FIT, the police’s so-called Forward Intelligence Team, specialises in monitoring members of the public engaged in a variety of activities: demonstrators, activists… Traditionally they have used large cameras and video equipment to record the faces of all activists, images which as far as I know end up in some warehouse for future reference, just in case they are undesirables.
Photographer Marc Vallee took this shot of the latest piece of FIT equipment at this weekend’s Climate Camp on Blackheath (London), which I have dubbed CitizenWatch 2.0. These mini-CCTV devices are lapel-mounted, and perhaps change the nature of the interaction between police and policed. While the devices look innocuous enough, they are of course recording only the actions of the policed, not the police.
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