Sousveillance and the undoing of the clean narrative of terror prevention
By Stephen Gasteyer
Initially Published on word press: November 21, 2015
In December of 1990, having just left a 3 year Peace Corps tour in Mali, I was traveling with my family in Morocco. Having arrived in Meknes with intention of traveling to the historic city of Fez, we were informed that the city was closed to outsiders. All we knew was that there had been “disturbances” between the army and local residents. The “disturbances” turned out to be the first of a series of mass demonstrations around raising the minimum wage in Morocco, organized by the national trade union, to which the government responded with deadly force.[i] The important point is that there was virtually no way to know what happened at the time except through rumors.
With the rise of social media, such silence is much harder for governments to maintain. And in the context of Israeli-Palestine, social media as well as conventional media is used to create, dispute, and recreate narratives for multiple audiences. Scholars Adi Kuntsman and Rebecca Stein have discussed how the Israeli military has used digital media to spin its narrative about the conflict.[ii] In this battle of narratives, while conventional media plays a critical role, differing perspectives are put forward by more informal reporting systems, specifically through using mobile recording and posting ability to practice what scholars have called “sousveillance.” “Sousveillance” has been defined as the use of smart phone and other technologies to record and publicize actions of a state or hegemonic power: or “surveilling the surveillers”(p. 332).[iii]
The concept of “sousveillance” may be understood in relevance to the growing surveillance of us all by both governments and corporate interests. As surveillance scholar Gary Marx has noted, we live in a “surveillance society,” where governments and corporations know an increasing amount about what we do and how we act through monitoring our internet and telecommunications activity. Marx notes that this is not so much a new development as an expansion of what governments and the private sector have done for quite some time. After all, speaking of how Queen Elizabeth (1533–1603) grappled with the balance between surveillance of society and privacy, Marx says “as a ruler concerned with the welfare of her subjects she needed information about them, as well as about rule breakers and those who would overthrow her government” (p.733). Modern governments also grapple with this balance. While some have expressed concerns about the growing oversight of society by government and private corporations, others have noted the benefits of everything from closed circuit cameras to internet trolling devices to spot those who would cause society harm. In the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, state surveillance has led to the arrest of people accused of “incitement” for posting about the current uprising.[iv] But sousveillance comes from the other direction. Techology has enabled non-state actors to monitor the actions of state agents such as military and police officers. No longer can excessive force be concealed simply by coopting or excluding the mainstream media.
Sousveillance has become a tool in many popular movements. Three recent examples of the use of sousveillance are in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, in the Burmese resistance to the return to military dictatorship in 2014-2015, in the “Black Lives Matter” campaign in the United States 2014-2015, as people with hand held devices were able to record the misdeeds of police, security forces, and state supported thugs. In all cases, the release of the amateur videos demonstrated evidence of a narrative that had been building for some time. Sousveillance exposed the increasing brutality of the regime and misinformation about the size of demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt, the reemergence of brutality by the military in Burma, and the excessive violence by police against minorities in the United States.
Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government heightened tensions that subsequently exploded through allowing and protecting visits to Al Aqsa by Jewish extremists. The Institute for Middle East Understanding primer below provides a concise overview of why most reasonable people might have predicted these actions to heighten tensions.[v] As I have written before, several years of increased settler colonialism, in and outside Jerusalem, and restrictions on Palestinian life (freedom of movement, economic opportunities) set the stage.
The Israeli government then tried to stamp out the uprising through three measures that were intended to quash the uprising with an iron fist: 1) increased penalties for stone throwing; 2) loosening of restrictions on Israeli military for use of live fire and lethal force; and, 3) and easing restrictions on arms among Israeli civilians. These actions were all supposedly necessary to quell new, random violence. The international media focused on the third action as potentially problematic. Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev argued, however, that this was a responsible activity of the government since, “firearms licenses are only issued to those who pass tests and meet other requirements” (including prior service in the Israeli military). [vi] Human rights organizations argued that this was effectively an invitation for lynch mob style vigilantism.
The original Israeli narrative (largely accepted initially by the US media) was that the use of lethal force only occurred in self-defense against Palestinian Arabs attempting to harm Israelis. Some have pointed out that two thirds of the almost 90 Palestinian deaths (as of 21 November 2015) have been in the course demonstrations – mostly of youth throwing stones or Molotov cocktails at Army installations or patrols, or attempting to cross the border fence in Gaza or the West Bank. But even among the one third of cases, there have been a number of cases where amateur video seemed to indicate excessive force or vigilantism that killed Palestinians who at least were not in the act of attacking Israelis. As an International Solidarity Movement article stated, “While there undoubtedly are stabbings of Israelis taking place, there are also undoubtedly mistaken or false accusations and pressure from Israeli civilians to kill people they suspect of being terrorists.”[vii]
From the first night of attacks, amateur videos undermined the clarity of the official Israeli narrative. The second Palestinian killed was videotaped running from a mob of Israelis who persuaded a security guard to shoot and kill him when he posed no clear threat. Only days later, amateur video footage indicate a Palestinian woman shot by Israeli security in an alleged attack in Afula was, in fact, unarmed. Local news reported the woman was recently released from custody and cleared of charges after a police investigation.[viii]
There have since been multiple incidences, specifically in Hebron, where there are known to be particularly violent and extreme settlers who would carry out such attacks.[ix] There have been at least 4 instances when amateur video unraveled clean narratives in that city that Israeli settlers or security killed attacking knife wielding Palestinian attackers.
Repressive governments and security forces are frequently hostile to documentation that complicates their narratives, so it should not be surprising that efforts to document these violations have been met with intimidation by the Israeli Military.[x] On several other instances, Palestinian activists such as the media coordinator of Youth Against Settlements have likewise been detained connected with releasing video footage of one such incident.[xi]
The use of video to complicate the Israeli narrative and allegations of vigilantism have gained credence in the international press as Israelis have attacked other Israeli Jewish citizens and an Eritrean asylum seeker in apparent revenge attacks. Indeed, the language used by the New York Times has moved from early reports that discussed “terrorist attacks” to discussing “alleged terror attacks.”
Sousveillance, as well as surveillance has become part of the landscape in the information campaigns of modern conflict. As Gary Marx and others have documented, it is very difficult in the modern society to ever really disappear. So government and corporations can always know where we are and what we are doing. But so, too, is it increasingly difficult for government (and others) to act out of the public view. It is in social movements and conflicts (like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict) that we see this truism most presciently.
[i] Iskander, Natasha N. 2010. Creative state: Forty years of migration and development policy in morocco and mexico. 1st ed. Ithaca: ILR Press.
[ii] Kuntsman, A. and R. Stein. 2015. Digital Militarism: Israel’s Occupation in the Social Media Age. Stanford University Press. http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=23022
[iii] The concept of “sousveillance” comes from Steve Mann and colleagues: Mann, S., Nolan, J., & Wellman, B. (2002). Sousveillance: Inventing and Using Wearable Computing Devices for Data Collection in Surveillance Environments. Surveillance & Society, 1(3), 331-355. The basic idea is that while electronic tracking allows the state to watch residents of a society to discipline actions, in the Foucauldian sense, with small recording devices
[iv] See, for instance, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/11/israel-arrests-palestinian-teenager-facebook-posts-151105070221213.html
[v] For a quick review of why this was problematic, see http://imeu.org/article/misperceptions-on-the-crisis-in-palestine-israel.
[vi] http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/15/middleeast/israel-palestinian-tensions/
[vii] http://palsolidarity.org/2015/10/shoot-first-dont-ask-questions-later/
[viii] See, for instance, On Afula, http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=768112; on Fadi Alloun in Jerusalem, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/10/controversial-killing-fadi-alloun-151005081834933.html; http://mondoweiss.net/2015/10/palestinian-jewish-audience
[ix] Electronic Intifada. https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/israel-killed-boys-they-sought-soldiers-help-group-says; Maan News. Israeli settler opens fire at Palestinian youth in Hebron. Video: Israeli soldiers beat, wrongfully detain Palestinian http://www.maannews.com/Content.aspx?id=768427; MEM: https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/news/middle-east/21735-17-year-old-bayan-al-esseili-shot-dead-after-alleged-attacks-in-hebron
[x]CPT: http://www.cptpalestine.com/uncategorized/bloody-saturday-three-palestinian-teenagers-murdered-cpter-arrested-for-instagram-photo/
