For example, back in August, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was having coffee at a Starbucks in Malibu when he was spotted by a blogger who took a couple of photos and posted them online. The blogger noted that Newsom was “talking campaign strategy” with someone, but didn’t know who. The pictures came to the attention of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci, who identified that person as political consultant Garry South. Soon political bloggers were having a field day, pointing out that the liberal mayor was meeting with one of the more conservative Democratic consultants around. This is sousveillance at its simplest.

The citizen-journalism project “Off the Bus,” which ultimately attracted thousands of volunteer reporters who posted their work on The Huffington Post during the 2008 election, was sousveillance en masse. Much of their work was too opinionated or first-person oriented to really break news, but Mayhill Fowler’s reporting of Barack Obama’s offhand remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser about “bitter” blue-collar workers at least briefly changed the course of the campaign. And there are numerous examples of bloggers and their readers acting in concert to expose some hidden fact. The coalition of bloggers known as the “Porkbusters” were at the center of an effort to expose which senator had put a secret hold on a bill creating a federal database of government spending, co-sponsored by none other than Barack Obama and Tom Coburn. Porkbusters asked their readers to call their senators, and by this reporting process, discovered that Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was the culprit. Soon thereafter, he released his hold. Likewise, Josh Marshall has frequently asked readers of Talking Points Memo to help him spot local stories that might be part of a larger pattern. It was this technique that helped him piece together the story of the firings of U.S. Attorneys around the country, for which he won the Polk Award.

The World’s A-Twitter

The final trend that is changing the nature of transparency is the rise of what some call the World Live Web. Using everything from mobile phones that can stream video live online to simple text message postings to the micro-blogging service Twitter, people are contributing to a real-time patter of information about what is going on around them. Much of what results is little more than noise, but increasingly sophisticated and simple-to-use filtering tools can turn some of it into information of value.

For example, in just a matter of weeks before the November election in the U.S., a group of volunteer bloggers and Web developers loosely affiliated with the blog I edit, techPresident.com, built a monitoring project called Twitter Vote Report. Voters were encouraged to use Twitter, as well as other tools like iPhones, to post reports on the quality of their voting experience. Nearly twelve thousand reports flowed in, and the result was a real-time picture of election-day complications and wait times that a number of journalistic organizations, including NPR, PBS, and several newspapers, relied on for their reporting.

Nothing to Hide

The question for our leaders, as we head into a world where bottom-up, user-generated transparency is becoming more of a reality, is whether they will embrace this change and show that they have nothing to hide. Will they actively share all that is relevant to their government service with the people who, after all, pay their salaries? Will they trust the public to understand the complexities of that information, instead of treating them like children who can’t handle the truth?

The question for citizens, meanwhile, is, Will we use this new access to information to create a more open and deliberative democracy? Or will citizens just use the Web to play “gotcha” games with politicians, damaging the discourse instead of uplifting it?

“People tend not to trust what is hidden,” write the authors of the November 2008 report by a collection of openness advocates entitled “Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda.” “Transparency is a powerful tool to demonstrate to the public that the government is spending our money wisely, that politicians are not in the pocket of lobbyists and special-interest groups, that government is operating in an accountable manner, and that decisions are made to ensure the safety and protection of all Americans.” In the end, transparency breeds trust. Or rather, transparency enables leaders to earn our trust. In the near future, they may have to, because more and more of us are watching.