This link between referee and police body cams is likely as unintentional as it is perverse. But referees are ultimately football’s cops, the game and its hierarchies of power offering another refracted view of society not unlike the video games that pioneered first-person aesthetics and the technology required to produce them. (Lenovo has invested heavily in a line of hardware outfitted with the kind of processing power sought after by gamers, marketed with the slogan “Choose Your Weapon.”) And much like video games are now made to be watched by the millions tuning in live on streaming platforms or recorded on YouTube, body cams, too, have their audience. They are more than a means of transparency; they are also tools of surveillance.
I had looked skyward as I alighted in the Meadowlands ahead of the Norway–Senegal match. Storms threatened to delay the match, and a deluge had just passed. Against the backdrop of purple clouds, to the right of the American Dream mega mall, hovered two drones. Whether they were there for broadcast, security, or perhaps a feed for both, I wasn’t sure. But the organs of security were unmistakable. The gauntlet we’d run between Penn Station and the swamp where the match would take place had been riddled with cops: NYPD, Transit Police, National Guard, NJ State Troopers, Unidentified Militarized Police (UMP!). Were they, too, cammed up? I couldn’t get many close looks in the rush, but I was confident my passage to the stadium had been captured, logged, and beamed to a hard drive somewhere for processing or to languish in data storage.
Lenovo, like most tech companies, sees law enforcement as a key market, and it sells its various products as a means of parsing the immense amount of data that today’s surveillance state produces. It doesn’t produce the cameras themselves (though Motorola Solutions, the other half of Motorola Mobility that Lenovo acquired in 2014, also a prominent World Cup sponsor, does). Instead, Lenovo deals higher up the supply chain: What do you do with the resulting files? How do you store them? How do you make them more usable, more accessible? Providing the back-end infrastructure for functional surveillance is where Lenovo focuses its efforts. “Police officers are often in a state of continuous evidence collection, especially with body cameras. The handling and storage of that evidence often requires multiple different types of media, devices, and reporting—eating up hours of valuable time in an officer’s week,” Lenovo tells us. “This has started to change thanks to automation and cloud-based evidence processing.”
Seeing Like a Referee, Jonathan Tarleton
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