The Panopticity manifesto: why mapping matters

Table of contents

This project is born in 2025. The initial idea was to create a website that would display CCTV cameras on a map, along with their field of view, in order to raise awareness about mass surveillance in cities and the amount of covered surfaces. The website was inspired by SunderS and motivated by the increasing number of surveillance cameras being installed in cities around the world, and more importantly the lack of transparency about their locations and capabilities.

The rapid deployment of CCTV and Algorithmic Video Surveillance (AVS) is often presented as a neutral, technical evolution of urban management. However, these “eyes in the city” carry profound implications for our democracy and our fundamental freedoms.

Concerns about CCTV and Algorithmic Video Surveillance (AVS)

Suspect by default: ending presumption of innocence

Mass surveillance operates on the assumption that all data is potentially useful to address a hypothetical future threat. This flips the legal pillar of “innocent until proven guilty”.

When a city is saturated with cameras, you are no longer a citizen moving freely: you are a “data point” being scrutinized for “abnormality”. We move from a society where the police need reasonable suspicion to track someone, to one where the act of being in public is itself a reason for being watched.

The AI panopticon: automation of social control

Modern CCTV is no longer just a “dumb” recorder: it is increasingly powered by Algorithmic Video Surveillance (VSA) and Facial Recognition.

Even without facial regnition, algorithms are used already to analyze behavior in real-time:

  • If you’re in a car and stop for an “abnormal” time in an intersection or park outside a parking spot, CCTV can automatically detect it, zoom onto your license plate and sometimes (depending on your location), verbalize you.
  • If you’re walking in the streets, cameras are programmed to detect “suspicious” patterns and zoom automatically onto your face, alerting an agent if needed. For example if you stop in a crowd to tie your shoes, if you change direction or start to run, thoses are behavior that can be automatically detected.

Facial recognition is just the last step of a completely automated workflow, and the perfect start for social control.

AI doesn’t just watch; it categorizes. It detects “suspicious gait”, “unusual loitering”, or “crowd movements”. This removes the human element from policing and replaces it with mathematical authoritarianism. If an algorithm flags you as “suspicious”, you have no way to argue with the machine’s “objective” logic.

La Quadrature du Net (and the awesome Technopolice Project) documents how “safe cities” projects transform urban centers into experiments for automated behavior modification, especially usefull to target vulnerable groups and activists.

Techno-fascism and the centralization of power

Techno-fascism is the use of advanced technology to centralize power, suppress opposition and civil liberties with the argument of efficiency.

With CCTV, total visibility leads to total control. When the state (or any group) knows every meeting you attend, every person you talk to, and every path you take, the “checks and balances” of democracy disappear. Surveillance technology is a danger at any time: even if today’s government is “good”, the infrastructure remains for a future authoritarian leader to use at the push of a button.

The chilling effect, how to change our behavior without noticing

Surveillance changes how people act, even when they have done nothing wrong. This is the chilling effect.

When people know they are being watched, they self-censor. They stop attending protests, avoid “controversial” books and conform to the “average” to avoid being flagged by an AI. The result is a sterile, stagnant society where the creative “deviance” necessary for social progress is extinguished.

Amnesty International (see ban the scan) has documented how the only presence of facial-recognition-capable cameras in New York or London has a chilling effect on the right to peaceful assembly and protest.

From surveillance to “protection”

In political discourse, the word “surveillance” is increasingly replaced by “protection”, “safety”, or “video-protection”. This is exactly what George Orwell described as newspeak: the use of language to limit the range of thought and change the perception of an ction.

By labeling intrusive monitoring as “protection”, authorities bypass the critical debate on the loss of privacy. “Protection” implies a service / “Surveillance” implies control.

In reality, it is obvious to say that a camera cannot protect you…

“I have nothing to hide”

One frequent argument in defense of surveillance is: “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.

This argument misinterprets the nature of privacy. Privacy is not about hiding “wrong” things, it is about the right to an autonomous life. We have blinds on our windows and doors on our bathrooms not because we are criminals, but because we require an intimate space to exist as individuals.

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” ~ Edward Snowden

This argument is so common that there is a dedicated wikipedia page about it.

Technology never stops

Security technology is rarely settled, it always expands.

Cameras installed to “stop terrorism” are quickly used to fine people for littering, then to track political activists, then to monetize foot-traffic data, etc.

With technologies and surveillance, the argument to make it acceptable is always one that cannot be objected: fighting terrorism for CCTV, finding pedophiles for chat control, etc. In the end it always expands and is used against the population.

Moreover, there is a massive global lobby of security companies that profits from fear. These companies sell “solutions” to cities for problems that often require social, not technological, interventions.

CCTV Effectiveness

Governments often install cameras to appear to be doing something about crime, even when the data shows they don’t work.

Multiple studies has been conducted to measure effectiveness of CCTV in public areas. It usually shows relative effectiveness but not in the spots we could imagine: in car parkings and residential areas … so not really in public spaces and city centers. It has zero impact on violent crime (crimes of passion or impulse). In most cases, it simply displaces crime to the next street over, rather than preventing it.

Also, field studies in cities have shown that video surveillance does not significantly help to solve investigations, nor does it reduce the number of violent crimes, drug-related offences or public order disturbances in cities. There are a number of reasons for this ineffectiveness: lack of coordination between security forces (private, state, municipal), poor quality images, misdirected or dirty cameras, etc. But the major problem is the staggering number of video streams compared with the small number of officers who are supposed to be using them.

The true economic cost

Installing and maintaining a network of cameras is immensely expensive.

Every euro or dollar spent on a camera is a not spent on social workers, youth centers, street lighting, or mental health services—measures that are statistically proven to reduce crime more effectively than surveillance.

Furthermore, cameras have a short lifespan (around 5 years) and require constant, expensive software updates, creating a “subscription to surveillance” for the taxpayer.

There is no official data about the cost of video-surveillance but estimations of the global worldwide market can vary between 50 to 130 billions dollars per year.

Hackable cities

A city of cameras is a city of “digital backdoors”.

By creating a massive network of connected cameras, cities create a massive attack surface for hackers or foreign actors. If a city’s camera grid is compromised, a malicious actor can track the movements of police, politicians, or any citizen in real-time. Surveillance infrastructure intended for “security” often becomes the greatest security vulnerability.

A recent example is the “Verkada” hack, where hackers gained access to 150 000 live camera feeds (including hospitals, police stations, and prisons).

Environmental impact

Surveillance is an ecological issue.

The “cloud” isn’t invisible. Storing petabytes of high-definition video 24/7 requires massive data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity and water for cooling. Furthermore, the production of millions of electronic devices obviously contributes to the global e-waste crisis.

“Digital Sobriety” is incompatible with the “Smart City” model, which relies on constant, energy-intensive data streaming.

Algorithmic bias

Surveillance, as well a algorithms and AI are not “objective”. They are biased by the people who build it, by the data used for training.

AI and facial recognition are notoriously bad at identifying people of color, women, and non-binary individuals. This leads to “automated racial profiling”, where certain demographics are flagged more often by “suspicion algorithms” simply because of the data used to train the AI.

What should we do ? The objective behind PanoptiCity

PanoptiCity does not exist to tell you that cameras are “evil”. It exists to make the invisible visible.

For too long, the deployment of mass surveillance has happened in the shadows, voted on in small committees, funded by opaque grants, and marketed as “innovation”. Politicians often trust the lobisters because they’re not familiar with the subject and the reality of the statistics, because it looks like a miracle solution.

We believe that the architecture of our cities is a democratic choice.

Some questions we must ask ourselves are:

  • Do we want a society built on trust?
  • Do we want to give up our privacy for a so call security?
  • Do this really bring more security?
  • Who can see and control thoses images, and if the argument is transparency (nothing to hide) why the images are not public?
  • Do we want those images to be automatically analyzed by algorithms?
  • How much did it really costs to my city?

Whether you are “pro-camera” for security or “anti-camera” for liberty, you cannot have a balanced opinion if you do not know where the eyes are. PanoptiCity provides the map: the conversation is up to you.

What even IS a PanoptiCity ?

PanoptiCity is the contraction of Panopticon and City.

A Panopticon is a type of architecture, originally designed for prisons, that try to create a situation where every convict can be seen by a guardian at all time. It is often represented with a central watch tower into a circular building so that it can maximize the number of prisonners seen by a minimum number of guardians. The core idea of Panopticons was that the fear of always being watched, not knowing if they really are, will change the behaviour of convicts (chilling effect).

This old concept (invented centuries ago) is nowadays sometimes used as a metaphor for modern surveillance, the idea being enforced by the fact that CCTV control centers looks a lot like panopticons control towers.

This name is therefore a wordplay to denounce a world where, because of global surveillance with CCTV, an entire city is now becoming a panopticon were citizens are constantly watched.

Resources to learn more

Ideas to protect yourself from surveillance

… and add cameras that you spot in your daily life on OpenStreetMap ! The best way to fight back is to know your enemy, so help us map all the existing cameras.

Inspirations

One major inspiration for this project has been the website SunderS. It gave me the idea of improving the project with new features and therefore obviously needs to be cited. Information used is from the awesome OpenStreetMap database. Other attributions and projects used for this application can be found on the dedicated page.