Watching the Watchers  🔗 **Source:** [Watching the Watchers](https://share.snipd.com/episode/f7b1f9d3-015c-4865-9240-bc34f4d89336) ## Highlights - **Flip The Gaze To Hold Power Accountable** - Inverse surveillance flips the gaze from citizens to power and uses tech, art, and data to hold institutions accountable. - It reframes surveillance tools as shields for communities rather than weapons for control. Transcript: Bridget Todd Inverse surveillance is about flipping that dynamic, using tech, art, and data, not to control people, but to hold power accountable. When citizens document police violence, track government flights, or build apps to warn neighbors about things like immigration raids, technology becomes a shield, not a weapon. ([Time 0:02:00](https://share.snipd.com/snip/24f064b7-6fe2-480e-b6a3-56641ab42ae3)) - **Teach Simple Tools To Empower People** - Empower communities with simple, teachable internet tricks like Tor and crowdfunding to enable transparency actions. - Teach practical, low-tech but effective tools so anyone can participate in accountability campaigns. Transcript: Simona Levi Working with the social movement, we do data collection in neighborhoods. We convict 65 politicians and bankers by using tools like crowdfunding. Crowdfunding can be just a very simple place in the internet where you can put money with the transparency, by having the transparency of where your money is going. We also generate boxes to leak information on these bankers by using Tor. And Tor, it's a very low-tech, but very high-tech technology. So all this, we have done the civil society, all these tools that are low-tech, but super efficient, and that can be understood by really by anyone. ([Time 0:06:38](https://share.snipd.com/snip/80b03156-d63e-408b-893a-88363f195347)) - **Bank Scandal Exposed By Xnet** - Xnet exposed a bank scandal and published documents that led to convictions of bankers and politicians. - Simona Levi called the campaign a peaceful guerrilla movement that combined community organizing with technology. Transcript: Bridget Todd Veteran of using tech to achieve citizen power. And back in 2014, her organization, Xnet, uncovered a huge scandal at one of Spain's major banks. Xnet published documents showing that senior officials were skimming millions of euros to buy luxury goods and vacations. And this was after the government had bailed out the bank. It led to public outrage and ultimately the conviction of 64 bankers and politicians. It was a huge win for XNet, which Simona calls a peaceful guerrilla movement. ([Time 0:07:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ebdc0048-ec76-4b00-bd98-264376335508)) - **Using AI To Track Parliament Behavior** - Domestic Data Streamers used computer vision to measure how often parliament members used phones and even slept during sessions. - They scaled video analysis to create heat maps and call out accountability issues at scale using AI. Transcript: Airi Dordas He started to use computer vision models to actually analyze how many parliament members were using their phones during the parliament sessions. And of course, the amount of parliament members that were there using their funds was huge. But there was also, you know, some kind of counter-criticizing, saying like, well, maybe we use it for our work, because this is also part of our work. And they say, okay, okay, this maybe we can still not know. So we went one step farther, and we started to use the same computer vision tools, also engineered by AI, to detect how many parliament members were actually sleeping during parliament Sessions. And most of the parliament sessions, especially in Europe, are recorded and available in the internet. So this is actually, the database is there. And you just need to know where these videos are and what technology to use to analyze it. And because AI allows us to do this in a large scale, because we could have done it ourselves one by one. And of course, at the beginning we did, but then we realized, okay, we have this technology that can actually help us identifying thousands of minutes of videos. So let's use it. So we developed a whole workflow that could allow us, again, to analyze all these videos and even create heat maps or where were the areas of the parliament where more people were sleeping. ([Time 0:10:13](https://share.snipd.com/snip/00626bf2-ec63-4de2-b704-02f7db2e16d4)) - **Build Alternatives While Using Existing Platforms** - Activists should both build alternatives and use existing big-tech platforms to avoid conceding public spaces. - Simona Levi calls this tactic 'Aikido': reverse the power balance while creating safe, democratic digital spaces. Transcript: Simona Levi Have to fix AI. We have to fix the tools. We shouldn't use big tech tools. But I think we have to do both things at the same time. So they have occupied the public space. So we cannot, as in the revolution in the street, you cannot leave the public space to the enemy. So you have to create your own safe space, of course, always. So we have to build democratic digitalization. We have to keep building this and to dismantle the space occupied by big tech and big senoros that we say, these five men that are occupying all our space. Yes, these five men who control everything about our lives somehow. Yes, exactly. But even X, even Twitter, we haven't exit Twitter because I think we cannot leave the space to these people. ([Time 0:13:40](https://share.snipd.com/snip/2a2c9051-4467-46e1-bccf-ffd77519f7d9)) - **Use Plugins That Teach Critical Reading** - Install Skeptic Reader to prompt critical thinking while reading news instead of relying on binary fact checks. - Use the plugin to flag bias, logical fallacies, and information gaps so readers question narratives. Transcript: Airi Dordas It came from this worry about the information and the spread of fake news and how we are building actually a society that's taking decisions based on information that usually we don't Know whether it's biased or, you know, it's fake or it's super outdated or it's just written in a way that it's manipulative. So we developed this plugin that, yeah, it's run with AI that's called Skeptic Reader. You can download it and install it in any of your browsers. And basically what it does is like every time you're reading an article from any source, it pops up with a little message that helps you to think critically about that piece. So rather than telling you whether that is true or not, it's not a fact checker, it's more like Jiminy Cricket that tells you like, maybe you should check this sentence because maybe This sentence is quite biased. Or maybe you should check the whole narrative because maybe it's written based on a fallacy. Or maybe it's better if you search for other sources to check that because it could look like it's not solid enough. Rather than telling you whether that it's true or not, good or bad, we encourage people to think critically about what they're reading. ([Time 0:16:21](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ad32add6-dab9-4e6c-9638-124093b11f7d)) - **Community Tracking Resists Institutional Erasure** - Community-run trackers (like private jet trackers) resist institutional attempts to hide powerful actors' behavior. - Small civic communities can preserve public data that institutions cannot easily erase or suppress. Transcript: Bridget Todd Surveillance in practice because, you know, Taylor Swift and Elon Musk really did not appreciate that people were tracking their use of private jets. And they worked with the FAA to try to get that information taken offline. And they were unable to because it was mostly run by a community of aviation nerds. There really wasn't a way for the FAA to obscure that data because community, powerful institutions cannot shut that down. You know, I think it really does show the power of an engaged, informed community sharing information with each other is always going to be more powerful than institutions. It just is. And something else about that that I love was that as someone who cares about the environment and climate change, I was very interested in celebrity private jet use. But it was easy to say, oh, this is just a frivolous celebrity thing. And then in the United States, those same loopholes that celebrities were trying to use to obscure their private jet usage. Well, when the Trump administration was in still is carrying out these mass deportations, they were trying to use that very same loophole to have that flight information obscured From the American public. And so even though you might be thinking, oh, you're just a gossip interested to know where Taylor Swift or Elon Musk's private jet is, you see how it's all connected. ([Time 0:19:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c1b8357e-b907-41a1-acbf-35d66e74e886)) - **Start By Mapping Local Power Structures** - Start inverse surveillance by mapping visible power infrastructures like CCTV density in your city. - Ask how surveillance shapes behavior, identity, rights, and then seek tools to flip the power dynamic. Transcript: Airi Dordas I would say maybe you can start by questioning yourself, what are the power infrastructures that are affecting our day-to lives? So maybe start by making visible what are these power dynamics that sometimes are so invisible, just the fact of counting how many CCTV cameras are in your city, for example, and then Make you the question about how is this affecting our behavior? How is this affecting our identities? How is this affecting our rights? How is it affecting our lives and futures? ([Time 0:22:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/66c98681-cc1a-480f-af59-4bd8d9b8f410))