Center for Citizen Media Rotating Header Image

Countering British Government Paranoia

Mar 5th, 2008
by Dan Gillmor.

Boing Boing: Remixing the London police’s anti-photographer terrror posters.
Responding to the London Metropolitan Police’s new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

This is how people, creating their own media, can help expose government (and other) overreaching. Another way in this case would be to encourage everyone to take photos everywhere.

The speed with which the U.K. is turning into a police state is just amazing, and frightening.

Posted in: Issues.

←
→

5 Comments on “Countering British Government Paranoia”

  1. #1 Jon Garfunkel
    on Mar 5th, 2008 at 7:39 pm

    This is one of the funniest things I have read in a long time! Consider the double-irony:

    Let’s assume that “Q-Branch” MI5 has the technology to scan a crowd of faces and pick out the most wanted terrorists. Surely the MPS has technology TO USE THE SECURITY CAMERAS TO RECOGNIZE THE PEOPLE WHO ARE TAKING PICTURES OF IT!

    One of the BB readers figured this out: “Oh, and won’t most people taking photos of security cameras show up on security camera footage?”

    And those government-created posters? Surely those were designed to fool BoingBoing into creating frivolous counter-posters!

  2. #2 Dan Gillmor
    on Mar 5th, 2008 at 9:27 pm

    I’d like to see a one-day event in London that worked roughly as follows:

    Thousands of people, wearing masks, take cameras into the streets and shoot photos of the surveillance cameras. Then they post the pictures on a geo-coded map.

    I’d love to see what MI5 would do with that.

  3. #3 Delia
    on Mar 5th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

    I love your patience, Jon… I don’t know what your rate of getting a response on this site is (it’s gotta be better than mine as of late) but it may not be that much better… yet you are hitting almost every single entry…

    Delia

    P.S. good luck with it! I’m taking a break… D.

  4. #4 Jon Garfunkel
    on Mar 6th, 2008 at 1:08 am

    Dan,

    Check flickr for cctv. Only problem is that those silly posters are now thusly tagged! (Them’s the breaks of everything being miscellaneous.)

    I did find the Panopticon pool, and look at the map of pictures. Here’s the one picture tagged in London. One camera down, 499,999 to go.

    Jon

  5. #5 Periodismo Ciudadano
    on Mar 6th, 2008 at 10:05 am

    […] | citmedia.org, […]