Protesting surveillance as an art

[Chuck0 <chuck@tao.ca>]

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Protesting surveillance as an art 
Friday, September 24, 1999

By TOM HAYS
The Associated Press

    NEW YORK -- Big Brother, whether he likes or not, is watching Bill
Brown.

    In the subway, parks, and dark corners where government and
businesses point security cameras around Manhattan, Brown and his
cohorts pop up like annoying Little Brothers with props: crudely drawn
placards cryptically quoting Orwell -- "We will meet in a place where
there is no darkness" -- and a boom box sounding mock emergency
broadcasts.

    "America is now under martial law," one broadcast warns. "Shut up.
Be happy. Obey all orders. Relax. Everything is done for you."

    Part performance art, part political protest, Brown's theatrics are
the work of what he calls the Surveillance Camera Players.

    SCP is composed of two dozen self-described anarchists. According to
their manifesto, members view hidden cameras as "a tool of social
control. . . . The group intends to explode the myth that only those who
are doing something wrong fear surveillance cameras."

    Brown, 40, is a media-friendly, chain-smoking subversive with a
sense of humor, a former literature professor who now gets by as a legal
proofreader on a graveyard shift. He views Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a
"mean bastard" who has turned City Hall into his own Ministry of Love,
manipulating the masses under the banner of "public safety."

    The native New Yorker founded SCP in 1996 in response to the
proliferation of video surveillance around the city.

    "It's hard not to view it all as a conspiracy," he said.

    SCP's early guerrilla productions -- mainly performed in subways
until broken up by police -- included rapid-fire, dumbed-down versions
of "1984," "Waiting for Godot," and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."

    The SCP has had no trouble being watched: A 1998 survey by the New
York Civil Liberties Union found more than 2,300 surveillance cameras
trained on public spaces in Manhattan. The Port Authority of New York
and New Jersey alone reportedly operates more than 1,200 cameras
throughout airports, bridges, tunnels, and terminals, most monitored
from a control room in the World Trade Center.

    The group's latest stage is popular Washington Square Park, a
notorious drug-dealing spot in the heart of Greenwich Village where
police have installed high-tech, remote-control cameras designed to look
like ordinary street lamps.

    The mayor and police officials deny any sinister motives. They have
defended the cameras' use in housing projects and other areas, touting
them as an effective and popular crime-fighting tool. Besides, Police
Commissioner Howard Safir has argued, "You have no right to privacy in a
public place."

-- 
Chuck0

Alternative Press Review
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"A society is a healthy society only to the degree 
that it exhibits anarchistic traits." 
        - Jens Bjørneboe

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