2. Abstract
• We will present insights arising from the ESRC Seminar Series DATA-PSST (Debating
& Assessing Transparency Arrangements -
Privacy, Security, Sur/Sous/Veillance, Trust).
• Vian is interested in how ‘sousveillance’ works across media to challenge official
versions of events and hold power to account in the secretive area of national
security. She is concerned that this potential for resistance is being compromised
by weak civic structures and through the ever-growing surveillant state operating
through what she terms the ‘Veillant Panoptic Assemblage’.
• Andrew is researching how emotions are both being watched by ourselves, and
corporate and governmental actors.
6. 1. Different aspects of transparency
2. How do these affect privacy, security,
surveillance and trust?
3. What different actors think of
existing/desirable transparency
arrangements?
4. Build a typology of transparency types
DATA-PSST!
7. Transparency has at least 2 dimensions
• degree of citizen control over how visible
they are
• degree of oversight of the surveillant entity
• Bakir, V. & A. McStay. 2015. Assessing Interdisciplinary Academic & Multi-
Stakeholder Positions on Transparency post-Snowden. Ethical Space, 12
(3/4):
http://www.communicationethics.net/espace/index.php?nav=feature
8. Transparency Type
Citizen Control over Personal
Visibility
Extent of Oversight of
Surveillant Entity
Liberal Transparency High
High (to ensure no unwanted
prying into citizens’lives)
Liberal Translucency High
Socially/ legally agreed
limitations
Radical Translucency
Low (everyone has signed away
their control to maximize social
good)
Socially/ legally agreed
limitations
Radical Transparency
Low (everyone has signed away
their control to maximize social
good)
High (to ensure concurrent citizen
& state/ corporate openness)
Forced Transparency
None (state/corporate-imposed,
secret control)
Insufficient to win social trust
9. Terminology (Steve Mann)
• Surveillance - monitoring from position of
power by those who are not a participant to
the activity being watched
• Sousveillance - monitoring from position of
minimal power, and by those participating in
the activity being watched
• Veillance - processes of mutual
watching/monitoring by surveillant
organizations & sousveillant individuals.
• Equiveillance - equality between surveillant &
sousveillant forces, or a‘transparent society’.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z82Zavh-NhI
• wearcam.org/veillance/veillance.pdf
• http://library.queensu.ca/ojs/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/veillance
11. Equiveillance – achieved when …
… veillance infrastructures are extensive
and the power requirements to enact
change from below are marginal.
This type of system would likely protect
whistle-blowers, encourage public fora
and debate, and implement participatory
projects and innovations to the system.
Even the powers of oversight in this
configuration are likely to be seen from
below and subject to evaluation.
(Mann & Ferenbok 2013: 30)
13. How healthy are these infrastructures for
enacting change from below?
Equiveillance:
• …. This type of
system would likely
protect whistle-
blowers, …
• Protect whistle-blowers:
• Snowden not technically a
whistleblower - didn’t follow
national security whistleblower
protocols -stranded in Russia
• Obama’s multiple indictments of
national security whistleblowers
under Espionage Act [1917]
• whistle-blowing is discouraged,
channeled & is a weak formal
mechanism to enact change from
below
14. How healthy are these infrastructures for
enacting change from below?
Equiveillance:
• …This type of
system would
likely …
encourage
public fora and
debate, …
• Encourage public fora & debate
– intelligence agencies manipulate
press via secrecy
• withhold information
• prior constraint
• whistle-blower prosecution
• harass non-compliant press
• self-censorship by journalists
– & propaganda
• spread intelligence-sourced,
disguised, propaganda
• Provide minimal critical reportage of
intel agencies
– MSM weak force for accountability
• http://hij.sagepub.com/content/early/20
15/01/29/1940161214566693.abstract
15. How healthy are these infrastructures for
enacting change from below?
Equiveillance:
• …This type of system
would likely …
implement
participatory
projects
• implement participatory
projects
• US/UK review groups/oversight boards on intel
agencies’ surveillance consulted wider
legislature & NGOs
• What weight was given to concerns expressed
by these broader voices?
– Eg UK’s Intelligence & Security Committee
presumes to know public opinion but
seems to discount it
– See Public Feeling on Privacy, Security and
Surveillance: A Report by DATA-PSST and
DCSS (Nov 2015)
– weak force for accountability?
16. How healthy are these infrastructures for
enacting change from below?
Equiveillance:
• …This type of system
would likely implement
…innovations to the
system.
• innovations to the
system
• tech industry campaigns for change
to surveillance & transparency
laws/practices
• Some leading tech companies
implemented end-to-end
encryption
• STRONG accountability mechanism
– intel agencies worry about
internet ‘going dark’
17. So where are we now (2017)?
• Very far from Mann’s ‘equiveillance’
• protect whistle-blowers – WEAK: discouraged, channeled
• encourage public fora/ debate – WEAK: MSM in thrall to security state.
• participatory projects - WEAK: just for show?
• innovations to the system – STRONG: Neo-liberal corporate activism/branding
18. So where are we now (2017)?
• Very far from Mann’s ‘equiveillance’
• Instead: a veillant panoptic assemblage
• assemblage – because conducted through the commercial digital networks &
platforms
• panoptic – because re-appropriated by the state for disciplinary purposes
• Veillant - because involves all sorts of directions of watching – sur, sous, & others
19. Veillance & Transparency
• Artistic/Academic responses
• Veillance:
https://player.vimeo.com/video/193888776?col
or=
• The Snowden Archive-in-a-
Box: A year of travelling
experiments in outreach and
education
• Crowd-Sourced Intelligence
Agency: Prototyping
counterveillance
• Tracing You: How transparent
surveillance reveals a desire
for visibility
• Academic Responses
• Veillance and Transparency: A
Critical Examination of Mutual
Watching in the Post-Snowden,
Big Data Era.
• Special Issue of Big Data &
Society
• Empathic media and advertising:
Industry, policy, legal and citizen
perspectives (the case for intimacy)
20. Empathic Media:
Emotiveillance, Cities and Security
‘If the technology is there – someone will exploit it.
This was true in Marconi’s time (radio), in Turing’s with
thinking machines, and today.’
David Omand (ex-Head of GCHQ, interview, 2016)
22. Profiling city emotion
Dev’ of intelligence-led policing post-London riots (2012)
OSINT
Funding to engage with social media
Tracking conversations
Emotion/heat maps
Feeling-into groups to gauge probability of trouble and allocate
resources
30. Thoughts (beyond thinking that was a lot to take in)
1) What of citizens having emotions profiled,
even if not personal? (THIS IS KEY)
2) What of public servants such as the police –
should they be subject to this? (Yes/no…
why?)
3) If yes, should they this data be made public?
31. Contact details
• Prof. Vian Bakir
– v.bakir@bangor.ac.uk
– Twitter: @VianBakir1
• Dr Andrew McStay
– mcstay@bangor.ac.uk
– Twitter: @digi_ad
