Paper short abstract:

“How is infrastructure politics by other means?” As police departments adopt and adapt technologies for crime reporting, citizens are not only on patrol, they are called into action by police who are experimenting with video evidence in order to surveil crowds.

Paper long abstract:

In this talk, I describe the politics of new apps for citizen policing in order to recast the STS question, "Do artifacts have politics?" (Winner 1980) by asking, "How is infrastructure politics by other means?" Technical questions become political ones as forms and norms of usage and users develop. As police departments adopt and adapt technologies for crime reporting, I describe the complicated ways in which citizens' use of policing technology is also a form of participation in the process of innovation and product development. I explore the infrastructure of the Large Emergency Event Digital Information Repository (LEEDIR) as it evolved from a website used to support the Susan G. Komen charity to a streaming mobile phone app and web repository for Occupy protesters called "Studio Occupy." In its current iteration, it is used by police who ask citizens to upload footage of events that involve hundreds of people. The consequences of participation in the LEEDIR project are chilling for protesters. The ethics of participation for the user are enmeshed with the business ethics of the provider, especially in moments of beta-testing and midstream engagement. In this situation, protesters were unaware of the consequences of adopting this technology or their role in its trajectory. Incorporating social media and online broadcasting technologies into social movement's repertoires is an important component of networked social movements, but the lessons of LEEDIR show a sharp distinction between the politics of participation by companies, police, and protesters when using the same technology.