'Big Brother's Bigger Brother': Militarized Surveillance and Citizen Sousveillance in Baltimore

• In Event: 1245 - Designing for Social Justice? The Politics of Technology

Abstract

For six months in 2016, without the knowledge of its citizens, Baltimore City Police trialed an advanced military aerial surveillance technology, called Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI), that can track the movements of every person in public view over 32 square miles. This article examines the controversy of this trial and subsequent attempts by activists from Baltimore’s low-income minority neighborhoods to reinstate the technology as a way to defend themselves against police misconduct and corruption. Based on in-depth interviews with many of the actors related to the system, the article argues that WAMI is a hybrid of militarized surveillance, where the state watches “from above” using tools of war, and citizen “sousveillance,” where citizens watch the state “from below.” The article traces how WAMI made its way from the battlefields of Iraq to the streets of Baltimore, highlighting how the aesthetics of the system’s imagery—its graininess, abstractness, and distance—has both facilitated its uptake by traditionally anti-surveillance actors as well as stirred up controversy with privacy advocates. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of the case for debates around racially-biased surveillance and resistance to surveillance in post-Ferguson America.

Author

• Benjamin H Snyder, Williams College