We Are Crowdsourcing the Panopticon
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Carvalho is a researcher and consultant at Cinderpoint focused on AI governance, surveillance systems, and institutional risk.
Illustration: IEEE Spectrum; Original images: iStock A man raises his phone as police move into a crowd. The video is shaky, loud, immediate. Within minutes, it is online.
Within hours, it is everywhere. This is how accountability works now. Something happens, someone records it, and that footage can show what really happened, sometimes contradicting official accounts.
It can empower citizens and create consequences for officials. In recent months, civil liberties groups have warned that adding facial recognition to consumer smart glasses could turn everyday recording into something more troubling: real-time facial identification. It reflects a broader shift already underway, where images and videos captured for one purpose can later be searched, matched, and used for another.
An ouroboros is an ancient Egyptian symbol, a snake or dragon eating its own tail. As I began to see patterns in my broader research on surveillance corporatism and governance lag, I began using the term “surveillance ouroboros” to describe this recursive pattern of observations intended to hold power accountable becoming new input for the same surveillance infrastructure. During the George Floyd protests in 2020, people filmed police in real time.
Phones were pointed at officers, not at each other. The goal was simple: to show what the state was doing. That footage spread quickly and became part of a much larger pool of public data.
At the same time, reporting from outlets including The New York Times and BuzzFeed News showed that law enforcement agencies were using facial-recognition tools, including systems built by Clearview AI. Those systems were built from billions of images scraped from across the internet, including publicly available photos and videos. The basic approach is now routine: People record the state, or anything else (as in the January 6 attack on the U.S.
Capitol), and the state compiles that footage and data into a searchable environment, which may later be used to identify some of the same people who made the footage. Facial-recognition systems used by law enforcement are increasingly outpacing the legal safeguards. A 2023 Government Accountability Office review found that federal law enforcement agencies continued to expand their use of facial-recognition systems for criminal investigations despite ongoing concerns around training, privacy protections, civil-liberties safeguards, and oversight.
Earlier GAO findings showed that agencies had conducted roughly 60,000 facial-recognition searches before formal training requirements were put in place for personnel using the systems.
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- Ask your child: “What do you think scientists discovered about crowdsourcing panopticon? What part surprised you most?”
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