No to Electronic Watchtowers

Elements of Reflection on Video Surveillance



"This little pamphlet on video surveillance doesn't have the pretension of considering all of the questions concerning video surveillance and its development over the last dozen years. Its only ambition is to diffuse a certain number of reflections written by the collective 'Smile, You're Being Filmed' and other activists, on the integration of video surveillance into security ideology, which also includes police officers on foot patrol, anti-crime brigades and local security agreements. This panoply is to be understood in the framework of the conception of the Penal State (described by Loic Vacquant in The prisons of misery), which since the beginning of the 1980s has supplanted the Providence State in the problematic of the social and economic regulation of 'those at the bottom.' The struggle against video surveillance is one of the elements of combat in the fight against the totality of security politics, which has been developed by both the right and the left." [Text on back cover.]


CONTENTS
1. How far will Big Brother go?
2. The fake debate
3. Calm yourself, you're surrounded!
4. The new local order
5. Work! Someone is watching you
6. The Juicy Security Market
7. Loft Story, video surveillance. . .
8. Smile, you're being filmed!
9. The left loves to surveill you
10. We won't be rats in cages
11. How to Stage Your Own "Surveillance Camera Theater"
12. SOS VIDEO SURVEILLANCE Vaulx-En-Velin
13. Security Ideology and Video Surveillance
14. Resistance to Video Surveillance

(A 42-page pamphlet assembled by Souriez, Vous Etes Filmes [Smile, You're being filmed!] and published in Paris, July 2001 by Editions Reflex. Translated from the French by Bill Brown in November 2003.)


Contact the New York Surveillance Camera Players

By e-mail SCP@notbored.org

By snail mail: SCP c/o NOT BORED! POB 1115, Stuyvesant Station, New York City 10009-9998




NOT BORED!