Surveillance is the act of collecting, analysing, and acting upon information about specific objects, data, or individuals. Recent advances have allowed for the automation of a large part of this process. Of particular interest is the use of computer algorithms to analyse surveillance data. We refer to surveillance that uses this form of analysis as *algorithmic surveillance*. The rapid growth of algorithmic surveillance has left many important questions unasked. Counter-surveillance is the task of making surveillance difficult. To do this, it subverts various components of the surveillance process. Much like surveillance, counter-surveillance has many applications. It is used to critically assess and validate surveillance practices. As well, counter-surveillance serves to protect privacy, civil liberties, and against abuses of surveillance. Unfortunately, counter-surveillance techniques are often considered to be of little constructive use. As such, they are underdeveloped. At present, no counter-surveillance techniques exist that are able to adequately address algorithmic surveillance. In order to develop counter-surveillance methods against algorithmic surveillance, the *process* of surveillance must first be understood. Understanding this process ensures that the necessary components of algorithmic surveillance will be identified and subverted. As such, our research begins by developing a model of the surveillance process. This model consists of three distinct stages: the collection of information, the analysis of that information, and a response to what has been discovered (the action). From our analysis of the structure of surveillance we show that counter-surveillance techniques prior to now primarily address the collection and action stages of the surveillance process. We argue that the neglect of the analysis stage creates significant problems when attempting to subvert algorithmic surveillance, which relies heavily upon a complex analysis of data. As such, we go on to demonstrate how algorithmic analysis may be subverted. To do this, we develop techniques that are able to subvert three common algorithmic analysis techniques: classification, cluster analysis, and association rules. Each of these attacks against algorithmic analysis works surprisingly well and demonstrate significant flaws in current approaches to algorithmic surveillance. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2007-09-18 10:42:21.025

The topic of this thesis is the biopolitics of video activism vis-à-vis racialized police violence. It is written against the backdrop of recent developments in the critique of two central concepts in field of biopolitics, namely Giorgio Agamben’s bare life and Michel Foucault’s biopower. Offsetting their respective framework, Alexander G. Weheliye (et al.) has introduced the imposition of race onto bodies as anterior to biopolitics. I incorporate this in a critique of Pasi Väliaho’s notion of biopolitical screens. To facilitate grounded theorizing, a field study of police accountability video activist groups in the United States was conducted. I argue that their observed practices should be seen as forms of embodied counter-surveillance and I situate them in the racially saturated field of visibility specific to the U.S. context. Moreover, I argue that the practices entail an extension of corporealities which is not inherently political in the sense of overt discursive iconography. It is, however, ideologically disrupting in how it networks politicized bodies through time and space. I conclude that raising the video camera to “look back” in the face of racializing assemblages constitutes a rights claim to a political subjectivity, however not necessarily in terms of polity or citizenship. Instead, the media practices are transversal and hold the potential to entail a political subjectivity ontologically anterior to state sovereignty.

[pt] O acesso do cidadão comum às tecnologias de imagem oferecidas pelos telefones celulares e a facilidade de compartilhamento de imagens no mundo paralelo da web favoreceram a produção e circulação de vídeos amadores que denunciam práticas policiais. Esse fenômeno contemporâneo aponta não apenas para o que tem sido caracterizado como uma sociedade do espetáculo e da vigilância, mas também para o que se entende hoje como uma prática de jornalismo cidadão. É a partir das contribuições das Ciências Sociais e da Comunicação Social sobre esses conceitos e à luz dos estudos da fala-em-interação que buscamos examinar como é construído interacionalmente esse flagrante em que o celular é usado como uma arma de contravigilância. O corpus desta pesquisa é constituído por um vídeo amador que registra a ação policial em uma comunidade que recebeu uma Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (UPP), no Rio de Janeiro. A gravação retrata um conflito após uma abordagem, estando todos os participantes presentes na cena cientes da gravação. As imagens foram disponibilizadas na maior plataforma de compartilhamento de vídeos da atualidade, o YouTube. Trata-se de um estudo de caso que ilustra as relações entre controle e prazer, tecidas na criação e distribuição dessas imagens, e o modo como é construída a prática do jornalismo cidadão do tipo incriminativo. Os resultados apontam, primeiramente, para o modo como a estrutura de participação na cena evidencia a construção do espetáculo e ainda a disputa pela edição desse espetáculo. Revelam também a especificidade desse flagrante em relação a outras práticas de vigilância já descritas na literatura. Finalmente, demonstra que o aclamado empoderamento do jornalista cidadão, armado com sua câmera, não é um mito, mas tem limites. / [en] Access to image technology supplied by cellular phones and the easiness with which images can be shared through the parallel world of the web have favored ordinary citizens to video and share amateur films denouncing law enforcement practices. This contemporary phenomenon shows not only what has been characterized as a society of spectacle and surveillance, but also what is understood nowadays as citizen journalism. In the light of the speech in interaction studies and from the contribution of the Social Sciences and Social Communication we have tried to examine how these situations in which cellular phones are used as counter surveillance weapons are constructed by interaction. The corpus of this research is comprised by an amateur video that records police officers in action in a slum that has a Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) in Rio de Janeiro. The video records a conflict after the approach made by police officers and all of the participants present in the scene are aware of the recording. It was shared on YouTube, which is currently the world s largest video sharing platform. This case study shows the relationship between control and pleasure, woven in the making and distribution of these images. It also shows how incriminating citizen journalism is practiced. The results lead us to see, at first, the way in which the participation framework reveals how the spectacle is being constructed and demonstrates that the participants are competing for how to edit this spectacle. They also disclose the specificity of this situation of being caught in the act when compared to other surveillance practices already described in the literature. Finally, it demonstrates that this hailed empowerment of citizen journalists, armed with their cameras is not a myth, but has its limitations.