Policing the Police: The Apps That Let You Spy on the Cops - Alexis Madrigal
After the recent Vancouver riots, it became clear that the world is surveiling itself at an unprecedented scale. Angry citizens gave police one million photos and 1,000 hours of video footage to help them track down the rioters. If we aren't living in a surveillance state run by the government, we're certainly conducting a huge surveillance experiment on each other.
Which is what makes two new apps, CopRecorder and OpenWatch, and their Web component, OpenWatch.net, so interesting.
CopRecorder can record audio without indicating that it's doing so like the Voice Memos app does. It comes with a built-in uploader to OpenWatch, so that Jones can do "analysis" of the recording and scrub any personally identifying data before posting the audio. He said he receives between 50 and 100 submissions per day, with a really interesting encounter with an authority figure coming in about every day and a half.
To me, something like OpenWatch could help solve a major problem for investigative reporting in an age when newsrooms are shrinking. We've still got plenty of people who can bulldog an issue once it's been flagged, but there are fewer and fewer reporters with deep sourcing in a community, fewer and fewer reporters who have the time to look into a bunch of different things knowing that only one out of a hundred might turn into a big investigation. Perhaps providing better conduits for citizens to flag their own problems can drive down the cost of hard-hitting journalism and be part of the solution for keeping governments honest.
The reflex is to call Cop Recorder and OpenWatch (both are open source) the app/service equivalents to the Rodney King camcorder and Witness.org, but I think there's a different potential here that involves plugging this into projects like Code for America. Justin Jacoby Smith called it 'analyzing data as a revolutionary act'. That feels closer to right.
