Access to image technology supplied by cellular phones and the easiness with which images can be shared through the parallel world of the web have favored ordinary citizens to video and share amateur films denouncing law enforcement practices. This contemporary phenomenon shows not only what has been characterized as a society of spectacle and surveillance, but also what is understood nowadays as citizen journalism. In the light of the speech in interaction studies and from the contribution of the Social Sciences and Social Communication we have tried to examine how these situations in which cellular phones are used as counter surveillance weapons are constructed by interaction. The corpus of this research is comprised by an amateur video that records police officers in action in a slum that has a Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) in Rio de Janeiro. The video records a conflict after the approach made by police officers and all of the participants present in the scene are aware of the recording. It was shared on YouTube, which is currently the world s largest video sharing platform. This case study shows the relationship between control and pleasure, woven in the making and distribution of these images. It also shows how incriminating citizen journalism is practiced. The results lead us to see, at first, the way in which the participation framework reveals how the spectacle is being constructed and demonstrates that the participants are competing for how to edit this spectacle. They also disclose the specificity of this situation of being caught in the act when compared to other surveillance practices already described in the literature. Finally, it demonstrates that this hailed empowerment of citizen journalists, armed with their cameras is not a myth, but has its limitations.