Skip to main content

Open Source Community Sousveillance System

There are various reasons for a community to develop a shared sousveillance system: It provides a legal witness for any crime, brings media attention (via the agreed and anoymised sharing of the captured information), deters anti social behaviour even amongst neighbours, and together with other activities to work on community cohesion such as assemblies or neighbourhood events, can lead to a positively reinforcing environment towards a socially and environmentally positive use of the tool. This in turn empowers the local community and pushes official surveillance or policing reasoning to require it's own justification or to work alongside neighbours on a more equal ground. Depending on the area a group may choose to ally with local law enforcement or only do so when a group determines that a crime has been committed.

So shall we make one? I'll be taking down and working on ideas for how it could work on this post. Some initial features:

1) A "camera view" showing all shared cameras, photos and audiofeeds
2) A group chat link.
3) A network only accessible to the group.
4) The ability to, as a group or small committee within, agree to publish or send media outside of the group.
5) Camera screen showing your camera view and some settings.
6) Content privacy levels you can set as private, shared with the group or public - publishing content directly somewhere online.
7) A group could decide to "id" a likeness captured in the photo via social media to identify the people involved. I believe verifying this is very delicate and should be a group process.

The network interface over which this system would work would ideally be a closed mesh of mutually identified but outwardly anonymous neighbours in a physical location, who are watching over the security of their own homes and adjoining space for break-ins or other illegal or antisocial activities.

In Spain, the legal situation is that you can't film with your security camera in the street unless the camera points on to your property. If you are recording with your phone, for example because you've seen a crime, you are permitted to record the crime but not the police in some cases, due to the "ley mordassa" or gag law. The reasonable excuse is interference with police activity especially in the case of plainclothes police. This means if you leave your phone recording at the window, depending on how this law works and the situation involved, the recording can be classed as your own home phone recording, whilst being networked with other local phones in a citizen run surveillance system with the above features. I need more details on the legalities of such a system.

Could such a thing be built on Matrix? Rocketchat?

A use case is different chat messages discussing a possible crime, requesting photos from people with different viewpoints of the street, building a case and sending it on to an outside group once this information has been collated and verified by a minimum of 2 neighbours.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How could Scotland have a more resilient food system?

The question that's led me to write this has been how do we adapt long term, specifically here in Scotland, where I live now, to coronavirus and the idea that pandemics are here to stay if we stay this industrialised and globalised. How does a society look if it's to be resilient long term, sensible and ecologically regenerative? We do know a few things about this novel coronavirus that we seem to be slowly figuring out as it evolves and spreads, and I have almost a picture of how it might look in my head. Here is the closest I can get so far to it, on a regional scale at least: In the picture, each block is a community of several households and work spaces, and each green space is where they grow crops, or graze animals. So why this system? Around the time when it was obvious a lockdown was coming, I read a community organisation manual that mentioned how graph theory applies to limiting the spread of something like Covid-19. It advocates getting together with your clos

Poem for peace, from a pirate recording in a Cairo Museum.

My love With peace I have placed loving flowers at your feet With peace With peace I stopped the seas of blood for you Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come Come and live with me my love Under a blanket of peace I want you to sing, beloved light of my eyes And your song will be for peace let the world hear, my beloved and say: Forget anger Forget pain Forget your weapons Forget your weapons and come And live in peace These I believe are the words of a widow at the tomb of her beloved. I got the words from this italian website . It was used in a seminal Italian anti-war song " Luglio Agosto Settembre Nero " by the band Area (although I guess they weren't called anti-war songs then) - whose vocalist Demetrio Stratos indirectly gives the name to this blog, and whose music is the inspiration for a lot of my mine. It's adapted in turn from a greek folk song, but no-one knows who wrote the original words, except that Stratos was probably