to a New York fund manager- we can see what really happened was that a policeman attacked Mr Tomlinson from behind. There was no hail of bottles. The police in their dark force armour positively owned that street. And the people who went t!
 o Mr Tomlinson's aid were members of the public.

There has been a lot of gloomy media talk about how the British are the most spied-upon nation in the world and how, by tolerating the spread of surveillance cameras, we are sleep-walking towards 1984. But Orwell didn't forsee the camera phone and how it levels the playing field. For every CCTV camera in a public place there are God knows how many camera phones in bags and pockets. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Well, all of us, actually. Any of us. We all of us have the gear.

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