How to fight back against surveillance (hint: it starts with care)

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Hi Cintila,

Surveillance is now presented as an unavoidable part of our lives, yet people are still finding ways to fight back – from anti-surveillance knitting patterns to anti-facial recognition makeup techniques.

Our inaugural scholar-in-residence, Petra Molnar, is tracking how people are coming together to confront the 'polycrisis'.

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Revolution begins with care: Confronting the polycrisis

Petra Molnar

We sit cross-legged in a circle, laughing as plates brimming with food are passed around. Chicken dressed with Aleppo peppers, charred aubergine smothered in garlic and adorned with precious pomegranate seeds, green mulukhia (a soup made from minced Jute mallow leaves – my all-time favourite) are just some of the offerings people bring to share. Golden saffron rice spills all over the carpet, but the hosts don't mind; besides, Snoopy, the local dog, has just had her puppies and will gobble up whatever remains on the ground when we aren't looking.

We're not at a restaurant or a tavern but in a shipping container in a Greek refugee camp, made festive with Christmas lights left hanging from a few months ago. Spaces of suffering often turn into spaces of tremendous care. Everyone brings what they can: some baklava from a local shop, a bottle of wine poured out into tiny beakers for those who partake, a box of diapers for a new mum in need.

After years of being stuck here without knowing when limbo may end, people turn towards one another, recognising that we are stronger together. This is mutualism, creativity, and care in action, a reminder that all is not lost in this era of polycrisis – of one disaster after another, all of them worsened by the fact that they are linked. Many people are doing what they can to work towards a different world, an antidote to despair.

As techno-fascism takes hold, the polycrisis is increasingly dominated by surveillance. From robo-dogs at the US-Mexico border to facial recognition at sports stadiums across much of the world and algorithms deciding what we do and don't see online, our lives are curated and sharpened by automation, digitisation and artificial intelligence. Technologies are used to oppress us rather than free us, as carla bergman and Nick Montgomery remind us in Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times: "Through social media, smartphones, browsing histories, and credit cards, surveillance is ubiquitous, and increasingly participatory".

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It is much more difficult to challenge surveillance when it is presented as an inevitable part of our lives, yet people are still finding routes to do so. Over the course of my time as openDemocracy's inaugural scholar-in-residence, I want to chart some of these ways that people are coming together to contest the challenging situation we are in.

Of course, people have long resorted to physically destroying surveillance cameras, either with brute force or spray paint. This is still true even now that the cameras are being flown overhead; take the videos of farmers in India going viral for throwing rocks with expert precision at government drones trying to quell their protests. But activists are now also turning surveillance back onto their oppressors, with environmental protesters using their own drones to monitor eco-crimes such as logging, and people in the occupied Palestinian city of Hebron filming Israeli police and settlers as a form of protection. There is creativity in resistance and survival.

And people are indeed getting creative. Make-up artists are designing anti-facial recognition make-up to bamboozle the cameras trying to scan our features, as has been covered by Vogue. Interestingly, it does not have to be a full face of makeup; even a modest application will confound the technologies. For those wishing for something a little bit more impenetrable, Polish designer Ewa Nowak has created the Incognito mask, which uses unique geometric shapes and reflective surfaces to deflect recognition software in security cameras.

For those looking to make use of what they already own, Wired magazine recommends wearing unremarkable dark clothing to "make yourself less memorable to both humans and machines". But should you be in the market for a new piece of anti-surveillance clothing, how about a knitted sweater? Artist Ottilia Westerlund has developed a pattern of black and white shapes to confound biometric surveillance, and in an act of care, she's made the pattern free to download. Sweaters as resistance?

So, how do we make things right?

Some groups are trying the co-optation route, using existing technologies to subvert and resist their oppressors.

Many use social media platforms such as TikTok to disperse information through quick explainer videos for know-your-rights campaigns or to share their journeys with the immediacy that can only come from a selfie-video filmed on a raft bobbing in the Mediterranean or from the treacherous crossing of the Darién Gap on the migration route between South and North America. Unfortunately, human smugglers are also using these platforms to sell their services, with business booming as many countries tighten their border controls. In Latin America, smugglers build their brands on promises of success laced with emojis and images of people climbing over walls and happy families waving American flags. All the while, people continue to die making these dangerous crossings.

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Meanwhile, for those already in the US, various initiatives have sprung up to turn the eye towards immigration enforcement as the Trump administration continues its brutal crackdown on people on the move and migrant justice communities. In March last year, the TurnLeft Political Action Committee launched its Resist Map, an open-source project that it hopes will create a live nationwide registry of ICE activity by enabling communities to monitor and track ICE via text updates and a national map.

The search and rescue space is also responding with its own technologies. Sea-Watch, a German non-profit that patrols the Mediterranean to rescue people in distress whom the authorities have left to drown, has teamed up with SearchWing, which builds drones to help NGOs spot people in need of help. Search and rescuers have even set up their own satellites to safely share information, literally circumnavigating the telecommunications grid.

While these efforts are commendable, poet Audre Lorde reminds us that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house". Current technologies are no panacea for freedom; they limit us to what already exists, rather than encouraging us to see what else is possible. But as Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, an author, musician, and academic from the Mississauga Nishnaabeg group of First Nation peoples in Canada, counters: "I am not so concerned with how we dismantle the master's house, that is, which set of theories we used to critique colonialism; but I am very concerned with how we (re) build our own houses."

Betasamosake Simpson's approach, which she details in Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence, champions the resurgence of what Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci termed "subaltern knowledges". These are the knowledge and perspectives of marginalised or oppressed groups, often those excluded from hegemonic systems of knowledge production.

Indigenous academics are introducing conceptions of AI that alter and enhance our understanding of reality, such as research by Megan Kelleher, from the Barada and Gabalbara people of Central Queensland in Australia, into how or whether Indigenous protocols can inform AI's design. Elsewhere, Michael Running Wolf, a McGill University computer scientist from the Northern Cheyenne First Nation, created the Lakota AI Code Camp to train Indigenous youth in data science and AI. Running Wolf also champions Indigenous data sovereignty, similar to the goals of Canada's First Nations Information Governance Center, which aims to ensure that data gathering is ethical and that First Nations communities are empowered to use their data for their needs, so that "every First Nation will achieve data sovereignty in alignment with its distinct world view… Our Data. Our Stories. Our Futures."

Others are finding ways to fight back using the master's ultimate tool: the law. Laws have long been used to oppress marginalised groups, concretising particular ideas about who belongs and who does not. Like a solid minority of the profession, I am a bit of a reluctant lawyer, having always struggled with the law being a hegemonic tool in and of itself, based on solidified categories such as 'refugee' vs 'immigrant' vs 'expat' – with little space left for the messiness of the human experience. And while international law can help maintain a common standard, states' ratification of conventions often amounts to nothing more than performance on the global stage.

Despite these limitations, existing domestic laws can sometimes be stretched and expanded in novel ways, such as forcing states to rethink privacy legislation and the implications of growing surveillance on people's data protection rights. International norms can be pushed to hold perpetrators of technological harm to account, such as a UN report from last year recognising that AI has played a major part in Israel's targeting of civilians in the genocide in Gaza.

Tech bros often lament that regulation stifles innovation, but some innovation should be stifled – especially when it hurts real people. Yet when it comes to technology, regulation continues to lag behind – and is even being actively turned away from as private sector actors increase their influence in policymaking, as can be seen by X owner Elon Musk's stint in the Oval Office and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg lobbying European politicians in Brussels. It's no wonder that the EU's long-awaited act to regulate AI does not go nearly far enough to protect people's rights under the guise of protecting innovation, nor that the White House has signalled absolutely no appetite to regulate even the most harmful of technologies...

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