Show More security comes come with tempered actions Lynne Duke The Washington Post Dont Don't look now Somebody's watching But you knew that didn't you How could you not Its It's been apparent for years that were we're being watched and monitored as a's as we traverse airports and train stations as we drive train fly surf the Web mail e-mail talk on the phone get the morning coffee visit the doctor go to the bank go goto goto goto to work word shop for groceries shop for shoes buy a TV walk down the street Cameras electronic card re readers ders and transponders are ubiquitous And in that parallel virtual universe data miners are busily and constantly culling our cyber selves Is anywhere safe from the watchers the trackers Is it impossible to just be let alone There in that quintessentially public space the Mall came Michael Thrasher 43 an ordinary guy just strolling on a lovely recent day We found him near an entrance to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial where a tower-high tower surveillance camera loomed overhead Thrasher didn't immediately see it But when asked his feelings about privacy and surveillance he said You just feel like theres there's always someone looking at you Hes He's a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport so he knows that hes he's watched at the workplace Since Sept 11 2001 transit hubs have been laden with layer upon layer of surveillance cameras i. i i v r biometrics sensors sensors ev even even a a new thing called the behavior d detection n o officer r. r And its it's good Thrasher says that someone's watching out for the bad guys Look what kind of world were we're in now But Thrasher doesn't like the way his private space is shrinking Like surfing the Web and knowing his data trail can easily be mined If Im I'm not doing anything illegal why is it any of their business Like being on the telephone and believing it could be tapped In Inthe Inthe Inthe the back of my mind Im I'm thinking anybody could be listening to whatever I say And just going about ones one's d daily ily business walking down the street going to the market It just feels like theres there's no privacy now at all when youre you're doing public stuff Suddenly he sees the camera his exclamation point and throws his hands in the air A Watching Culture All this surveillance monitoring and eavesdropping is changing our culture affecting peoples people's behavior altering their sense of freedom of autonomy That's what the experts say that surveillance robs people of their public anonymity And they go even further saying that pressure for conformity is endemic in a surveillance culture that creativity and uniqueness become its casualties While there are benefits to surveillance the sense of security the ability to view crime scenes the loss of autonomy represents the downside of our surveillance-heavy surveillance culture says Jeffrey Rosen a George Washington University law professor and author of The Naked Crowd Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age You need a sphere of immunity from surveillance to be yourself and do things that people in a a. a free society take for for granted s' s says says' ys Rosen Things like going to the t park or of or to the rn market The loss of such autonomy is one of the amorphous costs of having a world where theres there's no immunity from surveillance This will transform the nature of public spaces in ways we could hardly imagine he says People obviously behave differently when they're unsure about whether they're being observed We know this from personal experience Im I'm not at all suggesting that Orwell's 1984 is around the comer corner he continues But things will change and some of the changes will be good and others will be bad Christopher a University of Florida law professor writes in his upcoming book Privacy at Risk Anonymity in public promotes freedom of action and an open society Lack of public anonymity promotes conformity and an oppressive society After all who is Big Brother looking for in all this surveillance People who are different who do not fit a preconceived norm nonn In their insistent way those public digital message boards that urge us to Report Suspicious Activity are pushing a sense of that norm In effect they call upon ordinary people with no training or expertise to become and enforce a code of conduct an expected norm nonn based on what might seem to them suspicious or just different We watch what we say on the phone Where once it was just a joke now it itis itis itis is real You never know if you might be tapped We Ve dont don't joke about bombs or hijacking especially not in public Not that wed we'd want to mind you but who remembers the days when it was just a joke In mixed company we dont don't say anything about al that isn't flat out condemnatory And we are aware alas that our library book selections could be added to our possible dossiers as per the USA Patriot Act How far can it go goVe We Ve have only to recall the 2006 film The Lives of Others which portrays how the Stasi of Communist East Germany deployed hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to spy on their fellow citizens and turn them in The work of the new b behavior havior detection officers BOO watching us at airports is all about enforcing a norm Part of the Transportation Security Administration the officers are trained to detect extremely nervous deceitful or unusual travelers by observing travelers' travelers facial expressions and their behavior In training the BOOs we teach that everybody's been in an airport long enough to know what the norm is says Carl Maccario a program analyst for what the TSA calls SPOT or Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques Theres an expected norm or an expected baseline environment We teach the BOOs in a simplified form to look for anomalous behavior in that environment Being different A big problem Becoming invisible If we know were we're being watched and know there is an expected mode of behavior how does that change our actions Call it anticipatory conformity Shoshana a Harvard social psychologist who has studied information technology for decades coined the phrase in 1988 Applying that concept to the post 9 era says she sees anticipatory conformity all around and expects it to grow even more intense y M. M s. s 4 v vi i Washington Post photo by Bill OLe OLeary O'Leary ry Passengers walking through a public transportation center during a holiday rush may not spot the surveillance equipment but they know its it's there I 1 think the first level of that is we anticipate surveillance and we conform and we do that with awareness she says We know for example when were we're going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or well we'll get nailed and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke Its It's within our awareness to self And that self-censorship self represents a diminution of our freedom We self-censor self she says not only to follow the rules but also to avoid the shame of being publicly singled out Once anticipatory conformity becomes second nature it becomes progressively easier for people to adapt to new impositions on their privacy their freedoms The habit has been set People have internalized the surveillance architecture within their own subconscious We have yet to reach the level of surveillance of say the ubiquitous retina- retina scanning in the movie Minority Report But the technology is changing quickly Just because youre you're paranoid doesn't mean no noone's noone's ones one's watching |