When Mans Adler founded Bambuser—a Sweden-based service that lets people broadcast live video from their cell phones to the Internet—his idea was simply to help users share their lives with friends in real time. Early this year, however, Adler saw an explosion of use from a political powder keg: Egypt.
During the Arab Spring, pro-democracy activists discovered that Bambuser let them thwart the Egyptian secret police. If a protester filmed an incident of police brutality, it didn’t matter whether they were arrested and their phone confiscated: The footage had already streamed to the world, where it catalyzed political energy against the Mubarak regime.
“The police thought, if we take all the phones, we can control the information. But they didn’t,” Adler notes. “The message still got out.”
The Arab uprisings showed that the use of video as a monitoring tool has shifted decisively. Throughout the ’90s and ’00s, civil libertarians worried about governments and corporations slapping up surveillance cameras all over the place. The fear was that they’d be used as tools of oppression. But now those tools are being democratized, and we are witnessing an emerging culture of “sousveillance.”
Sousveillance is the monitoring of events not by those above (surveiller in French) but by citizens, from below (sous-). The neologism was coined by Steve Mann, a pioneer in wearable computing at the University of Toronto. In the ’90s, Mann rigged a head-mounted camera to broadcast images online and found that it was great for documenting everyday malfeasance, like electrical-code violations. He also discovered that it made security guards uneasy. They’d ask him to remove the camera—and when he wouldn’t, they’d escort him away or even tackle him.
“I realized, this is the inverse of surveillance,” he said.
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