Illegal Surveillance? Ou como criminalizar o contra-poder.

Imagem de vídeo amador: caso Rodney King, 1991
Numa matéria divulgada por Roger Clarke, uma curiosa categoria punitiva - "illegal surveillance" - é alegada para coibir (ou mesmo prender) indivíduos por filmarem com seus celulares ações (e abusos) policiais. Claramente, uma tentativa de criminalizar formas atuais de contra-poder que nascem de apropriações e táticas menores, relativamente desordenadas, quase casuais e muitas vezes da ação solitária de um indivíduo, mas cujos efeitos coletivos racham os regimes de visibilidade, o aparato tecnológico e a força policial da vigilância "legal".

Trechos da matéria do Boston.com:
Police fight cellphone recordings
Daniel Rowinski, New England Center For Investigative Reporting / Jan 12, 2010

"Simon Glik, a lawyer, was walking down Tremont Street in Boston when he saw three police officers struggling to extract a plastic bag from a teenager’s mouth. Thinking their force seemed excessive for a drug arrest, Glik pulled out his cellphone and began recording.
Within minutes, Glik said, he was in handcuffs.
“One of the officers asked me whether my phone had audio recording capabilities,’’ Glik, 33, said recently of the incident, which took place in October 2007. Glik acknowledged that it did, and then, he said, “my phone was seized, and I was arrested.’’
The charge? Illegal electronic surveillance.
Jon Surmacz, 34, experienced a similar situation. Thinking that Boston police officers were unnecessarily rough while breaking up a holiday party in Brighton he was attending in December 2008, he took out his cellphone and began recording.
Police confronted Surmacz, a webmaster at Boston University. He was arrested and, like Glik, charged with illegal surveillance.
There are no hard statistics for video recording arrests. But the experiences of Surmacz and Glik highlight what civil libertarians call a troubling misuse of the state’s wiretapping law to stifle the kind of street-level oversight that cellphone and video technology make possible.
“The police apparently do not want witnesses to what they do in public,’’ said Sarah Wunsch, a staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, who helped to get the criminal charges against Surmacz dismissed."

Celulares transformados em CCTV

Pesquisadores do Institute for Pervasive Computing criam programa que transforma câmeras integradas a telefones celulares em redes "inteligentes" de vigilância . O Programa Facet usa tecnologia Bluetooth e conexão sem fio de modo a permitir que diversas câmeras de celulares partilhem as imagens registradas e as analisem em rede, funcionando como sistemas de CCTV. A matéria é da New Scientist.

"Software that turns groups of ordinary camera cellphones into a "smart" surveillance network has been developed by Swiss researchers. The team says it will release the software for programmers and users to experiment with. [...]
These work like an ordinary CCTV surveillance system, but use software instead of a human analyst to interpret what is happening on screen, comparing the footage captured by each camera for a more complete picture. [...]
Complex tasks
Whenever a phone detects an object entering or exiting its field of view, it sends a message via Bluetooth to alert the phones on either side. These phones, in turn, pass the message on to other nearby handsets so that eventually the entire network receives the message.
One handset on the network also reports this information to a computer over a normal GPRS cellphone connection.
Each phone determines the distance to its nearest neighbour. The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone's view to another's.
In testing, the system determined the distances between each phone with about 95% accuracy. They were placed 4 metres apart, making it accurate to about 20 centimetres. In future, recording the speed at which objects pass by would make more accurate judgments possible.
Knowing the shape of the cellphone network provides the foundation for the system to perform more complex tasks, says Bolliger. Facet could, for example, report via text message when someone walks down a corridor in a particular direction, or sound an alarm if a dangerous animal approaches a campsite, he suggests."

Celulares, monitoramento e publicidade

O monitoramento de mensagens de texto e chamadas telefônicas em telefones celulares é um dos focos das companhias de telefonia móvel e da publicidade "proativa". Matéria do Times Online mostra que empresas como a Motorola projetam monitorar mensagens de texto de seus clientes (condicionado ao consentimento destes) para enviar publicidades apropriadas ao que tais mensagens indicariam. Caso o cliente tecle "fome" ou "comida", por exemplo, receberá publicidade acerca dos restaurantes próximos ao local onde se encontra. Vigilância e monitoramento consentido e ao gosto do freguês. Mais uma vez, o problema maior não reside no serviço propriamente, o qual pode ser muito funcional e bem-vindo em certas ocasiões, mas sim na naturalização da vigilância no âmbito da vida e da comunicação cotidianas e a política de dados a que tais serviços estão atrelados.