Citizen Sousveillance: The Use of Sousveillance in Protests.

The Case of Mídia NINJA

Vinicius Teixeira

A Thesis
in
The Department
of
Sociology and Anthropology

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of Master of Arts (Sociology) at

Concordia University

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

April 2020
© Vinicius Teixeira, 2020
 CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY
School of Graduate Studies

This is to certify that the thesis prepared

By: Vinicius Teixeira

Entitled: Citizen Sousveillance: The Use of Sousveillance in Protests. The Case of Mídia
NINJA

and submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts (Sociology)

complies with the regulations of the University and meets the accepted standards with respect to
originality and quality.
Signed by the final Examining Committee:

_____________________________________ Chair
Prof. Dr. Amy Swiffen

_________________________________ Examiner
Prof. Dr. Katja Grötzner Neves, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

__________________________________ Examiner
Prof. Dr. Bart Simon, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

_________________________________Supervisor
Prof. Dr. Martin French, Department of Sociology and Anthropology

Approved by _________________________________________
Prof. Dr. Kregg Hetherington - Graduate Program Director

__________________________________________
Prof. Dr. Pascale Sicotte – Dean, Faculty of Arts and Science

Date __________________________________________
 ABSTRACT

Citizen Sousveillance: The Use of Sousveillance in Protests.

The Case of Mídia NINJA

Vinicius Teixeira

The power dynamics of the gaze have been examined from different perspectives, from the use
of surveillance for safety purposes and the monitoring of citizens, to concepts that study how
alternative gazes impact in society and its actors. One of these alternative gazes has been
described as sousveillance (Mann, 1998). While surveillance refers to watching from above,
sousveillance is its direct opposite, watching from below. Based on this dynamic, and using a
Brazilian group of activists that practices sousveillance as a case study, this thesis proposes a
new term called Citizen Sousveillance. This term highlights the particular, protective role that
sousveillance can play in protest contexts, preventing police brutality and other forms of
injustice, as well as its capacity to change the reality of protest as a whole.

Citizen Sousveillance encompasses five dimensions: 1. a nonviolence dimension—it can act as a

nonviolent form of resistance and as protection against violent repression; 2. a raw reality
dimension—it can work to spread, if not an unmediated version of reality, a more raw reality of
protest than we would see in coverage produced by corporate mainstream media; 3. a
counternarrative dimension—it provides material that can be used to create narratives that act as
counterpoints to corporate, mainstream media coverage of protest; 4. an archival dimension—it
can help accumulate media that records and preserves records of protest for historical purposes;
and 5. a virtual dimension—it can work as a channel for those not involved in protests to still
follow its developments. These dimensions — and the concept of Citizen Sousveillance itself —
were discerned through an empirically-grounded analysis of the activities of a Brazilian activist
group called Mídia NINJA. The social media work of this group, as well as interviews with five
members, make up the case-study around which this thesis is organized.

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank my thesis supervisor Professor Dr. Martin French
in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University. I am 100% sure that
without your support, strength of scholarship, and patience, this thesis would have never been
possible. Your kindness, compassion, and guidance made this (long) journey bearable, enriching,
life-changing, and successful.

I would also like to thank my committee members, Professor Dr. Katja Grötzner Neves, in
the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, and Professor Dr. Bart Simon, in the
Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University.

I would like to express my gratitude to my friends and family. To my mother Maria

Helena, and my father, Irineu, for having established the values that have brought me to where I
am today, and that I take everywhere – honesty, love, and the value of hard work. Also, thanks to
my family, who are in my heart at all times: Cris, Mara, Fabi, Clari, Will, Henry and Ryan. And
my furry loves – Maple and Oreo.

Lastly, I will always remember the soundtrack of my entire master’s degree. Since the first
courses in 2014, to the final review of my thesis in 2020, I listened to Explosions in the Sky to
focus or relax, especially the album The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place.

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 Table of Contents

Table of Figures....................................................................................................................... vii

1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Context: Introducing Citizen Sousveillance .......................................................................... 1
1.2 – Thesis Statement ................................................................................................................ 4
1.3 – Research Question .............................................................................................................. 4
1.4 – Methodology ...................................................................................................................... 5
1.4.1 – Interviews .................................................................................................................... 5
1.4.2 – Publicly Available Data ............................................................................................... 6
1.4.3 Data Collection and Analysis ......................................................................................... 7
1.5 – Thesis Structure .................................................................................................................. 8
2. Literature Review – understanding the theoretical basis of surveillance, sousveillance
and peaceful protest. ................................................................................................................... 10
2.1 – Panoptic Surveillance ....................................................................................................... 10
2.1.1 – Surveillance ............................................................................................................... 11
2.1.2 – The Panopticon, According to Bentham and Foucault .............................................. 12
2.1.3 – Applications of the Panopticon in Surveillance Studies............................................ 14
2.1.4 – Critiques of the Panopticon ....................................................................................... 17
2.2 – Veillances ..................................................................................................................... 18
2.2.1 Sousveillance ................................................................................................................ 19
2.2.2 Developing the concept of sousveillance ..................................................................... 21
2.3 Citizen Sousveillance .......................................................................................................... 23
2.3.1 – Citizen Journalism ..................................................................................................... 26
2.3.2 – Frame analysis ........................................................................................................... 28
2.3.3 – Citizen Sousveillance and the Multimedia Citizen.................................................... 29
2.4 – Nonviolent Resistance ...................................................................................................... 31
2.4.1 – Theory of nonviolence ............................................................................................... 32
3 – Mídia NINJA – development, challenges and presence ..................................................... 38
3.1 A brief account of the development of Mídia Ninja: How it all started – Jornadas de Junho
in 2013 ....................................................................................................................................... 39
3.2 – Mídia NINJA’s challenges – Changing the narrative ...................................................... 46

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 3.3 Mídia NINJA: A Social Medias Analysis. .......................................................................... 52
3.3.1 Protection and nonviolence .......................................................................................... 56
3.3.2 A more raw reality of protests ...................................................................................... 60
3.3.3 Challenging mainstream narrative ................................................................................ 64
3.3.4 Historical records.......................................................................................................... 68
3.3.5 Virtual accessibility ...................................................................................................... 72
4 – What is the relation of Mídia NINJA with protests? ......................................................... 76
4.1 – Can sousveillance change the reality of a protest? ........................................................... 76
4.2 – Sousveillance as a tool of nonviolent resistance: Changing protest through protection .. 80
4.3 – What is the balance between sousveillance and privacy in a protest context?................. 84
4.3.1 Scholarship on Privacy ................................................................................................. 84
4.3.2 Privacy and Sousveillance ............................................................................................ 87
4.3.3 Unmasking Power ........................................................................................................ 90
4.4 – People in protests vs people online: what is more important? The virtual dimension of
Citizen Sousveillance ................................................................................................................ 93
4.5 Citizen Sousveillance and its use ...................................................................................... 101
4.6 – Does Citizen Sousveillance prevent violence?............................................................... 103
5 – Conclusion and final analysis............................................................................................. 106
5.1 What is the future of Citizen Sousveillance? .................................................................... 109
References .................................................................................................................................. 112
Appendix .................................................................................................................................... 122

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 Table of Figures

Figure 1: June 2013 protest in Rio de Janeiro on June 20th, 2013 .................................................40
Figure 2: Reasons why people attended manifestations in June, 2013 in Brazil ..........................42
Figure 3: Ngram of the use of “sousveillance” in Google Scholar ...............................................53
Figure 4: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. A photojournalist is helped by firemen ........58
Figure 5: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. The police try to take a protester into custody 59
Figure 6: Police officers try to take a protester into custody for having vinegar on him ..............60
Figure 7: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Thousands of people on the streets in BH .......61
Figure 8: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. About 11,000 police officers are blocking the
protest.............................................................................................................................................61
Figure 9: Picture of protests in Rio de Janeiro on June 30th, 2013 ................................................61
Figure 10: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Thousands of people are at the protest in Rio
........................................................................................................................................................62
Figure 11: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Dozens of bombs are thrown at the protesters
in Rio..............................................................................................................................................62
Figure 12: Picture of protests in Rio de Janeiro on June 30th, 2013 ..............................................62
Figure 13: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Protesters peacefully resist police firing .......63
Figure 14: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Police disperse peaceful protest with rubber
bullets ............................................................................................................................................63
Figure 15: Picture of protests at Maracanã Stadium, in Rio de Janeiro on June 30th ....................63
Figure 16: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Captain Bruno, Brasilia Riot Police ...........65
Figure 17: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. “We don’t want the World Cup. We want
Health and Education” ...................................................................................................................65
Figure 18: Protesters carry sign “Fifa Go Home” ..........................................................................66
Figure 19: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. We are LIVE directly from the City Hall ......67
Figure 20: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. We were censored today at the collective
interview ........................................................................................................................................67
Figure 21: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Another Mídia NINJA censorship episode 68

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Figure 22: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Clash between protesters in Belo Horizonte
and the Police’s Mounted Forces ..................................................................................................70
Figure 23: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. More shocking scenes of Temer’s
democracy at Paulista Av tonight .................................................................................................71
Figure 24: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Live from Belo Horizonte now ......................72
Figure 25: Picture of Belo Horizonte City Council occupancy .....................................................72
Figure 26: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Youtube channel. Undercovered police officers start
violence in protest in Rio ...............................................................................................................73
Figure 27: Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Youtube channel. Military Police truculent approach to
a protester in Belo Horizonte .........................................................................................................74
Figure 28: Screenshot of a live interaction from Mídia NINJA’s Facebook account ...................74
Figure 29: Screenshot of a live interaction. 187 people are engaging live ....................................75

viii
1. Introduction

1.1 Context: Introducing Citizen Sousveillance

The newscasts were not the same on a June 2013 evening in Brazil. People watched as the
São Paulo riot police used tear gas, rubber bullets, and stun grenades to disperse a protest in the
largest city of the country. Protesters that were marching peacefully were suddenly running,
coughing, tripping and bleeding everywhere. The mounted police swooped in to finish the job of
dispersing the crowd, and people – both protesters and bystanders – had to hide and wait for a
calmer time to have a chance to go back home. Up to that point, what had happened was not very
different from other protests around the country, but for one difference – the police actions and
transgressions were recorded by people with their smartphones, and the images and videos
spread like wildfire on social media. These new dynamics of demonstrations, which started in
2013, changed the reality of protests forever.

The phenomenon of ordinary people having the ability and means to monitor what
authorities do, and how they behave, is given the name of sousveillance. However, to understand
sousveillance, we first have to situate it in relation to surveillance. Surveillance refers to
“processes in which special note is taken of certain human behaviours that go well beyond idle
curiosity” (Lyon, 2007:13). The term also organizes a field of study that has many important
contributions for a long time, from the historical studies about how the FBI would profile people,
tap and record telephone lines, and have agents follow suspects around (Sankar, 1992; McCoy,
2014), to more recent whistleblower cases like Edward Snowden, who leaked mass surveillance
secrets from the government of the United States. The idea that surveillance can be an instrument
of oppression has been studied and documented, and the literature illustrating this dynamic is
substantial (Lyon, 2002; Ball & Webster, 2003; Greenwald, 2015; Cohen, 2014; Noble, 2018).
Less well characterized in the field, however, is the relation of surveillance to other veillances.
Sousveillance, for example, has substantially expanded due to cheaper access to technology,
helped by the expansion of social media. In a sense, sousveillance is the opposite of surveillance.
While surveillance describes the top-down gaze, where the powerful in society watch and control

1
the ones below them, sousveillance involves regular people watching powerful ones, inverting
the gaze to establish a bottom-up line of sight (Mann, 2002).

Today, it is not hard to imagine that we are being observed at all times. Especially with our
online and offline lives overlapping the way they do. People are starting to realize that their
every step is monitored. The consequences of this monitoring, the entities involved with it, or the
purposes of these actions are far from being clear to the average people – those who do not
actually study surveillance and its repercussions. Not only are surveillance processes and their
wider ramifications not clear, but additionally, this subject does not usually become a point of
public concern (Doctorow, 2013; Kelly, 2015; Lyons, 2017; Shelton et al. 2015). This happens
mainly for two reasons. First, surveillance is an abstract concept. Although people know they are
being watched, they may not have a good sense of the implications of this fact in their day-to-day
lives. Second, how to fight it? Even those concerned with the subject find that it is difficult to
stand up to the system and escape from surveillance.

After considerable reflection and research about this field of study, I propose in this thesis
to analyze how sousveillance is used by protesters. The overall argument is that sousveillance
can be used by protesters as a nonviolent defense mechanism to prevent police brutality, first and
foremost, among other forms of injustice. The case I examine to support my argument involves
Mídia NINJA, an independent media activist network present in over 250 cities in Brazil, which
had an important role during the unprecedented protests that occurred in June and July of 2013. I
was able to interview five Mídia NINJA members, and the goal of the interviews was to
understand how they operate, how their experience has developed since 2013, and how they see
the future of the use of new technologies for the benefit and articulation of protesters, activists
and militant groups of all sorts. I use the concept of sousveillance to anchor my theoretical
framework, which will be described below.

Building on top of the idea of sousveillance, what I propose is a new concept called Citizen
Sousveillance. Citizen Sousveillance is a sort of sousveillance made in a group context; in
situations of protests, citizen sousveillance can act as a form of protection against violent
repression. I identify, in this thesis, five key dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance, which support
activities that can transform the reality of protest. First, as noted, there is a nonviolence
dimension. Sousveillance can act as a nonviolent form of resistance and as protection against

2
violent repression. Second, there is a raw reality dimension. Sousveillance can work to spread, if
not an unmediated version of reality, a more raw reality of protest than we would see in coverage
produced by corporate mainstream media. Third, there is a counternarrative dimension.
Sousveillance provides material that can be used to create narratives that act as counterpoints to
corporate, mainstream media coverage of protest. Fourth, there is an archival dimension.
Sousveillance can help accumulate media that records and preserves records of protest for
historical purposes. Lastly, there is a virtual dimension. Sousveillance can work as a channel for
those not involved in protests to still follow its developments, while serving as a safety net to
protesters.

Citizen Sousveillance is a concept that has the intention of filling a gap. It will give
meaning to a specific use of a veillance in a specific context. Citizen Sousveillance relies on a
broad base of knowledge that underpins its historical and sociological context, among other
aspects. Citizen Sousveillance feeds from the literature on surveillance, sousveillance, citizen
journalism, and the idea of the multimedia citizen, proposed by the case-study of Mídia NINJA,
which will be presented further ahead. This thesis will develop the concept of Citizen
Sousveillance to help advance research in the field of surveillance studies, and to provide a novel
lens for understanding the 2013 protests in Brazil.

This research contributes to a body of knowledge that is still in development. Many sorts
of “veillances” are being created, adjusted, and polished, including veillances that take into
consideration different settings, and different uses of the “watchers”. The use of sousveillance
has been explored to some extent, but there is no indication that it has been analyzed in the
context of protests with this magnitude of data, and using a Brazilian case study to substantiate
the research. On top of that, I claim that this organically created method of using sousveillance in
protests can be used as a nonviolent defense mechanism, which brings to the analysis its own full
body of literature of nonviolent movements and techniques.

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1.2 – Thesis Statement

This thesis examines the citizen-driven mediation of the 2013 protests in Brazil, using the
case study of Mídia NINJA. The research is based on 1. publicly available social media data, 2.
data from interviews with Mídia NINJA members, as well as 3. the consultation of numerous
books and articles. This thesis will argue that, in a protest setting, sousveillance may encompass
at least five different dimensions (described in the preceding section) that can transform the
reality of protest, and that are therefore worthy of additional study.
Although sousveillance itself is not a new phenomenon, this thesis makes a contribution by
approaching the subject of sousveillance from a specific angle, namely the peaceful/nonviolent
angle. The ability of sousveillance to be used in protests as a nonviolent tool is not well
theorized, developed, or studied, and this is what my thesis does. Getting to better know how this
mechanism works will allow us to interpret how these grassroots, spontaneous movements can
interfere in the power balance within societies.

1.3 – Research Question

The questions that this project proposes to answer are structured in a multilevel way,
having the main research question at the heart of this entire thesis. Secondary questions, that are
important to substantiate the building of knowledge, are discussed in different sections and
chapters, but always to support the main idea. Also, it is important to note that, as the research
evolved, other questions were added to the main idea, which were not captured initially.

Main research question:

- How has sousveillance been used as a nonviolent defense mechanism in protests in Brazil
since 2013?

Secondary research questions:

Once I identified that it would be possible to interview members of Mídia NINJA and develop a
case study around this organization and its activities in the 2013 protests, I developed the
following secondary research questions:

4
 - What are Mídia NINJA’s goals and aspirations?
- Where do they place themselves in this big picture of surveillance, sousveillance,
privacy, and peaceful protests?
- How does Mídia NINJA’s online activity help to understand sousveillance?
- How is Mídia NINJA currently developing and what are their challenges?
- How does Mídia NINJA foresee their activism developing in the coming years?

In summary, having access to all of this information and evidence will help us to
understand and analyze what could be the future of Mídia NINJA, as well as organizations that
have a similar agenda, and if it will have enough strength to push for major changes in Brazilian
society, which could be partially replicated by other peoples.

1.4 – Methodology

How do I propose to fill this gap in knowledge using the existing literature and the research
performed so far? This thesis uses a case-study methodology (Feagin et al. 1991). It also draws
on an analysis of numerous videos, articles, tweets and Facebook posts, as well as in-depth,
qualitative interviews with key informants. These sources of information are used to substantiate
the analysis and the argumentation on how sousveillance can be used as a nonviolent method.
Below, I first discuss why I decided to substantiate this thesis using interviews, and also some
literature on interview methodology. Following this, I explain how I collected the data, and how
it was analyzed, drawing attention to the fact that all the interviews and raw data are in
Portuguese, and not English.

1.4.1 – Interviews

With respect to the interviews I did with Mídia NINJA members, these were in-depth
interviews that aimed to capture the participant’s perception of how their actions are part of a
bigger picture, and contributing to the ideas/ideology they believe in (Crouch and McKenzie,
2006). The individual’s reality has to be taken into consideration when analyzing their answers.
We have to understand that the individual’s responses correspond not only to their own reality,

5
both perceived and conscious, but also that this reality is based on social experiences paramount
to the formation of that perception itself – for both interviewee and interviewer. To adequately
address my research questions, it was important to use interviews as a way of complementing
information derived from the other types of data I collected. The entirety of the interviews was
informed and supported by the underpinning epistemology of this sort of data gathering (Gill et
al. 2008; Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009).

Therefore, once I decided to use interviews, I also decided to use Mídia NINJA as a case-
study, as it could substantiate and support my argument. I then built a study protocol that was
reviewed by the Concordia University Research Ethics Unit, and after receiving approval for the
study, I reached out to Mídia NINJA and was promptly answered. They were willing to share
their perspectives on the matter of surveillance, and share their experiences, as a group and also
as individuals. The conversations were all done by email (13 exchanges), until we decided the
best day to carry out the first interview. The interviews were planned to last approximately 45
minutes, and that was communicated with all of the interviewees. Some of them read and signed
the consent form beforehand, and for some of them, it was read at the initiation of the
conversation. I highlighted the fact that they were not required to answer any question, and they
could stop the interview at any time, without any consequence to them or the group. It was also
stated more than once that there is a minimal risk involved in participating, as at some point this
thesis will be made public, and anyone could have access to it. All the participants understood
and agreed. The interviews took between 40 minutes to 1h20m, and one of them had to do it on
two separate days. Three interviews were done on Microsoft Skype, and 2 of them were done on
Google Hangout. All of them were recorded using two different cellphones.

1.4.2 – Publicly Available Data

As for the rest of the data collection, everything was done online. The social media
analyzed were Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The videos were spread among different
platforms, from third-party websites to YouTube. I also used Mídia NINJA’s official website,
and interviews that Mídia NINJA’s members have given to the Brazilian media. Mídia NINJA
not only shared, and still shares, content, but third-party movements do the same, forming a

6
network of information of all sorts, which on one hand is positive for the dissemination of
information, but on the other hand, makes it extremely hard to make a comprehensive analysis
without missing any important aspect of it. The method decided was to filter the content as much
as the platforms allowed. For example, Twitter provides a mechanism to filter one’s page by
date, so it made it easy to go back to Mídia NINJA’s tweets from June and July 2013. Instagram,
however, does not have this option, so to go back in one’s timeline, you have to actually scroll
down, making it excessively time-consuming. Facebook allows word search in one’s timeline,
but not a timeframe search. Considering the particularities of each platform, and the intent of the
data collection, I decided to use purposive samples of each social media platform to corroborate
the interview analysis. My aim was to 1. show how Mídia NINJA behaves online, and 2. show
how it disseminated sousveillance of protest.

1.4.3 Data Collection and Analysis

Data collection procedures: I collected a total of more than one hundred videos analyzed, dozens
of articles, and hundreds of tweets, Instagram and Facebook posts, that together will help us
understand the case of Mídia NINJA. While abundant, tools that can manage this amount of
information, and have access to it, are either paid or always gaining and losing access privileges.
While researching for hashtags is a free and comprehensive way to analyze an online trend, it
can be overwhelming. One popular hashtag can find millions of results, but without proper
access and online tools, that analysis becomes unfeasible (Rogers, 2017). There are also, as
mentioned, five interviews with members of Mídia NINJA, which were carried out by Microsoft
Skype (3) and Google Hangout (2), and audio recorded on two devices. The approximate length
of each interview was 1 hour, and the focus was mostly on how they carry out their activities and
how they see themselves being part of the larger activist media landscape.

Data analysis: All of this material was analyzed taking into consideration its ephemeral nature.
Regarding the videos shared by Mídia NINJA online, specific aspects of them were examined,
while also trying to situate them in relation to the context in which they were produced. Of
course, re-posting and re-circulation produces a shifting context (Harper, 2003), and I tried to
account for this in the analysis as well. As for the interviews, there are more than five hours of
audio recordings of conversations, trying to enter the world of people that are constantly
7
involved with the use of sousveillance as part of their lives. Because these interviews were
conducted in Portuguese, and because this thesis is written in English, I decided to use selective
verbatim transcription. There are many reasons behind approaching the interview data using a
selective verbatim transcription. The costs associated with pure verbatim transcription, whether
they concern time, or money, are high (Halcomb & Davidson, 2006). Besides, recording and
transcribing interviews can be problematic for cross-cultural and multilingual research (Loubere,
2017). Accordingly, I worked with my recordings in the following way. I first listened to each
interview and took notes to identify the time stamp and content of parts of the interview that
addressed my research questions. Then, drawing from Boyatzis, a thematic approach to the
subjects discussed during the interviews was used. The most pertinent topics are put forth as the
basis for the argumentation; these are fully transcribed in Portuguese and then translated to
English. A hybrid of deductive and inductive coding was considered at the time of analysis. The
same thematic approach is used to analyze tweets and posts on social media (Boyatzis, 1998;
Fereday et al. 2006). The goal is to build knowledge of how sousveillance can be used as a
peaceful tool in protests as a way to defend protesters.

1.5 – Thesis Structure

In Chapter 2, “Literature Review – understanding the theoretical basis of surveillance,

sousveillance and peaceful protest”, I explore literature that will help me to build the theoretical
framework of this study. Panoptic surveillance – proposed by Jeremy Bentham and theorized by
Michel Foucault – is discussed, and critiques and applications of this concept are considered.
This chapter also deals with the literature on the emergent concept of sousveillance, its
disambiguation from surveillance, and how other veillance concepts have emerged in the field.
The social scientific literature on important figures of nonviolent actions are also introduced. I
also touch on supporting literature related to privacy, frame analysis and citizen journalism,
social movements, and online activism, all of which help to conceptualize Citizen Sousveillance.

Chapter 3, “Mídia NINJA – development, challenges and presence” is where some history
of the group is discussed: namely, how they began their activities and positioned themselves in
the Brazilian social arena. I also consider how they work to change a narrative that has long been
dictated by the wealthy and powerful in society. This counter-point was important to bring to

8
light different versions of events that were largely known only through the biases of mainstream
media, which tended to criminalize minorities, like LGBTQ+ communities, black people and
poor people. How the online behaviour of Mídia NINJA acted is also demonstrated in the
chapter, giving special attention to the protests in June and July of 2013, and with the use of the
most popular social media platforms in Brazil – Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

In Chapter 4, “What is the relation of Mídia NINJA and protests”, the actual presence and
action of Mídia NINJA are debated. The interviewed members of the group shared their
experiences, which made it possible to briefly understand how they operate, how they behave in
street protests, and what are the outcomes of their actions. They also engage with the paradox of
surveillance/sousveillance in the face of privacy. How they balance the use of sousveillance in
protests while still preserving privacy, and their position on strategies like Black Blocs, is
presented. Lastly, the different impacts that online protest and street protests have on society
have been considered. Interviewees shared their experiences and contributed to the building of
knowledge concerning protests of different forms.

Chapter 5, “Conclusion and Final Analysis”, concerns how my findings will be inserted in
the surveillance studies frame. I conclude this thesis by pointing out some aspects of how this
field can still develop, and how many important changes are coming to play a role.

Finally, in an appendix, I propose that the term Citizen Sousveillance and its definition be
added to Gene Sharp’s list of Methods of Nonviolent Action.

9
2. Literature Review – understanding the theoretical basis of surveillance, sousveillance
and peaceful protest.

Introduction

Scholarly research on sousveillance is emerging as a new field of study, and to fully

capture the idea and meaning of sousveillance, it is important to understand a more established
concept, which is surveillance. Therefore, I will examine the following pieces of literature and
concepts in this chapter: 1) literature that develops and critiques the idea of panoptic
surveillance; and 2) literature that discusses the emergent concept of sousveillance. Additionally,
to create a foundation for the conceptualization of Citizen Sousveillance, I will discuss 3) social
scientific literature on nonviolent movements.

Taken together, these three streams of work will act as the main theoretical tripod that will
be used to sustain the argument about how sousveillance can be used as a nonviolent tool in
protests. Besides this tripod, there is a secondary literature that will add to the building of
supporting discussions on themes of privacy, frame analysis, citizen journalism, social
movements, and online activism.

2.1 – Panoptic Surveillance

While the sociology of surveillance is relatively new, tracing its origins in Anglo-sociology
to the mid-1970s, we can see that canonical sociologists were concerned with issues related to
surveillance, even if they didn’t always speak of these concerns with respect to the ‘sociology of
surveillance’. It has collaborations from Karl Marx analyzing surveillance in the capitalist
workplace; from Max Weber investigating how in bureaucracies officials keep tabs on others;
and from Georg Simmel, when he discusses the importance of privacy and secrecy as protection
against surveillance, all of which can be easily related to today’s information society, among
many others (Lyon 2007; Lyon, 1994, Coll 2012).

When it comes to modern panoptic surveillance, though, the world we know today has
been developing particularly fast in the past decades. Garland (2001), has an interesting reading

10
about how the crime control landscape in the United States and the United Kingdom emerged at
the turn of the century. For him, “today’s world of crime control and criminal justice was not
brought into being by rising crime rates or by a loss of faith in penal-welfarism … these were
proximate causes…” (Garland, 2001:193). Garland’s “crime complex” concept (2001:193), says
that the reactionary politics in place in both of these societies were used as foundation for the
cultural formation that served as a base for the control culture to spread. This is a reality that is
not necessarily replicated in Brazil, especially looking into the timeframe analyzed (June and
July, 2013). However, it is hard to dissociate Brazil’s historical inequality from the formation of
its own culture of control. This has manifested at many instances in history, lastly and more
clearly in 2018, with the election of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. Garland continues, “The
dialectic between freedom and control could be said to have characterized the last thirty years…
the social liberation of the 1960s and the market freedoms of the 1980s are now being paid for in
the coin of social control and penal repression” (Garland, 2001:198). The underlying
circumstances of the culture of control in Brazilian society are distinct from the ones Garland
analyzed, but this social control and penal repression are very present in people’s lives today. It
is more noticeable than previous surveillance practices that were in place before. It has
developed to a point that it is fair to assume that we live in a culture of control, whether in the
United States, United Kingdom, or Brazil (Lyon, 2007; Monaghan, 2006).

In this section, I will first discuss Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon. And the way that it was
theorized by Michel Foucault. I will then consider applications of the panopticon, as well as
critiques of it.

2.1.1 – Surveillance

Before going any further, it is necessary to clearly define surveillance. As the name
suggests, the word surveillance comes from the French sur (over) and veiller (to watch),
therefore it literally means to watch over (someone or something). Lyon (2007:14) defined
surveillance as being the “…focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for
purposes of influence, management, protection or direction”. I would build on Lyon’s definition,
adding the word control. Surveillance might seem a simple, straightforward concept at first,

11
however there are many nuances to it, which makes it a very rich field of study. It can be looked
at from the safety perspective, when someone watches over someone else for safety purposes,
like a lifeguard at the edge of a swimming pool. It can also be looked at from the control
perspective, when a police officer watches over people with dubious or suspect behavior (Lyon,
2007).

For the purpose in question here, the idea is to think of surveillance as the big “umbrella”
that covers all the studies under this realm, but to thoroughly look into some parts of the
surveillance studies that corroborate with the main argumentation. Jeremy Bentham created the
concept of Panopticon in the late 1700s, and it has an important contribution for us to understand
how surveillance is used to monitor and control people, and how Michel Foucault read and
reinterpreted it.

2.1.2 – The Panopticon, According to Bentham and Foucault

The Panopticon, as Jeremy Bentham originally envisioned it, consists of a circular prison
with an observatory tower in its center. From this tower, guards or prison staff were imagined to
have the perfect view of inmates, while the inmates could not know if anyone was watching
them. The uncertainty of not knowing if there is anyone out there is what puts inmates in a
permanent psychological state of feeling as though they are under surveillance, of feeling as
though they are being watched all the time (Bentham, 1791). Bentham says

To say all in one word, it will be found applicable, I think, without exception to all
establishments whatsoever, in which within a space not too large to be covered or
commanded by buildings, several persons are meant to be kept under inspection. No matter
how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be, that of punishing the
incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected,
employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any
branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word whether it
be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for
confinement before trial, or penitentiary-houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses,
or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools (Bentham, 1791:2-3).

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 The most influential reinterpretation of the Panopticon, and one that has its own
reinterpretations, is Michel Foucault’s. In his book Discipline and Punish (1975), he examines
Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon, and this is where he develops a surveillance theory that is
used and referred to this day in most studies on the subject. Foucault examines four main
concepts in this work – 1. Torture, 2. Punishment, 3. Discipline, and 4. Prison. Foucault’s
argument ends up permeating different avenues of the epistemology of these areas. One of the
practices touched by his studies on discipline is the hierarchical observation. It intertwines with
the panopticon idea itself, and it is supported by administrative and physical mechanisms and
knowledge structures. The subjection inherent to it is paramount for the understanding of how a
structure that watches people, keeps people in place, and maintain a chain of power relations can
be almost invisible. About this subjection, he says:

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to

use force to constrain the convict to good behavior, the madman to calm, the worker to
work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations.
Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more
bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed was that the separations
should be clear and the openings well arranged. (Foucault, 1975:202)

There are many nuances of Foucault’s reading on the Panopticon that can be examined.
However, besides the rigid hierarchical structure, and the apparent subtlety of power relations,
which implies that there is always a stronger force in an interaction, something else that I would
like to draw attention to, which concerns this project, is visibility and unverifiability. Foucault
builds on the dichotomy of inmates having to be able to see the watching structure, and the
guard’s presence must be unverifiable to inmates: “Visible: the inmate will constantly have
before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the
inmate must never know whether he is being looked at any one moment; but he must be sure that
he may always be so.” (Foucault, 1975:201). This dichotomy is what makes the structure
successful for its purpose. If at any point an inmate is not sure that there is someone watching,
due to the fact that he cannot see the watching structure, or if he can verify when there is
someone there and when there is not, the whole purpose is broken.

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 The structures used as examples by Foucault, like prisons, hospitals, schools, etc, are
embedded in the idea that physical places alone have the power to interfere in one’s behaviour
due to the underlying perception of surveillance. Therefore, the claim is that one’s behaviour
changes due to the possibility of being watched.

It is possible to stretch this view, and combine it with the hierarchical observation that
more flagrantly is an exercise of power between subjects, and apply to new scenarios. Those at
the top of the hierarchy, and at the privileged seat in the structure, would not only exercise the
power at their disposal, but would also be the ones telling how routine takes place. The routine of
events is, then, determined and reported, only by this one person or group of people that are at
this privileged position. The person or group is, therefore, the owner and controller of the
narrative of how these events exist.

The control of how events happen, namely, the control of the narrative, falls directly into
the discussion of how it is used in modern societies. Big corporations, powerful politicians, and
other elites have had this sort of control for most of history. They were the ones defining and
deciding what and how episodes in society should be reported. In a subsequent chapter of this
thesis, the idea of who controls the narrative will be important to help us understand the way that
Mídia NINJA operates, and how they put the change in narratives as one of their main struggles.
This narrative battle is also something that the concept proposed by this thesis, Citizen
Sousveillance, addresses.

It feels necessary now to see what the applications of the panopticon are, and how it
contributes to surveillance studies.

2.1.3 – Applications of the Panopticon in Surveillance Studies

There are many different reviews and interpretations of the Panopticon. It was used, for
example, to analyze the neoliberal state and economic life (Gill, 1995), as well as visibility in
contemporary urban settings (Koskela, 2002). In surveillance studies, discussion of the
Panopticon became so commonplace that Haggerty (2006) argued that it was being overused
(and that, in any case, it was not a good explanatory device for present-day surveillance).

14
 Regardless, the Panopticon shows that the control purpose of surveillance can be smooth.
The idea of a prison without bars was indeed revolutionary, and that was a concept that could be,
and was, applied on many different occasions and places in society.

Modern surveillance gained magnitude in the 1990s, with the rise of closed-circuit
television systems (CCTV). The use of cameras connected to a TV system became popular
rapidly. The days when physically following someone was the only option were mostly gone.
The idea behind CCTV is that someone, a guard for example, would look at the TV screens, live
or on recordings, and make assumptions. This guard would track and observe people that
presented a suspicious behavior, with intent to prevent any wrongdoing from happening, or using
the recordings for the possible legal action. However, under the pretext of being a crime
prevention initiative, CCTV has always been implicated in the profiling of people, whether for
one’s race, gender, or social class. The operators of the system would have the power to define
who was “acting suspiciously” (Norris and Armstrong, 1999:158). What can be deemed a
suspicious behaviour, though? The very nature of CCTV systems is subject to debate, as a
behavior, “suspicious” or not, is extremely subjective (Norris and Armstrong, 1999).

The surveillance supported and enabled by the use of a CCTV system made way for
authorities to comprehend how powerful it can be at large scales. The Panopticon, as per
Foucault, interacts directly with the idea of this contemporary sort of surveillance that developed
from CCTV systems, to tracking everything we do online. It can be seen as the manifestation of
Foucault’s theory of power relation, hierarchy, and, to some extent, punishment. Having an
operator tracking our movements from a privileged standpoint, even if through screens, relates to
a form of hierarchical observation discussed by Foucault. On top of that, the awareness of being
under scrutiny has the potentiality of changing one’s behaviour (Shaw, 2017; Oulasvirta et al.
2012). Consequently, the disciplinary measure can end up in punishment, oftentimes depending
on the parameters considered as regular or normal. The fact that camera operators have
significant discretionary power to decide who to watch, and if someone is acting suspiciously, is
troubling. Even more troubling has been the development of technologies and algorithms that
monitor our online behaviour, classifying it according to predetermined patterns. But,
predetermined by whom?

15
 CCTV is only part of the surveillance apparatus that is present mostly in urban settings
today. Koskela (2002) makes an interesting point when she discusses Foucault’s social power
relation, and the importance of physical space. That idea of transferring the panopticon from
closed spaces like prisons, schools and hospitals, to place it in a higher level analyzing the entire
city as a laboratory, is crucial to see how space has a direct connection with power relations
between individuals. She says

Urban space will always remain less knowable and, thus, less controllable than the
restricted panoptic space. Control is never completely hegemonic. There is always an
element of resistance. Surveillance can be turned to ‘counter-surveillance’, to a weapon for
those who are oppressed (Koskela, 2002:306).

The same way that space is analyzed as being determinant for how the power relations
occur, there is also the claim that power creates its own kind of space. That is to say, the equation
of power, space, and how the urban panopticon plays a role there, can be used to throw light
upon Mídia NINJA. They are indeed inserted in urban settings, and mostly struggling with the
notions of power in different scales. Being able to break away from the “institutional”
panopticon, in the sense that they are not in a confined space, they are able to employ the
“counter-surveillance”, as per Koskela’s suggestion.

Gill’s theory, on the other hand, looks at the panoptic neoliberal state, and says that the
panopticon antedates the modern bureaucratic state, and the use of technical innovations,
however its use, can be somewhat beneficial, as modern societies require some degree of
transparency. In an egalitarian and tolerant society, no citizen should have anything significant to
hide from others, but at the same point, in places where one’s political views or lifestyle can be
deemed less worthy, such transparency can be clearly oppressive (Gill, 1995). Gill’s theorization
of the neoliberal state panopticon also shed some light on Foucault’s understanding of
invisibility and unverifiability, as they might be less present when the panopticon is present in
labour processes and financial structure.

The use of surveillance employing some sort of panopticon, therefore, whether through the
use of CCTV in urban settings, in the financial structures of society, in medical context, in
workplaces, and many other places, has been evolving and developing through time. It is, then,

16
ingraining in every aspect of our lives, interfering in many different aspects of the way we
behave as an individual or collectively.

This illustrates how the use and application of the panopticon varied and morphed through
time, giving room to some critiques of it, which I examine next.

2.1.4 – Critiques of the Panopticon

Sometimes it is hard to separate the studies on surveillance from the panopticon. The
panopticon, being a classic idea created by Bentham in the 1700s, and having Foucault’s work in
transferring and connecting this idea to modern society in the 1970s, was extremely successful,
to the point of being hard for new studies to ignore it. The need to always refer to the panoptic
starting point whenever examining surveillance created focal points, but also blind spots, in
surveillance studies.

Haggarty (2006) summarizes well the influence of the panopticon in surveillance studies,
as well as the ways scholars have worked to evolve this idea to try and explain new aspects of
surveillance. As he notes, contemporary scholarship on surveillance has been prolific in its
proposals of opticons modified to suit modern-day conditions. The list of new opticons includes
the global panopticon (Gill, 1995), the panspectron (DeLanda, 1991), the myoptic panopticon
(Leman-Langois, 2002), the fractal panopticon (De Angelis, 2011), the industrial panopticon
(Butchart, 1996), the polyopticon (Allen, 1994), among many others. The creation of these new
concepts clearly demonstrates that the original theory had its limitations, and it was not sufficient
to understand modern society (Haggarty, 2006).

In response to critiques of the limitations of the panopticon, scholars have identified

aspects of surveillance that are not well characterized by panoptic dynamics. One of these
aspects concerns surveillance in contexts where hierarchical relations are less apparent, such as
amongst users on social media. To capture these dynamics, scholars have proposed new concepts
like “lateral surveillance,” developed by Andrejevic (2005), and “participatory surveillance,”
developed by Albrechtslund (2008).

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 In a disciplinary society, as per Andrejevic, the relationship between two people can
become a case of power struggle. Lateral surveillance flourished due to a climate of perceived
risks. As Andrejevic defines it

Lateral surveillance, or peer-to-peer monitoring, understood as the use of surveillance tools

by individuals, rather than by agents of institutions public or private, to keep track of one
another, covers (but is not limited to) three main categories: romantic interests, family, and
friends or acquaintances. (Andrejevic, 2005:488)

Lateral surveillance plays in a field that underpins this thesis, which is the developments on
the idea of where the watcher is, and who the watcher is. In the case of lateral surveillance, one
can be the watcher and the watched at the same time.

Extending from the lateral surveillance idea, participatory surveillance comes to examine
the dynamics of the social and playful aspects of surveillance, specifically shedding light on
online interactions where individuals willingly share their personal information, and details of
their lives with no direct benefit coming out of it. For Albrechtsland, these “social and playful”
aspects of surveillance were not well examined by concepts like the Panopticon. As he puts it,
“frameworks such as Big Brother and Panopticon […] do not seem to adequately describe the
actual practice of online social networking.” (Albrechtsland, 2008:6)

These two concepts of lateral surveillance and participatory surveillance - primarily the
latter - in conjunction with sousveillance and participatory sousveillance, permeate the
understanding and theorization of Citizen Sousveillance.

Building on surveillance studies, particularly on work that proposes alternatives to the

panoptic narrative, this thesis will develop the concept of sousveillance. To set up that
development, it will first be important to consider different kinds of veillances.

2.2 – Veillances

Deborah Lupton presents a straight-forward list with the most popular and studied new
concepts of the different types of veillance. Lupton blogged this list in an attempt to disseminate

18
a simplified approach to a very complex concept that is in expansion, with new concepts and
studies coming to light every day. Some examples are:

Surveillance: watching from above (the powerful watching the less powerful)
Sousveillance: watching from below (the less powerful watching the more powerful)
Panoptic veillance: the few watching the many, leading to self-watching
Synoptic veillance: the many watching the few
Uberveillance: watching from all directions, particularly with the use of tracking devices
worn on or embedded into the human body
Liquid surveillance: watching that is dynamic, moving restlessly from site to site and
using various types of technologies
Banoptic surveillance: exclusion of individuals or social groups via surveillance
techniques
Participatory veillance: voluntary participation as a subject of veillance
Social veillance: watching each other via social media
Dataveillance/panspectric veillance: watching that involves the use of digital data
technologies rather than human senses alone
Algorithmic veillance: watching using computer algorithms and digital data (Lupton,
2013)

This short list does not encapsulate all veillances, however, for people who are not familiar
with the literature, it gives an idea of how rich and complex this area of research is. As said
before, the one veillance that this thesis wishes to use as the basis of the analysis is
sousveillance, which is diametrically in opposition to surveillance.

2.2.1 Sousveillance

Among all these concepts, there is one which expresses the opposite of the most
common and popular idea of the veillances – surveillance – which is sousveillance.
Sousveillance is diametrically opposed to surveillance in the sense that the one who is
normally observed is now the observer. It means to offer panoptic technologies – like
smartphones – to individuals and support them in observing the authorities. It is a kind of
reflectionism, which is the use of technology to mirror and confront bureaucratic
organizations (Mann, 1998).

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 A famous case of sousveillance, which helps to illustrate this discussion, happened in the
summer of 2004, during the Republican National Convention. On that occasion, 1,806 people
were arrested in the city of New York. Many of these people were peacefully participating in a
group activity when they were approached by police officers and taken into custody. During the
trial, accounts from officers were many times counterargued by videos of participants, along
with bystanders who were not even taking part in the event, showing total cooperation with the
police and still being taken into custody. This was a clear case of the use of sousveillance, which
could also be read as a case of Citizen Sousveillance, that illustrates how sousveillance can be
used to protect people in a protest setting, as well as the utility of having protestor-generated
images and videos that can support litigation in police brutality and human rights cases (Dwyer,
2005).

Another famous example of sousveillance is in the case of Rodney King, a black man who
was beaten by over 20 police officers in 1991 after he had been stopped for a traffic violation.
The whole scene was captured on tape by George Holliday, a Los Angeles resident, sparking
protests all around the city when the officers were acquitted. (Good-Williams, 1993; Mann,
2003).

These are cases with great repercussions and that had videos used to report police abuse
and excessive use of force in court.

Mann, who is one of the main articulators of the concept of sousveillance, and who coined
the term, describes this bottom-up veillance as referring:

both to hierarchical sousveillance, e.g. citizens photographing the police, shoppers

photographing shopkeepers, and taxi-cab passengers photographing cab drivers, as well as
personal sousveillance (bringing cameras from the lamp posts and ceilings, down to eye-
level, for human-centered recording of personal experience). It should be noted that the
two aspects of sousveillance (hierarchy reversal and human-centeredness) often
interchange, e.g. the driver of a cab one day, may be a passenger in someone else's cab the
next day (Mann, 2004:620).

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 Having this concept clear in mind is important, as it is the basis used in the new concept
proposed by this thesis.

2.2.2 Developing the concept of sousveillance

The core idea of sousveillance is the bottom-up watch: the idea that the least favored in
society still have some sort of micro-power to use, juxtaposed against surveillance by massive
and powerful organizations. Gasnacia (2010:496) goes even further, suggesting that “local
surveillance societies have now been replaced by a generalized sousveillance society, which
reaches incredible proportions”, as these new societies are equally distributed, strictly egalitarian
and delocalized over the entire planet. He proposes the antitheses of the Panopticon, which is the
Catopticon. The Catopticon “allows everybody to communicate with everybody and removes
surveyors from the watchtower” (Gasnacia, 2010:489). It consists in total transparency of
societies and within societies, fundamental equality, which gives everybody the ability to watch
– and consequently to control – everybody.

The point is that studies of sousveillance as opposition to surveillance have not been
evolving for long, and sousveillance can be observed, at least to some extent, in many societies
around the world today. Examining a group like Mídia NINJA, who performs a sort of
sousveillance on a daily basis, and contributes to this general idea of bottom-up veillance that
sousveillance proposes, it is fundamental for us to understand its effectiveness, its reach, and its
longevity. The idea, then, is to resignify the use of sousveillance in the context of protests, with
the intent of self-protection and peaceful manifestation of an agenda, giving it a new name to
instantly connect to this meaning: Citizen Sousveillance.

Sousveillance can even have other underlying features that are bringing more transparency,
especially online, in the sense of exposing data that was gathered by companies like Facebook
(Fernback, 2013). According to Fernback, an “informed knowledge society” describes people
and communities that use sousveillance to expose Facebook data collection on Facebook itself,
therefore raising individual empowerment and social responsibility and equality. Fernback
highlights the importance of this transparency on social media, and the internet as a whole.

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Today it is common sense that our everyday life is greatly impacted by our online life. Platforms
like Facebook and Google have an important role in influencing people’s opinions. It is a known
fact that these companies collect data from their users for marketing purposes, but that is not all.
In a recent scandal involving Facebook and data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, it was
demonstrated that millions of Facebook profiles of voters in the United States were harvested
and used to influence choices at the ballot box during the 2016 elections (Cadwalladr et al,
2018). These episodes contribute to the understanding of the field as a whole. Whereas the case
of Cambridge Analytica can signify a clear case of surveillance, the leak of information, and
employees coming public about it, can be considered a sousveillance example.

Another way to interpret sousveillance/surveillance is to look at it as a response to anti-

black racism, as Simone Browne does. The long history of racial formations has influenced how
the surveillance operative is designed to be unequal and unfair towards black people. The
Martiniquais psychiatrist Frantz Fanon described the embodied physical effects of surveillance
such as nervous tensions, insomnia, fatigue, accidents, light-headedness, and less control over
reflexes, as very severe threats to the human condition.

Browne argues that the branding of slaves in the 19th century was some sort of racializing
surveillance at a time that the black body was seen as a mere commodity, building on top of
Fanon`s idea of epidermalization, or the black body “being an object among other objects”
(Fanon, 2008:89; Browne, 2015). Without going into detail of the cruelty of slavery, we can see
that the act of surveillance can be an act of oppression and racism. To this day, we do not have to
go far to see that black people are more prone to be stop-and-frisked by the police (NYCLU,
2019), or taken aside for pat-downs at airports, especially hair pat-downs in black women
(Medina & Frank, 2019).

Still drawing from Browne, some angles were used to substantiate the claim that “the
historical formation of surveillance is not outside of the historical formation of slavery”
(Browne, 2015:50). The point she makes, based on the rules created by Charles William Tait for
governing enslaved laborers, “demonstrate how disciplinary power operated by way of set rules,
instructions, routines, inspections, hierarchical observation, timetable, and examination”
(Browne, 2015:51). The hierarchization, and the hierarchical observation within a white-
controlled private household, can be read in relation to Foucault’s concept of hierarchy, and, to a

22
certain degree, also read in relation to the change in narrative attempted by Mídia NINJA, as the
control of such narrative did not belong to slaves, but their white owners. Browne points to the
theory that people who do not control the narrative can use sousveillance tactics against powerful
regimes and, in so doing, start to change the narrative those regimes tell. In Browne's account,
the apparent dominance of the regime of white slave owners was resisted through sousveillance,
for example, through advertisements warning of the presence of slave catchers. In Mídia
NINJA’s case, the traditional media narrative is the dominant regime, and the live streamings
and videos are the form of resistance. The understanding of Browne’s work helps us understand
how this insight about dark sousveillance is important for making sense of the work that Mídia
NINJA does.

For Browne, the term dark sousveillance comprehends not only the collection of data to
neutralize surveillance, as described by Steve Mann, but it also englobes a “way to situate the
tactics employed to render one’s self out of sight, and strategies used in the flight to freedom
from slavery as necessarily ones of undersight” (Browne, 2015:21). Her focus in dark
sousveillance, which does not necessarily mean blackness, develops a view that slave narratives
and “black looks” (a concept that Browne borrows from bell hooks) can be seen as a way to
resist the oppression perpetrated by white slave holders (Browne, 2015).

All of that helps us understand the different nuances that the studies of the veillances might
have, and most importantly, how to make use of these studies and experiences to promote a fairer
society. The use of Citizen Sousveillance comes to light with the intent of spreading the idea of
protection of protesters in a peaceful manner, precisely by understanding the importance of the
subject.

2.3 Citizen Sousveillance

Although the many readings of sousveillance keep the bottom-up aspect, obviously there
are few nuances and different readings of the concept. Mann, being the one who conceptualized
it, has the “rawer” idea of sousveillance. Ganascia’s Catopticon pays attention to the egalitarian
potential of it. Fernback attends to its online use, and the possible transparency that it can bring
with an informed knowledge society. Lastly, Browne examines the racism that can be embedded

23
in a top-bottom relation, as well as sousveillance as a form of resistance. I would claim that my
reading on sousveillance, or at least the reading that will be used to make the argument of this
project, and the reading that will be used to justify the newly proposed concept of Citizen
Sousveillance, is embedded within two main ideas: 1. Sousveillance can be used as a way to
show wrongdoings committed by the most powerful actors in society within a protest setting, and
2. Sousveillance can be used as a way to defend those opposing powerful actors, especially when
it involves transgressing of human rights, which can be seen as common in protests. In the same
way Browne describes dark sousveillance as a tactic to oppose the oppression of slaves, and as a
way to resist black slavery by inverting not only the gaze, but the attitude of slaves, Citizen
Sousveillance also can be seen as a way to resist. The notion of Citizen Sousveillance being used
as a defense mechanism for protesters against state violence can be read in parallel to dark
sousveillance. The overarching claim is that Citizen Sousveillance can be used as a nonviolent
defense mechanism, using the group Mídia NINJA as an example and executor of it.

What is proposed by this thesis, then, and what will be substantiated throughout the project
is the utility of the concept of Citizen Sousveillance for highlighting the creation and expansion
of the use of sousveillance in a very specific scenario. This scenario is real, hence the case-study
on Mídia NINJA; it explores what happened when sousveillance was employed with the intent of
protecting protesters, especially against police brutality.
The utility of the new concept of Citizen Sousveillance is founded in the literature,
specifically about sousveillance, developed over the years. As mentioned, there are five
dimensions in which Citizen Sousveillance can be employed. They are:

1. Nonviolent dimension: which consists in the use of Citizen Sousveillance as a way for
protesters to defend themselves and resist aggression to basic human rights. This is primarily
based on Mann’s idea that sousveillance exposes the powerful one. Although it ultimately can be
seen as a defense tool, Mann does not reach that conclusion. He states the difficulty of pursuing
the proper channels, and the unbalance in the dynamics between surveillance and sousveillance
actors.

By definition, the sousveillance practitioner is not in a position of authority, and therefore,

without verifiable documentary evidence, information reported by the sousveiller to any higher
authority may be on its own insufficient to attain their goal and to meet the needs of the

24
sousveiller. Testimony can be challenged by other testimony, and in this situation, the person
with greater authority has an advantage (Ali & Mann, 2013:246).

It might be counter-intuitive to think of sousveillance as having a nonviolent dimension,

especially insofar as it may capture and disseminate images of state violence. The argument here,
however, is that by helping to hold perpetrators of violence to account, the presence of Citizen
Sousveillance may act as a deterrent to violence and result in a net reduction of brutality and
violence.

2. Raw Reality dimension: which consists in the use of Citizen Sousveillance to

disseminate a less mediated reality of protests. This is also derived substantially from Mann’s
work on how the use of sousveillance can balance and impose limits to surveillance. The
dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance, for obvious reasons, overlap to some extent. For example,
when I say that it portrays a raw reality, it will also be used as a counternarrative. For Mann,

Whereas radio and television generally provided curated and produced materials from
centralized broadcasters, lifecasting gathered and broadcast ubiquitous information from
below. With 24/7 streaming ‘incidental’ observations, events are captured as part of the
continuous channel of information. Events captured by ordinary people then become an
unofficial official record of events that may be used to challenge to authoritative history
(Mann, 2013:27).

3. Counternarrative dimension: which consists in the use of Citizen Sousveillance as a

manner to challenge traditional mainstream narratives. This relies considerably on Browne’s
work on dark sousveillance, and the way that the connection between racism and surveillance
can explain how the use of sousveillance can be decisive when it is employed with the intent of
protecting a group. When Browne (2015) recounts the stories of an ex-slave, she says

“…Maybe we (slaves) would be fiddling and dancing on the bridge and they’d say, ‘Here
come the paterollers!’ Then we’d put out”. Such playful tricks were a means of self-
defense. These oral histories of ex-slaves, slave narratives [emphasis added], and runaway

25
 notices, in revealing a sociology of slavery, escape, and freedom, recall the brutalities of
slavery … and detail how black performative practices and creative acts (fiddling, songs,
and dancing) also functioned as sousveillance acts and were employed by people as a way
to escape and resist enslavement, and in so being were freedom acts (Browne, 2015:22).

4. Archival dimension: which consists in the use of Citizen Sousveillance with the purpose
of keeping and sharing media material with the intent of disseminating knowledge about the
reality of protests. This observation is mostly based on the interviews I conducted with Mídia
NINJA members. It seems that this one specific dimension has not been approached yet, and
Citizen Sousveillance addresses it.

5. Virtual dimension: which consists in the use of Citizen Sousveillance with the purpose
of working as an alternative channel for protesters who are unable to be physically present at a
demonstration, to participate virtually. This relies on my interviews, as well as the reality that the
technology that makes it possible is fairly new. In 2013, when the protests happened in Brazil,
live streaming on Twitter was just beginning, in a very rudimental way. Today it is a more
established idea, the use and sharing of live activities being more common, and digitally more
feasible.

2.3.1 – Citizen Journalism

Without a careful evaluation and a deeper analysis, a first impression of the new concept
proposed by this thesis – Citizen Sousveillance – could be mistaken with the more popular and
better-known idea of citizen journalism. Citizen journalism does not have a clear-cut definition
(Lasica, 2003), however it usually:

includes practices such as current affairs-based blogging, photo and video sharing, and
posting eyewitness commentary on current events. Sometimes the term is used quite
broadly to include activities such as re-posting, linking, ‘tagging’ (labeling with
keywords), rating, modifying or commenting upon news materials posted by other users or

26
 by professional news outlets, whereby citizens participate in the news process without
necessarily acting as ‘content creators’ (Goode, 2009:2).

The concept of citizen journalism can, therefore, refer to a broad range of activities.

The formal way news is commonly reported, and the fact that for many there is not a
reflection of themselves when they watch news reporting, can be seen as producing a
disassociation between the piece of news and the rest of society, creating a dichotomy of “us and
them”. Citizen journalism can be a bridge to make this news more “real”. Allan (2007), believes
that “At stake is its perceived capacity to create discursive spaces for empathetic engagement—
of bearing witness—at a distance, especially where human rights violations are concerned.”
(Allan, 2007:373).

The ability to connect people to the reality of events, even if it’s from a distance, is part of
what Citizen Sousveillance is, and a reality of what Mídia NINJA does. The fact that both
concepts bear the word ‘Citizen’ is not by mistake. Citizen, in both instances, implies that a
regular citizen in society has the ability to connect with other citizens, and report events
independent of big corporations’ curation. Also, the “human rights violations” aspect raised by
Allan incorporates, and intertwines with, to some extent, other purposes of Citizen
Sousveillance, such as being a nonviolent method of protection of protesters. Citizen journalism
can be used to read an important aspect of the usefulness of Citizen Sousveillance.

However, there are important distinctions between Citizen Sousveillance and citizen
journalism. Citizen Sousveillance focuses attention more on the specific dynamics and politics of
watching in ways that are not necessarily foregrounded in concepts of citizen journalism.
Additionally, citizen journalism does not have in its core the importance of originating outside of
traditional media. Because Citizen Sousveillance may be less edited/produced than citizen
journalism, it can present a more raw reality. In the context of the 2013 protests in Brazil, this
less-mediated reality was not easily assimilated by mainstream media. This feature, too, may
distinguish Citizen Sousveillance from citizen journalism; the former may be less easy to
assimilate into mainstream media coverage than the latter. Additionally, Citizen Sousveillance

27
may be more 'activist' than citizen journalism, which might have journalistic objectivity as a
goal. With respect to resisting police violence, therefore, Citizen Sousveillance may be more
active and 'activist' than citizen journalism. Finally, the archival dimension of the Citizen
Sousveillance studied in this thesis has as a purpose the organization of a challenge to existing
power hierarchies. It is in this sense perhaps more political than citizen journalism.

2.3.2 – Frame analysis

Another important dimension that is part of Citizen Sousveillance's purpose, is the support
it gives to one of the main goals of Mídia NINJA – the change in narrative. As said before, the
power relations amongst the different actors in society carry with them the evidence that the
most powerful have the edge when it comes to reporting and sharing events.

On the other hand, social movements, Mídia NINJA included, have the abstract challenge
to aggregate people and move towards a symbolic goal of a fairer society, never forgetting to
take into consideration people’s own challenges. Jameson (1976), says that “meanings, in
everyday life, are the projection of the structure or form of the experiences in which they are
embodied, and that they may most adequately be dealt with in terms of the ways in which such
experiences are framed” (Jameson, 1976:119).

Benford and Snow (2000) also examine the use of collective action frames and frame
processes in relation to social movements. For them “collective action frames are action-oriented
sets of beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate the activities and campaigns of a social
movement organization” (Benford & Snow, 2000:614). Their study of social movements under
the concept of frames derives from Goffman’s dense work on it (1974). For Goffman, “social
frameworks provide background understanding for events that incorporate the will, aim, and
controlling effort of an intelligence, a live agency, the chief one being the human being”
(Goffman, 1974:22).

Snow and Benford (1988) also discuss the importance of the meaning to participants of
such a frame, as meanings are produced in the course of interactions. Social Movements

28
assign meaning to and interpret relevant events and conditions in ways that are intended to
mobilize potential adherents and constituents, to garner bystander support, and to demobilize
antagonists (Snow & Benford, 1988:198).

Snow and Benford (1988) identified four sets of factors that influence the powerfulness of
mobilization, or the powerfulness of a movement’s efforts and activities. In the form of
questions, the factors are 1. How robust and thorough is the framing effort? 2. What is the
internal structure of the larger belief system? 3. What is the relevance of the frame to its
participants? And 4. Is this frame within a cycle of protests? Furthering their analysis, they add
another layer of interpretation to the study of collective frames, which are the core framing tasks.
They divide those into three component parts: diagnostic framing, prognostic framing, and
motivational framing.

The concept of frame analysis, while not necessarily central to the understanding of
sousveillance, nor Citizen Sousveillance for that matter, adds a depth to the understanding of the
importance, motivations, and goals of social movements to take to the streets. Jameson,
Goffman, and Snow and Benford look into how one’s perspective impacts the dynamics of social
movements. Citizen Sousveillance relies on the context of people who enable, and want, change.
These changes can many times happen in conflictual and hazardous circumstances. “Why”
people are willing to partake in such situations should also be flagged as a deeper foundation for
the use of Citizen Sousveillance.

Citizen Sousveillance has as one of its utilities the possibility of helping in the change of
narratives, or change of frame, so that it can help to change established ideas, concepts, and
events. Citizen Sousveillance can corroborate to a new reality – potentially a new way of life for
many. It can be employed in different structures, although in this thesis it is examined only
within a specific context, namely, the 2013 Brazilian protests.

2.3.3 – Citizen Sousveillance and the Multimedia Citizen

Finally, it is worth noting and investigating a concept mentioned by members of Mídia

NINJA during the interview process, which is the Cidadão Multimídia (Multimedia Citizen).

29
Considering factors like unequal access to technology in an unequal society such as Brazil’s, the
emergence of a multimedia citizen is new. One interviewee said

Quando a gente começou a ir para a rua, a ideia era entender que todo mundo poderia ser
um cidadão multimídia. Todo mundo com um celular na mão, e com câmeras poderiam
fazer fotos, poderiam fazer vídeos, poderiam fazer uma transmissão e mostrar as coisas
que estão acontecendo, diferente do que a gente veria num resumo no jornal a noite. A
partir de 2013 especialmente foi quando as pessoas começaram a ir mais para as ruas,
quanto a usar mais esse serviço de streaming. Porque você já podia fazer transmissão pelo
Twitter, mas nem todo mundo usava isso, então a partir de 2013 as pessoas começaram a
usar essa ferramenta muito mais. E a usar o Facebook muito mais para isso também. Em
2013, quando a gente começa a falar do cidadão multimídia, é isso. É inverter essa lógica
de você ser sempre o vigiado, e conseguir ser também o vigilante. Você não precisa
necessariamente estar em um protesto. Você pode estar em uma situação comum em um
metrô e ver uma pessoa ser agredida e você pode ou transmitir aquilo ao vivo, ou filmar e
levar isso para frente depois. Esse vídeo pode viralizar e virar uma denúncia – o que pode
ser uma prestação de serviço, de certa forma (Interviewee #2, 2018).1

As it is shared by this interviewee, the multimedia citizen can act and be present in any
instances of social interactions within a society. It does not have boundaries, and it does not have
a formal limit. As long as there is a human interaction where a third party has the capability to
register in video – or in audio or photograph, for that matter – the idea of a multimedia citizen is
feasible.

1
When we started taking to the streets, the idea was to understand that everyone could be a multimedia citizen.
Everyone with a cellphone at hand, and access to cameras could take pictures, make videos, or start streaming to
show exactly what was happening, differently from what people would watch in the evening news. Especially from
2013 on, when people started going to streets to protests more often, they started using streaming more. You could
broadcast via Twitter before that, but not everyone would use it, so in 2013 people started using this tool [Twitter
streaming] more often. And to use Facebook for that too. In 2013, when we started to talk about multimedia citizen,
it was about that. It inverts the logic of being always the watched, allowing them to also be the watcher. You do not
necessarily need to be in a protest. You can be in an ordinary situation in a train, and see someone being assaulted,
and you can broadcast that live, or record it and share it afterwards. This video can go viral and become a complaint
– what can be considered a service provided to society, in a way.

30
 The relevance of this way of being a citizen, encapsulated by Mídia NINJA participants in
the idea of a multi-media citizen with access to various means of media production, is that it
helps to understand the possibilities of multimedia interaction in contemporary Brazilian civic
participation.

I would like to trace a distinction, for the purposes of this thesis, between the idea of the
multimedia citizen and the concept of citizen sousveillance. While Citizen Sousveillance
emphasizes the power dynamics of the gaze in protest settings, the multimedia citizen is, in many
instances, the agent of it. The multimedia citizen is the person who performs the Citizen
Sousveillance. Citizen Sousveillance works in the sense of being a nonviolent tool for protection,
a way to portray a more raw reality of protests, to challenge mainstream media narrative, to
archive raw material for future studies, and to provide virtual accessibility. The multimedia
citizen is the agent actually responsible for it.

2.4 – Nonviolent Resistance

In this section, I intend to examine nonviolence and demonstrate why it is important to

understand Citizen Sousveillance. Nonviolent action, like surveillance, is not a new concept, and
it has been studied and used for a long time. It has a record of successful outcomes and it has
world-renowned names that used nonviolence to substantiate their ideals for a cause, most
notably Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. Nonviolent action,
however, has been used before and after the struggles of Thoreau, King, and Gandhi. In South
America, there are dozens of documented instances where nonviolence was employed. From the
nationalization and control of gas reserves in Bolivia in the mid-2000s, to the occupation of
mines by women in Chile in 2010, to protest job losses (Global Nonviolent Action Database,
2019).

Before delving into the angles of nonviolent resistance, it seems important to give a brief
explanation about the theorization of it.

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2.4.1 – Theory of nonviolence

The use of nonviolence can be examined from a wide range of perspectives. It can be
discussed taking into consideration different factors, such as the religious, social, or political
background of a struggle, for example. However, nonviolence of any kind can hardly be
separated from two pillars of its theory: power and violence. Proponents of nonviolence theory
such as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Gene Sharp, debated, theorized and acted
on the idea that a conflict could be resolved in a conciliatory manner, and that power (brutal
power) can be faced with a peaceful attitude (Atack, 2012).

The field of nonviolence research has developed considerably in the last century. It is also
possible to find studies permeated by nonviolence theory in many fields, ranging from research
discussing the ambiguity of nonviolence, the intrinsic relation of violence to human behavior, the
morality of violence (Stiehm, 1968), the jurisprudence of nonviolence within a cultural feminist
prism (Murray, 2010), and analyses of empirical data to better understand the psychological
aspects of nonkilling and nonviolent struggle (Mayton, 2012). Hence, there are many angles
from which the study of nonviolence can be approached. I would like to point to one,
specifically, that discusses two ideas of nonviolence: pragmatic nonviolence and principled
nonviolence. Drawing from Atack, we can assert that the most renowned proponents of
nonviolence, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and David Thoreau are exponents of
what is considered nonviolence by principle. This means that not only would they not engage in
confrontation with opposing forces, but they would accept the consequences of their actions,
knowing it is implied in the theory of nonviolence. However, nonviolent methods can be used
pragmatically too. When there is a calculation, consciously or unconsciously, about confronting
the opposing forces or not, this may be called a pragmatic exercise of nonviolent methods. Some
nonviolent movements, Gandhi’s included, had principled advocates of nonviolence, as well as
pragmatic ones, meaning, people that were part of the movement only because the alternative
choice was not necessarily realistic, or too dangerous. Many times, movements use nonviolent
methods pragmatically, without necessarily knowing that these are nonviolent methods.

One important distinction to make here is about the term used to describe the peaceful
political manifestation of an idea or an action. Gene Sharp, one of the main theorists of

32
Nonviolent resistance, wrote in one of his most known and important books, From Dictatorship
to Democracy:

The term used in this context was introduced by Robert Helvey. “Political defiance” is
nonviolent struggle (protest, noncooperation, and intervention) applied defiantly and
actively for political purposes. The term originated in response to the confusion and
distortion created by equating nonviolent struggle with pacifism and moral or religious
“nonviolence.” “Defiance” denotes a deliberate challenge to authority by disobedience,
allowing no room for submission. “Political defiance” describes the environment in which
the action is employed (political) as well as the objective (political power). The term is
used principally to describe action by populations to regain from dictatorships control over
governmental institutions by relentlessly attacking their sources of power and deliberately
using strategic planning and operations to do so. In this paper, political defiance,
nonviolent resistance, and nonviolent struggle will be used interchangeably, although the
latter two terms generally refer to struggles with a broader range of objectives (social,
economic, psychological, etc.) (Sharp, 1994:1)

The above description used by Gene Sharp in From Dictatorship to Democracy is

pertinent, as in the end it underpins a clear political stand. However, for the benefit of this
thesis, the term nonviolence should be more connected with the idea of nonviolent political
action. Atack (2012:86) defines it as “collective action outside the formal institutions or
procedures of the state that avoids the systematic or deliberate use of violence or armed force
to achieve its political or social objectives”. Based on Atack’s definition of nonviolent
political action, I would add the following: a protester behavior that anticipates possible
human rights violations from police forces with the objective of dissipating it. Also, the use of
these terms could be employed interchangeably: nonviolent methods, nonviolent action,
nonviolent struggle, nonviolent tool, all of which are within a nonviolent movement context.

Everything considered, nonviolent movements are still political movements with

objectives, and strategies to achieve these objectives. Movement leaders such as Gandhi and
King knew that on one hand, they could be considered pacifists, but on the other hand, whenever

33
there was some sort of confrontation, they knew they would likely gain sympathetic support
from bystanders (Gurr, 2000). That could be interpreted as a pragmatic result from their peaceful
approach, or another way to look at it would be to see them as pragmatic pacifists. Considering
that the classic definition of the pacifism ideology is the “belief that not only violence is evil but
also that it is morally wrong to use force to resist, punish, or prevent violence” (Narveson,
1965:259), Howes (2013:428) says that “Pragmatic pacifism reformulates pacifism as a
principled commitment to non-violence grounded in a realistic understanding of the historical
record and the inherent political liabilities of violence”. The muddied waters that often seem to
cloud the definition of nonviolence and pacifism made room for these new approaches, amongst
which was pragmatic pacifism. Pragmatic pacifism helps to understand the protest setting and
what I take to be the primary objective of Citizen Sousveillance. Howes gives the following
definition of pragmatic pacifism:

Against the conventional wisdom, pragmatic pacifism maintains that the advocates of
violence are prone to unrealistic ideological commitments that are often doomed to failure,
whereas nonviolence offers a self-limiting, pragmatic, and realistic approach that accounts
for the manifold difficulties of politics. In contrast to traditional pacifism, which rejects
violence on moral grounds, this brand of pacifism relies upon political as opposed to moral
principles to make the case against violence. Violence may be immoral, but recent
empirical and theoretical work pushes us toward the perhaps more important insight that
violence is counterproductive to politics (Howes, 2013:428).

The connection made between nonviolence and pacifism, and their pragmatic
understanding, set the bases for the nonviolent mechanism that Citizen Sousveillance can bring
to a protest situation.

Nonviolence is a broad term. It can refer to a movement, where people behave in a non-
violent manner; it can also be considered a tactic when people decide not to physically engage in
confrontation with opposing forces; and it can be a theory, as studied by Sharp, to see where
these movements and techniques are inserted in society, and how they play a role in protests and
revolutions. Some of these terms can be used somewhat interchangeably during this research, as

34
the meaning of nonviolent struggles, resistance, movements, action, and methods can overlap
depending on the context, use, and intention of the author.

The idea that I put forward in this thesis of juxtaposing the use of sousveillance as a
nonviolent tool in protests, in one dimension, implies as well to underline the positive highlights
of peaceful movements. First, it is important to note that throughout this project some
generalizations are made, as there is not a unified consensus of what constitutes nonviolence – if
there is no interaction with one’s physical body, could an action still be considered violent? John
V. Bondurant (1988) defined violence as “the willful application of force in such a way that it is
intentionally injurious to the person or group against whom it is applied”, hence the use of force
or intentional injury cannot be present in nonviolent methods. The concepts of violence and
nonviolence are, obviously, exclusionary of each other (Bondurant, 1988). Although important
definitions, there is still an open debate about what especially constitutes nonviolence. This
conception differs among authors, and differs depending on whoever is practicing a nonviolent
action. Second, according to Nojeim, the principle of nonviolence can be due to religious
commitment and training, or some sort of secular conviction, therefore slightly different from
Sharp’s, as for Sharp it is clearly political (Nojeim, 2004).

For the purpose of this project, nonviolence will be considered a political movement
(encompassing other commitments and convictions) in which the participants of a nonviolent
movement would avoid physical confrontation with police forces, for example, and take non-
physically confrontational actions, like strikes, refusal to pay taxes, picketing, praying and
worshipping, among others, to advocate for their causes. These concepts have not changed much
throughout time and are still close to the ones used in the past. It is worthwhile to first briefly
consider some examples of nonviolent resistance.

Not paying taxes, for example, was the method found by Henry D. Thoreau to non-
violently protest the government. The question at the heart of his famous essay “Civil
Disobedience” is what citizens should do when they have a president that they whole-heartedly
oppose. In his case, he was against James K. Paul’s administration, who was in favor of slavery
and wars. For him, paying taxes would be a way of financing the government during the
Mexican-American war that started in 1846, and he therefore refused. He spent a night in jail for
not paying the five dollars of taxes that he owed. Some friends even offered to pay it for him,

35
disregarding the fact he had the means to do so himself – in the end, someone paid it for him,
against his will, and he was freed. Not paying his taxes was his way of saying that he would not
contribute to the war. It was his way of saying that he would not finance a government that was
pro-war and pro-slavery. Because of the repercussion of his essay, Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes
is today considered one of the first examples of documented nonviolent action.

Mahatma Gandhi, to take another famous example, is someone that was influenced by
Henry Thoreau. Gandhi gained notoriety when he marched to protest the taxation imposed by
Britain on the salt produced by villagers from where he was born in colonial India, in what was
known as the Salt March. Gandhi was also responsible for formulating, clarifying and qualifying
the doctrine of ahimsa. Ahimsa is a philosophy of nonviolence propagated by Gandhi, but it is
also a concept used in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Gandhi spent a great part of his life
polishing and developing this concept, and although a very religious man, he tried to disconnect
it from the strict religious sense, where many times it was only used in reference to saints, and
not men. (Iyer, 1974)

The sentiment of non-conformity towards decisions judged unfair also permeates the
actions of Martin Luther King Jr. King’s main cause was the racial division that was in place,
especially in the south of the United States. He led the civil rights movement from the mid-1950s
until his assassination in 1968. He had a vital role in ending the legal segregation of African
Americans, and he was a prominent advocate of nonviolent methods.

What these three figures have in common is that they are considered by many as important
actors in the history of nonviolent movements and their effectiveness. They acted at different
times, for different reasons, and with particular purposes, but they all carried common traits in
the way that they decided to do things, which was the nonviolence against those whom they were
fighting or protesting.

As for Latin America, Sharp also identified movements, such as the downfall of General
Jorge Ubico in Guatemala (1944), the peaceful protests of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo in
Argentina (1977-1983), and the Chilean marches against the Pinochet regime (1985-1989). In
Latin America, however, it happened more in a collective way, as actual collective movements.
For example, when the workers of a cement factory in São Paulo, Brazil, went on strike. Records
tell that some workers were cajoled to go back to work, but when the cement trucks were leaving

36
the factory, protesters threw themselves in front of it, and were run over. The names of these
people are unknown. The way that these events have been recorded in Latin America are usually
an artefact which relegates important individuals to a lesser know place in history (McManus et
al. 2004).

Besides Latin America, examples of successful nonviolent campaigns are plentiful and can
be easily found in history. Nonviolent movements became more “modular”, easily spreading
around the world (Tarrow, 1994). Examples can be found in the Iranian Revolution in 1977 –
1979, the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987 – 1992, the Philippine People Power Movement in
1983 – 1986, and more recently in Egypt, Ukraine and Tunisia (Chenoweth et al, 2011). These
are many different occasions where nonviolent struggles were used. There are many different
methods of nonviolent action and how they can be employed. According to Sharp (1973), there
are some 198 different methods of nonviolent action. Sharp classifies and exemplifies all sorts of
demonstrations that can be considered a nonviolent method against a dictatorship, a government,
the police, or anyone that exercises power in society. He divides them into three broad
categories: 1. Nonviolent protest and persuasion; 2. Noncooperation (social, economic and
political), and 3. Nonviolent intervention.

The use of nonviolent techniques is, therefore, proven to some extent. There are examples
of nonviolent movements that worked, and instances where it did not achieve the end goal. The
objective here is not to analyze the movements themselves, but just use them as a background,
where the use of Citizen Sousveillance will be added as a nonviolent tool. Citizen Sousveillance
can, then, be added as a defense mechanism, in any sort of protest context, but most interestingly
to be analyzed, in the context of nonviolent movements.

37
3 – Mídia NINJA – development, challenges and presence

Introduction

The main argument to be defended at this portion of the thesis is that Mídia NINJA
represents a key case-study of sousveillance in the Brazilian context. To make this argument, I
begin my examination of Mídia NINJA as an institution, considering in what context this
initiative came to light, so later on, we can also look at it from the sociological perspective that
they are a part of, and elaborate a debate on their importance to today’s Brazilian society. To
follow that, I will dwell on the idea that what Mídia NINJA does is aim to possibly diminish the
influence of powerful, traditional media2, and give an alternative source of information to people.
These mainstream channels will also be critiqued in this chapter. Considering that social
movements and media frames are constrained due to a long and established history of narratives
being controlled by few, Mídia NINJA proposes to facilitate access to different frames (Benford
& Snow, 2000). To substantiate this discussion, it will also be critiqued how the perception of a
protest can change, depending on the framing, the narrative, and the actors involved in it. Cases
like the Jornadas de Junho, and the protests in Turkey in 2013, show that the framing of protests
can change in any direction (Mendonça et al, 2019). The members that I interviewed spoke with
details about how they usually act on these matters, and what they do to try to approach this
narrative battle. Lastly, I make a connection between these attempts to change the narratives with
all of Mídia NINJA’s online exposure, mostly analyzing all the material I accessed as a means to
understand how they act regarding their online initiative, and how they spread their work on
social media like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
I will use the interviews I conducted with five members of Mídia NINJA, along with the
online material gathered, to examine their online behavior to corroborate the main argument.
Also, the information collected in these interviews and online activities helps us to have insight
on how Mídia NINJA is developing, how they perceived sousveillance before and after they
started using it, and how their participation in the Brazilian protests’ scenario has affected the

2
The concept of traditional media used in this thesis refers to, mainly, long-established newspapers, television
networks, and magazines.

38
way they have positioned themselves in society. All of this will underpin the importance of
Mídia NINJA as an important case study in the field of veillances.

3.1 A brief account of the development of Mídia Ninja: How it all started – Jornadas de Junho in
2013

It feels necessary, at this point, to discuss and understand more about how Mídia NINJA
became what it became, and it is hard to talk about Mídia NINJA without mentioning the June
Journeys (Jornadas de Junho). Jornadas de Junho was a sequence of manifestations that
happened in June 2013 all around Brazil. It all started with protests against the increase of public
transit fare in the city of São Paulo, mostly organized by students and left-wing activists. Transit
fare hikes are common in Brazil whenever a new administration comes to city offices around the
country. It usually happens in the first year of the city administration, as they would have four
years for people to assimilate it, having less impact in a possible re-election campaign (Wainer,
2014; Saad-Filho, 2013). At that time, the one-trip ticket went from R$3 to R$3,20 – a 20-cent
hike (approximately CAD$ 0.07). A group of protesters named Movimento Passe Livre – MPL
(Free Fare Movement), which advocates for free transportation for everybody, took to the streets
right after the increase was announced. At that point, it was a localized manifestation, not big in
numbers, and only in the city of São Paulo. Everything changed when the police dispersed the
protesters with tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets. Here, I like to say that the modern
history of Brazil changed – empowered by the use of sousveillance, and having Mídia NINJA as
an important representative of the movement, the images of police brutality dominated the news
and spread widely with the help of social media. What started as small protests on June 6th, hit its
peak on June 13th, 2013. That day is when everybody watched clearly unprepared police forces
beating and bombing everyone. The Riot Police (Tropa de Choque) made no distinction that day.
They attacked protesters, reporters, bystanders, and anyone that was near the area. A reporter of
the very influential newspaper Folha de São Paulo was shot in the face with a rubber bullet,
which almost blinded her (Vallone, 2013). A reporter of a smaller newspaper was shot in the face
and was blinded (Reis, 2016). The outcry was instantaneous, forcing the mayor of the city of São
Paulo at the time, PT’s Fernando Haddad (Workers’ Party – center-left), and the governor of the
state of São Paulo, PSDB’s Geraldo Alckmin (Social Democratic Party – center-right), to make
official statements about what happened. At first, both of them tried to defend the actions

39
perpetrated by the police forces, and they were backed up by traditional media, which
criminalized the social movements. However, they were not yet aware of the repercussion of
what was live-streamed by groups like Mídia NINJA. The videos of police brutality were way
too clear and honest. Soon after, the mayor and the governor had to make new statements
condemning the actions of the police and they claimed to punish whoever had exceeded their
functions. They also promised to look into the transit fees hike again, which actually happened
and the transit fee hike was canceled (Wainer, 2014; Saad-Filho, 2013; Santos, 2018).

Figure 1: June 2013 protest in Rio de Janeiro on June 20, 2013.

The outcome of June 20th, 2013 was a general revolt, having as a consequence a sequence
of protests that took over the entire country. However, the cancellation of the transit fare hike
made the agenda of the protests spread into an extremely diverse one, and sometimes conflicting.
There was a mix of people still fighting for the free transportation issue, and people asking for
more rights, fewer privileges for the political class, and the classic trifecta of health, education
and security (Saad-Filho, 2013). I say that this is a game-changer in Brazil’s modern history
precisely because at that time, society was not polarized, as it is now. People from all across the
political spectrum were attending the same manifestations, which is unlikely to happen again in
the short term. One of my interviewees talked about his impressions about that time:

40
 Junho de 2013 foi certamente uma época que mudou nossas vidas, mudou a história
política do Brasil, e trouxe à tona diferentes aspectos da sociedade brasileira. O começo
dos protestos foi liderado pelo MPL e com o foco de baixar a tarifa de ônibus – eles
sempre estiveram nas ruas e então sabem o que o pobre precisa. A repressão foi muito
grande, o que confronta até mesmo a democracia no país – nenhum país democrática
poderia permitir isso. Mas acho que isso acabou levando a incentivar pessoas a irem aos
protestos, pessoas que nunca estiveram em um protesto antes. Com muitas agendas nos
protestos, isso acabou diluindo as demandas e perdendo a efetividade – aquela história de
pessoas gritando para acabar com a corrupção, mas usando uma camisa da CBF, umas
das organizações mais corruptas do Brasil ... não fazia sentido. Essa diferença veio de
todos os campos políticos. Do pessoal da esquerda, pedindo desapropriação de prédios
públicos em São Paulo, aos extremistas da direita, pedindo uma intervenção militar para
acabar com a corrupção. Ambos no mesmo protesto (Mídia NINJA, Interviewee #3, 2018).
3

Below is a chart of a poll done while the protests were still happening. It shows the wide
range of demands, and consequently, the wide range of different people attending the same
events, something that is not likely to happen any time soon in Brazil, due to today’s
polarization.

3
June 2013 was a time that certainly changed our lives, changed the political history of Brazil, and brought out
many different aspects of Brazilian society. The beginning of the protests were led by a group that has always been
on the streets, that knew and knows what are the needs of poor people – therefore their agenda of accessible public
transit. The repression that was thrown upon the protests was just unbelievable. No democratic country should allow
this sort of conduct by its police forces. That, however, fuelled people to take the streets – people that have never
been in a protest before. As it got diverse, many different agendas were also brought to the streets. The variety of
people and agenda, obviously, did not work out. People asking to “end corruption”, while wearing the Brazilian
soccer team jersey, which is controlled by Confederação Brasileira de Futebol - CBF, one of the most corrupt
entities in Brazil… it made no sense. The difference in agendas covered mostly all of the political spectrum, from
people more to the left, asking for the government to expropriate empty buildings downtown São Paulo, to people
on the extreme right, protesting for military intervention, as the only solution to corruption – in the same event!
(Mídia NINJA, Interviewee #3, 2018).

41
 Figure 2: Reasons why people attended manifestations in June, 2013 in Brazil
Translation from Portuguese to English. 53,7% Public Transit – 49% Against Corruption –
40.5% Reduction of Transit Fee – 36.7% For a Better Public Health System – 30.9%
Against the Expenditure with Soccer World Cup – 29.8% For Better Public Education –
11.9 Against Bill 37 – 11.4% For Changes in The Political System – 4.1% Against Police
Brutality.

While these kinds of figures are illustrative of the diversity of interests that people brought
to the protests, they also tend to reduce the complexity of the narrative, for example in
communicating the idea that people would be motivated to protest by a single issue. Sometimes,
as the research below suggests, sousveillance can help to complicate such frames.

Mídia NINJA’s role in bringing a coherent “diagnostic” frame to the protest—one that
emphasizes the complex connection between the socio-economic and political conditions of
Brazilian politics and police violence—helps us to understand the importance of this
organization, and how influential sousveillance can be in a society. Mídia NINJA’s involvement
with the manifestation, covering many of them, independently, on the ground and in real-time,
made them an alternative to the mainstream media. The attempt of the traditional media to
delegitimize and suppress the manifestations at first was not successful precisely because there
were videos of Mídia NINJA and independent protesters being massively shared on social media.
The impact and visibility that these videos achieved when they went viral got to a point that
mainstream media could not control the narrative anymore, and as in every power-oriented actor
in that field, it did not want to be on the losing side of history, or to be accused of biased

42
coverage of events, so they also started blaming the police brutality and the lack of political
ability of the mayor and the governor.

The Jornadas de Junho is the perfect example of how sousveillance can empower
alternatives to traditional media channels, and most importantly, how it can bring to light the
reality of protests, which, most of times is about giving voice to minorities and populations that
are excluded from society. In tandem with that idea is the fact that sousveillance itself can be a
powerful and nonviolent tool to bring change to society, as this thesis argues. Sousveillance is an
impressive tool/technique, and as we can see, it has the power to change sociological stigmas
long solidified in people, in an instructive manner, and seems to go hand-in-hand with education.
This whole idea, encapsulated in a very specific concept of the use of sousveillance, and as a
peaceful tool to protect protesters, is what I call Citizen Sousveillance. The five dimensions that
can be explored within the concept of Citizen Sousveillance are exemplified later, with the help
of Mídia NINJA’s social media platform examples.

Before I go further into the analysis of Mídia NINJA and how they are agents of one sort
of sousveillance themselves, I believe that it is important to go a little deeper to understand
where Mídia NINJA comes from. It was not straight-forwardly formed as a collective of
individuals that started streaming protests on the ground, but as a branch of a bigger group that
was created in 2002, named Fora do Eixo (or Off-Axis). Fora do Eixo (FdE) started as a cultural
collective, where people would promote independent festivals (especially music festivals), as
well as all sorts of cultural and art events. The objective was to allow independent musicians and
artists to reach out to people and to give people accessible entertainment and cultural options.
Sadly enough, culture, access to culture, and subsidy to culture are considered a left-wing agenda
in Brazil. (Capilé, 2013).

FdE worked, and still does, as a big incubator for new ideas and cultural initiatives. They
are a network of collectives (communal houses of like-minded people) who organize festivals
and general art initiatives. It is within this atmosphere that Mídia NINJA was born, with people
interested in sharing the reality of protests with a bigger audience, and people that were
dedicated to doing something about the control of the narrative imposed by the traditional media.

43
These people started covering music festivals and various art events, and soon after it developed
to protests and manifestations coverage (Capilé, 2013).

Today, FdE counts almost three thousand people divided into more than 200 houses
spread throughout the country. The events they organize give them a financial return, with the
sale of tickets, food, and beverages. This revenue is used to cover the common expenses of these
collective houses such as the internet, food, clothes, trips for those who will work, etc. Mídia
NINJA was still incipient when the Jornadas de Junho happened in 2013, and their coverage
made them very popular. Today there are fully committed members to Mídia NINJA, and
although it is part of FdE, Mídia NINJA has a bigger reach and exposure than its creator (Capilé,
2013).

Only members know the very structure of FdE, but one of my interviewees gave some
superficial details about it. FdE is divided into 4 fronts, or pillars, as he describes: “há a
Universidade Fora do Eixo, que cuida das ações de formação. O Banco Fora do Eixo, que cuida
das ações de sustentabilidade. O Partido Fora do Eixo, que cuida das ações de articulação E a
Media, que cuida da comunicação especificamente.”4 (Mídia NINJA, Interviewee #2, 2018). My
participant focused his remarks on how the Fora do Eixo University works, as he was more
involved with that area. The university, which was structured as it is in 2011, is an initiative of
spreading and sharing knowledge among everyone that is part of the organization. For example,
if someone is known for being a photographer, or skilled in preparing public bidding projects,
s/he can organize an online workshop for everyone interested in acquiring, developing or
polishing this skill. For people more interested in a specific theme, there are the “vivência”
(experiences), which is to shadow a senior member in person to get more connected with the ins
and outs of how to maximize resources, better share productions, etc. (Mídia NINJA,
Interviewee #2, 2018).

As for the FdE Bank, it can be complex. There is no central department that runs all the
transactions for them, but instead, this “financial control” is spread all around the collective
houses. They communicate and share the bills and payments that have to be paid. It can also get

4
… there is Fora do Eixo University, in charge of training initiatives. There is the Fora do Eixo Bank, in charge of
the sustainability initiatives. There is the Fora do Eixo Party, in charge of the articulation initiatives, and the media,
which is in charge of the communication, specifically.

44
extremely complex because they have even created an alternative currency to use internally,
named “cards”. The total expense of someone living in one of the houses is approximately R$
900 per month (CAD$ 300). This is the estimated cost in “real currency”. The “cards” are
counted/used according to the work that one provides to the whole network. For example, if a
photography job costs R$ 2000 (market price) for an event when someone within Fora do Eixo
does it, s/he earns the equivalent amount in “cards”. If this job is to help in the organization of a
festival that will tour the country, doing 50 presentations, for example, instead of hiring different
people in different cities, it is all done by this one person, so s/he accumulates 50 x 2000 cards.
These cards are commonly shared with the house in which this individual is based. However, the
details of how these operations take place are known only to the members (Capilé, 2013). The
pillar concerning the communication is where Mídia NINJA is inserted, and is the biggest part.
Most people working in this “department” also work for Mídia NINJA, and there are only a few
projects that are not run by the Mídia NINJA “brand”. The pillar of communication also takes
care of all the audio-visual productions and all general communication of the organization.

Understanding more details about this organization, and how they operate and are spread
out, helps us to have a better grasp of the size of the group, some of its history, how they finance
themselves, what is the “culture” underneath the actions, and so on. Needless to say that this
concise account is not enough to fully capture how Mídia NINJA operates and how they came to
be what they are today, but for the objectives of this thesis, it is sufficient.

Also, understanding some of the origins of Mídia NINJA and Fora do Eixo is relevant to
help illustrate what the intentions of their current actions are. The use of sousveillance, and as a
consequence the proposed use of Citizen Sousveillance, can be a different angle to be explored
by what this group of activists proposes. Their history shows that they have a nation-wide
structure, that they have people interested and motivated by what they are doing, and people that
believe that they could be an important actor in these turbulent (and as of 2019, also troubling)
times that the Brazilian society faces. The use of sousveillance – and Citizen Sousveillance – by
this legitimate group of people make its importance even more pronounced. The sociological
arena shifts and changes directions incredibly fast, so it is hard to predict how and if protests will
be more or less popular than in the timeframe of 2013-today, however, the advancement of
alternative narratives by legitimate groups like Mídia NINJA, in addition to the use of

45
sousveillance and Citizen Sousveillance, is a great achievement for the plurality of ideas in
Brazil. This will be discussed in more detail next.

3.2 – Mídia NINJA’s challenges – Changing the narrative

In 2013 Brazil went through what many consider the most important sociological and
transformational experiences in its recent history. The protests called Jornadas de Junho that
took over the entire country were comparable to the ones that Anglo Media has dubbed the
“Arab Spring”. One of the results of those intense months of protests, especially June and July,
was that people had then discovered the power of social media to disseminate videos and
different accounts of events, and consequently, the narrative that historically has been in the
hands of few in Brazil, now had a powerful competitor.

One way that Mídia NINJA goes about their narrative is by treating complex subjects in a
more approachable manner, and working as an alternative channel for people to become
informed – in a way, perfectly aligning to one of their published objectives, which is “strengthen
narratives that have no visibility on the conventional means of communication” (Mídia NINJA,
2013). This approachability could be read in relation to diagnostic framing, by “focusing blame
or responsibility”, in the sense that Mídia NINJA helps regular citizens to navigate more
complex issues (Benford & Snow, 2000:616). This change in narrative works as an alternative to
traditional communication channels, and as it is done in a more accessible manner, they have a
better chance of connecting to their audience at a different level. As reported by some of the
members I interviewed, people that follow their work and later on become “ninjas” themselves
are not uncommon – the interviewees being an example of how the duo “connection to people” +
“becoming a ninja” can happen. The fact that they speak a language that can easily be relatable
to common individuals makes Mídia NINJA’s narrative more approachable, and consequently,
more credible for many people. As they can also be described as a social movement due to their
political agenda, power of congregation, and sociological activism, they manage to have many
people identifying with their cause in a more grassroots manner, inspired by their stance on
social issues, as many people see them as a representative of their own situation. It is fair to
assume that having a more accessible language is instrumental for the reach that Mídia NINJA
has today. During the interviews, the background of the interviewees itself can attest to that –

46
most of them started working at Mídia NINJA due to the identification with the ideas, and the
social connections developed in events supported and covered by the organization.

That is exactly the opposite of what happens with the so-called traditional media like
influential newspapers and wealthy networks. They have been established for so long that the
way they portray their reality does not necessarily take into consideration this “connection” with
people. Historically, this traditional media has not been worried about how people on the other
end would receive or connect with the information (although, an exception is made when it
comes to the marketing practices of mainstream media). The competition has always been slim,
especially before the advent of the internet, so it was a comfortable position to dictate what
should or should not be delivered to people. Having said that, it is important to note that the
development of “the media” happens in an extremely fast manner. It is hard to keep track of,
given the speed with which social networks gain and lose relevance, and the changing ways that
they influence people. The difference between this new media, compared to the broadcast media
of before, is that far more people have a voice now. It went from a one-to-many communication,
to one that provides access, participation, reciprocity and peer-to-peer connection (Jenkins,
2006). On one hand, we have these webs of communication, where people interact with one
another and are subject to different filters. On the other hand, the narratives portrayed by these
main representatives of mass communication channels tend to be biased and loaded with their
own agenda. Everywhere, mass communication vehicles have as a common characteristic the
influence that they practice over a society in many different fronts such as behavioral, economic,
and obviously, political (Desgualdo, 2014).

When we juxtapose this standard scenario of how traditional mainstream media works –
carrying its own agenda and an almost-always biased narrative – with the Brazilian society and
what are its main influencers, we must identify one specific powerful actor: Rede Globo (Globo
Network). Rede Globo, or just Globo, is the 14th biggest media company in the world, ahead of
Yahoo and Warner – mounting up to an incredible 4.8 billion dollars in media revenue
(O’Reilly, 2016). Such wealth gives Globo the strength to be present in any sort of media in
Brazil, from an extremely popular TV channel, to newspapers, and it recently increased its online
presence. The foundation of Globo in 1965, during Brazil’s Dictatorship regime, supporting its

47
project of national and economic integration, is only a small demonstration of how intertwined it
has always been with power and politics. It helps us to understand why Globo is still so
influential (Porto, 2007, 2012). Globo’s power of manipulation and political meddling is well
known in Brazil and very well documented (Lima 1988, 2001; Straubhaar, 1989; Amaral &
Guimaraes, 1994; Miguel, 2000, 2004). Such power is evident in how Globo dominated the
narrative of what was considered the truth in Brazil for decades. Even today has considerable
credibility among Brazilians, determining if an event is “good” or “bad”, and imposing its own
agenda. (Borelli et al, 2000)

The presence, power, and influence of this one media company make it evident that having
capable alternatives to long-established and biased narratives is vital for a fairer and more equal
society, where people should be free and able to access different channels of communication and
information, and not be a hostage to only one group whose main concern can be questioned as
keeping its agenda and relevance. (Borelli et al, 2000). This is where Mídia NINJA sees itself in
this bigger political/sociological spectrum – being the flipside of this traditional media, and
consequently a decent alternative to Globo. On Mídia NINJA’s “about us” official website
(2018), we can find the following statement:

As grandes corporações de mídia vivem uma intensa crise. Esse momento pode ser
entendido em dois aspectos principais: no âmbito econômico, de um modelo pautado pela
venda de anúncios e a circulação física de publicações que não conseguem se adaptar aos
novos tempos digitais. E de credibilidade, por anos e anos de omissão e manipulação de
informações em prol do poder econômico e de grupos políticos de seu interesse.
A velha mídia está amarrada a uma linguagem e a um padrão de qualidade que são
paradigmas do jornalismo comercial, com pouca abertura para experimentação e
adaptação às novas formas de produção e interação com a informação permitidas pela
explosão das redes sociais (Ninja, 2018). 5

5
The big media corporations are under an intense crisis. To understand the current situation, we have to examine
two distinct aspects: from the economic perspective, they have a model based on selling advertisements, and the
physical circulation of their publications whichi struggles to cope with the new digital era. And from the credibility
perspective, due to year after year of omission and manipulation of information in favor of big economic powers and

48
 We have to have a clear understanding of how the traditional media in Brazil has been
married to political power for a long time. Being a source of information is not necessarily the
priority for these powerful corportations. There is an evident disconnection between them, and
the great majority of Brazilian society (Lima 1988, 2001; Amaral & Guimaraes, 1994). Mídia
NINJA’s stance also helps us to deconstruct myths that are well spread, and have been told as the
only truth, without anyone to disaffirm or contradict them. There are many of these “myths”, but
for this project, a specific one is more pertinent, which is that social movement members are
more easily manipulated, and in general, uneducated: in other words, just pawns in the political
and sociological game played by the government, big media corporations, unions, political
parties, etc. This view was consolidated in the past, especially because the media coverage of
protests, and social movement coverage in general, was consistent with a specific – read: biased
– narrative that was modeled by the main actors in Brazilian society (Arruda, 2016).

Jochen Peter (2003) did a study to investigate whether a media coverage that is mostly
aligned towards the same goals affected support for European integration. The results showed
that the consonant coverage has an important role in shaping citizens’ opinions about political
parties and politicians (Peter, 2003:145). For Peter, consonant media coverage is “a very similar
presentation and evaluation of issues in all media of a particular country” (Peter, 2003, 144).
This concept of “consonant media coverage”, when combined with mainstream media coverage
with the goal of spreading a certain narrative, can be borrowed and used to explain how
particular views are rooted in the Brazilian society. Globo, which was the first nation-wide
network, influenced all the other media organizations that came after them, establishing what is
considered a standard of professionalism. This standard was followed by smaller and newer
networks, and this media consonance almost organically created. The narrative created by Globo
was, usually, also followed. One of these narratives, consolidated over decades, is that social
movements are, in their majority, composed of poor, uneducated, and manipulated people.
Although the dominant media claims to be impartial, a deeper examination of its content
easily helps us understand how their intentions are pervaded with the ideology of the dominant

political. The old media is tied up to a certain speech, and a “quality standard”, that became the commercial
journalism paradigms. This way of portraying news leaves little space for new experiences and adaptation to new
forms of production and interaction with the information, now enabled by the explosion of social medias. (Ninja,
2018).

49
class. Fragments of news are distributed as being the entirety of the reality of facts. This practice
is correlated with the criminalization of social movements (Guimarães, 2015). Still drawing from
Guimarães (2015:739 – apud Sader, 1995:193), there is a “consonance” (again the consonance)
between Brazilian right-wing forces and new versions of modern ideologies. The combination of
older and newer actors always fed the perpetuation in power of the elites, and the conservative
and anti-democratic mentality that still permeates the country. This predominance and power of
the elites was very successful in making a great part of Brazilian society distrust social
movements.

All of this highlights the need for new narratives and new ways of portraying the reality of
many, which is what Mídia NINJA has been doing for some time now. Giving space to people
that are often at the margins of society is a constant, endless, necessary fight if we want to see a
more equalitarian and fair society. Mídia NINJA gives these people a space where they can voice
their concerns. They show them an alternative way of accessing information. The work done by
Mídia NINJA has a side, as they say. They identify as “mídia ativistas” (media activists), in the
sense that they use all media outlets available to them to defend and support most groups that fall
into the more progressive side of society, such as workers, feminists, prostitutes, the LGBTQ+
community, and minorities in general. One of the interviewees explained it very well when I
asked her where she sees Mídia NINJA in the big societal picture. She said:

Eu acredito que a Mídia NINJA é uma poderosa e criativa narrativa. A gente sempre se
posicionou dessa maneira, está até mesmo no site ... tudo tem um lado. A Mídia NINJA não
é diferente e também tem um lado, e sempre somos bem transparentes em qual lado nós
estamos. Portanto nossas narrativas são construídas dessas perspectivas, não somos uma
voz sozinha, mas milhares de vozes ... e isso faz com que o que eles chamam de minorias,
que na verdade são maiorias, tenham uma voz. Aqui na Mídia NINJA temos mais de 33
editoriais falando sobre tudo, feminismo, indígenas, prostitutas ativistas, padres
progressistas, professores .... pessoas com uma trajetória bem diferente. Tudo isso faz com
que a construção da narrativa que espalhamos seja composta de diferentes pessoas dentro
do campo progressista que nos posicionamos. Nós não entendemos a Mídia NINJA, nós
não nos entendemos como jornalistas, mas mídia ativistas. Essa diversidade na agenda
agregado ao fato de estarmos em um lado bem definido politicamente hoje, somado a

50
 nossas posições, e como levantamos certas bandeiras ... tudo reforça nosso ponto de vista
e o mídia ativismo que promovemos (Interviewee #1. 2018). 6

The legitimacy of Mídia NINJA, hence, comes from its base of supporters, and people that
they reach out to, so they can expose their stories. These stories corroborate with their narrative
and give them more meaning, making the work of Mídia NINJA an important piece for people to
get information about parts of society that do not often make to the big media. Having different
opinions, and representing different points of view about such an impactful topic, is fundamental
for a healthier society, and I would argue that Mídia NINJA addresses that.

The fight is not fair. Mídia NINJA is inserted in a niche where extremely powerful actors
have been playing for a long time, so, unquestionably, the challenges faced by the group are
monumental. The importance of placing Mídia NINJA’s presence closer to the mainstream is yet
to be seen whether beneficial or not. The mainstream media, at times, replicates Mídia NINJA’s
contents to claim impartiality. Still, the gain of presence and reach that Mídia NINJA has
achieved since its birth is remarkable, and it is verifiable upon examining their success, online
and offline, which will be done later in this project. Most importantly, it works to deconstruct
false ideas that are ingrained in some parts of society, and such false ideas feed the hate between
different groups within society.

Almost six years after the Jornadas de Junho, we can see that the alternative media has
spread in Brazil. The narrative control that powerful players like Globo had is now pulverized in
different channels. Mídia NINJA continues to be an important part of that, being a reference to
many, but many other groups and channels are now available, on both sides of the political
spectrum, including extremists. The election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, against powerful and

6
I believe that Mídia NINJA is a creative and narrative power. We always undertook this position – it is even in our
website guidelines – everything has one side. Mídia NINJA will always have a side, and we were always very clear
in which side we are on. Therefore, our narratives are composed and built from these perspectives, so we are not a
voice alone, but thousands of voices coming from the idea that the “minorities”, as they are named, are actually the
majority. We have more than 33 editorials at Mídia NINJA and they cover issues ranging from feminist groups to
indigenous people, from activist prostitutes to progressive ministers and teachers …. People from very diverse walks
of life. All that makes the narrative construction composed by different people within the progressive left field. We
do not understand Mídia NINJA, we do not understand ourselves as journalists per se, but as media activists. This
diversity in agendas, combined with the political spectrum that we identify ourselves, the way we conduct our
actions, our lifestyle … all are factors that strengthen the media activism that we preach. (…) (Interviewee #1.
2018). […]

51
wealthy campaigns, was mostly based on the alternative media, popular Youtube channels, and
fake news, and is proof that traditional media lost the absolute control it once had (Baronas et al.,
2019)
The importance of analyzing this diverse range of existing narratives today is crucial for
the understanding of Mídia NINJA and how they have played an important role in Brazilian
society. The underlying intention of this thesis is to examine how protesters are leveraging new
technologies as a form of resistance and protection against state violence, potentially in a
peaceful manner. Emphasizing the importance of how narratives were controlled previously is
crucial to make sense of the nature and necessity of Mídia NINJA’s resistance. In this process, it
felt important and helpful to propose and develop a concept that would encapsulate this new
phenomenon, as the existing literature did not fully contemplate what Citizen Sousveillance
proposes. This new term can be further used and studied in the ever-changing dynamics of
protests. The use of social media is part of these constant changes, and the publicly available
interactions of Mídia NINJA will be reviewed next.

3.3 Mídia NINJA: A Social Medias Analysis.

The power and longevity of sousveillance are still to be proved. Steve Mann may have
come up with the incipient idea of sousveillance a couple of decades ago, obviously without
using the current nomenclature, but it actually has only recently gained notoriety. A search for
the word “sousveillance” on Google scholar shows that each and every one of the results in the
first ten pages are articles, books or citations made since the year the 2000, with the majority
having been published in 2010 or later. This is to highlight the one aspect that made
sousveillance, if not possible, important to the extent it is, which is the social media platforms.

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 Figure 3. Ngram of the use of “sousveillance” in Google.

The popularization of the internet, and better and cheaper services, made it possible for
millions of people to get online. A study conducted in 2018-Q3 shows that out of the 7.6 billion
people on Earth, 4.1 billion have access to the internet, and 3.3 billion are active social media
users (Kemp, 2018). The magnitude and reach of social media are only second in magnitude to
television (Nagel, 2017). However, television concessions, in its great majority, have to pass
through the filters of powerful governmental institutions, and are subject to private interests, as is
the case in Brazil. The internet is a less regulated land of information, so there is this major
different characteristic between these two channels of information. Because the essence of
sousveillance is to go against the top decision-makers, the mainstream media (ie. television) is
not the best channel to spread the results of its production, and the internet therefore ends up
being the best way to share sousveillance content. And, because there are so many people using
social media in the world, the importance of these platforms for sousveillance is evident. It is
worth noting that these techniques or tools evolve. Surveillance today is far from what it used to
be when it started. Sousveillance is borne in the digital age, but this does not mean it will not
evolve; therefore, what we can say is that for today, social media platforms are essential for its
survival and importance.

In Brazil, some platforms are not as popular, such as Ozone, Douyin, and Sina Weibo, so
the ones most used are Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter (Kemp, 2018). Social media
platforms now are a major competitor in the news segment. Besides television channels that rival
social media to be the preferred source of information for people, there is now a new platform

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gaining importance, namely chat applications: specifically Whatsapp and Telegram. There are
reasons to believe that the 2018 presidential elections in Brazil were heavily influenced by the
content shared on the Facebook-owned application Whatsapp. There are around 120 million
Whatsapp users in Brazil and at a time when the traditional press is being discredited, the use of
a tool with a reach such as this can be extremely powerful (Oliveira, 2018). The information
shared on Whatsapp brought to light a debate regarding fake news, which is believed to have
helped elect the extreme-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro for the presidency in 2018, in a campaign
riddled with inaccuracies (Almeida, 2018; Baronas et al., 2019). While the election of Bolsonaro
and the debate about fake news is relevant to what this thesis analyzes, my focus is less on the
distribution platforms and platform politics, and more on the street-level and citizen-led content
production side of sousveillance.

As is expected, and is the nature of social media platforms, the online content available
overlaps quite a lot. One unique piece of news is usually shared on Facebook, Instagram, and
Twitter, for example. A video will be shared on all of them. Each social media platform has its
characteristics and a way to influence the followers of an account (Cha et al, 2010). For example,
on YouTube, Mídia NINJA has over 160 thousand subscribers to their channel, where they have
published over 600 videos since 2013, gathering more than 13 million views (Social Blade,
2018). However, some content has more reach and exposure on Facebook, for example. Also,
some of the content produced by Mídia NINJA was shared by other important pages and
accounts, and from there it is hard to keep track of how far this content goes, meaning that it is
fair to assume that it has reached a much larger number of people than those registered on their
accounts.

To corroborate the analysis developed in this chapter so far, I decided to present some of
the online initiatives used by Mídia NINJA. The importance of analyzing their publicly available
online content is in serving as proof of behavior that underpins the entire culture inside Mídia
NINJA. However, analyzing their online behaviour (read: their attitude on platforms such as
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram) in a quantitative way is difficult, at least by using
conventional methodologies. There is a clear need to further develop the methodology to
research social media material. The few available tools are in constant change and can be costly,
as they obey a marketing logic, and as social media companies are always seeking more revenue,

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and therefore changing the access that tools can have to their databases. The more manual search
(eg. researching keywords and hashtags) “is necessarily limited, and will not capture
[…discussions] which do not explicitly include the chosen terms.” (Bruns & Burgess, 2012:4).

Among these different approaches, I decided that selecting a defined corpus of data, from
the start of June to the end of July 2013, would be the most feasible. I used this parameter to
analyze the Twitter platform, as their search engines are straightforward and easy to use. Mídia
NINJA’s general use of social media, and how they portray themselves online, can be drawn
from these examples. Citizen Sousveillance examples are more abundant on Twitter, where this
content was shared in real-time, at least in 2013. The usage of the other platforms, like Facebook
and Instagram, are used as examples of more recent activity.

If we consider that Mídia NINJA’s most relevant work started in June 2013, it would not
possible to go through all tweets, posts, and comments since 2013 until 2020. The idea here,
then, is to understand how they operate, and a sample of this material was used as a way to
support this argumentation. It would be extremely interesting and useful to perform a
quantitative analysis of Mídia NINJA’s online behavior, but that is beyond the scope proposed
by this thesis. The rationale behind the qualitative approach used here is to select posts and
comments on the three most popular platforms in Brazil: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. As
they are the most popular platforms in Brazil, they are also, consequently, the ones on which
Mídia NINJA is more active. In Brazil, chat applications such as Messenger, Telegram, and
WhatsApp are just as popular, but as they are mostly private, it is not feasible to gather material
for a research purpose. The analysis starts in June 2013, as this was the timeframe in which
protests took over the entire country. Just as important would be to see how these protests,
narratives, and actions evolved after some time. For the purpose of this thesis, which is to
demonstrate how Mídia NINJA used Citizen Sousveillance, what makes the most sense is to
delimitate the analysis timeframe, primarily, to June and July 2013, which is when they were
very active, especially on Twitter.

The publicly available data below will be examined from the lenses that support the use of
Citizen Sousveillance by Mídia NINJA. The question is: How do these images and texts support
the use of Citizen Sousveillance? How are they connected? Citizen Sousveillance is based on the
idea of the gaze, ie. the bottom-up sousveillance heretofore examined. However, the

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complementing piece of the use of sousveillance in protests relies on the fact that sousveillance
media have to be available, and people should know they exist. Hence, the use of social media
platforms is important for sharing sousveillance media, and for supporting it with additional
textual content.

It is important to notice that, throughout the many years of completion of this thesis, the
concept of Citizen Sousveillance, as expected, has morphed and developed into something that
was not previously anticipated. Hence, the analysis of Mídia NINJA’s online presence, though
fixed in the defined timeframe, has changed according to how the main argument of the thesis
evolved. Consequently, it makes sense to examine the online initiatives of the group through the
lenses of the different dimensions of the proposed new term, Citizen Sousveillance, which are
presented next.

Some of the images presented in the following sections depict peoples’ faces. In these
cases, where the pictures presented are of protestors who are not public figures, I have pixilated
their faces in order to preserve their anonymity

3.3.1 Protection and nonviolence

The first dimension to be examined concerning the use of Citizen Sousveillance relates to
its primary purpose – to be used as a nonviolent mechanism in protests. Within this dimension,
we can unpack and, based on how Mídia NINJA utilized and shared this sousveillance data on
social media, see how the idea of solidarity was integrated to the idea of protection and defense
of protesters. At this point, I believe that it is important to bring to the conversation the concept
of solidarity, as it helps us examine how the connection within a group can be the strength of this
dimension of Citizen Sousveillance.

Hechter, (1988), brings an interesting definition that can be applied to this context. A

… group’s solidarity is a function of two independent factors: first, the extensiveness of its
corporate obligations, and, second, the degree to which individual members actually
comply with these obligations. Together, these provide the defining elements of solidarity.
The greater the average proportion of each member’s private resources contributed to
collective ends, the greater the solidarity of the group (Hechter, 1988:18).

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 The solidarity idea that permeates Hechter’s words can be read in relation to the reality of
protests. Having interviewed Mídia NINJA’s members, I drew some conclusions. First,
protesters and ninjas often share many similar values; this makes sense, considering they
likewise often share the same progressive political background. Second, both groups have
decided to act on the fact that they do not accept a certain measure, attitude or order from
superior instances – usually governments – and therefore protest their indignation together.
These two factors combined increase the potentiality of a sense of solidarity with one another.
The feeling that they are fighting for the same purpose – and the sense of purpose here unites
these people. Empowered by large numbers, as well as the feeling of belonging, street and online
protesters tend to feel more secure in both their actions, and how the events will develop. All
facilitated and improved by the use of Citizen Sousveillance. Below are some examples of Mídia
NINJA using their social media to spread their Citizen Sousveillance practices.

Figure 4. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Translation from Portuguese to

English. A photojournalist is helped by firemen after being hit in the leg by bomb shrapnel,

57
 allegedly thrown by the police. The reporter was covering the protesters that were trying to
get close to Mineirão Stadium this afternoon, in Belo Horizonte. Watch live: [link] Photo:
Mídia NINJA [links]

Protesters came together to help an injured photojournalist during a protest. They helped
him while firemen and paramedics were en route. The claim is that Citizen Sousveillance can be
used as a nonviolent protection for protesters against abuse of human rights. They help each
other based on the solidarity amongst protesters, which strengthens the effects of this tool. The
act of filming, streaming or photographing the actions of police forces has the potential to change
behaviours. As a Mídia NINJA interviewee puts it

Há uma mudança significativa na própria produção de narrativa e no próprio

engajamento também das pessoas nas ruas. Só pelo fato de você poder ir na rua ... e você
ter um celular na mão, e você usá-lo como uma ferramenta de poder diante de um policial,
por exemplo, é significativo. Você falar para o policial “estou aqui narrando esse fato
para duas mil pessoas”. Isso dá um poder para esse cidadão que está com o celular, que
antes não era possível (Interview #2, 2018).7

This Mídia NINJA testimonial is extremely rich, to the point that it can be framed in a way
to be a representation of the five dimensions that Citizen Sousveillance proposes to enact. The
two thousand people online, watching the events, demonstrates a situation where a nonviolent
method is being employed with the intent of self-defense, and at the same time it is also a way
for people to virtually follow what this protester is doing. If the protesters are confronting a
police officer, for example, there are witnesses of such interaction. Besides these two
dimensions, such a situation can clearly portray a raw reality of protests, and can also be used to
challenge any narrative that might be created by mainstream media – usually in favor of the
police. Lastly, such videos could be archived, and used for future references.

7
There is a significant change in the narrative production itself, and in the engagement of people on the streets. Just
by the fact that you can go to the streets, and have a cell phone at hand, and use it as a power tool before a police
officer, for example, is significant. Being able to tell a police officer “I am here narrating this event to two thousand
people”. It gives a power to this citizen with a cell phone that was not possible before.

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 Below are some other examples of Mídia NINJA’s social media usage that reinforce the
claim that Citizen Sousveillance was employed by them. In the instances below, it was used with
the intent of a nonviolent defense mechanism.

Figure 5. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.

The police try to take a protester in custody but the other protesters keep chanting “Don’t
take him”. He had vinegar on him. [Links]

Figure 5 shows another example of how Mídia NINJA used its social media to share a use
of Citizen Sousveillance. They shared online (and in real-time) that the police were taking a
protester into custody only for the fact that he had on him a bottle of vinegar. Vinegar, as it is
known, reduces the effects of tear gas bombs. At this point in time in certain protests in 2013,
people were being taken into custody for the mere fact of having vinegar on them. Protesters and
ninjas were following the police’s action, chanting, filming, and trying to defend the person
being taken. It is a use of a nonviolent technique, with the intent of defending a protester with the
use of Citizen Sousveillance. Figure 6 below shows a picture of such events.

Figure 6. Police try to take a protester into custody for having vinegar on him.

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3.3.2 A more raw reality of protests

Portraying a more raw reality of protests, especially compared to what is depicted by

traditional media, is one of the dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance. Below are examples of
Mídia NINJA’s social media activity illustrating sousveillance in protest settings, and
highlighting this ‘raw reality’ dimension of Citizen Sousveillance. Instant sharing of events can
be seen as an underlying feature of Citizen Sousveillance as a whole, and for this dimensions it is
no different. Reporting the raw reality of protests while they happen, in real-time, is a strong
feature of Citizen Sousveillance.

The series of tweets and pictures below will be analyzed afterward.

Figure 7. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.

Thousands of people on the streets in BH right now and the POSTV is live broadcasting
everything! Check it out. [link]

Figure 8. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.

About 11 thousand police officers are blocking the protest that is going towards Maracanã
Stadium in Rio – LIVE. [links]

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Figure 9. Picture of protests in Rio de Janeiro on June 30th, 2013 – reflecting Mídia
NINJA’s coverage and posts.

Figure 10. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
Thousands of people are at the protest in Rio. Follow LIVE [links].

Figure 11. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
Dozens of bombs are thrown against the protesters in Rio de Janeiro – LIVE [links]

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Figure 12. Picture of protests in Rio de Janeiro on June 30th, 2013 – reflecting Mídia
NINJA’s coverage and posts.

Figure 13. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
Protesters peacefully resist to police firing. [links]

Figure 14. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
From the streets of Maracanã (Stadium). Police disperse peaceful protest with rubber
bullets. [link]

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 Figure 15. Picture of protests at Maracanã Stadium, in Rio de Janeiro on June 30th, 2013 –
reflecting Mídia NINJA’s coverage and posts.

These tweets and pictures show how Mídia NINJA used its Twitter account to share the
development of different protests, live. In many of the above examples, there is the word ao vivo
(live), which highlights the immediacy of how these events are shared. The fact that they are
happening “right now”, and being shared “right now”, strengthens the dimension of Citizen
Sousveillance that discusses the raw reality of protests. The raw reality of a given protest can
indeed be presented at a later time without necessarily compromising its credibility, however, the
immediate sharing of such events ao vivo guarantees that this material is unedited, and therefore
raw. These tweets were shared with a base of millions of followers, directly and indirectly. The
images, streaming of content, and videos were seen by people who are engaged in social
movements, but also by people that are not necessarily engaged politically in any cause. It is fair
to assume that bringing the reality of protests, without the editing that is used when portrayed by
mainstream media, to a bigger audience has the possibility of impacting people differently. This
is one of the purposes of Citizen Sousveillance – to bring to light what a group of citizens is
doing to pursue certain change(s) in society. Having this action done in the context of protests is
very pertinent precisely because it is one of the main practices used by movements to act on their
agenda.

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3.3.3 Challenging mainstream narrative

Citizen Sousveillance also provides material that can be used to challenge mainstream
narratives. The change in narrative is one of Mídia NINJA’s main battles. As discussed, before
the internet especially, people depended mostly on mainstream media for information about
news, whether local, national, or international. Powerful television networks like Globo were the
ones dictating what was shared, under what light it was shared, and would persuade people to
reach certain conclusions.

Below are a few examples of how Mídia NINJA has used Citizen Sousveillance intending
to be an alternative narrative. Afterwards, these posts were shared on their social media
platforms.

Figure 16. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Translation from Portuguese to

English. BECAUSE I WANTED. Captain Bruno, Brasilia Riot Police, when asked about
his motivations to attack peaceful protesters answers: “Because I wanted”. The group took
the “Unfair Player” yellow flag created during the Confederation Cup to parade in front of
Congress, as shared yesterday by Mídia NINJA.

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 Figure 16 shows a captain who attacked peaceful protesters without reason, but had his
action recorded; this is a clear example of the way that Citizen Sousveillance can challenge a
mainstream narrative. This sort of video can be used to give context to the event, and it can also
be used to counterpose any position presented by traditional media, by the police (as an
institution), or by the captain himself. The video was shared on Mídia NINJA’s Facebook.

Another example:

Figure 17. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
“We don’t want the World Cup. We want Health and Education” Protesters at #ProtestRJ

Figure 18. Protesters carry a sign “Fifa Go Home”. Showing their protest against the
World Cup of soccer.

Brazil was the host country of the World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympic Games in
Rio de Janeiro in 2016. The official government narrative during the campaign to host such huge
events was that the entire country was behind the bid. During the protests in 2013, one demand
that was frequently heard in protests was that people were actually against these events, as the

65
priorities of the country should be, mainly, improving the quality of public health and public
education. Again, this can be seen as the use of Citizen Sousveillance to challenge official
narratives put forward by the government, and replicated by mainstream media. Mídia NINJA
helped concerned citizens voice their protest against what was being depicted then.

And a final example concerning changes in narratives:

Figure 19. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
[1] We are LIVE directly from the City Hall to an exclusive interview with [Rio de
Janeiro’s] mayor Eduardo Paes, check it out [links]. [2] Breaking. #EduardoPaes will talk
to #midianinja in an exclusive interview, live at 7 pm. Send your questions.

Figure 19 is an example in which a powerful actor in society was connected to an

organization using Citizen Sousveillance. Mídia NINJA had an exclusive interview with the
mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes. The fact that Mídia NINJA had an exclusive interview
with Rio de Janeiro’s mayor says a lot. In such a situation, they were able to pose questions that,
for different reasons, would not be asked by a Globo reporter, for example. Besides that, the
manner in which they shared the information from this interview was uncurated and unmediated.
If other media vehicles asked the mayor similar questions, there would be a way to cross-check
the answers, and the implied narrative.

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Figure 20. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
[1] @LeiSecaRJ serious. We were censored today at the collective interview. This is how
the Government of the State of Rio deals with the free press! [2] We are live in front of the
house of Governor of Rio, Sergio Cabral.

Figure 21. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Translation from Portuguese to

English. NINJA CENSORED. Another Mídia NINJA censorship episode. We were the
only vehicle impeded to broadcast the press conference now at the Palácio Guanabara,
where the governor of the state, Sérgio Cabral makes a statement of the protests in Rio de
Janeiro. Follow the negotiation #LIVE: [links]

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 Figures 20 and 21 show two Mídia NINJA’s tweets and a Facebook post after they were
barred from attending a press conference of Sergio Cabral, the governor of the state of Rio de
Janeiro. This is an example of how alternative media vehicles do not always have the same
access traditional media does. NINJAs were not permitted to speak to a powerful actor – in this
example, the governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

Being excluded from a press conference with the governor shows a not-so-hidden facet of
such government.

3.3.4 Historical records

Citizen Sousveillance can also be used as a way to record events from alternative
perspectives, which can be helpful for future studies on the reality of protests. The importance of
this particular benefit is that, especially in Brazil, the attention and value given to the country’s
history is not embedded in people’s or government’s culture. The lack of investment for
infrastructure, which would preserve aspects of the history of the country, and how it unfolded, is
minimal. Besides that, even if there was some sort of policy concerned with preserving the
historical aspects of protests in Brazil, they would then be from a certain perspective – one that
would likely be ingrained in a certain world view. One that portrays a reality known for not
favoring social movements, progressive thinking, or the sharing of wealth and power.

Citizen Sousveillance can, then, be used to create material for an archive that will secure
this alternative access to what protests are like in this fraction of the 21st century. It will combine
the other three aspects of Citizen Sousveillance (protection against violence, depicting a more
raw reality of protests, and challenging mainstream narratives), to be available for future uses.

Below, we can find material taken from Mídia NINJA’s social media that show how it can
be useful when explored by a future generation.

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Figure 22. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Translation from Portuguese to
English. While all sorts of protests have been happening everywhere in the country in the
last days, a recurrent necessity has also been that protesters have had to deal with State’s
unpreparedness and truculent repression. The demilitarization of the police is a subject
gaining followers in many different popular assemblies around Brazil. Meanwhile, the
population still needs to resist to have the right of free expression guaranteed, mainly in
cities where the Confederation Cup games are taking place. This video shows the clash
between protesters in Belo Horizonte and the Police’s Mounted Forces. [links]

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 Figure 23. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Facebook. Translation from Portuguese to
English. More shocking scenes of Temer’s democracy at Paulista Av tonight. By
Democratize.

Both images above show Mídia NINJA coverage of protests. Both posts lead to videos of
the repression suffered by protesters, and how they were being beaten and attacked by police
forces. Just as important as the videos themselves is the narrative that will accompany it.
Although some television networks might have shown videos of these protests, the perspective,
and editing of such material, could easily be twisted to make it show something that was not
exactly what happened. The historical importance of such material, being unedited and
uncurated, with the added narrative independence, can be extremely valuable for future work that
challenges mainstream narratives.

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Figure 24. Screenshot of Mídia NINJA’s Twitter. Translation from Portuguese to English.
Live from Belo Horizonte now. Occupying the City Council.

Figure 25. Picture of Belo Horizonte City Council occupancy.

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3.3.5 Virtual accessibility

Mídia NINJA also employs in Citizen Sousveillance through its social media platforms
when they live-stream events, in real-time, and they are an option for people who can not be
present to engage virtually. In the pictures below, we can see how many people were able to
follow what the protesters were doing, and how the protest evolved. Since these pictures show
the aftermath of the events, they do not necessarily show how many people engaged with the
protest as it was occurring. The actual number of people watching it live, for obvious reasons,
can only be seen while the broadcast is also live. As it is impossible to get these numbers for
events that happened many years ago, I decided to add a screenshot of an event that I actually
watched live, just for the sake of illustrating how to identify the number of people in the
audience. The use of new features in the social platforms has also evolved in recent years, and
today one that is very popular for Brazilians is the use of “stories” on Instagram, where you can
share a picture or video that auto-deletes in 24 hours, but that you can also start broadcasting live
with the click of a button.

Figure 26. Protester detained by police. Screenshot from Mídia NINJA’s youtube. Title
Translation from Portuguese to English: State vandalism – Undercovered police officers
start violence in protest in Rio #EagoraCabral? – 25/Jul/2013.

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 Figure 27. Protester detained by police. Screenshot from Mídia NINJA’s youtube. Title
Translation from Portuguese to English: Military Police truculent approach to a protester in
Belo Horizonte – 17/AUG/2013.

Figure 28. Screenshot of a live interaction from Mídia NINJA’s Facebook account. 113
people are engaging with them live.

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 Figure 29. Screenshot of a live interaction. 187 people are engaging live.

Figure 26 and figure 27 show screenshots of videos shared by Mídia NINJA on their
Youtube channel. These two pictures illustrate how Citizen Sousveillance can be a source for
people to access protests without being physically present. In figures 26, more than 30,000
people watched the video, and were impacted with a narrative of how and why that protest
happened. In figure 27, more than 16,000 people watched it. The virtual dimension of Citizen
Sousveillance serves to give access to people to follow these developments. These two figures
show the number of people who watched these videos after they were uploaded. As for figures
28 and 29, they represent how many people are interacting with Mídia NINJA in real-time.
Figure 28 is taken from Mídia NINJA’s Facebook, while they were having a talk with
participation of a guest. It this example, 113 people were engaged in the conversation. Figure 29

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shows an influencer doing an Instagram live. In this screenshot, 187 people are engaging with
him. Such real-time engagement has the power to also be used as a way to non-violently defend
protesters, when employed in a protest – which is not the case of these examples. Having other
people watching online gives protesters a more comfortable safety network, especially in
situations where there is a confrontation with police forces.

Conclusion

Having presented all of this material, the analysis of Mídia NINJA’s social media
platforms demonstrates how sousveillance has been used in protests in Brazil since 2013, and
why Mídia NINJA represents a key case-study of that. Their social media were used to
disseminate their content. The content consisted of pictures, texts, analysis, and in many
instances, videos of protests that they covered – occasionally, even protests that they were
attending and streaming in real-time. The analysis in this section of the thesis shows how Mídia
NINJA operationalizes its sousveillance. While some were attending a protest, part of the team
stayed behind to give this support and work on the sharing of information coming from members
covering it. Looking at what they shared, and how they shared, it is possible to identify key
dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance. For the purpose of the analysis, I divided the posts,
messages, and tweets in the different usages of Citizen Sousveillance; however, these examples
can overlap. One tweet, for example, can potentially demonstrate more than one dimension of
Citizen Sousveillance. Citizen Sousveillance, though, is supported by the idea that the five
dimensions of it were identified based on the material gathered in the case study, and also in the
literature referenced in this thesis. Although some dimension examples can illustrate two or more
usages of Citizen Sousveillance, their unique contribution to the development of sousveillance
studies, and ultimately, to their usage in a context of protest, can be observed separately. The
reading and usage of Citizen Sousveillance and its dimensions are open to changes and
adaptations, especially with the analysis of new groups and new realities that are present in
protest settings since 2013.

Further, the next chapter will look into the relation between Mídia NINJA and protests.
Also, it will discuss an important critique of sousveillance, which concerns the privacy of
individuals.

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4 – What is the relation of Mídia NINJA with protests?

Introduction

Following the discussion of the previous chapter, which presented some of Brazil's and
Midia NINJA's recent history, along with an account of Midia NINJA's sousveillance activities
as they manifested on social media around the 2013 protests, this chapter examines Midia
NINJA's approach from the vantage point of key actors in the organization. I will present some
data that I gathered from interviews carried out with Mídia NINJA members. Having access to
an inside perspective like that can cast light upon the organization's intentions, challenges,
modus operandi, and sousveillance tactics. In presenting this interview data, I have taken care
not to disclose what Mídia NINJA members would consider sensitive information about their
organization’s operations.

Thus, this chapter is set out to elucidate three mains questions. First, can the reality of a
protest be changed due to the use of sousveillance and/or by the presence of Mídia NINJA?
Second, in a protest context, what are the precautions, if any, taken with respect to the privacy of
participants, given that this is a concern present in some sousveillance studies and many
surveillance ones (Lerch, 2014; Ganascia, 2010)? Third, what is the importance of people
attending protests in comparison to people watching the videos online? Answering these
questions will support the idea of the use of Citizen Sousveillance as an important aspect of
protests, giving room for different angles of analysis of this phenomenon.

4.1 – Can sousveillance change the reality of a protest?

When interviewing Mídia NINJA members, four out of the five of them acknowledged that
the use of sousveillance in a protest is unprecedented and has the power to change the whole
dynamics of protests – but to what extent?

The notion of a surveillance coming from the bottom, which describes sousveillance
concisely, can be applied in many different scenarios.

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 When Mann created the concept of sousveillance, it encompassed much of what Mídia
NINJA would use in the future. On one hand, the attempt to change the narrative against
traditional media can be understood as a form of hierarchy reversal. On the other hand, being on
the streets, with protesters trying to portray this reality, we have an illustration of human-
centered sousveillance. I argue that these aspects of sousveillance can be found within the
proposed five dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance. Whether we are examining the nonviolent
tool to be used in protests, the challenge Citizen Sousveillance imposes to traditional media, or
reporting a more raw reality of protests, the essence of Mann’s aspects of sousveillance is
present. As protection, we see a hierarchy reversal of the gaze and a human-centeredness on, for
instance, human suffering; as a representation of a more raw reality we see a hierarchy reversal,
as compared to images presented in mainstream media and a human-centeredness in accounts of
the events. Mann’s concept works as a foundation for the dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance.

Citizen Sousveillance tackles different angles regarding the reality of protests, before and
after people are on the streets. It is based in the literature on framing, on citizen journalism, on
the literature of the veillances, and the literature of nonviolent movements. It also converses with
the idea of “Multimedia Citizen”, brought up by Mídia NINJA members. The concept of Citizen
Sousveillance is unique, especially because it is confined within a protest framework. This
“citizen” view complements Mann’s idea of sousveillance, with the focus on how social
movements, protesters and activists are inserted in the big picture of veillances.

The role played by Mídia NINJA in this big picture can be seen as revolutionary and
unprecedented. Cammaerts (2012:118) argues that mediation enables a connection between
media and communication to protest and activism. There is an obviuous asymmetry when it
comes to the strength mainstream media and political elites have in comparison to activists and
regular citizens. Particularly taking into consideration the current framing processes. Mídia
NINJA engages with media and communication in an aggressive (not violent) way, tweaking this
balance of power.

Due to the size and numbers of where Mídia NINJA is inserted, being present and
operating in the fifth biggest country in the world – in size, population, and with an historical
background of inequality – the group is then an important case to be studied, and its
representation in the sousveillance field can be deemed substantial for the field. They are first

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and foremost an element in protests that can work in favor of the less fortunate in society, and
secondly a source of study, to examine the impacts that these new tactics will bring, the effects
they will have, and if they should and could be replicated elsewhere.

As explained in chapter two, Mídia NINJA was not born or created with the intent of
covering protests, but as the communication branch of Fora do Eixo. The coverage of music and
art events soon became more political, and with the 2013 protest all around Brazil, Mídia NINJA
doubled in size of affiliates (Interviewee #2, 2018), and became known to a greater part of
Brazilian society, especially those who were following the developments of those protests online.
The relation that Mídia NINJA has with protests, though, is impressive. Even excluding
consideration of any coverage done before the protests in 2013, the amount of content they have
produced is remarkable. According to their oficial website:

De 2013 até aqui estivemos presentes em todos os momentos decisivos da história de nosso
país. Foram mais de 7.500 transmissões ao vivo, 100.000 fotos no nosso banco de
imagens, cerca de 4.000 horas de imagens filmadas e mais de 10.000 cartazes e memes.
Fizemos cerca de 150.000 posts e atualmente temos mais de 2 milhões de seguidores que
nos acompanham em todas as redes. Esse ano iniciamos ainda a Rede Ninja de Opinião,
junto a mais de 100 colunistas (Mídia NINJA, 2018). 8

This data shows the magnitude and reach of Mídia NINJA. There are well over a million
people interested in what Mídia NINJA has to say. A quick search shows that they have over 3
million followers in the four main social media platforms: Facebook 1.98 M – Instagram 561k –
Twitter 445k – YouTube 165k (Mídia NINJA, 2018). Obviously, these followers overlap to
some extent, as the same individual can be a follower on all four platforms; nonetheless, this a
substantial number of followers. It is also worth noting that usually, their content has a viral
appeal, meaning that it has the characteristics of contents that are commonly shared on social
media, making the reach of it almost incalculable.

8
From 2013 to today, we have been present in every crucial moment in the history of this country. We have made
more than 7,500 live broadcasts, and currently have over 100,000 photos, 4,000 hours of recordings and more than
10,000 posters, banners and memes stored in our database. We shared more than 150,000 posts, and we currently
have more than 2 million people following us on every platform. We also count on the help of more than 100
collaborators/columnists that write to our audience (Mídia Ninja, 2018).

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 The example of Mídia NINJA as a representative of Citizen Sousveillance helps us to
understand its importance and impact. Sousveillance in the context of protests came to light only
recently, and its repercussions are still being analyzed. The fact that media activism makes it
possible for people who cannot attend protests to watch – online, in real-time, and not subject to
mainstream editorials – is unparalleled. With Mídia NINJA, media activism is helping to
transform protest in ways that would have been unimaginable twenty years ago: protesters no
longer need to be at the place of assembly to be a part of it (Landesman et al, 2018). This thesis
discusses that specific issue later on, as this exact question about the importance of people at
protests and people watching from home was posed to NINJA’s interviewees. The topic under
examination, for now, is the connection of sousveillance and protests, having as an important
actor Mídia NINJA.

Mídia NINJA not only has an amazing reach and significance, but I would also claim that
they provoke a behavior change in protests. It was mentioned by the interviewees, in the same
context, that the relation between content and viewer went from a passive watching to a more
active, engaging participation (Landesman et al, 2018: 62; Interviewee #2, 2018). Not only has
the behavior of protesters somewhat changed since the introduction of Citizen Sousveillance in
protests, but the behavior of the police is morphing too. On the protester side, because of the
exposure Mídia NINJA had, many times its members have been identified in the crowd, and their
presence was requested by protesters to safeguard them against police abuse. In Brazil, it is not
uncommon for police officers to plant evidence on protesters, so as to have a reason to take them
into custody; consequently, whenever there is a stop and frisk at a protest, it is common to hear
people chanting “Mídia Ninja!” so they can go over and record and live-stream everything
(Landesman et al, 2018:61; Interviewee #4, 2018). Now protesters seek Mídia NINJA to be
around them, as a form of protection. Protesters also look for NINJAs to speak out and make a
protest inside the protest. The reach that Mídia NINJA has is now known, and being in front of a
NINJA’s camera can mean being in front of thousands, and even millions, of people that are
watching it from their homes. (Interviewee #3, 2018; Landesman et al, 2018).

On the police side, major developments have also happened. The use of technology has
increased significantly in recent years. It is common now for the police to have officers filming
protesters during manifestations too. It is believed that the police intelligence holds a

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considerable database of videos and pictures of protesters, which according to some members
can be very worrying, as the right to protest is ensured by the constitution. It is not clear what
they will do with this material (Interviewee #1, 2018). According to one of my interviewees, this
fast response of the police, to start filming people in protests soon after it became more popular
on the side of protesters, shows how impactful it was. Especially in Brazil, where bureaucracy is
almost cultural, having the state organizing this new approach so fast means that they were
clearly worried about losing the power and the ownership of narrative. At the same time, it was a
counter-offensive using the same model as the protesters.

It is important to note here that the use of sousveillance in protests implies that the order is
being somewhat inverted. The definition of sousveillance consists in an inverted surveillance,
where the less powerful have the means to watch the more powerful, hence the bottom-up idea,
where protesters who are at the bottom can watch those at the top. The use of the exact same
technology by the police during protests, ie. cameras and phones to record people, does not
constitute the use of sousveillance, as it is not bottom-up. It should be classified as plain
surveillance, as it is still a top-down sort of veillance.

Something else that has developed in recent years is the use of what is called P2. P2 are
undercover police officers that infiltrate amongst the protesters, mainly to collect information
and collaborate with police intelligence on how protesters operate. A case of undercover police
inside Mídia NINJA happened in 2014/2015, in what became known as the Balta case, which
will be discussed in section 4.5 of this chapter.

4.2 – Sousveillance as a tool of nonviolent resistance: Changing protest through protection

It would be impossible to discuss Mídia NINJA and protests without touching on the
concept of sousveillance, and it makes a lot of sense to bring up Mídia NINJA when we are
examining sousveillance in a protest context, as they are a clear, genuine, and powerful
representation of what this new mix of technology, technique, and perspective can achieve. The
fact that all the data collected indicates that this is something not likely to go away makes it even
more important, as the tendency is for sousveillance to adapt, improve and spread in societies
around the world.

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 Therefore, I claim that one of the dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance is to be used as a
way for protesters to protect themselves against abuses of human rights, which are not
uncommon in a protest context. Besides, there are the other dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance,
such as the sharing of the raw reality of protests, the fact it serves as a way to challenge
mainstream narratives, the historical importance of having videos of these protests for future
studies, and being a virtual option for people who want to engage in a cause, but can not be
physically present in a protest. One of the interviewees talked a little about the importance of
recording and live-streaming protests as a form of protection as something that can bring more
justice and fairness to unequal realities in protests. To this interviewee, the use of this sort of
tactic in protests:

... é imprescindível, pois na sua base, inclusive garante a manutenção das vidas das
pessoas. Já houve casos em que a nossa extensiva produção de conteúdo já tirou gente da
cadeia, quando foi necessário provas para processos judiciais, ou então quando
conseguimos comprovar através das imagens que aconteceu uma coisa e não outra, como
é colocado na grande mídia. Nosso processo de produção extensivo de conteúdo em tempo
real, acaba sendo de grande benefício para defensores de direitos humanos, especialmente
quando estamos lidando com violência policial que é tão alta aqui no Brasil (Interviewee
#5, 2018).9

The importance of Mídia NINJA increases at the same proportion that their reach and
exposure do. At this point, it is not possible to say that it rivals in number of viewers the long-
established TV channels, but it does appeal to a specific part of society that more and more look
for information that represents their needs.

Having Mídia NINJA’s material used in court and making it an alibi that helps people be
freed from jail are clear examples of how sousveillance can be used to protect people in a
peaceful way.

9
… in its core, helps in the maintenance of many things, including people’s lives. There were cases where our
content got people out of jail. We were used as evidence in litigations, and our videos shown in court. We contribute
to the truth, when our videos help to clarify what happened was one thing and not the other. Our extensive
production of material ends up being of great value to human rights field, especially when we talk about police
brutality, which unfortunately is very common in Brazil. (Interviewee #5, 2018)

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 Mídia NINJA supports and relies on a core value, which is the change of narrative. The
sousveillance performed by Mídia NINJA has this change of narrative as a goal. It aims to give
an alternative account of facts that will not be biased in favor of the actors in society that are
already amongst the richest and most powerful. The inversion of perspective, and a tweak in the
scale of power, even if minimal, has already brought impressive results as described above. If we
think of the context in which the NINJAs are inserted, considering developments in the medium
and long term, inversion of perspective has even more significance. The reality of protests today,
with police forces being aware that they are being recorded, and protesters organizing themselves
to become what Mídia NINJA calls Multimedia Citizens, is shaping the new battle for narratives,
and in a way, sousveillance is also used in the polarization that is more and more clear these
days. One of the interviewees elaborated a little about that:

… Dá para observar muito bem como a Mídia NINJA atua nesse sentido, no sentido de
inverter um pouco essa lógica da vigilância, trazendo inclusive dentro de uma lógica que é
a do cidadão multimídia, de como cada um agora tem o poder de ter a narrativa nas
próprias mãos ... a gente consegue subverter um pouco dessa lógica – de ter esse grande
olho olhando para todo mundo. Em contraponto a isso temos as tecnologias de
comunicação nas mãos, fazendo com que a gente consiga também ter o poder de vigilância
constante, que há 20, 30 anos não seria possível. Eu acho que a Mídia NINJA trás essa
quebra de lógica, especificamente quando a Mídia NINJA nasce, que é de dar uma
narrativa diferenciada das grandes manifestações, especialmente em junho de 2013, que
foi quando ela teve essa grande notoriedade (Interviewee #2, 2018). 10

In this passage, my participant comes very close to describing the logic of sousveillance,
without actually naming it as such. The participant emphasizes that Midia NINJA acts to help
multimedia citizens invert the logic of surveillance. They help their followers to subvert the

10
… It is possible to well observe how Mídia NINJA acts in the sense of inverting, even if just a little, the logic
behind surveillance. Bringing about, inclusively, within the logic of what we commonly call multimedia citizen.
That means it is now possible for everyone to have the ability and the power of the narrative at the fingertips, being
literally a multimedia citizen, and subvert this idea of having a big eye watching everyone. Now, we have this
communication technology at hand, making it possible for us to be the constant watcher, which would be impossible
20-30 years ago. I believe that Mídia NINJA represents well this logic break, and a clear illustration of that is the
moment when Mídia NINJA is born, where it was possible to give a different narrative in the 2013 major
manifestations all around Brazil, which is when we got considerable notoriety (Interviewee #2, 2018).

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protest-deterring effect of "having a big eye watching over everyone". This effect of
sousveillance, this "logic break" was born in and helped to subsequently transform protest.

One other effect of the use of Citizen Sousveillance is related to the behavior of protesters
and police forces. Before, the state/police were the only ones with access to surveillance videos,
and in the few places where wearable on-officer devices were available, these videos were
always used to favor police forces; no civilian or attorneys had access to these footages. Now,
protesters can also have a way to protect themselves with the aid of technology. A video with
images that contradicts a statement can go a long way. How much this new reality has changed
police officers’ behavior is hard to measure. In itself, police excessive use of force can be
determined by a number of factors, such as officers’ age, tenure, gender, and race, for example.
External factors have an impact like the subculture of policing too (Lersch & Mieczkowski,
2005). The work environment, and the “rotten apple” theory, which claims that problem-prone
officers are very few, but they cloud the good reputations of the police as a whole, also play a
role. The rotten apple theory has been dismissed by many researchers, who critiqued it for not
examining in depth the structural problems within the law enforcement system. No theory,
however, is able to provide a complete explanation about police officers' behavior. Now, added
to that, there is the fact that officers are being, in many instances, watched and recorded, which
also has its own implication on their conduct and general behavior (Brucato, 2015).

As time passes, and the exposure of Mídia NINJA increases, their own perception of where
they are embedded in this new reality of protests changes. People now have an extra channel that
they can use to protest, and be heard by many people. The reach Mídia NINJA has can be a
productive space for people that many times are at the margins of society. The democratization
of the media channels, like Mídia NINJA, boosts the participation of more people in the whole
democratic process, as the more information people have access to, the more aware of their
situation they may be, and the harder it might be to manipulate them. Also, as time passes, the
idea of sousveillance spreads. As it spreads, so does knowledge of how sousveillance can be
used to change narratives that before were owned by few. This combination can give new
perspectives, and makes us believe that change and a more equal society are possible; therefore,
the presence of an actor enabled by the use of sousveillance can indeed change the reality of
protests. Brazil, being one of the most unequal societies in the world (Chancel et al, 2017), is

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definitely a great field to see the use of sousveillance happen, and Mídia NINJA is a great case-
study for that matter.

It is possible to state that the reality of protests is changing. The incorporation of new
technologies to public demonstrations itself already has its own significant impact. Added to
that, we have activists that have organized themselves to make the use of these new technologies
a tool to show a different reality of protests, breaking an old paradigm of how protests were
portrayed. Not only that, but also even the legal repercussions of images and videos can support
the theory that the media that used to control the narrative now has a strong competitor for the
information.

Nevertheless, the debate about the benefits of Citizen Sousveillance, and about whom it
benefits, is valid. In the next section, I consider a part of this debate, which concerns the privacy
of activists and other actors in the protest context.

4.3 – What is the balance between sousveillance and privacy in a protest context?

As should be clear by now, the overarching goal of this project is to claim that
sousveillance can be used as a defense mechanism for protesters against police brutality, and it
can change the reality of protests in different ways, and by different means. Having access to
smartphones and a decent network is vital for the success of sousveillance, therefore in places
where cheaper technology is available, sousveillance has more chances to see it flourish.
However, as many as the benefits of sousveillance are being demonstrated, critics of this
technique have at least one concern that needs to be investigated. This concern relates to privacy.

4.3.1 Scholarship on Privacy

Before getting to the discussion about sousveillance and privacy, it feels necessary to
consider privacy in the context of surveillance, which is a more established phenomenon and
already studied by many academics. Governments claim the right to look into people’s activities
so that they can guarantee fairness and equal access to services and the law. In this day and age,

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access to one’s personal information may mean having access to someone’s full name, address,
phone, and social security number. It may also include having information on bank transaction
history, purchases made on credit cards, and with the advance of technology, access to one’s
browser history, conversations on social media, online purchase history, and places visited (Lyon
et al, 1996; Lyon, 2015). All of this information is stored and kept with the use of powerful
computers and used by the government as well as by the private companies that control
platforms, like credit card providers, Facebook, Google, etc. On one hand, governments use their
own discretion to access this information if they want to investigate someone, as they have this
immense data stored and have relatively easy access to it. On the private company’s side, all of
this information is bought and sold with the intent of targeted marketing, in a market aiming to
influence, especially, people’s buying behavior (Lyon, 2015).

There is longstanding literature that investigates privacy as both a social value and a
fundamental individual right. Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948),
says that “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or
correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honor and reputation. Everyone has the right to the
protection of the law against such interference or attacks.” (United Nations, 1948).

It should be noted that privacy was seen as an individual value or right, which was
incompatible with the idea of the “social” to some extent. For Alan Westin (1968), privacy is
“the claim of individuals, groups, or institutions to determine for themselves when, how, and to
what extent information about them is communicated to others” (Westin, 1968:7). This
definition does not contemplate “social privacy”, or privacy in context with the nuances of the
social. As the concept of privacy evolved, the social value of it began to be considered and the
conversation on how and where it happens started to be analyzed, whether it was in relation to
citizens and governments, or consumers and businesses (Westin, 2003). Also, the debate about
how to ensure the appropriate flow of information we share online, and not only how to limit the
access to it, is now a priority to governments (Nissenbaum, 2010).

Nonetheless, the concept and definition of privacy can be gray, depending on the day and
age, country, or even political situation that it is outlined. Nissenbaum (2010), highlights this
difficulty in conceptualizing and solidifying the concept of privacy. She says

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 Almost as many who have taken up the subject of privacy in relation to information
technology have declared it deeply problematic, referring not only to questions and
disagreements about its value, benefits, and harms but to its conceptual morass. Attempts
to define it have been notoriously controversial and have been accused of vagueness and
internal inconsistency – of being overly inclusive, excessively narrow, or insufficiently
distinct from other value concepts (Nissenbaum, 2010:2).

In Brazil, for instance, Ferraz Jr. (1993) defines privacidade as “o direito de o indivíduo
excluir do conhecimento de terceiros aquilo que a ele só é pertinente e que diz respeito ao seu
modo de ser exclusivo no âmbito de sua vida privada.” (Ferraz Jr., 1993:439) 11. In general, the
Brazilian laws and jurisprudences do not take individuals’ rights to privacy as their priority.
Recent examples show that the disclosure of public employees’ salaries, the unauthoraized
publication of the details of peoples’ lives, or employers accessing employees’ business email
accounts, were not considered violations of privacy (Ávila & Woloszyn, 2019).

In 2014, the Marco Civil da Internet (Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet)
was signed by President Dilma Rousseff. The bill was well received by specialists in the field, as
it made progress to regulate some aspects of internet usage in Brazil, which was fairly
unregulated. However, while there was an effort to guarantee freedom of speech and establish
several rights for internet users, the privacy aspects of it were given less importance, and the
provisions needed to support the law were never put in place. Companies such as Google and
Facebook continue to operate collecting and utilizing users’ private information, for example
(Rodriguez & Pinho, 2015).

While it is not the intention here to go into this literature in-depth, I would still like to
provide an illustration of work that argues that privacy is essential to one’s freedom. In the book
by American investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, No Place to Hide (2013), he describes
the journey that he and film-maker Laura Poitras went through to meet with former NSA
employee Edward Snowden. He describes how Snowden contacted him, what the security checks
Snowden imposed were, such as the use of specific phone applications, and all the precautions
taken so Greenwald could help Snowden in publishing what can be considered one of the biggest

11
The right of the individual to exclude from a third party’s knowledge what is only pertinent to him, and that
concerns his way of being in the scope of his private life.

86
and most important leaks in the United States’ history. Among many readings that can be drawn
from Greenwald’s work, the main message of the book is to examine how the Surveillance State
can interfere with and control one’s life, and how harmful surveillance can be. When Snowden
disclosed that the American government was monitoring its own citizens, as well as foreign
citizens (including world leaders), we became aware of the magnitude and power of this twenty-
first-century surveillance. Greenwald elaborates for a whole chapter about the importance of how
giving up the right to privacy is umbilically connected to the right to freedom itself, and how
pernicious surveillance can be. He says:

Privacy is essential to human freedom and happiness for reasons that are rarely discussed
but instinctively understood by most people, as evidenced by the lengths to which they go
to protect their own. To begin with, people radically change their behavior when they
know they are being watched. They will strive to do that which is expected of them. They
want to avoid shame and condemnation. They do so by adhering tightly to accepted social
practices, by staying within imposed boundaries, and by avoiding action that might be seen
as deviant or abnormal. The range of choices people consider when they believe that others
are watching is therefore far more limited than what they might do when acting in a private
realm. A denial of privacy operates to severely restrict one’s freedom of choice
(Greenwald, 2013:173)

There are many angles to approach the subject of privacy, especially if we build it on top
of other concepts, such as surveillance and sousveillance. Adding to that, if we consider the
social aspect of privacy, taking into consideration a protest context, such as the one being
analyzed here, answers can be conjectural. I will delve into this subject a little further in the
coming sections of this thesis.

4.3.2 Privacy and Sousveillance

If we consider that the right to have our privacy is fundamentally linked to our right to
freedom, how would we look at the relation of sousveillance and privacy? If we accept that
surveillance is a form of social control (Lyon et al, 1996), would sousveillance not have that
characteristic too? The fact that sousveillance is veillance from below does not automatically

87
discredit the fact that people being watched might not agree to be exposed. That is a concern
already on the radar of scholars (Michael, 2015; Mann et al., 2002; Rhodes et al., 1999), but no
substantial work has been done so far. Although there were significant cases of whistle-blowers
before, the Snowden case burst a bubble and reached people that were not usually concerned
with surveillance. Since then, five years ago, scholars have been studying, developing, and
polishing the field of surveillance studies even further, in face of the magnitude of new
information, and at the same time, social and political movements concerned with this theme
have multiplied and reached meaningful size, making more and more people aware of the
subject. I posed a question about the theme of sousveillance versus privacy to Mídia NINJA
members. As this is a new debate, understanding the perspective of a group that practices
sousveillance on a daily basis seems very important. One member elaborated about that when
asked about his/her perception on the subject:

Eu acho que esse trabalho, de você ir para a rua e filmar o que está acontecendo em uma
grande mobilização social, ele é um trabalho que não fere, de modo algum, uma outra
característica que para mim é muito importante, na verdade um valor que é muito
importante, que é o direito a privacidade das pessoas. Quando você está indo para a rua
manifestar, há momentos que é importante privar e preservar a privacidade das pessoas
que estão lá, mas também cada pessoa que está presente é um partícipe social e político.
Não são só indivíduos, mas são indivíduos coletivos que estão alí se manifestando em prol
de uma demanda, de uma causa, ou uma luta social. Então geralmente as pessoas que
estão indo para as ruas por uma mobilização social, eles estão se enxergando enquanto
um cidadão coletivo. Há casos, claro, que temos que privar os cidadãos que estão alí. Há
coberturas e cenas que vemos que decidimos tomar cuidado com a questão da privacidade
da pessoa que está alí naquela manifestação. De uma forma geral, todos são cidadãos
políticos coletivos, acho que não teria problema nenhum, e é diferente de uma luta que se
faz pela privacidade especialmente online. É um outro debate. É um debate muito
complexo e mais profundo, e é superimportante e temos uma afinidade muito grande

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 também com essa luta, mas não é um debate que a Mídia NINJA ainda teve (Interviewee
#3, 2018). 12

As we can see, the debate about privacy and surveillance/sousveillance is important, but also
complex, and one that has not yet been the subject of formal, internal debate, so there are no solidified
positions. Mídia NINJA, as expressed by one of its members, still haven’t embraced the debate
over sousveillance versus privacy, but it is something they might do at some point. There is a
difference between privacy wishes and privacy rights, and being in a protest can fall more into a
state of a wish to be private, which, as per Mídia NINJA, might not be practical. The thin line of
practicing sousveillance and still complying with individuals’ privacy can be grey, and this
thought brought up by this interviewee about “collective citizens” while in manifestations might
be a good way to start thinking about it. Although these “guidelines” were not entirely set at
Mídia NINJA, one of the members mentioned during an interview that there is some common
sense when they are covering protests. This common sense would prevent them from publicizing
images or videos that could compromise someone attending a protest, for example. Situations
where protesters block streets and highways by setting car tires on fire - which in Brazil is fairly
common - is a good example of a coverage where Mídia NINJA would try their best to avoid
showing anyone’s face. Other examples would be protests involving women bearing their chests,
as their videos and pictures could corroborate to the objectification of women, or any protest
where there are clearly underaged activists, for example when secondary school students
occupied over 200 schools in the state of São Paulo in 2015, arguing for better conditions, and
advocating against the closure of many of these schools (Interviewee #1, 2018; Catini et al,
2016).

12
I believe that when you go to the streets to record what is happening in a social manifestation is a kind of work
that does not necessarily hurt a value that is of utmost importance to me, which is the right to privacy. When you
take the streets to protest, there are times where it is important to protect and preserve the privacy of people that are
attending, but we have to bear in mind that, nonetheless, when you are attending a protest you are there as a social
and political participant. We are a collective of individuals advocating for a cause and a social struggle, therefore we
have to see ourselves, at that time, as collective citizens. Again, there are situations where we take care and try to
prevent the exposure of someone; however, the general idea is that we are there as political collective citizens. The
debate about privacy and data protection is deep and complex, and definitely a struggle that we are in line with, but
Mídia NINJA never really had an internal debate about that yet (Interviewee #3, 2018).

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4.3.3 Unmasking Power

In tandem with this conversation, I also asked Mídia NINJA participants to weigh in on the
matter of protesters using masks so that they cannot be identified. Again, this blurry line of
privacy and the importance of sousveillance can bring forward different interpretations of values
and rights. If on one hand it can be argued that it is important to protect the identity of people
that go to protests, then on the other hand, sousveillance, especially in those situations where it is
used to live-stream events, cannot guarantee the anonymity of participants. Anyone wearing a
mask can prevent their identity from being public, however, they inevitably also become a target
for police forces. One of the interviewees raised some interesting points:

Não existe um juízo de valor de nossa parte em torno das escolhas de privacidade que as
pessoas têm. Não é uma prática da Mídia NINJA, apesar da assinatura coletiva, de não
nomear nossa atuação, nenhum de nós fica se divulgando. Não existe uma pessoa que seja
a cara da MN, não temos um perfil individual. Mas também não existe uma busca pela
invisibilização. No caso de iniciativas que fazem isso, acreditamos que eles tenham seus
motivos, principalmente porque estamos falando de desobediência civil. Não nos sentimos
no direito de julgar, mas também não promovemos esse tipo de coisa, então estamos em
uma área cinza (Interviewee #5, 2018). 13

The issue of privacy in the context of the use of sousveillance, including here the use of
masks by protesters, needless to say, is complex and filled with nuances, so that even Mídia
NINJA does not take a firm stance on that. In Brazil, during the manifestations of 2013, after
movements were being organized in every major city, a new phenomenon that had a substantial
impact on that issue came to light – the protest participants engaged in direct action using black
bloc tactics. Protesters using black bloc tactics are usually identifiable as masked individuals

13
Mídia NINJA does not make a value judgment about people’s privacy choices. It is not our practice. Although we
do appreciate some sort of anonymity by using collective signatures in communications, and no individual credits to
pictures or videos, there is no self-promotion of any kind … there is not a face. [People and initiatives that have the
habit of wearing masks in protests], even if we do not do it ourselves, they have our respect, as we are sure they
have their own reasons, especially because in some occasions we are talking about civil disobedience. We do not
feel we have the right to judge them, the same way we do not foster these initiatives, so we just stay in a grey area
on this issue (Interviewee #5, 2018).

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who wear black clothes and form a contingent within rallies. They usually have a more
anarchical approach. The idea behind the tactic is to send a message using performative violence,
while at the same time confronting global capitalism and the state (Juris, 2005). Their actions are
constantly categorized as civil disobedience, and this modus operandi that started in Seattle in
1999 has spread to manifestations in Canada, Mexico, Turkey, some countries in Europe, and
Brazil (Dupuis-Déri, 2014). In Brazil in 2013, due to the fact that they always covered their
faces, and because they were most of the times watched and recorded breaking private property,
they had a considerable influence on public opinion about the protests, mostly negative, and
about the conversation on the right to privacy in protests.

The black bloc participants are a good way to illustrate this conundrum of privacy versus
sousveillance. Should a group that operates violently against private properties, always wearing
black clothes and masks, have their identities preserved? They may not have mainstream support
in society (Dupuis-Déri, 2010), however, what constitutes “social disobedience” practiced by
them? Are the smashed windows the one factor that fuels people to be against them? In Brazil,
the legality of the use of masks in protests is still to be ruled on by the Supreme Court, where the
bill has been sitting since 2016. States like Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais already passed their
own bills forbidding it, while the federal legislation is not yet in place (Luz, 2016). This is not a
debate happening only in Brazil. In the United States, this discussion can be traced back to the
times of the Ku Klux Klan, when bills were passed aiming to prevent their actions and
symbolism (Haag, 2017), and today having different versions in different states. In Canada, the
use of masks in protests was banned in 2013, and today it can carry a 10-year prison sentence
(Fitzpatrick, 2013). The debate about the limitations of privacy for individuals, and the
limitations of privacy for people under sousveillance are still blurry, and it is hard to say that it
will be possible to have a more permanent resolution anytime soon. With the advent of the
COVID-19 pandemic, and its convergence with Black Lives Matter protests around the world,
the debate over wearing masks in protests has taken on new dimensions and complexities As for
Mídia NINJA, when the interviews were conducted, they did not have a formal position on the
matter of black blocs participants, masks during protests, or the right to privacy, which can be
understandable and expected. All these debates are new, and it can be risky to make assumptions
without knowing the full extent and developments of these issues.

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 While, understandably, Mídia NINJA abstain themselves from the debate about protesters
wearing masks, they are more vocal when it comes to powerful actors in society not identifying
themselves in a protest setting. Their position is clear when it comes to cases of police officers
not wearing a name tag. Considering their stance, we can draw an analysis of how sousveillance
relates to power. The assumption that sousveillance is the bottom-up sort of veillance makes it
clear that the inequality of power also plays a role in how laws are bent on each side. While there
can be a justification for the ones on the bottom to wear masks, there is not a clear reason for the
ones on top to hide. The duality on how to read these circumstances comes embedded in the
different available strengths and structures on each side. If Mídia NINJA were to out the masked
protester, they would only be playing a part for the stronger and more powerful side, meaning,
they would not, to any extent, be practicing sousveillance, but they would only be a mere
surveillance instrument.

The main goal of this section was to open the debate about how important privacy is, and
how it can interfere and be a part of a protest context. Drawing from Greenwald, Nissenbaum,
Ávila and Woloszyn, and Ferraz Jr., the value of privacy is undisputed, as it can be seen as the
value of freedom itself. The debate here is how this value plays a role when a group of people
decides to expose their point of view, with the intent of drawing the most attention possible to
their agenda, which includes the use of technologies like social media to amplify their reach. If
on the one hand there is one’s privacy to be protected, then on the other it may be difficult to
preserve one’s identity when protesting. There is also the fact that was brought up by a Mídia
NINJA member who said that once you are in a protest, it should be assumed that you are
automatically, to some extent, relinquishing your right to total privacy, as you are in a public
space, protesting and trying to draw attention to your cause. Having said that, it is possible to
link this debate with the one that deals with the importance of people attending protests
physically, versus online activism.

The privacy issue discussed above can be read in relation to the fourth and fifth dimensions
of Citizen Sousveillance – the archival and virtual ones. These dimensions, which will be
explored next, concern the opportunity created for people that can not attend a protest physically
to do so virtually. Having that option, people that are extremely concerned with their privacy still
have a way to support such protest from their homes. Using the example of Mídia NINJA, while

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ninjas are covering the protests and live-streaming its developments, people that for whatever
reason are unable to participate can feel and be part of it.

4.4 – People in protests vs people online: what is more important? The archival and virtual
dimension of Citizen Sousveillance

The power of social media is unquestionable these days. It influenced Barack Obama’s
election in 2008 and subsequently in 2012 (Cogburn et al., 2011). It had a considerable role in
Macron’s election in France in 2017, supported by the “advance” of fake news (Ferrara, 2017).
And, in Brazil, far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro’s popularity was fueled by social media and
chat applications, such as Whatsapp, the latter being fundamental for his election in 2018
(Campos, 2018). It is not news that if this technology is well employed, it has a magnificent
power of aggregating people with the same views on certain controversial issues. It is not news
either, that what you see on your social media feed is what social media platforms want you to
see. The famous “algorithms” decide what you should see. Algorithms are the codes that decide
what kind of content should be on your timeline, and they also make “suggestions” of what kind
of people or community you should follow (Sunstein, 2017).

The role played by these new channels when it comes to people manifesting their
dissatisfaction with public policies is also substantial. The ease of use of these tools – the
intuitive and uncomplicated nature of their applications and platforms – made them something
that is part of how people organize, communicate, and interact before, during and after a protest.
Mídia NINJA was born in an age in which these technologies were already established in the
Brazilian society, having extensively penetrated all layers and corners of the country. Just to
have an idea of how rapidly it developed, we can look only to Facebook, the most popular social
media platform in Brazil, which went from 12 million users in 2011 to 67 million users in 2013.
Today, it has over 90 million users, and is expected to surpass the mark of 100 million users by
2021, which means almost 50% of the entire population (Statista, 2018; Hohagen, 2013).

If the premise is that the popular social media are extremely influential, the reflection that I
propose now is a critical discussion of the dichotomy between online protest and offline protest,
which is the foundation of the dimensions of the concept proposed by this thesis – Citizen

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Sousveillance. In this sub-chapter, I use the responses provided by Mídia NINJA members
concerning their perception of online and offline protests, which illustrate two dimensions of
Citizen Sousveillance – the archival and virtual ones.

One of the first questions that came to my mind, when I reflected on the questions I would
ask the participants of this project was: Is it more important for people to protest on the streets,
or is it more important than a video of a protest, like the ones Mídia NINJA makes, reaches the
biggest number of people possible? What would cause a more important impact in society, and
consequently have more chances of a response from policy-makers? There is no intention here to
make a claim in favor for or against being in the streets, or being online. And, in any case, the
online protests that Mídia NINJA facilitated would be of an entirely different character if there
hadn’t been people in the streets, a fact that troubles the idea of a strict dichotomy between
online and offline activity. One of the hypotheses here is that both sorts of protests have their
own effectiveness and reach, however, the objective is to examine if there is a tendency of online
protests, and their reach, to become more “important” than having people on the streets, blocking
avenues, picketing and so on. Besides examining the perceived effectiveness of these sort of
protests, there is the claim that online/virtual protests unquestionably open the possibility for
more people to follow these protests in real-time. This is exactly one of the dimensions of the use
of Citizen Sousveillance, the virtual dimension. The virtual dimension observes how the use of
sousveillance in protests opens a window of possibility that was inexistent before. People that are
not in the same geographical space as a given protest, with the use of sousveillance/Citizen
Sousveillance, have the opportunity to follow it online.

I posed a question about the differences of online and offline protests to all of my
interviewees. Mídia NINJA members are the ones participating and covering protests, and as
such, they know exactly how the dynamics occur; additionally, they are the ones streaming it
over social media and sharing it online after the stream has ended, so they know how impactful
that can be as well. The evolution of manifestation can be stagnant for many decades, but it is
also always prone to new ways of connecting people, and the combination of sousveillance with
social media can be, and in a way already is, a new form of protest. The challenge is to
understand how the classic and the new ways will interact from now on. One of the interviewees
said

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 Acho que as coisas são diferentes, mas ao mesmo tempo elas são complementares. A gente
faz um trabalho em rede mesmo, uma rede em movimento, e uma produção de conteúdo
que a gente sabe que quanto mais pessoas a gente atingir e de diferentes lugares, do Brasil
profundo, da América Latina, do mundo. Então quanto mais a gente atingir isso, mais
daremos visibilidade e força ao que está acontecendo nesse lugar. Sem presencial também
não existe esse online, essa pauta online – precisamos dela, pois elas se retroalimentam.
Quando as pessoas vão para as ruas dentro das manifestações, quanto mais gente na rua
também significa mais pessoas transmitindo, mais pessoas gerando conteúdo, mais
pessoas usando uma mesma tag, mais pessoas reverberando isso, e mais a gente consegue
extrapolar as bolhas. Ano passado, dia 31 de maio aconteceu a greve geral no Brasil, o
que foi um momento ímpar no percurso das greves gerais, e a gente recebeu conteúdo do
Brasil todo. E notamos que quando a gente posta um conteúdo de uma cidade “X” ,
aquela pessoa que mandou, compartilha e esse conteúdo viraliza, e isso explode a nossa
bolha Mídia NINJA, até chegar nos contatos que essa pessoa têm, na rede que ela tem, e
ajuda a gente a se reverberar, mas ao mesmo tempo muitas vezes a gente posta algo e o
alcance do post ele pode ser muito maior que a quantidade de pessoas daquela cidade
(Interviewee #3, 2018). 14

According to this interviewee then, they complement each other, most importantly, when it
comes to the reach that protest has. Where, before the sousveillance aspect, the indignation of the
people many times would not be heard, now it can reach a wider audience. This small city prism
is interesting because it can be very easy for someone that has always lived in big cities to
overlook the reality of how the dynamic of protests works in smaller cities.

14
I believe that these are different topics, but one complements the other at the same time. The main issue for us will
always be the collaborative work and the content production, we are aware, the more people we reach, from
different places, either from small towns in Brazil, Latin America or the world, the more we will give visibility and
strength to what is actually happening in that “physical” place. And without what actually happens on the streets, the
online does not exist. They feed each other. When people take to the streets to protest it also means more people
getting involved, more people broadcasting, more people creating new content, more people using the same hashtag,
and more people passing on the message, which in the end means that we can reach people out of our bubble. We
noticed that when there was the general strike in 2015, we received videos from every part of Brazil, and we
replicated that, so these bubbles – ours and theirs, were extrapolated reaching people that would never know if it
were not because of this work. Sometimes if we replicate a content that happened in a small city, the penetration of
that content can reach even more people than the number of people that actually lives in this city (Interviewee #3,
2018).

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 The dichotomy of such different views can be used to read one of Citizen Sousveillance’s
dimensions, which talks about the virtual access to protests. Smaller cities tend to echo what
happens in bigger cities concerning the general dissatisfaction of the population, which can be
considered one of the major triggers for protests in Brazil. Once smaller cities have the chance to
share not only their common challenges, but also their particular demands, that creates a new
mass and democratic element that is enabled by Mídia NINJA. The access that more people now
have to particular demands in smaller cities, in a way, makes these demands go from a personal
trouble perspective, where it can be seen as being something happening mostly to this small
group of individuals, to a public issue perspective. Using the notion of the sociological
imagination, proposed by Mills, protests help to turn personal and even local issues into public
issues pertaining to everyone, identifying them as structural problems in our society (Mills,
1959). It helps turn local problems into social problems.

Obviously, this is one opinion about the difference and importance of these two scenarios
of protests. Unquestionably, there are differences when it comes to protests in small and big
cities, and usually, access to information in big cities tends to be easier. This is not the only
factor, though.

The characteristics of the demand being made by protesters can be a determinant of

whether or not offline or online tactics are favoured. When asked about these differences,
another interviewee commented:

Toda vez que a gente se engaja em um processo de mobilização, a gente sabe que é muito
importante fazermos mobilizações dos mais diversos tipos possíveis. Eu acho que vai
depender muito de cada momento, enfim, que aquela circunstância pede, e as vezes é mais
interessante você ter uma mobilização de rua muito forte naquele momento do que ter uma
mobilização mais forte nas redes sociais. Acho que isso é muito intrínseco um ou outro. As
vezes a gente consegue, por exemplo, fazer uma manifestação em prol do Marco Civil da
Internet, que a gente fez há um ou dois anos, para nós era muito mais interessante, já que
não conseguiríamos mobilizar um milhão de pessoas para ir às ruas em prol daquela
política, mas a gente vai conseguir mobilizar nas redes muito bem, então fazemos
“tuitaço” .... até porque aquilo não tem uma demanda muito grande de mobilização de rua
de fato. Então fica claro, há circunstâncias e circunstâncias. Agora é claro, que o

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 impeachment, por exemplo, e o golpe que o Brasil sofre, isso vai mobilizar e vai demandar
uma atividade de rua muito forte. A própria morte da Marielle no Rio de Janeiro,
consequentemente vai mobilizar cada vez mais pessoas a irem às ruas, com uma força
muito maior por conta do que a própria violência gera, do que aquele próprio
acontecimento gera nas pessoas. Então eu acho que a mobilização de rua e nas redes
sociais são termômetros do que a gente vive hoje. É claro que se a gente tem uma
mobilização de rua enorme, e várias pessoas estão indo para rua por conta de algo, e por
causa do momento em que o Brasil e o mundo estão vivendo ... fica claro que há algo forte
acontecendo ... porque mobilizar para a rua é muito difícil. Obviamente é muito mais
difícil do que mobilizar para as redes sociais, até porque é muito mais fácil você se
mobilizar para as redes do que ir para as ruas. Acho que são dois termômetros que são
diferentes, mas que são também complementares, um ao outro. E reforçando, vai depender
muito da circunstância dos acontecimentos do mundo.. que o país ou o mundo está
demandando (Interviewee #4,2018).15

As pointed out by this interviewee, the “mobilization” aspect is fundamentally decided

depending on the agenda. In this case, the interviewee paid less attention to the external factors,
like big or small cities, as the first interviewee pointed out, and highlighted the agenda as being
more of a priority when it comes to gathering people to make a demand. It is fair to assume then,
that the combination of both could be used, with the objective of examining and analyzing the

15
Whenever we engage in a mobilization process, we know it is extremely important for us to mobilize for a wide
variety of agendas – and this is somewhat influenced by the moment that the country is going through. Sometimes it
is better to have a strong street mobilization at certain moments, instead of having something strong happening on
social media. Other times, for example, when we decided to mobilize for a cause like the “Marco Civil da Internet”
* [Civil Rights Bill for Internet in Brazil] about 3 years ago, for us, it was way more important and interesting the
internet presence, as we would not be able to mobilize one million people to go to the streets for that bill. We would
be able to mobilize people on social media fairly well, even because this sort of cause has no appeal for street
mobilization. On the other hand, during the impeachment of president Rousseff, for example, that culminated in the
Coup D’Etat that Brazil is currently under, it mobilized and demanded a strong street organization and activity. The
death of Marielle Franco [Rio de Janeiro city councillor assassinated on March, 2018], in Rio de Janeiro, will
mobilize more and more people to take the streets, due to the effect that cases like these have on people. I believe
that the mobilization on the streets and on social media are thermometers of what we are living today. Obviously, if
we see that many people are taking the streets for a cause, we have to pay attention and see, as something significant
is happening – street mobilization is really hard, way harder than to mobilize on social medias, as it is easier for you
to go on line, than to go to a street protest […] And again, the circumstances imposed by the world or the country
will determine the demand impact (Interviewee #4, 2018).

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proposed question about the importance of protesters on the streets versus the importance of
protesters online.

Here, then, we have what could be a limitation of sousveillance, but a strength of Citizen
Sousveillance. On the one hand, depending on what kind of protest and what kind of agenda, the
utility of sousveillance may be minimal, as it would add no value as a defense mechanism, or a
way to pressure powerful actors to be in accordance to the rule of law. On the other hand,
though, other dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance are still employable. The archival dimension
of Citizen Sousveillance can be used to show the support such an agenda has, and citizens can
potentially influence government decision-making. It can be used as a record, demonstrating
that citizens were for or against a given bill, and because it was online, anyone with an internet
connection was able to participate.

The online and offline debate, however, had other interesting answers from members of
Mídia NINJA, which in a way reflects how this specific issue has not been thought out entirely,
and analyses like this are important to help us make a clear reading of it all.. The interviewee
showed the concern they have with the historical value that these videos will have in the future –
again, addressing the archival dimension of Citizen Sousveillance.

Praticamente falando, de forma objetiva, é mais importante que as pessoas vão até as
manifestações, sem dúvida nenhuma. A gente entende nossa importância para o registro
histórico, no caso estamos falando de algo local, mas além disso, pelo serviço informativo
mesmo. Mesmo com um número arrebatador de pessoas em uma manifestação, se não
existe uma narrativa que acompanhe esse movimento, por exemplo, a gente pressiona
menos o governo, a gente imprime menos a realidade para fora daquela cidade, a gente
pressiona menos a grande mídia a falar sobre aquilo. Quantas vezes grandes
aglomerações de pessoas aconteceram e a grande mídia simplesmente ignorou? Se não é a
gente falando sobre aquilo, e fazendo eles passarem vergonha por não estarem noticiando
aquilo ... existe uma outra pressão, em um outro nível. Eu acho que é definitivamente mais
importante a presença das pessoas nas marchas, mas existe um grande peso em torno do

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 que fazemos no pós, e da pressão que advém disso (Interviewee #5, 2018).16

This view can overlap with citizen journalism to some extent, as it stresses the
“information service” that Mídia NINJA provides. However, what is clear from my fieldwork is
that there is more than the provision of an information service. The Citizen Sousveillance
concept comes to encompass some angles of how the dynamics of protests happen.

Related to the specific history and political economic context of Mídia NINJA, there is a
concerted effort to counter "mainstream media" narratives and to exert "symbolic pressure", as
the interviewee expressed. This touches a third dimension of Citizen Sousveillance, which is to
challenge mainstream narratives. The effort mentioned suggests something that is perhaps more
activist than citizen journalism, which may be guided by ideals of journalistic objectivity. At the
same time, this is not at all about making 'fake news'. Rather, it is about having videos of protests
that actually happened - of massive gatherings of people - so that the demands of the protest
cannot be easily dismissed by mainstream media. These videos, grounded in the reality of
protest, are examples of Citizen Sousveillance that Mídia NINJA leverages.

For this interviewee, it is more important for people to attend a protest rather than simply
following it online; however, protests have to be followed by a narrative that “explains” what the
issue is. The protest alone might not be sufficient, especially if people do not understand the
depth of the claims being made, and if other narratives, mostly controlled by big corporations
and traditional media, either discredit or ignore that movement. The issue is mass
communication, and online activism plays a big part. Mídia NINJA relies on Citizen
Sousveillance to help mobilize people. This is about making protests heard, and rendering them
virtually so that they can reach a wide number of citizens who might not otherwise be connected

16
Objectively speaking, it is more important that people go to manifestations instead of following it online. I
understand the importance of Mídia NINJA for the historical record, and how this could impact the coming
generations. Beyond that, the importance of our work is the information service aspect. Let’s say there is a big
manifestation and there are thousands and thousands of people, if there is not a narrative that follows that cause,
there is less impact on policy-makers, and in general, less impact on people that are unaware of it, or out of that local
space. Besides, that also pushes less – or it does not push at all, how the mainstream media will report it. There are
countless cases of massive gathering of people demanding something and the big media just ignored it due to its
political views. So, if we have videos and push this piece of news through, it also pushes them, the big media, to talk
about it. Having said that, I believe it is definitely more important people attending protests, but there is certainly a
great value on what we do, which includes a lot of after work and the symbolic pressure that comes with it
(Interviewee #5], 2018).

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to them. Making the issues of the protests heard by a larger number of people, and making the
issues actually within a narrative that is in line with what was proposed at the protests is part of
social movements’ struggles now.

As it is demonstrated by the accounts of Mídia NINJA members, the fact of more people
physically going to a protest or more people following it online are not necessarily in conflict.
These two different sorts of protests act in different fields, having different impacts on people
and governments. Having more people online protesting does not make street protests less
important, and having a lot of people on the streets applies the same pressure that it always has.
What could be drawn from these reports is that they work together most of the time. Online
protests can make street protests gain repercussions and reach. Besides, online participation will
bring a different crowd to the “conversation”, making this virtual dimension of Citizen
Sousveillance important to provide accessibility.

Moreover, it can signify the accumulation of historical material, which didn’t previously
exist in the history of protests, and which is one of the usages of Citizen Sousveillance. The
material of the archive, built by people in the streets capturing images, by the use of Citizen
Sousveillance, provides the fundamental material necessary to change narratives of current and
future protests. It can contribute to making possible protests that would never make it to the
streets because of their nature. Therefore, Mídia NINJA is bringing to the reality of protests the
use of Citizen Sousveillance, which can be a game-changer on the streets, as well as a
contribution to the historical archive of protests in Brazil.

One interviewee said

A narrativa que a gente produz tranquiliza pessoas a se sentirem mais seguras para sair
de casa para irem a protestos, porque nós acabamos desmitificando uma série de coisas de
que elas tinham ideia que acontecia em uma manifestação. Só o efeito antecipado já muda
o rumo das manifestações. Muitas pessoas que estão nas manifestações, estão ao mesmo
tempo nos assistindo, então se mostramos que lá na frente está acontecendo enfrentamento

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 com a polícia, elas decidem se querem ir para lá ou não. Impacta o ato e a sociedade.
(Interviewee #3, 2018). 17

Therefore, the element mentioned by the above Mídia NINJA member, is that with the
coverage of demonstrations, it makes it easier for people that do not usually go to protests, or are
unable to go, to see how it usually flows. Hence, it “demystifies” the dynamics of them. Once
again, the virtual accessibility that Citizen Sousveillance brings to this scenario addresses that.
Added to the challenge it poses to mainstream narratives, and the archival value that this material
has, it now can be “consumed” by different citizens, many times persuading some to attend a
protest.

4.5 Citizen Sousveillance and its use

After presenting and sustaining my argument about Citizen Sousveillance, and making the
case that it is important to bring this new concept to the study of veillances, I would like to
summarize the uses of Citizen Sousveillance.

The way Citizen Sousveillance is supposed to be interpreted, and the usefulness of it, is
underpinned by the five below aspects:

1. Nonviolent Dimension.

A theoretical gap that Citizen Sousveillance proposes to fill is the idea that it can be used
as protection for protesters. It can be seen from an individual perspective when one has a
smartphone and starts recording something unusual, or through a collective action, where the
number of citizens involved in such action, with smartphones, and through solidarity, acts a way
for protesters to be safer. There are two strands that can be seen here: 1. Consider Citizen
Sousveillance as an actual nonviolent method, and within a protest setting, it can be a deterrent

17
Our narrative reassures people to feel safer to leave their homes to go to a protest, so we demystify a series of
prejudgements that people thought happened at a protest. This anticipated effect alone already changes the course of
a protest. Also, many people that are at a protest are at the same time watching it on their personal devices, so if we
show that there is some sort of confrontation with police forces ahead, people can decide to join it or not. It impacts
the society as a whole (Interviewee #3, 2018).

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for the transgression of human rights by the state apparatus. And 2. After a protest, the material
created by Citizen Sousveillance can be used in court litigations, showing that a protester or
bystander was wrongfully taken into custody, and even sentenced to jail time. Both situations
illustrate the deployment of Citizen Sousveillance as a nonviolent defense mechanism.

2. Raw Reality Dimension

The use of Citizen Sousveillance can be seen as a way to spread a more “raw” reality of protests.
People attending protests, with their smartphones in hand, and connection to the internet, can in a
matter of seconds start streaming. They can share their perspective of the developments of such
protests. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram “lives” are more common today than ever, and in a
way, this new technology, and the way people are interacting with it, make everyone a potential,
as Mídia NINJA puts it, Multimedia Citizen.

3. Counternarrative Dimension.

Another important aspect of Citizen Sousveillance is to work as a way for alternative channels to
challenge the mainstream and traditional media. In a way, this is one of the main goals of Mídia
NINJA. As discussed before in this thesis, while big and powerful corporations often have some
hidden agenda besides reporting the news, Citizen Sousveillance can bring a different
perspective to any story. The possibility to have an alternative way to access what happens in a
protest, and the possibility to have more developed users of Citizen Sousveillance – like Mídia
NINJA members, talking to protesters on the spot, and getting their reasons to be there, is an
important advancement in many different fronts.

4. Archival Dimension.

Specifically talking about the Brazilian reality, the history of the country is not taken seriously.
Investments in museums, just to take one example, are minimal (Santana, et al. 2018). The lack
of importance to the memory of the country is not embedded in Brazilians cultural priorities,
therefore it is not uncommon to see historical facts manipulated to serve a certain agenda. Citizen
Sousveillance has the potential to partially fill this gap in Brazilian society’s history. The amount
of data collected by Citizen Sousveillance can be significant, and if it is organized and stored for

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future generations, it can be of great value. Accessing videos of protests and interviews in 30, 40
or 50 years will give the possibility of a close connection to what is happening today. Whereas
mainstream media creates a record of the voices of the powerful, Citizen Sousveillance creates a
record of the actions and voices of those who have been historically disenfranchised.

5. Virtual Dimension.

Lastly, Citizen Sousveillance can be important and useful when it concerns being an accessible
way for people to engage with protesters virtually. It is not uncommon that the major protests
happen mostly in big cities. Gathering enough people to make a noticeable demonstration seems
more feasible in a city with millions of inhabitants, than in a city with tens of thousands.
Therefore, this dimension of Citizen Sousveillance can be powerful for small cities to have a
channel so more people can follow their protests, and it can also be a chance for a big city to
maximize their protests’ reach. Having said that, besides being this extra channel of accessibility
for protesters and citizens sympathetic to certain causes, this dimension of Citizen Sousveillance
also plays a part in being a nonviolent defense mechanism for protesters on-site. If Citizen
Sousveillance is employed in real-time, people that are engaging with it virtually can be seen as a
nonviolent defense mechanism for the protesters on-site. There are instances where protester,
when confronted by the police, said they were broadcasting it to thousands of people. This
virtual assurance that protesters are not alone can serve as a deterrent for police from committing
brutality.

4.6 – Does Citizen Sousveillance prevent violence?

With respect to the question of whether Citizen Sousveillance prevents violence, we face
a sort of paradox. If Citizen Sousveillance was used as a defense mechanism and it stopped
violent repression, how could we see its protective effect? For example, if the police did use
excessive force captured by Citizen Sousveillance, then arguably Citizen Sousveillance did not
fulfill its role as a defense mechanism. Alternatively, if the police did not use excessive force
while protesters were filming, then we would not have ultimate confirmation that the brutality
was not committed uniquely due to the fact that there were cameras and phones around filming.

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 Talking to Mídia NINJA members, I asked if they believed that recording protests could
have prevented police forces from using force excessively. Their answers fell into such paradox.
Some said it might have prevented violence – but it is hard to be sure without a doubt that
excessive force was not used due to the sousveillance aspect. Some said it did not prevent
violence and abuse, and they have witnessed protesters being attacked by police despite people
recording it. A possible way to have a better idea would be to analyze a considerable number of
protests, and verify which ones ended up with some sort of confrontation between police and
protesters. However, not even a qualitative study like that, if feasible, would bring a definitive
answer, as the variables in a protest are countless.

Also, it would not be very reasonable to assume that police forces willingly used brutality
against protesters, because they were being filmed. Therefore, the only conclusion is that the
efficiency, as in any other defense tactics or mechanism, has a maximum reach, and it is not
100% effective. The unanimous answer from Mídia NINJA members, though, is the fact that
when sousveillance is employed in a protest, at a greater or lower level, it changes the behavior
of authorities and protesters alike.

An example of Citizen Sousveillance that actually revealed abuse by authorities is what

became known as the Balta case. In Brazil, it is not uncommon for undercover police officers to
infiltrate a protest and start a riot, so the uniformed police, or the riot police, have a reason to
disperse the crowd with tear gas, bombs, and rubber bullets. The Balta case happened in 2016,
when one of these undercover officers known as P2 was caught starting the riot. This one officer
was part of the army intelligence forces, and he was responsible for the arrest of 18 people
during a protest against former president Michel Temer, who took office after Worker’s Party
Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment. He infiltrated social movements, especially through the popular
dating service mobile application Tinder. Once connected with people, he would attend protests
with them and start riots. Because he was in protests with social movements, and because they
were being recorded, the protesters had no doubt about him being behind these riots. After being
discovered, his case was sent to court, but he was found not guilty (Rossi, 2018).

To conclude this chapter, I should note that there are still many questions to be asked and
analyzed. The basis used to sustain the argument in favor of Citizen Sousveillance can and
should be explored further. The privacy issue is unresolved – one must wonder whether a

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resolution is even possible. And the expansion of the use of social media tends to be an even
bigger part of this discussion. This question tags along with the debate of the number of people
in a protest versus online. Mídia NINJA acknowledges the importance of both, and it would be
fair to assume that at this stage the two sorts of activism complement rather than rival each other
– though street protest will never become obsolete. Finally, the use of Citizen Sousveillance can
indeed change the reality of a protest. It can and was used to free innocent people, and it is used
to raise awareness about certain agendas that can no longer be hidden and controlled by few
actors in society.

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5 – Conclusion and final analysis

This thesis aimed to further our understanding of sousveillance. When I set out to write a
thesis, I was immersed in the outcomes of two major events that happened in 2013: 1. the
unprecedented street protests that took place in Brazil, as examined, due to many different
factors, and 2. the case of Edward Snowden, the NSA contractor that revealed to the world the
extent of America’s mass surveillance. These two cases were connected, at least from my
perspective, because both were embedded in the study of veillances, or could be analyzed
through such lenses. In Brazil, while the biggest protests in the country’s 21st century history
were happening, people were sharing videos recorded on smartphones, and these videos were
impacting national policy – for example when congress rejected bill 3718. And the Snowden case
showed us how extensive mass surveillance perpetrated by the Five Eyes Allies was, and how it
captured even global leaders. It also revealed how the manipulation of data and our online
behavior could be so powerful. Backed by these two major events, I dove into the field of
surveillance, and I came across extremely interesting material. However, soon after, I realized
that there were unexplored areas or gaps in the literature that could be further developed. Hence,
I decided to combine some aspects of the studies of the veillances, like sousveillance, with a
study of social movement activism in Brazil, and in particular the case study of Mídia NINJA.
Also, as a background, I added how sousveillance in protests can be used as a nonviolent
method, creating a new concept I call Citizen Sousveillance.

One of the primary goals of my thesis was to fill a gap that I felt would benefit the entire
community that studies surveillance. When I engaged in the process of research, I noticed that
the study of sousveillance could be further developed. Sousveillance was more alive than ever.
Although we can track back the use of sousveillance as far as the American Civil War at least, as
per Browne (2015), new dynamics of cheaper access to technology, and better infrastructure that
provides better internet connections to more people could substantially resignify how
sousveillance works. Gasnascia (2010) proposes that we live in a generalized sousveillance

Bill 37 (Proposta de Emenda Constitucional 37) was a constitutional amendment that would change how crimes
18

were investigated in Brazil. It would withdraw from the Prosecution Office or Public Ministry (responsible for most
white-collar investigation) the right to oversee or perform such investigation, leaving it all for police departments,
which do not have the resources to do so.

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society, which is also only made possible by technology. Fernback (2013) works with the idea of
an informed knowledge society, also based on the technologically-mediated interaction between
people, especially via social media. The fact is that the Multimedia Citizen brought up by Mídia
NINJA can already be considered a reality. A citizen with this sort of technology in hand has the
capability of spreading news as fast as traditional networks, and all of this is ubiquitous and
available in many places around the world, right now. Citizen Sousveillance is supported by, and
contributes to, each one of these perspectives.

Looking back at 2013, and being under the shocking revelations of Edward Snowden,
there was something special about the protests in Brazil that year. It brought to light a very new,
complex, and interesting sociological actor, Mídia NINJA. In chapters 3 and 4, I delved into
what it means to have Mídia NINJA playing a role in Brazil. I presented a piece of their history,
and I discussed how what started as a collective of artists and musicians became an important
organization that helped to insert and strengthen the use of sousveillance in the country. I argued
that the Mídia NINJA case study exemplifies several important dimensions of Citizen
Sousveillance.

One of the limitations of Citizen Sousveillance is, in a way, the same limitation of
sousveillance itself, which is the challenge of balancing the protection aspect of it with the
respect and care for one’s privacy. The blurry line that divides one’s power to use a gadget to
stream a protest, or any other situation for that matter, will always encounter the dilemma of the
right to privacy that everyone should be entitled to. Moreover, the very present debate in
different societies around the world about the legality of protesters wearing masks falls into this
piece. While law enforcement agencies, and the judicial system as a whole, often criticize the
practice, protesters still attempt to remain anonymous in a protest. The complexity of this
discussion involves, on one hand, protesters that wish to stay anonymous due to personal
reasons, as well as protesters that wish to remain anonymous due to the fact they use civil
disobedience as a way to protest. On the other hand, there are the law enforcement agencies that
wish to have the control, and the possibility to hold protesters accountable for any “misconduct”
in protests. Therefore, the use of sousveillance, or Citizen Sousveillance can, in a way, work
against protesters. The conversation about privacy in public spaces, its legality, and practicality,
has to be analyzed from different perspectives. It is a debate that is not settled, not even by

107
groups like Mídia NINJA, as explored in chapter 4. An extra layer of complexity to this debate
was added in 2020, with the new COVID-19 pandemic. Protests in Brazil, and most notably, the
Black Lives Matter protests in the United States that sprawled all around the world, counted
many protesters wearing masks to prevent the spread of the virus.

In this thesis, I have illustrated the key dimensions of Citizen Sousveillance. Many
veillances have been used to monitor, inspect, and oppress certain communities in society. With
recent developments and cheaper access to technology, this is a scenario that is changing. The
21st-century use of sousveillance is heavily based on this accessibility to technology. Citizen
Sousveillance names a specific aspect of sousveillance, which is its use in a protest setting.
Along with the research, and after analyzing the interviews conducted with Mídia NINJA
members, and reviewing their online exposure, the following dimensions were identified. First,
Citizen Sousveillance was used as a nonviolent defense mechanism in protests. Second,
sousveillance could be theorized as a way to report a more raw view of protest. The obvious
asset of having a different perspective of protests became a reality. Besides that, one of Mídia
NINJA’s main battles, which is to free the narrative from powerful actors in society, can also be
read through Citizen Sousveillance. Sharing a different view of a protest – one that will not be
curated by whoever detains the power in such events – certainly aligns with the overall idea of
Citizen Sousveillance. After all, the word Citizen was not chosen by chance. The strength of
citizens fighting a battle together to remain free from manipulation is inspiring. There is also the
dimensions that speaks about the importance of archiving this material, with possible educational
purpose. The material produced with the use of Citizen Sousveillance can be seen as a way to
collect data, and ultimately, a different perspective of events. In this day and age, the importance
of a broad perception of how history happened can be paramount to how future generations base
their knowledge, understanding, and even policies about protests. And lastly, that can be more
explored, and has significant contribution to the field – the virtual accessibility Citizen
Sousveillance gives to protesters.

While research into the veillances and the use of sousveillance in a protest setting can be
illuminating, this thesis also made an effort in regards to the understanding of protests through
the lens of Citizen Sousveillance, by adding an extra component: the nonviolent movements, and
nonviolent techniques in general. The research question of this thesis reflects how I intended to

108
join the literature on sousveillance with the literature on nonviolent protest under one roof. I
argue that one of Citizen Sousveillance’s uses is as a defense mechanism. Nonviolent
movements have their own solid scholarship, and while this thesis fed from the body of literature
of the veillances, adding literature on nonviolence gave the research a unique twist. Although the
subject of surveillance can be found in studies about nonviolence (Martin & Varney, 2003;
Chenoweth et al., 2017), it is not possible to find a more direct connection between studies of
nonviolence and sousveillance. One uniqueness of this thesis is precisely the fact that it seems to
be the first one to make that connection. I argue, then, that Citizen Sousveillance should be
added to the list of methods of nonviolent actions elaborated by Gene Sharp (1973). The current
198 methods, which can be found in the appendix of this thesis, could be expanded to include
Citizen Sousveillance as its 199th. This would grow the list of methods to 199 (it currently
describes 198 methods of nonviolent protest, persuasion, and social noncooperation). And, it
seems most fitting to add Citizen Sousveillance at number 50, within the Public Assemblies sub-
category of methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion

This thesis addressed how the use of sousveillance can be employed in protests with the
intent of being used as a defense mechanism. It argued that Citizen Sousveillance can change the
reality of protest, perhaps with the effect of making violent repression less possible. Mídia
NINJA was used as a case study to substantiate this claim, and the concept of nonviolence was
added as a way to demonstrate how Citizen Sousveillance can be considered a method of
nonviolent action.

5.1 What is the future of Citizen Sousveillance?

Lastly, it feels important to briefly speculate about the future of Citizen Sousveillance.
From the beginning of the writing of this thesis, much has changed. We saw that the American
government has not pardoned Snowden; we saw a far-right government elected in Brazil; and we
saw that the 2013 protests gave way to an extremely polarized society. This polarized society
came to the point of having different and divided protests – the ones in favor of “left” agendas,
and the ones in favor of “right” agendas. Nonetheless, the importance of the endless battle for a
fairer society continues. Protests are a vivid part of democracies all around the world, and, again,

109
the use of technologies becomes more accessible everywhere, every day. That alone makes the
use of Citizen Sousveillance still incipient, and with great possibilities to be used, adapted,
transformed and resignified in the future.

As for Mídia NINJA, it continues to carry out extremely important work when it comes
to portraying a truth that is different from the mainstream narratives. Mídia NINJA keeps its
journey towards the “O empoderamento das pessoas a partir das tecnologias de comunicação”19
(Interviewee #4, 2018). However, the political determination is the core matter that will bring
considerable changes to society as a whole. One of the interviewees talks about that when asked
how he sees the future of Mídia NINJA

Ha várias motivações políticas que vão fazer com que a gente chegue no futuro que a
gente está querendo – mais solidário, mais coletivo, mais colaborativo. Não é só o poder
da comunicação, e o poder das tecnologias de comunicação que vão trazer isso. E também
não é só a Mídia NINJA, que vai fazer com que isso aconteça (Interviewee #2, 2018).20

However, it is also added by the interviewee that

Mais pessoas conseguindo entrar nos papeis, e nas institucionalidades, vai fazer com que
mais pessoas consigam ter uma mobilidade urbana, e uma mobilidade social para poder
participar mais das mobilizações sociais e das mobilizações de rua. O ideal é fazer com
que mais pessoas tenham o poder e protagonismo de narrativa de fato (Interviewee #2,
2018).21

The power of narrative is the foundation of Mídia NINJA’s actions. Their main agenda,
empowered by the use of Citizen Sousveillance in protests, is to give a different narrative to
events that concern and impact marginalized communities in Brazilian society. Citizen
Sousveillance, which was and still is used by Mídia NINJA, is a part of this complex picture of

19
The empowerment of people through communication technologies.
20
There are many political motivations that will make us achieve the future we want – more solidary, more
collectivity, more collaboration. It is not only the power of communication, and the power of communication
technologies that will bring this future. Also, it is not only Mídia NINJA that will make that happen.
21
More people having access to roles within the institutional structures, will make more people achieve urban
mobility, and social mobility, being able to take part in social and street mobilization. Ideally, more people should
have the power and protagonism when it comes to a narrative.

110
how society changes constantly, and how protests are part of, and a driving force for, these
changes.

This thesis focused on how Citizen Sousveillance can be used. The five dimensions of
Citizen Sousveillance identified here can form a foundation to help guide future research on this
topic. The use of new technologies in protests seems inevitable, and just as inevitable is the new
stance from police forces when confronted with sousveillance. These dynamics will always
evolve, the same way that the concept of Citizen Sousveillance also will.

111
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Appendix A

Gene Sharp’s 198 nonviolent methods

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION

Formal Statements
1. Public Speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions
4. Signed public statements
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions
Communications with a Wider Audience
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
12. Skywriting and earthwriting
Group Representations
13. Deputations
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
16. Picketing
17. Mock elections
Symbolic Public Acts
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
20. Prayer and worship
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
24. Symbolic lights
25. Displays of portraits
26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names
28. Symbolic sounds
29. Symbolic reclamations
30. Rude gestures
Pressures on Individuals
31. “Haunting” officials
32. Taunting officials

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 33. Fraternization
34. Vigils
Drama and Music
35. Humorous skits and pranks
36. Performances of plays and music
37. Singing
Processions
38. Marches
39. Parades
40. Religious processions
41. Pilgrimages
42. Motorcades
Honoring the Dead
43. Political mourning
44. Mock funerals
45. Demonstrative funerals
46. Homage at burial places
Public Assemblies
47. Assemblies of protest or support
48. Protest meetings
49. Camouflaged meetings of protest
50. Teach-ins
Withdrawal and Renunciation
51. Walk-outs
52. Silence
53. Renouncing honors
54. Turning one’s back

THE METHODS OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION

Ostracism of Persons
55. Social boycott
56. Selective social boycott
57. Lysistratic nonaction
58. Excommunication
59. Interdict

Noncooperation with Social Events, Customs, and Institutions

60. Suspension of social and sports activities
61. Boycott of social affairs
62. Student strike
63. Social disobedience
64. Withdrawal from social institutions

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Withdrawal from the Social System
65. Stay-at-home
66. Total personal noncooperation
67. “Flight” of workers
68. Sanctuary
69. Collective disappearance
70. Protest emigration (hijrat)

THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS

Actions by Consumers
71. Consumers’ boycott
72. Nonconsumption of boycotted goods
73. Policy of austerity
74. Rent withholding
75. Refusal to rent
76. National consumers’ boycott
77. International consumers’ boycott
Action by Workers and Producers
78. Workmen’s boycott
79. Producers’ boycott
Action by Middlemen
80. Suppliers’ and handlers’ boycott
Action by Owners and Management
81. Traders’ boycott
82. Refusal to let or sell property
83. Lockout
84. Refusal of industrial assistance
85. Merchants’ “general strike”
Action by Holders of Financial Resources
86. Withdrawal of bank deposits
87. Refusal to pay fees, dues, and assessments
88. Refusal to pay debts or interest
89. Severance of funds and credit
90. Revenue refusal
91. Refusal of a government’s money
Action by Governments
92. Domestic embargo
93. Blacklisting of traders
94. International sellers’ embargo
95. International buyers’ embargo
96. International trade embargo

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THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: THE STRIKE

Symbolic Strikes
97. Protest strike
98. Quickie walkout (lightning strike)
Agricultural Strikes
99. Peasant strike
100. Farm Workers’ strike
Strikes by Special Groups
101. Refusal of impressed labor
102. Prisoners’ strike
103. Craft strike
104. Professional strike
Ordinary Industrial Strikes
105. Establishment strike
106. Industry strike
107. Sympathetic strike
Restricted Strikes
108. Detailed strike
109. Bumper strike
110. Slowdown strike
111. Working-to-rule strike
112. Reporting “sick” (sick-in)
113. Strike by resignation
114. Limited strike
115. Selective strike
Multi-Industry Strikes
116. Generalized strike
117. General strike
Combination of Strikes and Economic Closures
118. Hartal
119. Economic shutdown

THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION

Rejection of Authority
120. Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
121. Refusal of public support
122. Literature and speeches advocating resistance
Citizens’ Noncooperation with Government
123. Boycott of legislative bodies
124. Boycott of elections
125. Boycott of government employment and positions
126. Boycott of government depts., agencies, and other bodies

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 127. Withdrawal from government educational institutions
128. Boycott of government-supported organizations
129. Refusal of assistance to enforcement agents
130. Removal of own signs and placemarks
131. Refusal to accept appointed officials
132. Refusal to dissolve existing institutions
Citizens’ Alternatives to Obedience
133. Reluctant and slow compliance
134. Nonobedience in absence of direct supervision
135. Popular nonobedience
136. Disguised disobedience
137. Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
138. Sitdown
139. Noncooperation with conscription and deportation
140. Hiding, escape, and false identities
141. Civil disobedience of “illegitimate” laws
Action by Government Personnel
142. Selective refusal of assistance by government aides
143. Blocking of lines of command and information
144. Stalling and obstruction
145. General administrative noncooperation
146. Judicial noncooperation
147. Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents
148. Mutiny
Domestic Governmental Action
149. Quasi-legal evasions and delays
150. Noncooperation by constituent governmental units
International Governmental Action
151. Changes in diplomatic and other representations
152. Delay and cancellation of diplomatic events
153. Withholding of diplomatic recognition
154. Severance of diplomatic relations
155. Withdrawal from international organizations
156. Refusal of membership in international bodies
157. Expulsion from international organizations

THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION

Psychological Intervention
158. Self-exposure to the elements
159. The fast
a) Fast of moral pressure
b) Hunger strike
c) Satyagrahic fast
160. Reverse trial
161. Nonviolent harassment

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Physical Intervention
162. Sit-in
163. Stand-in
164. Ride-in
165. Wade-in
166. Mill-in
167. Pray-in
168. Nonviolent raids
169. Nonviolent air raids
170. Nonviolent invasion
171. Nonviolent interjection
172. Nonviolent obstruction
173. Nonviolent occupation
Social Intervention
174. Establishing new social patterns
175. Overloading of facilities
176. Stall-in
177. Speak-in
178. Guerrilla theater
179. Alternative social institutions
180. Alternative communication system
Economic Intervention
181. Reverse strike
182. Stay-in strike
183. Nonviolent land seizure
184. Defiance of blockades
185. Politically motivated counterfeiting
186. Preclusive purchasing
187. Seizure of assets
188. Dumping
189. Selective patronage
190. Alternative markets
191. Alternative transportation systems
192. Alternative economic institutions
Political Intervention
193. Overloading of administrative systems
194. Disclosing identities of secret agents
195. Seeking imprisonment
196. Civil disobedience of “neutral” laws
197. Work-on without collaboration
198. Dual sovereignty and parallel government

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