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On 7 September 2001, a loosely organized network of autonomous groups staged An International Day Against Video Surveillance. Twenty-three groups from eight different countries participated in this action, which (according to the interests of the groups involved) included exhibits, installations, film and video screenings, information tables set up in public places, walking tours and street theatre.

A good deal of the street theatre was staged directly in front of "webcams" (video cameras that periodically or continuously upload images to the Internet) so that these performances could be seen by people all over the world, and not just in one particular location. The use of webcams was also meant to highlight the facts that both the use and the opposition to the use of surveillance cameras in public places are truly international and not limited to just one or two countries or continents.

Just four days after this "International Day Against Video Surveillance," that is, while its participants were still putting together their accounts of what they did on 7 September 2001, a group of terrorists hijacked several commercial airplanes and crashed them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center (WTC), thus killing all of the planes' passengers (and the hijackers themselves) as well as thousands of people who were in the targeted buildings when the planes struck them. Given the "sensitivity" or symbolic power of the locations, the severity of the damage to at least one of them, the large numbers of civilians ("innocent") people killed, and the fact that one of the plane crashes at the WTC and the collapses of both "Twin Towers" took place in front of untold numbers of television cameras, which meant these disasters were watched "live" (and then over and over again on videotape) by hundreds of millions of people -- given all that (and more), it wasn't surprising that the "International Day Against Video Surveillance" was completely upstaged.

What was surprising was the tone and content of the hate-mail that the New York Surveillance Camera Players (SCP-New York) began receiving immediately after 11 September 2001. The group's website was very popular on that fateful day, especially among people who were searching for the phrase "Manhattan webcam." They wanted to find a site that used a webcam to provide live images of the disaster, and what they actually found was a group that used webcams in Manhattan to broadcast anti-surveillance messages. Some of the disappointment clearly turned into anger and righteous indignation.

In response to this hatemail, some of which accused the group of being "traitors," and to post-11 September calls for the use of even more surveillance cameras in public places, the SCP-New York issued a statement, which explained that, despite the attacks or, rather, because of the American government's untenable responses to them, the group was going to continue and even intensify its efforts to remove any and all surveillance cameras from public places.

It is in this same spirit that the SCP-New York has proposed that the follow-up to the first "International Day Against Video Surveillance" be held on the first anniversary of 11 September 2001, and not on 7 September 2002. This relatively modest proposal has already been attacked, and not, as you might think, by people who are in favor of surveillance cameras or the "war on terrorism," that is, by people who are happy to give up "some" of their freedom for a little more security. The attacks have come from anti-surveillance activists -- some of them participants in last year's performances -- who are afraid that, if the day is moved to 11 September 2002, the international movement against video surveillance will be ignored by the mass media and/or "discredited" in the eyes of potentially sympathetic viewers. These activists fear that any and all anti-surveillance actions taken on that day will be seen as "disrespectful" to "the dead," that is, to the people who died on 11 September 2001.

Our response is simple: it is the Bush Administration that has been and continues to be "disrespectful to the dead." It was the Bush Administration that, despite warnings from all over the world, failed to protect the occupants of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon from attack. It was the Bush Administration that used these attacks as justification for attacking and occupying Afghanistan, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, which is also the birthplace of Osama Bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist organization thought to have ordered and financed the attacks on the USA. It is the Bush Administration that has used "the war on terrorism" as the pretext for repealing the Bill of Rights, and it is the Bush Administration that now intends to carry out first-strike attacks on an ever-growing list of countries that had nothing to do with 11 September 2001.

And so, if we speak out against the Bush Administration and perform against video surveillance on 11 September 2001, we will actually be showing "the dead" the utmost respect: an unwavering commitment to the truth.

-- the New York Surveillance Camera Players, 28 June 2002.