LONDON — When

London’s mobile CCTV cameras were shut down by a legal ruling two days before the G20 protests in London, conspiracy theorists suggested that the blackout had been contrived so that the police could be let off the reins. Without CCTV, there would be no record of official wrongdoing.

It was a neat theory, but naively old-fashioned in its assumption that the state had a monopoly on surveillance. The emergence of amateur video showing Ian Tomlinson, the man who had a heart attack on the day of the protests, being pushed to the ground by a police officer soon before he died. It clearly demonstrates that for every camera pointed at you by Big Brother, there are 10 more pointed back by Little Brother —

an informed, digitally savvy civilian population that has the tools to record anything, anytime, anywhere.







Extensive networks of fixed cameras throughout Britain remain the preserve of the authorities, but these are essentially dumb systems monitoring empty streets in the hope that something significant will happen when they’re pointing in the right direction. An informal network of passersby with camera phones creates a crowdsourced, peer-to-peer network of citizen surveillance.

Footage trapped in a phone is of limited power, but coupled with the integrated network of the old and new media, it is set free. The Guardian, which obtained the footage exclusively, led its print edition with a freeze-frame from the video and its website with the video itself.

However, rather than trying to keep the exclusive to itself, it posted the video on YouTube, inviting other sites and blogs to use the footage.

Faced with such a compelling piece of video, would the competition look the other way? Not a bit of it. Times Online also lead with the Guardian

footage, branded throughout with its rival’s logo, because the grainy footage couldn’t be ignored. That’s a big philosophical change for a news organization, and an indication of the power of the web.

We’ve grown used to the idea that amateur footage will trump the professionals in the moments after air crashes, floods and fires, but we haven’t yet grasped what that does to the balance of power between the state, the media and the individual.?? Surveillance is still talked of as something done to us by them, but increasingly it’s something done to everyone by everyone else. What that means for the authorities is that they can no longer control the flow of information about their actions.

They haven’t yet stopped trying. Without the camera work of the New

York fund manager who captured some of Tomlinson’s last moments, the final word on his death would have gone to the police: "[He] suffered a sudden heart attack while on his way home from work."

The week-old footage that emerged today does not contradict that official statement, but it widens the lens through which we see the event, and it changes our perspective. Instead of the sober, considered response of a senior media-trained officer, calmly delivered hours after the event, we’re in the thick of the action. It’s messy footage of jeering protesters and a policeman lunging at a middle-age man, who stumbles to the ground. It leaves little room for complacency.

The picture we see remains incomplete. We don’t see what happened before the camera started rolling and we barely see the baton strike.

If only we could see it from another angle, if only we could hear what was said. As more evidence emerges and more footage surfaces, we may.

The reaction to this incident, like the fears about blacked-out

CCTV, illustrate an interesting shift in attitude towards surveillance.

People normally opposed to cameras are, for the moment, looking to them to protect civil liberties and guard the little guy against the threat of state oppression.

The story brings to mind Cory Doctorow’s novel, Little Brother, which examines how smart, tech-savvy individuals can level the playing field against agents of the state by using their own understanding of digital tools to subvert and confront them.







The footage of the attack on Tomlinson demonstrates the moral neutrality of technology: The cameras routinely used by the state to gather information on demonstrators conducting legal, peaceful protests, or to record witness confessions, are now pointing both ways.

The people who broke RBS’s windows during the G20 demonstrations will have to deal with the consequences of their actions because of video evidence. So too will the police officer who pushed Tomlinson over, in what seems, at this stage, to have been an unprovoked assault.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that in the near future we will see a police officer killing a suspect on camera, with all the strange implications for due process and public opinion that a visual record of such violence would entail. The death of Jean Charles de

Menezes, shot by the police after the London bombings, would have been recorded, if one of the Tube’s cameras had not been out of order. When a member of the San Francisco’s transport police shot a man dead on camera earlier this year, the video, placed on YouTube, provoked riots.





Google, the owner of YouTube, provoked a flurry of outrage (and plenty of benign curiosity) when it launched Street View in Britain last month, but taking still images of a street every couple of years is even less efficient as a means of surveillance than official CCTV. An individual with a camera and access to a network is a far greater threat to our privacy, and a far more powerful guardian of our liberty.

Little Brother is watching you, and watching over you.

By Holden Frith, Editor wired.co.uk