Australian Journal of International Affairs

ISSN: 1035-7718 (Print) 1465-332X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/caji20

Sousveilling the ‘Global War on Terror’

Roger Stahl & Sebastian Kaempf

To cite this article: Roger Stahl & Sebastian Kaempf (2019): Sousveilling the ‘Global War on
Terror’, Australian Journal of International Affairs

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2019.1613633

Published online: 05 May 2019.

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AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2019.1613633

Sousveilling the ‘Global War on Terror’

Roger Stahla and Sebastian Kaempfb
a
Department of Communication Studies, University of Athens, Georgia, USA; bSchool of Political Science and
International Studies, University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article theorises what it means to challenge official regimes of Sousveillance; War on Terror;
surveillance in the War on Terror by further developing the notion of Panopticon; surveillance;
‘sousveillance’. In particular, we focus on the performative performance; drone
dimension of surveillance by attending to its sites of struggle,
particularly where alternative and counter-performances work to
disrupt and dislodge official regimes of vision. These potent
counter-performances have become important flashpoints for
discussion in the ongoing negotiation of security state power
since the onset of the War on Terror. The article begins by
considering what it means to call surveillance ‘performative’ and
how such official performances have had a documented chilling
effect on free expression and democratic deliberation. It continues
by exploring Steve Mann’s notion of ‘sousveillance’, or the view
from below, as a theoretical resource for understanding counter-
visual performances that otherwise challenge authoritarian
surveillant practices. Finally, the article illustrates these dynamics
through a number of sousveillant performances that have
provoked new deliberative spaces in the context of the War on
Terror.

Introduction
In 2016, the British Transport Police rolled out their ‘See it. Say it. Sorted.’ security cam-
paign for the National Rail. The campaign took its cues from ‘If you see something, say
something’, a slogan invented by a U.S. advertisement executive the day after 9/11, trade-
marked by the New York Metro Transit Authority in 2002, and eventually adopted by
Homeland Security and other agencies as what the Washington Post called the new
national motto (O’Haver 2016). The British version added a novel warning for daily com-
muters, however: beware of photographers.
One of the ubiquitous posters (see Figure 1) featured a shadowy figure holding up a
smart phone to take a picture of a CCTV camera near the ceiling. A woman, who
appears on a CCTV monitor nearby, takes note of the suspicious activity. The relation
of cameras to bodies sets up the morality tale. While the good citizen submits to the
state’s gaze and vigilantly extends it, the suspect citizen refuses to submit and even
turns the gaze back on the state. The addition of the hand-held camera as an object of

CONTACT Sebastian Kaempf s.kaempf@uq.edu.au School of Political Science and International Studies The Uni-
versity of Queensland St Lucia, Qld 4072 Australia
© 2019 Australian Institute of International Affairs
2 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

Figure 1. (Left): ‘Are they checking security?’ 2016 British ‘See it, Say it. Sorted’ poster. Right: ‘Don’t rely
on others. If you suspect it, report it’ 2009 British counter-terrorism poster.

suspicion was perhaps a natural elaboration in a country that possessed some of the
densest CCTV infrastructure in the world (Evans 2012), yet it was only a matter of
time before this yen for criminalising photography made the trip back to the United
States. In 2018, under the banner of ‘If you see something, say something’, the Department
of Homeland Security began to warn of photography in public places as a ‘sign of potential
terrorism-related activity’. The move prompted the American Civil Liberties Union and
others to sound the alarm that such messages ran counter to constitutional right of
expression and presented a significant chilling effect (Peters 2018; ‘Photographers -
What to Do if You are Stopped or Detained for Taking Photographs’, 2018).
This newfound concern about the terrorism of photography betrays a latent tendency
in public discourse regarding surveillance since 11 September 2001: the will to regulate
practices of seeing. This goes beyond prevailing in public debates of ‘security vs.
privacy’ and the general legitimacy of new surveillance infrastructures. As the ‘See It,
Say It’ campaign indicates, a powerful dimension of the discourse seeks to discipline
the public performance of the gaze by both naturalising the everyday performance of
the official gaze and criminalising counter-visual performances. From CCTV cameras in
subterranean London to the drone camera’s aerial occupation of Waziristan, the figure
of the camera has become a focal point in this public negotiation of the security state’s
power. Visual surveillance is of course only a thin slice of the broader phenomenon of sur-
veillance (bulk collection, flagging, profiling, predictive analytics, etc.) that has attended
the so-called War on Terror and its expanding quest for ‘information dominance’ over
asymmetric threats (Gelber 2016; Greenwald 2014; Kaempf 2018). Nonetheless, the
camera’s mode of public performance (who wields it, where is it pointed) is a powerful
symbolic condensation of this particular public drama. The CCTV camera at the train
station not only gazes down at the platform, it also stands as an emblem of surveillance
writ large, including the non-visual, invisible, and abstract world of ‘dataveillance’. Like-
wise, any given counter-performance of vision not only looks back, it also stands as an
emblem of state transparency and free expression. Normalising the state’s claim to surveil-
lance often entails policing of counter-performances of vision, particularly those that
summon the potent figure of the camera to challenge the state’s monodirectional gaze.
Ultimately, we argue that these performative forces are locked in a struggle between
authoritarian and democratic politics.
This article endeavours to theorise the performative dimension of surveillance by
attending to its sites of struggle, particularly where alternative and counter performances
work to disrupt and dislodge official regimes of vision. From activist street photography to
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 3

artistic engagements with the weaponised drone’s camera, these potent practices have
become important flashpoints for discussion in the ongoing negotiation of security state
power since the onset of the ‘War on Terror’. We proceeds in three parts. The first explores
what it means to call surveillance ‘performative’, tracks how the scholarship has begun to
turn in this direction, and explores the disciplinary function of such official performances
in terms of the demonstrable chilling effect it has had on free expression and democratic
deliberation. Part two delves into Steve Mann’s notion of ‘sousveillance’, or the view from
below, as a theoretical resource for understanding counter-visual performances that other-
wise challenge, disrupt, and dislodge authoritarian surveillant practices. Part three illus-
trate, through a series of examples, how sousveillant performances have provoked new
deliberative spaces in the context of the War on Terror. In particular, this section
focuses on how artists and activists have seized upon the weaponised drone as a rich
visual site. Before examining how sousveillant practices can provoke and create new delib-
erative spaces, however, we first need to ask what it means to claim that surveillance is
performative.

Theatres of surveillance
Following 11 September 2001, images of a new threat (a shape-shifting spectre who skirts
national borders and sublimates into digital networks) underwrote sweeping changes to
the architecture of the Western security state. Promoted with a promise to safeguard
democratic life, the new regime of counter-terrorism instead shifted state power in a
decidedly less transparent and undemocratic direction by mimicking the essential qualities
of the perceived threat: invisibility and secrecy (Andrejevic 2006; Deibert 2013; Kaempf
2018, 155–169). Such a shift has included a new reliance on black ops, black sites, extra-
ordinary rendition, and absentee warfare using remote-controlled drones. Meanwhile, the
security state massively stepped up its surveillance capacities (Deibert 2013; Greenwald
2014). As the Edward Snowden revelations have shown, such capacities have far outpaced
traditional surveillant practices such as the increased use of closed-circuit television
cameras in public and commercial space. The National Security Agency, the Department
of Homeland Security and the international surveillance alliance known as the ‘Five Eyes’
(US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) have gained the technical and political
power to collect the entire haystack, to sweep up, archive, and datamine virtually every
digital electronic transmission in what has been euphemised as ‘bulk collection’
(Deibert 2013; Greenwald 2014). The current reliance on the drone as weapon of
choice, moreover, marks the centrality of surveillance as a theme, where entire geographies
are subject to a new prototype occupation, one marked not by storm troopers kicking
down doors on the ground but by persistent intensities of remotely operated vision in
the sky.
Gaining understanding of such radical shifts in surveillance – both governmental and
corporate – has not been easy. Doing so has required moving beyond conventional
approaches that have long regarded ‘surveillance’ as a dynamic of data transmission
along the lines of what we might call a logic of capture. This was the logic of early surveil-
lance theory, which posited the image of a watchful Big Brother (Lyon 1994; Staples 2000)
who archives our ‘data doubles’ (Haggerty and Ericson 2000). More recently, however,
scholars broadened their scope to consider the ways that surveillance might also entail
4 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

systems of expression and not simply collection. John McGrath’s Loving Big Brother was
an early entry into a new subfield that asked how pop culture representations authorised
surveillance: ‘Could the obsessive repetition of CCTV imagery on television be, in some
way, a way of making sense of, of narrativizing, the daily experience of being watched
and recorded?’ (McGrath 2004, 31). In his foundational work, iSpy, Mark Andrejevic
(2007) extended this question into the realm of interactive media, which groom citizens
to be active data confessors. By 2011, surveillance scholars like Torin Monahan initiated
a turn toward viewing surveillance as a ‘cultural practice’ in a special issue on the subject in
The Sociological Quarterly, and by 2016, Surveillance and Society formalised this turn with
curated a special issue on ‘performative surveillance’. Here the guest editors noted that
‘cracks are appearing in the dominant modes of inquiry in the field of surveillance
studies’ and enquired about what would happen ‘if we intentionally pry open these
fissures and attempt a fuller and richer engagement with performance’ (Hall, Monahan,
and Reeves 2016, 154).
The current article attempts to pry further, but it is first necessary to refine the particu-
lar sense of ‘surveillant performance’ that we plan to develop. Among the many productive
engagements with this terminology in recent years, perhaps the most conventional are
those that denote ‘performance’ as the everyday behaviours under surveillance, from
the stopwatch-clicking Taylorism of the Fordist era to today’s sophisticated biometric
tracking of worker behaviour and the so-called ‘quantified self’ movement, whose
current emblem might be the Fitbit (Anderson 2016; Ball 2010; Whitson 2013). Here
we begin to shade into the subject-creation potential of performance, which might be
exemplified best by Tobias Matzner (2016), who argues that big data does not so much
represent and ‘double’ the subject but rather actively performs and produces subjectivity.
Others have described a kind of surveillance where one takes a more active and deliberate
role in one’s subject formation. Mark Andrejevic (2006) introduced the notion of ‘lateral
surveillance’, or peer-to-peer monitoring that deputises the neoliberal subject as a sensing
extension of the surveillant apparatus, a notion that Joshua Reeves (2017) later deploys in
his excellent history of citizen snitching. With such work came the increasing recognition
that performance is not limited to that-which-is-observed but is a vital mechanism for
crystalising vigilant and confessional roles. A variant of this form of performance is
what Rachel Hall (2007) calls the ‘aesthetics of transparency’ – from the banal rituals of
the airport checkpoint to endless iterations of the CSI procedural genre – which carries
forth McGrath’s earlier contention that for surveillance to function, it must be naturalised
as the air we breathe (See also Adelman 2014).
Indeed, from Bentham’s Panopticon forward,1 one could argue that a logic of perform-
ance (rather than a logic of capture) was the essence of surveillant power (Bentham 1995).
In Foucault’s description, there is no figure collecting observational data from a perch in
the panopticon’s central tower. Instead, he stresses that no one need occupy the tower at
all, only that the tower be ‘visible’ and its occupancy be ‘unverifiable’ (Foucault 1995, 201).
The panoptic function lies in its architecture, a ‘certain concerted distribution of bodies,
surfaces, lights, gazes’ that ultimately produces an effect in the psyche of the observed,
who ‘inscribes in himself the power relation in which simultaneously plays both roles;
he becomes the principle of his own subjection’ (Foucault 1995, 202–203). While Foucault
prefers the language of the automated machine, he also liberally uses the metaphor of the
theatre to describe the panopticon’s function. The observed ‘play roles’ but also occupy
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 5

observational cells like ‘so many small theaters, in which each actor is alone’ (Foucault
1995, 203). This formulation obviously aligns audience/tower against prisoner/actor,
but encoded in Foucault’s discussion is the reverse as well, which is in many ways more
revealing. Panoptic architecture also must be viewed as a scene staged not for the
implied figure in the tower but for the prisoner, the true observer, in whose imagination
the panopticon inscribes its power relation. In short, the function of the panopticon is not
necessarily surveillance per se but the performative presentation of a ‘theater of surveil-
lance’ that functions regardless of whether exact accounting mechanisms even exist.
The architecture of the gaze sends an unrelenting message: you are a field of transparent
data continually scanned by the unfathomable eyes of the state. Donna Haraway (1991,
188–189) later described this ‘seeing everything from nowhere’ as the ‘god trick’, itself a
metaphor that highlights a performative nature. While it is undoubtedly useful to ask
what the state actually knows about its citizens and how that information constitutes a
power differential, surveillance operates on these other, more discursive registers as
well. After all, one could imagine a surveillant mechanism that operates in an absolutely
clandestine fashion as some version of literally seeing everything from a secretive nowhere.
This mechanism would have limited disciplinary utility, however. As Foucault makes
clear, the true power of surveillance is its ability to convincingly announce itself and
implant its own structure into the psyche of disciplined populations (Foucault 1995).
Like Haraway’s god, the panopticon must turn two discursive tricks. On the one hand,
it must display its powers to lay open the lives of observed populations. On the other
hand, it must display itself as hidden and inscrutable (Bentham 1995; Foucault 1995;
Greenwald 2014). The state and its surveillance regime must not simply be a secret, but
an open secret; not disappear, but perform a disappearing act; and not hide, but cultivate
a sense of its own opacity. These displays and discourses operate to normalise the power
relationship between citizen and state and, importantly, control and discipline the state’s
citizens.
These rather abstract theoretical positions have been buttressed in recent years by
empirical research that has shown that the vastly expanded regime of surveillance has
had real chilling effects on the willingness of Western citizens to exercise free speech,
engage in deliberation, form their own views about democratic politics, and hold govern-
ments accountable through a robust fourth estate (ACLU 2009; Constitution Project 2009;
Gelber 2016; Matthews and Tucker 2015; Penney 2016, 2019). Katharine Gelber describes
these effects succinctly in her seminal book, Free Speech after 9/11:
… . [W]e are now living a new normal for freedom of speech, within which restrictions on
speech that once would have been considered aberrant, overreaching, and impermissible are
now considered ordinary, necessary, and justified as long as they occur in the counter-terror-
ism context. This change is persistent, and it has far-reaching implications for the future of
this foundational freedom. (Gelber 2016)

Ample research empirically documents the chilling effect on freedom of speech and
freedom of expression in the wake of the Snowden revelations in 2013 which exposed
the level of surveillance undertaken by otherwise democratic governments. To give a
few examples, a 2016 study by Jon Penney of the Oxford Internet Institute provides evi-
dence for an argument long made by privacy advocates: namely, that the mere existence of
a surveillance state breeds fear and stifles free expression. The study documents how,
6 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

following the 2013 Snowden revelations, there was a 20 per cent decline in online website
views such as Wikipedia of articles related to ‘terrorism’, ‘al Qaeda’, ‘car bombs’ or
‘Taliban’ out of fear by average internet users to become seen as suspicious (Penney
2016). For Penney, the overly broad anti-terrorism laws, coupled with a new surveillance
regime, have spooked average people from learning about important policy matters to
such an extent that it has become a real threat to proper democratic debate (Penney
2016). A 2013 study from PEN America (Poets, Essayists, Novelists), a global free
expression NGO to support the right of freedom of speech, empirically documented
that one in six of their writers curbed content they themselves wrote due to fear of surveil-
lance. The study found that writers were not only overly scared by surveillance, but they
nonetheless engaged in self-censorship in response to its perceived presence (PEN
America 2013). A similar study undertaken by MIT researchers Alex Matthews and
Catherine E. Tucker in 2015 that looked at Google search data found that post-
Snowden, internet users were significantly less likely to use sensitive terms in their
search queries. The authors thereby identified a chilling effect on search behaviour on
the internet (Matthews and Tucker 2015).
These are just three examples amongst numerous others (See ACLU 2009; Constitution
Project 2009; Penney 2016, 2019) that, on aggregate, demonstrate a significant chilling
effect, one that has generated a climate in which both citizens and media are less
willing to oversee and deliberate the actions of their own governments. Free speech and
democratic debate have effectively been stifled by overly broad and exceptional counter-
terrorism laws that are purported by governments as necessary to prevent terrorism
and to safeguard democratic life itself. The chilling effect has thereby reduced the capacity
in democratic societies to question existing surveillance regimes, let alone whether these
constitute too large an infringement on citizens’ rights and freedoms.
Given these stifling effects on freedom of speech and democratic debate produced by
the new post-9/11 security paradigm and its accompanying laws, we now turn to investi-
gate what a counter-performance of surveillance might entail. Here Steve Mann’s notion
of ‘sousveillance’ provides some help in laying the groundwork for theorising the challenge
to official discourses and their disciplining effects.

The sousveillant corrective

In its simplest formulation, ‘sousveillance’ can be described as the multitude of vernacular
resistances that contest the normalisation of official surveillant operations. The history of
this particular term extends back before its coinage to 1998 when MIT professor, engineer
and video artist, Steve Mann, published something of a manifesto in the art journal, Leo-
nardo, regarding ways that people might respond to the growing intrusion of surveillance
cameras in everyday life (Mann 1998, 93–102). For nearly two decades, Mann had been
experimenting with a ‘WearCam’ headset (see Figure 2) that recorded and transmitted
video the user saw in an over-the-eye display.
During this time, Mann became aware of a double standard. While CCTV cameras
seemed to be everywhere, his own WearCam apparatus was treated with a certain
amount of hostility and suspicion, especially by retail store managers. Mann responded
by developing strategies for calling attention to this double standard and asserting a
right to record. He called the first strategy ‘reflectionism’, inspired by the Situationist
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 7

Figure 2. Steve Mann with his ‘WearCam’ headset.

notion of detournement, which sought to turn institutional surveillance back on itself. For
example, Mann made a series of videos with his WearCam called Shooting Back (1996)
that featured him approaching security guards and managers in department stores and
asking them about the security cameras in the ceiling. He often heard statements like
‘The cameras are for everyone’s protection’ and ‘If you aren’t doing anything wrong,
you shouldn’t worry’, phrases familiar to anyone living in the wake of 9/11. In response,
Mann would reveal that he himself, like the ceiling cameras, had been non-selectively
recording everything he saw. This revelation typically resulted in a confrontation, which
helped to prove Mann’s point about the power differentials at play in what might other-
wise seem like a neutral practice. When security guards told him that they had no control
over the overhead security cameras, Mann would invoke the ‘My Manager’ response,
claiming that the images were transmitted to his own off-site manager, who was ‘really
paranoid’ that shopkeepers were accusing his employees of shoplifting. The WearCam,
went the script, helped to keep everyone honest. Mann and his team developed other,
low-tech tactics, including T-shirts with black plastic bubbles on them proclaiming that
people may be being recorded for their own protection. In addition to ‘reflectionism’,
Mann (1998) listed a second strategy called ‘diffusionism’ that proposed to flood a
venue with cameras a representations of cameras to level the playing field.
Mann coined the term ‘sousveillance’ in 2003, using the French ‘sous’ (below) to des-
ignate the inverse of ‘sur’ (above). Again, through a series of public performances with
wearable cameras and screens, he and his colleagues tested what kinds of camera practices
might be legitimately undertaken by individuals within the greater surveillant infrastruc-
ture and what would draw objections from citizens, shopkeepers, and police. Among other
things, this group experimented with wearable screens that projected a feed from live
cameras, gauged reactions in public space versus commercial space, and tested various
iterations of the ‘My Manager’ defense described above. In the ensuing negotiation,
what seemed to assuage both everyday citizens in public space and ‘front-line surveillance
workers’ like clerks and security guards in commercial space, was the suggestion that the
camera operator was working for some external institution such as an advertising firm or
off-site manager. In this explanation, the camera operator was a helpless pawn who could
8 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

not remove or turn off the device. In contrast, the most objectionable use of the camera
was by someone who had full control and no institutional affiliation. Later Mann
(2005) revisited the sousveillance thesis to consider discrepancies in the law with regard
to camera usage by individuals. By 2013, he began to attend to the proliferation of wearable
camera devices in the form of smart phones, smart watches, and Google Glass. Here he
sketched a theory that power can be charted along a surveillance-equiveillance-sousveil-
lance continuum depending on the technical arrangement (Mann and Ferenbok 2013).
For our purposes here, Mann’s work offers a focal point for thinking about how disrup-
tions in a particular optical regime may occur. On the one hand, his approach is decidedly
dialectical, conceived as a set of powerful surveillers challenged by a sousveillant vanguard.
Although Mann pays passing lip service to Foucault’s notion that power in the panoptic
arrangement is imminent and diffuse, the goal of this quest seems to be finally rooting out
Big Brother and looking him squarely in the eye. On the other hand, Mann’s theorising
and experiments play out as much more than a series of confrontations with security
guards. Importantly, before one round of experiments, he anticipates that ‘surveillers
will object more to the social act of challenging their authority through sousveillance
than to the actual existence of sousveillance’ (Mann, Nolan, and Wellman 2003, 338).
Indeed, these experiments found that objections and confrontations, especially in com-
mercial spaces, had very little to do with the actual information gathered and revolved
instead around the spectacle of the practice. This indicates that what is at stake is the auth-
ority of the optical regime as a system of signs. This dimension of surveillance recalls Fou-
cault’s conception of the panopticon as a scene staged for purported object of surveillance.
The bubble in the retail store ceiling, the passive-voiced road sign that reads ‘Speed
Checked by Detection Devices’, or a news report on the awesome focal length of the Pred-
ator drone, each function as placeholder in a larger story about who is the proper object of
the institutional gaze and who, in the grammar of vision or language, remains hidden.
Likewise, we ought to understand challenges to the optical regime not simply as
unauthorised attempts to gather information. Sousveillance, more broadly understood,
is a performative kind of ‘looking back’ that itself functions as a sign, or more precisely
as a disruption in the story of how power circulates through the gaze. As Justine Gang-
neaux points out, there is a rich history of public challenges to the increasing density of
CCTV cameras in urban spaces. To list some examples (see Figure 3), the Surveillance
Camera Players, a prankster group founded in 1996, made a name staging street theatre
in front of New York City’s CCTV cameras (Surveillance Camera Players 2006). In
2013, a Berlin-based group hosted ‘Cam-Over’, an event that invited participants to
smash as many CCTV cameras as they could and send in footage of the destruction (Stall-
wood 2013). The next year, in celebrating the anniversary of George Orwell’s 1984, a
Dutch group decorated surveillance cameras in the city of Utrecht with party hats
(Sewell 2013). Although Gangneaux’s thrust is that we should take these pranks seriously,
she alludes to an important point for our purposes here. In her words, such tactics ‘offer a
space of negotiations, resistance, and reflections on processes that are usually taken for
granted and/or invisible’ (Gangneaux 2014, 445). Following this line of thought, we
suggest that they serve to turn the gaze in one way or another so as to disrupt the
taken-for-grantedness of surveillance. The Surveillance Camera Players, while feigning
to play for the security guard at the other end of the camera’s cable, function instead to
put the camera itself on stage for those passing on the street (or browsing any of the
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 9

Figure 3. (Top): 1996 Surveillance Camera Players. (Bottom Left): CamOver in Berlin in 2013. (Bottom
Right): Utrecht Party Hats in 2014.

SCP videos). Even smashing of cameras for Cam-Over, which might otherwise be viewed
as an act of shutting down the surveillant network through material sabotage is only a
pretext for the main act, which is the signifying practice of posting the videos online.
We should thus retain but complicate the notion of ‘sousveillance’ as a mode of looking
back. Mann’s thoughts on the balance of power – of the surveillance-equiveillance-sous-
veillance distribution – mainly account for the information-gathering dimension of sur-
veillant power, where the gaze itself is conceived as an act of force. Because surveillant
power is more than who has access to the technological apparatus of the gaze and thus
who can claim more ‘situational awareness’, one might more productively conceive of
the gaze as what Deleuze and Guattari call an assemblage: a system of representational
practices fused to material surfaces (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 89–90). The most funda-
mental sign is the technical apparatus itself, whether it is a network of CCTV cameras or a
phalanx of police officers. The directionality of the gaze divides observed from observer
while working to sculpt both as ideal figures. The complex geography of the gaze is yet
another layer of signification. Marita Sturken, borrowing from McKenzie Wark, calls
these lines of sight ‘vectors’ and suggests that they invoke identities, communities of
watchers, and ultimately publics (Sturken 2002, 185–202). The effect is akin to what
Louis Althusser describes in his famous example of the police officer hailing a citizen
on the street, thereby interpellating the subject in relation to the institution. Althusser
not only argues that ideology is a collection of such relations, but that relation is essentially
10 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

visual. The absolute Subject (the institution, state, God, etc.) is ‘speculary’, enforcing sub-
jectivities, as Althusser puts it, composed of a structure of mirrors (Althusser 1972, 180).
In the case of camera surveillance, what is at stake is how optical machinery signifies the
state through a set of practices, thereby crystallising a particular political and social milieu.
Sometimes the best way to understand the smooth operation of power is to observe its
disruption. As it happens, some of the most powerful challenges to the gaze of the surveil-
lance state in the context of the War on Terror have engaged drone warfare and the figure
of its roving camera in the sky. An array of activists and artists have sought to look back
through this aperture and thereby challenge the circulation of signs that works to normal-
ise the infrastructure of surveillance and constitute the permanent warfare state.

Nowhere from everywhere: sousveilling the drone

Although commonly called a weapon, the drone is first and foremost a way of seeing, of
distributing the gaze of the state over vast territory, from the Mexican-American border to
Peshawar Province. In such theatres, before the drone ever goes kinetic, it hangs in the sky
often for days on end, filling servers with optical data and feeding the military bureaucracy
known as the ‘kill chain’ (Gregory 2011). Outside the closed corridors of power, however,
the drone has a second theatre of operations in public consciousness. This public face con-
sists of viral drone strike footage, news stories, and filmic representations from The Bourne
Legacy (2012) to Zero Dark Thirty (2012). The mosaic of available drone imagery and its
attendant discourse tells a consistent story about the technology, the enemy, and ourselves
that justifies an unbounded War on Terror. This ‘drone vision’ does not just describe the
narrow selection of objects the public sees through the drone camera. First and foremost, it
describes a gaze, a habit of looking that structures relationship to the security state (Stahl
2013). The drone, as it has been normalised in public culture, cannot be separated from
these practices of looking. In some ways, they render the machine hypervisible insofar
as drone vision is always available and the drone always present. In other ways, the
drone is absent and invisible to this public eye, rendered see-through by virtue of being
seen through.
These habits of seeing become apparent when one challenges the structure of the gaze.
Beginning in 2013, for example, anti-drone protesters began to get press for staging dem-
onstrations in cities across the US as well as drone manufacturing sites like General
Atomics in San Diego (Harris 2013). The visual centrepiece of these ‘days of action’
was a scale model replica of Predator drone mounted atop a rolling hoist (see Figure 4).
Nick Mottern, veteran and founder of one of the organising groups, Know Drones,
noted that despite their simplicity, the replicas drew people to critically engage the
issue. They worked so well, in fact, that Mottern and others began mass producing
them for dozens of groups across the country, jokingly calling this garage industry the
‘anti-military-industrial complex’ (Mottern 2012). These models continued to play a
central role in anti-drone events, but they functioned to do more than identify the contro-
versy to onlookers. Low-flying drones cruising down American streets over a churning
crowd of protesters charted a collision course with the usual ways of beholding the
weapon. The replica challenged the drone’s remote character, forcing one to imagine
the gaze as hostile and the self as its target, a reversal much like the one prompted by
the well-known Stanford/NYU report ‘Living Under Drones’, which documented the
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 11

Figure 4. (Top) Know Drones replica at a San Diego protest of General Atomics in April, 2013. (Bottom)
Left: Replica Drone built by Know Drones. Right: Nick Mottern, founder of Know Drones.

everyday lives of Afghanis (Living Under Drones 2012). Indeed, many of the model drones
were outfitted with off-the-shelf IP cameras that broadcast an image to a nearby screen so
that passers-by could imagine themselves in the crosshairs. The group also handed out
black T-shirts with the words ‘Unarmed Civilian’ printed on the front in white block
letters, a message to a would-be Predator in the sky. These arrangements confront the
weapon as an object of vision rather than as an extension of subjective vision, thus
forcing the drone into view and critical availability. By inviting one to stare up the gun
barrel and back through the aperture of power, the replica invited one into sousveillant
subjectivity.
Taking this logic a step further was the Brooklyn artist, Essam, a former Army geospa-
tial intelligence analyst who served over three years in Iraq over two deployments in the
mid-2000s. Tuned into the politics of surveillance, and later trained as a photographer at
the School of Visual Arts at NYU, he initiated a street art campaign in 2012 that erected
dozens of professionally constructed red and white street signs in Manhattan displaying
the words, ‘Attention: Local Statutes Enforced by Drone’, ‘Drone Activity in Progress’,
and ‘Authorized Drone Strike Zone’, all stamped with the NYPD logo. Even though
they blended in well with the regulation banalities on city street poles, the signs quickly
initiated a flurry of police activity and public chatter according to the Daily News
(Fisher 2012). Essam’s signs came at an opportune moment. Earlier that year, there had
been intimations that the NYPD had planned to use drones to patrol the streets (Drew
2012). The effect of this artistic disruption was not only to force the issue but also force
the average American street-goer to consider the quality of everyday life under the
12 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

drone’s eye. Wishing to go even bigger with the project, Essam initiated a new wave of
street signs, this time bringing the weaponised drone squarely into the equation. This
time he slipped over one hundred permanent framed ad spaces into pay phone kiosks.
The posters played on the aesthetic of early iPod ads. With blue background, they depicted
a silhouette drone in the sky dropping a bomb on a family running for cover, with the
iconic headphone cord tracing the path of the bomb. Beneath the image ran the copy,
‘NYPD: Protection When You Least Expect It’. Although the signs were meant to be
read quite as satire, the city took them quite seriously. According to The Blaze, the
posters were a source of significant embarrassment for the NYPD. A good number of
them had been erected in Times Square and during a moment of increased security, the
first anniversary of Occupy and days before the UN General Assembly was scheduled
to meet (Opelka 2012). Eventually, the city charged Essam with 56 counts of criminal pos-
session of a forged instrument, grand larceny, possession of stolen property, and criminal
possession of a weapon when they found an antique revolver in a house search (Jacobs
2012). The NYPD eventually dropped all charges, but not before he had spent nearly
two years contemplating felony jail time, initiated a ‘Free Essam’ fundraiser for legal
fees, and received a thorough education in ‘just how authoritarian the city really is’
(Attia 2013). In the end, as Gawker put it in a headline, ‘NYPD Proves Street Artist
Right by Tracking Him Down and Arresting Him’ (Nolan 2012).
Meanwhile, in cyberspace, media artists were busy making waves by drawing the drone
war together with the everyday use of smart phones. In 2012, Josh Begley, an NYU gradu-
ate student and internet artist known for aerial photography exhibits that map the US
military footprint around the world, developed an iPhone app called ‘Drones+’ that
alerted users of time and location of drone strikes using data from the Bureau of Investi-
gative Journalism (BIJ) (Brook 2015). Strikes appeared as information pins on a Google
map (see Figure 5).
Perhaps the real story began when Begley attempted to register Drones+ on the App
Store, whereupon Apple rejected it, claiming that it ‘not useful or entertaining enough’.
After the second and third rejections, Apple claimed that the app violated its prohibition
against ‘excessively objectionable or crude content’ (Henn 2012; Wingfield 2012, 4). This
came as a surprise given that the app featured only map data and no other images. Indeed,

Figure 5. Drones+ app by Josh Begley and images from Dronestagram.

 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 13

this same data had been available for some time through The Guardian newspaper’s app
and other news aggregators. Both Wired magazine and MSNBC contacted Apple for an
explanation, but the company declined to comment (Ackerman and Bonnington 2012).
Undeterred, Begley took the information and began a Twitter feed called ‘Dronestream’
that tweeted information regarding each US drone strike since 2002. Due to the
advance publicity, the feed quickly garnered more than 20,000 followers.
At the same time, James Bridle, an artist who ran the New Aesthetic blog, brought the
image closer with an Instagram account he called ‘Dronestagram’. Using the same BIJ
database, Bridle broadcasted close-up aerial images of buildings that had been struck by
drones as the information became available. Before releasing the image, Dronestagram
applied a colour wash filter to directly evoke the drone’s-eye view. Like Drones+, Drones-
tagram amassed a following of over a thousand in less than a month, seventeen thousand
as of 2015, as well as attention from Wired, The Guardian, RT, and a host of other outlets.
The Atlantic speculated that the project is compelling because it served as a corrective to
the drone war’s general invisibility, giving a sense of presence to the sites rendered absent
by remote control (Rosen 2012). The Guardian followed suit with the theme of exposure,
elaborating on Bridle’s language that Dronestagram was an attempt to make the strikes ‘a
little bit more visible, a little closer. A little more real’ (Hopkins 2012).
These two projects are illuminating on a number of levels, but they should be under-
stood in the context of existing media practices. As Wired magazine noted, the connection
between the smartphone and the drone was already well established by the time Drones+
went up for review (Ackerman and Bonnington 2012; Stahl 2013). Several other iPhone
apps were already on the market including drone strike video games, software for flying
actual toy drones, and augmented reality apps allowing one to fire pretend weapons
from them. Indeed, war in the post-9/11 era had been reorganised around a cluster of
new metaphors and communications technologies that wired civilian life to the war
zone: smart phone, drone, cell, network, etc. These projects tinkered, in other words,
with the very tools that made the drone war legible. More than make an invisible war
visible again, they offered an aesthetic that reframed the official regime of visibility,
which relies on the perspective of the virtual cockpit, identification with the weapon,
and a decontextualised, out-of-time, soda-straw view of affairs on the ground. As
Begley put it, Drones+ was about provoking real-time ‘drone consciousness’ and a
glimpse of light from the specific receiving end of state violence. With its reams of
specifics, the information gathered by the Bureau of Investigative Reporting already was
a powerful challenge to the generic official gaze that revolves around the ‘fire-and-
forget’ ethos of the weapon. The US Air Force tacitly acknowledged this power when,
only a few months later, it withdrew all public data of its drone strikes in Afghanistan
(Alex 2013). What gave special potency to Drones+ and Dronestagram, however, was
the visual rendering that marks these sites in real time such that violence took on a
rhythm, a place, and a name. Even if the Drones+ app itself never achieved distribution,
the concept propagated, reorienting subjective vision around a landscape that sprawled
open as a memorial site in progress. Likewise, Dronestagram took the familiar view
through the drone camera and reframed it as an exercise in sousveilling the drone war
rather than surveilling the target.
Further down the gun-camera’s line of sight, we encounter NotABugsplat, a 2014 effort
by a group of Pakistani, American, and French artists to confront the logics of drone
14 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

vision. The group, supported by an international human rights groups, unrolled a 90 × 60-
foot poster on a farm plot in the Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region where drone strikes reg-
ularly rained down. The poster featured the face of a girl who had lost two siblings and
both parents to a drone raid. To publicise the project, the group took a photo of the instal-
lation from the sky using a small consumer drone to simulate the view from the Predator
cockpit. The image quickly circulated through mainstream and social media (Krainin
2014; Schonfeld 2014; ‘Aerial Protest Pakistani Artists Created’, 2014; ‘Pakistan’s Artistic
Appeal to Drone Pilots’, 2014).
While NotABugsplat billed itself as a way to visually speak to drone pilots in order to
humanise those on the ground, its real significance was to be found in public ways of
seeing. ‘Bugsplat’ is military slang that describes the moment of the kill from the
remote operator’s point of view, which is often through an infrared camera. (The compa-
nion term, ‘squirter’, describes a person who attempts to flee the initial explosion.) ‘Bugs-
plat’ had circulated prior to drone warfare as a way of describing death dealt from the air.
In 2003, for example, the US Department of Defense designed a piece of software named
‘Bugsplat’ for predicting civilian casualties that might come from particular bombing raids
during the Iraq invasion (Graham 2012). NotABugsplat played on the fact that the term
had migrated into the public understanding of drone weaponry. The project contested the
conventional weapon’s-eye-view that abstracted human beings into clusters of ghostly
white pixels, but it also challenged the aesthetics of ‘seeing everything from nowhere’.
Because the drone hovers invisibly at more than 5000 feet, victims seen through the tar-
geting camera normally show no signs of looking back. This contrast to the normal geo-
metry of vision is in part what made NotABugsplat so powerful (see Figure 6).
Beyond humanising the civilian families who are continually terrorised by the invisible
drones’ ever-present hum (called ‘bangana’, Pashtu for ‘buzzing wasps’), NotABugsplat
turned the gaze back on the eye in the sky (Smith 2012). The visage of the girl stares
straight up, her eyes large and dark. She clutches an object, perhaps a keepsake from
her previous life. Her expression, smoothed of any signs of resentment seems to project
an unstated question.
It is only a small step from NotABugsplat to the act of pointing a camera back at
machinery of the security state, a task taken up by the photographer Trevor Paglen. For
the cover of their May, 2011 issue, Artforum published one of Paglen’s photos, ‘Untitled
(Reaper Drone)’, which is a view of a red wispy sunset marked with an ominous dot on the

Figure 6. NotABugsplat.
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 15

far right edge. This indiscernibility is characteristic of much of Paglen’s work, which fore-
grounds the many veils that separate the security state from public accountability. From
his early work photographing the infrastructure of the extraordinary rendition
program, he moved to black sites in general. Back in 2006, he opened an exhibition in
New York entitled ‘Black World’ that featured photography of various secret prisons,
research facilities, and communications installations. Most are shot from long range
from the sky using astronomy-grade telephotographic lenses through the ripples of atmos-
pheric interference one might expect at a distance of eighteen miles. As the New York
Times put it, these installations, featured so prominently in mainstream entertainment,
have been obscured by an unreality. Paglen’s photography works to de-fictionalise the
security state through a reversal that ‘turn[s] military surveillance inside out: here the sur-
veillant is surveilled’ (‘Art in Review: Trevor Paglen Black World’, 2006). Others give a
more sophisticated read. Rune S. Andersen and Frank Möller suggest that the layers of
obscurity that characterise Paglen’s photos are much more about the banality of surveil-
lance, the fact that it is ‘entirely uninteresting, even boring, seemingly trivial. Its ordinari-
ness makes security invisible and, therefore, is powerful’ (Andersen and Möller 2013, 217).
Paglen’s approach, however, is not so much linked to unveiling or obscuring new infor-
mation as it is performing the very act of looking back. He is explicit about this posture. In
a New Yorker profile of his work entitled ‘Prying Eyes’, he notes that his photos are ‘useless
as evidence, for the most part, but at the same time they’re a way of organizing your atten-
tion’ (Weiner 2012, 56). Paglen’s book-length treatment of his journey, Blank Spots on the
Map, features the sousveillant theme front-and-center. The prologue tells the story of
Paglen travelling by car to one of the first black sites erected in the post 9/11 era, the
Salt Pit prison on the outskirts of Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. ‘Outside the
walled gates was another windblasted and paint-chipped sign in Dari and English. NO
PHOTOGRAPHY. I start snapping pictures’ (Paglen 2009, 3). Artful as they are,
Paglen’s photos thus serve to index an even more compelling work in progress: the
story of Paglen himself and his own sousveillant journey. His eyes reveal a counter-orien-
tation to the security state. In the New Yorker article, Jonah Weiner recounts the trip to the
Salt Pit, and he accompanies Paglen on an expedition to Creech Air Force Base outside Las
Vegas for some drone watching. Here the story turns again to the performance of contest-
ing optics. The drones appear as specks in the distance before one of them flies toward
them, nose pointed down ‘like the crop duster in North by Northwest’ (Weiner 2012,
57). Weiner is careful to note that while Paglen is certainly wary of the drone as ‘technol-
ogy for killing’, he is more interested in it as a ‘technology for seeing, reconfiguring our
sense of vision and distance’ (2012, 57).
Inspired by Trevor Paglen’s work, German artist Florian Freier in 2015 produced a
series of photo collages called Cached Surveillance to reveal and visually illustrate locations
of high-surveillance utilised by German intelligence agencies (Freier 2015). For his photo-
graphic artwork, Freier used Google Maps to pay online visits to signals-intelligence
related sites that had been researched and published by Paglen. Unlike Paglen, however,
Freier was not so much interested in rendering visible the secret physical infrastructure
of the mass surveillance state. Instead, his focus lay in analyzing the digitally cached
image data that had been stored on his own computer as a result of his visit to these
secret sites (Collins 2015). In other words, his interest lies in drawing attention to the
image files that by default were silently archived and stored in his computer’s browser
16 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

Figure 7. Florian Freier, ‘Cached Landscapes/Objects of Surveillance #2 – Egelsbach Transmitter Facility

(2015).

cache in a hidden system of folders during the duration of his research. Cached Landscapes
therefore seeks to reveal not only hidden landscape of surveillance, but also the user’s
invisibly tracked and stored data which is accumulated and processed on servers and com-
puters (see Figure 7).
Downloading the cached versions of these files from his own computer and turning
them into visual artefacts allowed Freier to offer a meta-commentary on the automated
tracking of an individual’s download histories and browsing caches by companies such
a Google (Emory 2015). It revealed the online implications of employing sousveillance
methods in an attempt to render secretive surveillance more transparent. At the same
time, downloading cached versions of these files was purposefully chosen to attract the
attention of German intelligence agencies:
“If today’s internet traffic might be systematically tracked, it is pretty sure that the download
of these files to my computer also have been noticed by the related programs and
 AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS 17

organisations and in return might be interpreted as an act of suspect behavior,” he writes on

his website. (Freier 2015)

Rather than simply rendering hidden digital folders and tracking systems public, his
artwork deliberately sought to draw the attention of the surveillance machinery itself
and thereby reverse the surveillant gaze.

Conclusion
This article set out to theorise the performative dimension of surveillance, with a particular
focus on those sites of struggle where counter-performances seek to disrupt and dislodge
official regimes of vision. After demonstrating how the collection, storage and analysis of
data is one of the core functions of surveillance, we turned to another crucial function of
today’s surveillance regime: its performative nature. To persist, surveillance must induce a
certain docility, which means it must be successfully staged. We hoped to show, too, how
this naturalisation poses a real threat to liberal democratic values. As we advance from the
old system of targeted surveillance (where the suspect is first identified and then surveil-
lance is acted upon the target) to the new system of ‘bulk collection’ (where everyone’s data
is collected first in order to then identify the target), these threats have been magnified.
Indeed, we can empirically demonstrate the significant ‘chilling effect’ that the performa-
tive discourse of surveillance has had on free expression and the willingness to engage in
democratic deliberation about controversial issues. The result has been a paradox: state
surveillance has undermined the very democratic process that it was ostensibly designed
to safeguard.
With traditional pathways for discussion, dissent, and free speech increasingly fore-
closed, visual counter-performances that ‘look back’ have become some of the very rare
and therefore politically important sites of resistance in democratic societies. We theorised
these counter-performances by extending Steve Mann’s notion of ‘sousveillance’. The
struggle between surveillance and sousveillance, as we have conceptualised it here, goes
beyond the practice of data gathering. Instead, it is a struggle to naturalise the prerogative
of state surveillance on the one hand and, on the other, to disrupt and denaturalise this
prerogative. In this way, the camera acts as a potent figure in an ongoing debate, rendered
in a grammar of visual vectors, about the possibility of democratic participation. Theoris-
ing the push and pull of this performance has been the main objective of this article, but we
also hoped to illustrate with sousveillant performances undertaken by a range of artists
and activists.
Perhaps not surprisingly, these projects have gravitated to that ultimate emblem of the
post-9/11 security state, the drone camera and its established ‘theatres of surveillance’. In
one way or another, each project has rendered visible what has been kept from sight, visu-
ally contested the directionality of the surveillance camera, and generated important pol-
itical spaces for alternative, resistant deliberations. It is perhaps also not surprising that
these potent acts have triggered various attempts to police and criminalise the very act
of looking back. From Apple’s rejection of Begley app to the New York Police Depart-
ment’s arrest of Essam to the suggestion that photography is ‘sign of potential terrorist
activity’, the surveillant state shows signs of pushing back. Through the dust of these
struggles over security state power in the War on Terror, one thing comes into stark
focus: we have moved beyond the conventional ‘security versus privacy’ dispute and
18 R. STAHL AND S. KAEMPF

now must entertain surveillance as a visual contest, with the figure of the camera at the
centre, between free expression and authoritarianism.

Note
1. The term Panopticon stems from ancient Greek: ‘pan’ means ‘all’, and ‘opticon’ means ‘to
observe’. The Panopticon therefore denotes something that is all-viewing, something that
can observe everything and everyone. Its etymological origin lies in Greek mythology,
where it refers to Argos Panoptes, an ancient giant with a hundred eyes who was known
to be a very effective watchman.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor
Roger Stahl is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University
of Georgia.
Sebastian Kaempf is Senior Lecturer in Peace and Conflict Studies at the School of Political Science
and International Studies at the University of Queensland.

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