A/HRC/29/37 58. Just as the preventive impact of closed-circuit television works best where there is cognition of its presence, some argue that body-worn cameras deter violations because of their institutionalized use, whereby the police must issue a warning that incidents are being recorded, which creates cognition of surveillance among both police and civilians. 23 59. Concerns exist around possible violations of the right to privacy that body-worn cameras may generate, leading to suggestions that they be turned off upon entering a home or when speaking with victims. Others consider that individual officers should not have control over their cameras, so as to reduce opportunities for selective documentation. 24 Concerns also exist with respect to access to and secure storage of the footage. Although questions remain to be answered, many feel that the deterrent effect of police body-worn cameras warrants further deployment. 25 Linked with the potential advantages of the police recording themselves is the equally important protection of citizens’ right to record the police. 60. If body-worn cameras bring surveillance to the micro level of interpersonal interactions, at the opposite end of the spectrum is the surveillance potential of remote sensing imagery, either from satellites or drones. Initiatives such as the Satellite Sentinels Project and Amnesty International’s Eyes on Darfur campaign have highlighted the possibilities of such mechanisms. Raising awareness among potential perpetrators that vulnerable areas are being watched could deter violations, or at least those that are visible remotely.26 However, such surveillance is expensive and can involve rather arbitrary decisions about which communities or places to monitor. As with other surveillance methods, the deterrent effect of the technology is connected to both awareness of its existence (making the accompanying media campaign significant) and the credible threat of punitive measures.27 61. Those surveillance methods use the threat of accountability in the future to condition behaviour in the present. It is potentially also possible to exploit the capacities of ICTs to use information from the (recent) past to influence what happens in the present. Social media analysis could predict hotspots of human rights violations in real time. For example, the Hatebase database collects data on the vocabulary and incidence of hate speech on social media based on the correlation between hate speech and the risk of genocide and is used to predict regional violence.28 62. There are limitations, however, to the possibilities of ICTs as early warning systems. Although “big data mining”, i.e. collecting large amounts of data, has a record of being 23 24 25 26 27 28 The effect of cognition of surveillance was perhaps most memorably elaborated by Jeremy Bentham, but its criminological effects, as well as its potential dangers, have not been technologically realized until recently. Bracken Stockley “Public support for police body cameras – but who controls on/off switch?” The justice gap (March 2014), http://thejusticegap.com/2014/03/body-worn-video-cameras-scrutiny/. Robert Muggah, “Why police body cameras are taking off, even after Eric Garner’s death”, IPI Global Observatory (11 December 2014), http://theglobalobservatory.org/2014/12/ police-body-cameras-eric-garner/; see also Alexandra Mateescu, Alex Rosenblat and Danah Boyd, “Police body-worn cameras”, Data & Society Research Institute Working Paper (February 2015), www.datasociety.net/pubs/dcr/PoliceBodyWornCameras.pdf. Nathaniel A. Raymond and others, “While we watched: assessing the impact of the satellite sentinel project”, Georgetown Journal of International Affairs (26 July 2013), http://journal.georgetown.edu/ while-we-watched-assessing-the-impact-of-the-satellite-sentinel-project-by-nathaniel-a-raymond-etal/. Patrick Meier, “Will using ʻlive’ satellite imagery to prevent war in the Sudan actually work?” iRevolutions (30 December 2010), http://irevolution.net/2010/12/30/sat-sentinel-project/. See http://www.hatebase.org/. 11