Smash the Surveillance State Google Glass!

Sarah Slocum, a tech writer in
San Francisco, claims she was harassed and attacked at a bar last
weekend for wearing and operating Google Glass. The Los Angeles
Times
reports:

“I got verbally and physically assaulted and robbed last night
in the city, had things thrown at me because of some … Google
Glass haters,” [Slocum] wrote. She got the Google Glass back but
was allegedly robbed of her purse and phone.

One witness later told a television station that some in the
crowd were “just rather insulted that someone thinks it’s OK to
record them the entire time they’re in public.”

This altercation is reminiscent of two events.

In 2009, a.k.a., the pre-Glass Stone Age, Canadian filmmaker
Robert Spence decided to
make a documentary about surveillance, and used a small camera
implanted in his prosthetic eye to film it. He
said at the time, “In Toronto there are 12,000 cameras. But the
strange thing I discovered was that people don’t care about the
surveillance cameras, they were more concerned about me and my
secret camera eye because they feel that is a worse invasion of
their privacy.”

In 2012, an individual known only as “Surveillance Camera Man”
began filming random people in Seattle and they consistently

flipped out.

Unsurprisingly, people don’t like to be watched and recorded.
“Glassholes”
and other strangers with cameras make people nervous. Yet, as
Spence observed, it seems like this fear doesn’t extend to the
massive, invasive surveillance state.

A recent Reason-Rupe poll
found that people trust the IRS more than they trust Facebook.
Instead of pushing back against surveillance, a whopping 85 percent
of writers are worried that the government is watching, prompting
many among them to self-censor,
according to a PEN American Survey. This week, a security
executive
lambasted members of the tech community for be passively
accepting malacious government action. 

It’s certainly an interesting quirk that people lash out against
individuals like Slocum and Spence–but collectively shrug while
various government agencies at all different levels record
virtually every
law-abiding citizen everyday in the form of warrantless
wiretapping, surveillance cameras on private
property, license
plate reading, spying
through computer webcams
and microphones, mail
logging, domestic drone use,
infiltrating peace advocacy
groups, and facial
recognition systems to name a few practices and
tactics.