Outlaw Josey Wales
08-21-2007, 2:11 PM
Electronic surveillance destroys our privacy, but few seem to mind
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Largely unmonitored and apparently ineffective in solving any crimes, those video surveillance cameras in San Francisco housing projects have become symbols of futility and waste. The intrusive Big Brother implications of cameras peering into our daily lives were ominous enough. But for many readers who responded to The Chronicle's recent stories about the cameras, the real crime is the money spent on something that simply doesn't work.
However it plays out, the controversy opens a window on a much larger truth: Americans are being closely and constantly watched, carefully scrutinized and meticulously monitored as never before. From government wiretapping, to Google cameras that offer up street-level views of private houses around the world, to mighty digital data banks that record and store everything from real estate loan applications to pizza purchases, the machinery of observation and analysis has become powerful and pervasive.
And how do members of the public react to all this unsought attention? In most cases, they either take it for granted or feel reassured. To a considerable extent, whether through willing acquiescence or willful innocence, people seem surprisingly ready to accept what would have been seen, not so long ago, as alarming invasions of privacy.
Indeed, in an age that empowers anyone with a cell phone camera and an Internet connection, we're all free to participate in this surge of information gathering and revelation. All of us can be spied on and engage in some high-visibility spying of our own.
"People have a desire to be protected," says Oscar Gandy, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "We have this expectation that technology will solve the problem."
Jennifer King, a research specialist at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, believes that "surveillance feels comfortable to some people."
"There's a sense of guardianship, a feeling that someone is watching over me. It counteracts that aura of anonymity in the public space," she says.
Gary Marx was a 1960s UC Berkeley activist and civil libertarian who once took a "sky is falling" view that privacy was gravely endangered; he opposed virtually all intrusions. Today the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus has a more measured approach to the issue.
"Nobody used to check the backgrounds of adults who wanted to work with children," Marx says. "It's appropriate that we do that now. Children are safer because of it." Marx even argues that the problem of identity theft could be substantially controlled if people were willing to absorb the social and ethical costs of encoding more personal and biometric information, including facial topography and eye recognition data.
While calling some aspects of the Bush administration's Patriot Act and other programs predicated on national security "clearly illegal," Marx does not reject them entirely. "History moves in cycles," he says. "In periods of crisis and perceived threat, there is going to be less liberty."
Much of the current scrutiny is out in the open and freely accepted by the public. As the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks approaches, the screening and shoe-removal rituals at airports are generally viewed as prudent if inconvenient measures. Parents might regret that their children must pass through metal detectors on their way into school, but few would object to the presumed increase in safety with fewer weapons in backpacks and lockers.
Other public programs, such as the National Security Agency's wiretaps, are more problematic. Last week, in a San Francisco courtroom, three federal appeals judges appeared to rebuff the administration's request that lawsuits challenging the wiretaps be dismissed.
A key question that historians of early 21st century America will have to confront is the justification for the widespread erosions of privacy. To what degree did 9/11 and the war on terror mandate a fundamental change in the nature of individual freedoms and autonomy? And to what extent were the policies a product of fear-mongering and politically motivated exploitation?
A number of privacy experts believe that the real concerns lie less in the public sphere than they do in the largely unregulated environs of commerce.
"It's a simple fact that private companies can collect information about people in ways the government can't," Robert O'Harrow Jr. wrote in his 2005 book "No Place to Hide." "At the same time, they can't be held accountable for their behavior or their mistakes the way government agencies can."
The Annenberg School's Gandy focuses on the ways in which increasingly sophisticated data banks can be used to discriminate in everything from housing loans to whether a taxi or pizza delivery truck will be dispatched to a particular neighborhood. "People don't understand how information they are giving away at the shopping center in order to get a discount on something can become harmful to them as individuals," he says. "This segmentation and targeting are tearing us apart."
Paul Krassner, the satirist, author and stand-up comic who came to prominence as a journalist and founder of the Realist magazine in the late 1950s, is struck by "blatant" changes in "fearful, control-freak invasions of privacy" in recent years. He recalls an event put on by author Ken Kesey in Bend, Ore., in the 1970s, when "the one constant, across the spectrum from liberal to conservative, was the importance of privacy."
The current zeitgeist shift alarms some observers. "The way we create trust and friendship is by selectively revealing aspects of ourselves to others," says Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, or EPIC, in Washington, D.C. "That's how we form bonds. One thing that is very disturbing about these various systems of surveillance is that they tend to dismantle a lot of the social architecture that foster those connections."
Such uneasiness registers across the culture. One of the most honored foreign films of recent years, the 2006 Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others," depicts the unraveling of a spy operation by the East German secret police in the 1980s. In the ironic climax, the psychologically battered Stasi spy and his prey are hauntingly united. "Surveillance," a recent dystopian novel by Jonathan Raban, is set in a near-future Seattle clouded by police-state tactics. In "1996," novelist Gloria Naylor recounts a partially fictionalized experience from her own childhood of a neighborhood quarrel that escalated into an investigation by the National Security Agency.
Even Google encountered some friction when the company launched its StreetView feature this year. People and places that might not necessarily welcome a worldwide audience were suddenly accessible to anyone. A statement from the company defended the new program: "The imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."
It's a response that bordered on the disingenuous to some. Taking a photograph is one thing. Posting it on the Internet is another. What's strikingly distinct about privacy in the digital age is not only the thoroughness with which it can be penetrated, but the ease of sharing that information widely. In an odd but somehow perversely logical reaction, self-revelatory tools like YouTube and MySpace have flourished. It's as if people were seizing control of their own privacy and serving it up to the public before anyone can seize it away from them. Gandy labels the trend "counter-exhibitionism, since there's no privacy left."
Musing on the broad ramifications of the issue, from a convenience store camera that might help identify the shooter in a holdup to warrantless government wiretaps, Krassner compares invasion of privacy to a hammer. "You can use it to fix something," he says, "or you can use it to give somebody a big bang on the head."
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/21/MNLTRM4TR.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle Sections DatebookCommentaryBay AreaSportsNewsBusiness
Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
Largely unmonitored and apparently ineffective in solving any crimes, those video surveillance cameras in San Francisco housing projects have become symbols of futility and waste. The intrusive Big Brother implications of cameras peering into our daily lives were ominous enough. But for many readers who responded to The Chronicle's recent stories about the cameras, the real crime is the money spent on something that simply doesn't work.
However it plays out, the controversy opens a window on a much larger truth: Americans are being closely and constantly watched, carefully scrutinized and meticulously monitored as never before. From government wiretapping, to Google cameras that offer up street-level views of private houses around the world, to mighty digital data banks that record and store everything from real estate loan applications to pizza purchases, the machinery of observation and analysis has become powerful and pervasive.
And how do members of the public react to all this unsought attention? In most cases, they either take it for granted or feel reassured. To a considerable extent, whether through willing acquiescence or willful innocence, people seem surprisingly ready to accept what would have been seen, not so long ago, as alarming invasions of privacy.
Indeed, in an age that empowers anyone with a cell phone camera and an Internet connection, we're all free to participate in this surge of information gathering and revelation. All of us can be spied on and engage in some high-visibility spying of our own.
"People have a desire to be protected," says Oscar Gandy, professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. "We have this expectation that technology will solve the problem."
Jennifer King, a research specialist at the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, believes that "surveillance feels comfortable to some people."
"There's a sense of guardianship, a feeling that someone is watching over me. It counteracts that aura of anonymity in the public space," she says.
Gary Marx was a 1960s UC Berkeley activist and civil libertarian who once took a "sky is falling" view that privacy was gravely endangered; he opposed virtually all intrusions. Today the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor emeritus has a more measured approach to the issue.
"Nobody used to check the backgrounds of adults who wanted to work with children," Marx says. "It's appropriate that we do that now. Children are safer because of it." Marx even argues that the problem of identity theft could be substantially controlled if people were willing to absorb the social and ethical costs of encoding more personal and biometric information, including facial topography and eye recognition data.
While calling some aspects of the Bush administration's Patriot Act and other programs predicated on national security "clearly illegal," Marx does not reject them entirely. "History moves in cycles," he says. "In periods of crisis and perceived threat, there is going to be less liberty."
Much of the current scrutiny is out in the open and freely accepted by the public. As the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks approaches, the screening and shoe-removal rituals at airports are generally viewed as prudent if inconvenient measures. Parents might regret that their children must pass through metal detectors on their way into school, but few would object to the presumed increase in safety with fewer weapons in backpacks and lockers.
Other public programs, such as the National Security Agency's wiretaps, are more problematic. Last week, in a San Francisco courtroom, three federal appeals judges appeared to rebuff the administration's request that lawsuits challenging the wiretaps be dismissed.
A key question that historians of early 21st century America will have to confront is the justification for the widespread erosions of privacy. To what degree did 9/11 and the war on terror mandate a fundamental change in the nature of individual freedoms and autonomy? And to what extent were the policies a product of fear-mongering and politically motivated exploitation?
A number of privacy experts believe that the real concerns lie less in the public sphere than they do in the largely unregulated environs of commerce.
"It's a simple fact that private companies can collect information about people in ways the government can't," Robert O'Harrow Jr. wrote in his 2005 book "No Place to Hide." "At the same time, they can't be held accountable for their behavior or their mistakes the way government agencies can."
The Annenberg School's Gandy focuses on the ways in which increasingly sophisticated data banks can be used to discriminate in everything from housing loans to whether a taxi or pizza delivery truck will be dispatched to a particular neighborhood. "People don't understand how information they are giving away at the shopping center in order to get a discount on something can become harmful to them as individuals," he says. "This segmentation and targeting are tearing us apart."
Paul Krassner, the satirist, author and stand-up comic who came to prominence as a journalist and founder of the Realist magazine in the late 1950s, is struck by "blatant" changes in "fearful, control-freak invasions of privacy" in recent years. He recalls an event put on by author Ken Kesey in Bend, Ore., in the 1970s, when "the one constant, across the spectrum from liberal to conservative, was the importance of privacy."
The current zeitgeist shift alarms some observers. "The way we create trust and friendship is by selectively revealing aspects of ourselves to others," says Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center, or EPIC, in Washington, D.C. "That's how we form bonds. One thing that is very disturbing about these various systems of surveillance is that they tend to dismantle a lot of the social architecture that foster those connections."
Such uneasiness registers across the culture. One of the most honored foreign films of recent years, the 2006 Oscar-winning "The Lives of Others," depicts the unraveling of a spy operation by the East German secret police in the 1980s. In the ironic climax, the psychologically battered Stasi spy and his prey are hauntingly united. "Surveillance," a recent dystopian novel by Jonathan Raban, is set in a near-future Seattle clouded by police-state tactics. In "1996," novelist Gloria Naylor recounts a partially fictionalized experience from her own childhood of a neighborhood quarrel that escalated into an investigation by the National Security Agency.
Even Google encountered some friction when the company launched its StreetView feature this year. People and places that might not necessarily welcome a worldwide audience were suddenly accessible to anyone. A statement from the company defended the new program: "The imagery is no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street."
It's a response that bordered on the disingenuous to some. Taking a photograph is one thing. Posting it on the Internet is another. What's strikingly distinct about privacy in the digital age is not only the thoroughness with which it can be penetrated, but the ease of sharing that information widely. In an odd but somehow perversely logical reaction, self-revelatory tools like YouTube and MySpace have flourished. It's as if people were seizing control of their own privacy and serving it up to the public before anyone can seize it away from them. Gandy labels the trend "counter-exhibitionism, since there's no privacy left."
Musing on the broad ramifications of the issue, from a convenience store camera that might help identify the shooter in a holdup to warrantless government wiretaps, Krassner compares invasion of privacy to a hammer. "You can use it to fix something," he says, "or you can use it to give somebody a big bang on the head."
E-mail Steven Winn at swinn@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/08/21/MNLTRM4TR.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle Sections DatebookCommentaryBay AreaSportsNewsBusiness