Sunday, September 03, 2006
Private losses, yours and mine
I've been thinking back to that Camelot time, before Bush, before 9/11. One thing stands out for me as the most broad-ranging change from that time: the loss of the unobserved life.
Unless you live in the countryside, several miles from a village, it is probably impossible now to have a private life, a life in which what you do is your affair. I'm not talking about the habitual gossip that is at the core of social matters in small towns, but the relentless mechanical gathering of observation and fact by government that is now connected from the lowest to highest levels. Even in the countryside, if you use the public library, you risk government observation of your choice of reading material, without your consent or knowledge. If you write mystery novels and want to do research on various methods of killing people, or historical events that involve explosion or subterfuge, you might be better off finding a friend who owns a lot of books than going to the hitherto sacred realm of the public library and doing legitimate research -- better off, that is, if you treasure your privacy.
Run a stop sign in Idaho, and your license plate is captured along with your photo, and easily accessible in Florida where you didn't pay a parking ticket. Try to disappear from a bad marriage (for whatever reason) by moving out of state and show up on some security camera elsewhere, which makes you easily trackable by anyone with access to the photo. Your phone is tapped, including your cell phone, by faceless government workers and machines that store everything you say, regardless of context -- "It's da bomb!" as well as "Oh, that performance bombed" could easily be triggers these days to start recording -- without your consent or knowledge. Your every keystroke can be captured by software such as this, whether you're writing reports or answering email, or answering a silly online poll or planning a family reunion.
I'm not arguing with the genuine law-enforcement purpose involved here. I'm looking at this from the other direction, from the viewpoint of a private person. In all this haste to capture information on people, whether it's personally tagged or simply abstracted into a database, there's little to no consideration of what is being lost here -- the integrity of personal privacy, the simple liberty of the unrecorded life. Instead, we have the presumption of wrongdoing implicit throughout everyday life, replacing the presumption of innocence before proven guilt.
Back then, during Camelot, on a nice spring day I could take a book down to the National Mall and sit on a park bench under an elm tree. I could watch people playing frisbee on the lawn, or running, or walking their dogs. I could practice sketching the red sandstone Smithsonian Castle or the other beautiful buildings in the area. Now? Depending on the status of the alert level, if I were to sit there sketching I'd be inviting a visit from the nearest FBI agent to ask my designs upon the safety of that building. But there's no reason to go there now to sit, with the grass blocked by fences to keep people from using it, and the constant awareness of security cameras everywhere. It's like trying to be private in the middle of a Peeping Toms convention. Tourists, of course, don't notice a thing; they think this is normal, or at least within the definition of normal that they ascribe to DC or any other largish city, when it isn't normal at all.
If I walk down the street now in any city, surveillance cameras watch me and record my every movement from one place to another, block to block, storefront to storefront. Suppose I want to check my wallet to make sure I have enough change to get a cup of coffee at the sidewalk stand. I can't see all the cameras; there's no way for me to know exactly who's looking over my shoulder. How do I check my money (a legitimate private activity) without letting unknown people see some or all of the numbers on my credit cards? With the rise in credit card fraud in this country, why hasn't anyone asked how many people have been looking over the shoulders of the people whose identities are stolen? And, with the recent consolidation and coordination between departments from the local village cop all the way to the FBI and CIA, there's an awful lot of people who have access to all this information.
Suppose, as I'm walking down the street, I'm talking with a friend about a personal issue; what guarantee do I have that what I say isn't being picked up by microphones, or captured on camera by someone who is skilled at lipreading? Perhaps we were talking on the street because there was nowhere else to speak privately enough, in terms of family and friends and colleagues -- because offices are under surveillance now as much as streets are, and there's no way to know if one or more of those cameras is aimed at your urban apartment's windows. How private are our words? When even washrooms are surveilled, how much privacy do we have in our most despairing moments?
It's no wonder the stress level in DC and elsewhere in this country has gone sky-high. What ordinary people need these days is a way off the merry-go-round, a space in which they can be themselves without the stress of being watched, without constantly feeling the unknown eyes on the back of the neck. I can count on one hand how many people I know who are not on antidepressants or mood enhancers, and have a few fingers left over, and I can't help thinking that this constant observation, this sense of always being at the wrong end of the microscope, is contributing to the everpresent stress.
I suppose the question has to be asked: how much do you trust the police? My answer is that I don't know them. There are a lot of police out there -- nine or so organizations that I can think of offhand, with varying and overlapping jurisdictions, such as DC cops, Montgomery and Arlington and Prince George's county police, state troopers in Maryland and Virginia, National Park police, military police at the Pentagon, Capitol Police, security details at official buildings and so on. I don't know the vast majority of them. I have no idea how seriously they take their sworn oaths to uphold the law. I have no idea whether they can be trusted not to use what they see to their personal advantage on days when people's charge card numbers are easily seen, or how often they might tune in to private conversations of private individuals for their own amusement. I've been told it happens. I don't like thinking that my life is someone else's Truman Show.
The thing is, it's not just something that happens in DC now. It's something that happens where you are, wherever you are. Flashpasses allow vehicles to be tracked wherever they go on major roads. Traffic observation cameras can make sure your whereabouts are known in Kansas and Arizona as much as in Michigan or Minnesota or Connecticut. Wherever you are, you can be found without even using a charge card. It's probably a little more likely in the west than in the east in some ways, because the cities are more recent and the technology is newer, so there's less difficulty in upgrading from minimal to maximal surveillance. Don't think that because you're out in the country you entirely escape this; it's possible to zoom in on Google Earth and see which roofs were repaired in the neighborhood, and that's just the publicly available photos. I understand the resolution on some of the photos we don't see is so good that these letters I'm writing onscreen could be read.
And with the Cheney-Specter surveillance bill that would allow anyone to be spied on officially for up to a year without warrant, what guarantee is there that someone didn't break into your house and install a few bugs and cameras without your consent or knowledge, just because you sat on the subway or bus next to someone they consider suspicious?
So where do you go on a bad day, when you want to be by yourself, when you want not to have official voyeurs cataloguing and chronicling your every move? When you can't go to many public parks without having every footstep recorded? How far is this kind of technology going to erode simple private liberty? Are you certain you aren't being watched now, as you read this, wherever you are? What places are left in which one might be able to live quietly without the ever-present consciousness of being the object of attention of official and faceless voyeurs, whose motives and rules are largely unknown and whose integrity and lack of malice toward those who are observed may be questionable?
The standard reply to all of this, of course, would be to accuse me of being unpatriotic, and a danger to the safety of the entire country. But that's missing the point. I've already conceded, above, that there are valid security issues here. What I'm concerned about are the civil losses. When government at any level undergoes a taking, such as condemning land for public use, it is supposed to provide compensation for what is taken. Through the unvarying and omnipresent eyes of cameras government has taken the liberty of our privacy, the integrity of our ability to live our lives quietly outside of the public eye -- something that was unquestionably ours until six years ago. We have no recourse for seeking compensation; what compensation could there be, for so great a loss?
9/03/2006 11:59:00 AM
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