Inside an NSA Blacksite – Trevor Paglen


Complete video at: fora.tv Artist and author Trevor Paglen describes what he claims to be a San Francisco-based National Security administration “black site” used to monitor telecommunications. —– A Roundtable Discussion of Agency in Surveilled Space: who is watching, who is being watched, who decides which spaces are visible to the camera and which are effectively invisible, off-limits to authorities. The panelists will examine how engineers, artists, and activists intervene in surveillance systems to subvert, invert, and redefine these relationships, and how the principle of “sousveillance” – meaning surveillance from “below,” or watching the watchers – applies. It features artists and engineers who collaborate to produce software and hardware applications that access and visualize data usually obscured from public view; artists whose projects have questioned the rhetoric of surveillance by intervening more playfully in the expected aesthetics or power dynamics; and activists who monitor post-9/11 surveillance by intelligence agencies and its effects on immigrant and dissenting communities – The New School Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, and experimental geographer working out of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. His work involves deliberately blurring the lines between social science, contemporary art, and a host of even more obscure disciplines in order to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to interpret