SURVEILLANCE * by Dimity

How often do you look up while ambling around the city and see cameras
aimed at you?  Walk on to a railway platform and become conscious of the
video pointing in your direction, go into a bank (often, unfortunately, an
unavoidable exercise) and be surrounded by the bloody things, happily
whirring away, getting a good look at your every profile, just in
case...Look up at certain high rise buildings throughout the city and smile
- there they are again.  Why are we being watched and by whom?

"Security" cameras and other paraphenalia are designed to intimidate.  With
camera's trained on your every movement, it is hard enough to relax let
alone do anything anti-social.  And if you are opposed to this society, one
which is white skin and wealth dominated, one in which women are still
subject to so much sexual abuse, a patriarchal society with no room for
dissent, then yuo probably have some anti social antics that thses cameras
happily snap.  The constant activity of the police helicopter, also taking
photographs,  serves this intimidatory function.  An American police manual
states "The helicopter possesses and omnipresence which no other police
vehicle ever had before."  It has been said so many times that these things
are necessary.

"Security measures" is the offhand explanation and suprisingly the general
population accepts this.  But I never feel comfortable when my every
movement is being watched and perhaps recorded by an unseen eye.  To me
such measures have a sinister ring; the old "Big Brother is watching you"
fear leaps up every time.   Imagine what the helicopter does to Vietnam
Vets.

I have been told that as a women, video's spying on every train station,
post office, bank etc, is meant to make me feel a little safer.  A little
less likely to face attack, rape or harassment.  However I know this is not
the case.  If sexually harassed on a train platform even if someone is
watching behind the cameras there is no guarantee of help or assistance.
Considering the amount of pornography and the extent to which the
television has distorted peoples ability to react to a situation right in
front of them, we can't guarentee that the man behind the camera isnt
getting off on the 'action'.  The eye is definately male, the protecting
strong bucket of hormones ready to save the lady in distress.  Problem is,
the distress of women is a multi million dollar industry and that's just
the explicit stuff.   If vido evidence was produced at a court hearing
there is still no more likelihood that the justice system will be any more
sympathetic to the abuse facing women in our society every day because the
systematic violence aganist women is an integral facet of justice in this
system.  So those cameras are not really there to help and protect us.  The
eye is perverse enough to look, we can only imagine what the imagination of
the eye could be.

A black American man is beaten to within an inch of his life by four white
cops "hitting a few home runs" on the streets of LA for a simple driving
offence.  The entire event is filmed by another party and an American court
still can find these racist jerks "not guilty"

There is a belief that the camera never lies, but who can guarentee the
viewer's internal or beuracratic editing device?? At AIDEX in Canberra last
year, hours and hours of video footage was shot by protesters and media
which depicted excessive and unecessary police violence and yet to get any
one in "authority" willing to view it and take on the obvious inquiry into
police methods at such demonstration, has been a monumental and ongoing
unsuccessful task.

Surveillence is a power over other people.  Early European prisons had
developed fairly unsophisticated methods of surveillence, but they still
allowed the prison officers to see into the prison quarters while not being
seen.  Because they were never sure when they were being watched, the
prisoners did not have the freedom to carry out their most basic functions
in comfort.  As films like Ghosts of the Civil Dead show, now we are the
prisoners, our every step observed, our words monitored, our freedom and
privacy encroached day in day out.  And don't believe that it is only the
street level surveillence.  Every telephone in the country is able to be
monitored.  At the slightest suspicion of subersive activity, the police
can monitor your phone, record your conversations, stake out your
movements.  The more subversive elements are documented the more
justification for increased money, powers and numbers the police have thus
it is in their interests to invite more to their bad taste party.

 Kerry Browning knows the far reaching lengths the powers that be will go
to to keep their blood shot eye on citizens, especially those who are
politically active, usually under the auspices of drug investigation.
Hours of audio and filmed footage of her movements and those of her
household were presented at the court case, even recordings from inside her
bedroom.  Other events that were clearly innocent household activities like
chopping wood were turned into baby massacres by the police in court.

Do not underestimate the paranoia of the "powerful".

