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Why a Surveillance Balloon Is Flying Over London to Protest Surveillance

The balloon-kite hybrid will carry aerial cameras and darknet routers, and release the data to anyone who wants to see it.
Images by the author

When James Bridle picks up my Skype call, his voice is lucid and loud. Its tone gives off a sense of hurriedness, as if the occasion of our interview is merely an interruption to the flow of his work.

Bridle, a prolific and influential writer and publisher, often weds technology and aesthetics to probe technology’s creation of new cultural paradigms. For example, his exploration of surveillance and aerial technologies is the bedrock of Dronestagram, the popular Instagram account which publishes drone’s-eye photographs of foreign terrains decimated by UAV attacks from US and UK military operations.

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Bridle’s works function on a balance of reverence and criticism towards today’s most popular entity: the “network,” that ambiguous mothership of telecommunicated identities, and the way it removes the physicality of our lives and exchanges it for alternatives that are much more powerful, yet ultimately invisible.

When asked how his newest project, "Right To Flight", is manifesting, he responds that it’s going well. He pauses, and then remarks, “It’s quite intense.”

“Surveillance isn’t going away, so the first step is democratizing access to it and making what it’s doing more transparent.”

On June 19, Bridle released a military-grade surveillance balloon into the air above South London. Hosted at the parking-structure-turned-art-space Bold Tendencies, it’s the central part of the work. Until September, the balloon will lift a variety of communications payloads up into the air, such as aerial cameras and darknet routers.

I spoke to Bridle about the purpose of this event, why London is the perfect place for it, and why you'd be wrong to assume his project is actually just another form of surveillance.

Motherboard: What’s the inspiration behind this project? How does it fit with the rest of your work?
James Bridle: It reaches back into the history of ballooning, and looks at the way ballooning started in the 19th century as this utopian project, with incredible balloon empresarios doing dazzling flights over cities.

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In particular, there’s Nadar, a Parisian photographer, who wrote this book called The Right To Fly, which is an incredibly utopian account of what taking to the air will mean for mankind, like bringing an end to all wars.

But of course, what you see is that shortly after Nadar, that vision and technology were very swiftly militarized. Nadar takes the first aerial photographs in Paris in the 1850s, and by the 1870s, he’s organizing the first balloon post out of Paris to relieve the Prussian siege.

Later, balloons really come into their own in the US civil war when first used for reconnaissance and aerial mapping, and that use has kind of continued very strongly ever since.

In particular the balloon I’m using is called a Helikite. It’s half-balloon, half-kite. It’s currently used by the British army for surveillance. It was employed in Afghanistan and Iraq over coalition bases to do military surveillance. But there are other contemporary infrastructures and technologies which have started out in very utopian ways, yet we’ve come to realize they’re incredibly rooted in military and surveillance culture. I’m interested in how we can reclaim those, how we can use them for what might ultimately be more beneficial for the wider society.

So the first thing I’ll be chucking up is a camera, and a router based on OccupyHere, a system developed by Dan Phiffer, which is a local wifi network for sharing information and files. By putting it on a balloon I can radically extend its range—an act which ultimately ties back to my more activist interests.

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This specific Helikite is military grade?
Yes, it’s used by the British Army. It’s also being trialed in the US for monitoring the US-Mexico border. The balloon is quite closely related to the drone in the sense of being an unmanned aerial system, essentially, with a quite similar yet otherwise distanced set of performances that it could be used for.

Drastically cheaper than a drone, as well.
Yeah, but there are interesting issues around that, of course. The price of helium worldwide is currently at an all-time high, in large part because of the increased use of balloons in war zones in the last 10 years. The two major uses of helium are for balloons, which the US Army is the world’s biggest purchaser of, and for cooling and medical equipment, like MRIs and such.

In addition to darknet routers and cameras, what else will the balloon lift with it over the course of its run?
We’re working with a local ham radio group to do ham radio reporting, and civilian-bound radio workshops, and advancing on that to mesh networks. We want to see how far we can send a signal across London to create local area networks, of the kinds that are used in protest situations, but also quite frequently in humanitarian situations.

We’re going to be working with ScanLab, who are a brilliant young architectural and fairly artistic research group in London who do lidar scanning. Lidar is the technology used in Google StreetView, and Google uses it on its self-driving cars. It’s effectively radar, but done with a beam of light that records depth, so you can build up a 3D map of the area.

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How, in your eyes, does this project comment on surveillance without being just another act of surveillance?
I keep catching myself in that exact quandary. How do you make this as open a project as possible? It’s quite easy to make work that’s supposed to be about surveillance but just does more surveillance.

The first thing I’m doing is releasing all of the balloon’s recorded data to anyone who wants to see it. That’s an absolute first step. We’re doing this in a public space, and all the results and as much of the raw material I can possibly upload and share will be available for anyone to access.

Beyond that, I’ll also be giving people direct control over it. I’m working on developing systems so that people can not only access the images but control and request the use and production of images themselves.

We’re working on the assumption that, certainly in London, surveillance isn’t going away, so then the very first step is democratizing access to it and making its gatherings and what it’s doing more transparent.