Tue

Aug 8
2006

Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly

Suburban Mom Embraces The Surveillance Society

Over on Dave Farber's IP list, Greg Brooks sent in an interesting note about a story from the Riverside (CA) Press-Enterprise about how a suburban mom had tracked down the kids who toilet-papered her house. Greg wrote:

  • "She canvassed local stores to see which one had a run on toilet paper.
  • She then got the manager of the store to show her surveillance videos, allowing her to see the personalized letterman's jacket of one of the purchasers, as well as the license plate of the vehicle they got into.
  • Finally, she used a high school yearbook (matched to the school based on the letterman's jacket) and online databases to get the names, phone numbers and addresses of all the teens spotted in the store tapes."

Greg put a negative spin on this, saying "we're pretty far down the road to sheepdom when average citizens start thinking 'well, everything's monitored all the time anyway - let's see if I can make use of that.'" I don't see it that way at all. This "news from the future" story tells us that the vision of David Brin's Transparent Society is starting to come to pass. Brin argues that we need to accept the reality of pervasive surveillance, and just make sure that it is democratized, so that the surveillance is not just by those in positions of power, but of those in power. While the mom in question wasn't "watching the watchers" (a phrase that entered the language with the Roman poet Juvenal nearly 2000 years ago), she was taking the tools of surveillance into her own hands. That's anything but "sheep."

Dylan Tweney made the same point in a followup posting on IP:

As YouTube proves, we are far more adept at watching each other than the government could possibly be. In the future, it's not "Big Brother" that will be watching us, but millions of Little Brothers. Maybe that's a little creepy. On the other hand it can work both ways. And if the surveillance extends to the halls of government (and those who work in government) then we will have an unprecedented level of transparency into the workings of our democracy. We've already got C-SPAN -- what we need now are a hundred thousand webcams all over Washington. Especially in our representatives' offices.

In this regard, see Nikolaj's recent post about theyworkforyou. As I mentioned the other day, we're starting to see some unusual spins on surveillance technology. People adapt. The future changes us.


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Comments: 20

  Frank Shaw [08.08.06 10:39 AM]

Great post. the most interesting things happen at the intersection of tech and society, and we do tend to adapt, mostly in good ways.

fxs

  Carlos [08.08.06 10:43 AM]

"As YouTube proves, we are far more adept at watching each other than the government could possibly be."

It didn't take YouTube to prove this. Think East Germany under Honecker, China during the Cultural Revolution, Russia under Stalin. It's been done before and no good came of it.

  Justin Walters [08.08.06 12:38 PM]

Carlos, do yourself a favor and lookup the word "adept".

  adamsj [08.08.06 03:16 PM]

And if the surveillance extends to the halls of government (and those who work in government) then we will have an unprecedented level of transparency into the workings of our democracy.

And if it doesn't, what then?

  Carlos [08.08.06 04:57 PM]

Justin, read some history. Mass surveillance was successful in the regimes I mentioned because the public themselves were the front line of that surveillance. i.e. The people were adept at watching each other.

  Tim O'Reilly [08.08.06 05:28 PM]

Carlos -- really good point, alas!

  gnat [08.09.06 01:04 AM]

The discussions of East Germany and China are spot on. It's the culture of the country, the tenor of spirit, that makes or breaks every technology. In an expanding optimistic society that values freedoms and fights their removal, new technologies create opportunity, wealth, and freedom. Think the Internet in the US in the 1990s. In a fearful society that values control and fights democratic freedoms, new technologies create injustice, tyranny, and oppression. Think the Internet in China in the 2000s.

  Richard [08.09.06 06:10 AM]

The problem with this kind of surveillance is the lack of due process. How do you prevent it from being abused? How to you prevent it from being used to persecute people for minor slights? How do you prevent it from being used by malicious predators to stalk people? How do you prevent mobs from using it to deprive unpopular people of their civil rights? How do you prevent fuzzy evidence from being used against innocent wrongly-accused people?

And when bad things do happen, how do you pursue your grievance? How do you get restitution? How do you reconstruct a shattered life damaged by public perception and poorly investigated allegations that ultimately prove false?

Does anyone honestly think that the halls of Congress and the White House will ever be open to public scrutiny? If your elected representatives aren't living with the same social security retirement plan you are, as just one example, what makes anything think they won't pass laws to exempt themselves from observation?

I'm sure there are a lot of foreign governments and organizations who would love the idea of a web cam in every representative's office.

  adamsj [08.09.06 07:03 AM]

It's the culture of the country, the tenor of spirit, that makes or breaks every technology. In an expanding optimistic society that values freedoms and fights their removal, new technologies create opportunity, wealth, and freedom. Think the Internet in the US in the 1990s.

And yet, Nat, we have this example of panopticonism in the US in 2006. What does that say about this country, right now?

  Joseph Hunkins [08.09.06 10:22 AM]

Tim you are exactly right. The USS Privacy sailed long ago and the issue is how we can seek wise, democratic management of the storms of data flowing online.

  Ted [08.09.06 11:16 AM]

Anecdotes rule, don't they? This single story changes everything.

  Laurie Clemans [08.09.06 05:25 PM]

Living off the grid works for my friend Jen, but the rest of us are on somebody's radar. With Video Camera Surveillance, including infrared sensors, thermal imaging and standard issue technologies like caller ID becoming ubiquitous, there are few ways not to leave a fairly deep footprint.

My company develops strategic lead generation programs directed to technology decision makers, so I understand too well how customers' and prospects' information is merged, cleaned, updated, stored, and analyzed. The same goes for our personal data; once it is merged enough times from multiple sources, bingo, our identities are completely exposed.

To throw off the pack, the next level may be a life lived in disguise. Digital masks, fake noses, altered factoids, what have you. Maybe that's why secondlife is succeeding!

The Truman Show is here, so fix your make-up, straighten your tie and look over your shoulder. Someone's probably watching or at least taking notes.

  Andrew B. [08.10.06 11:57 AM]

Careful quoting Juvenal. His "Who shall guard the guards?" question is facetious. He is referring to eunuchs guarding women in his satire "On Women." Not exactly a cry of alarm or a statement of concern for the rights of individuals.

  Max Lybbert [08.10.06 01:24 PM]

People who followed the link know that this wasn't just about toilet paper; the first line of the article begins "Teenagers who toilet-papered and *damaged a home* now face felony vandalism charges. ..." The article continues "She and husband Ken also found damaged landscaping and light fixtures as well as ruined finishes on two cars."

Legally speaking, she got information from public places. The grocery store in question is, by definition, a public place, as is its parking lot. They are places where judges claim you don't have much of an expectation of privacy.

Do I want to keep my curtains closed all the time for fear that the neighbors will see what I'm researching online? No. But I don't see how this example qualifies as a violation of privacy (or presages a violation of privacy). If you asked the kids why they didn't steal the stuff, I bet they would say "because they have cameras in places like that."

  Tim O'Reilly [08.10.06 07:30 PM]

Andrew B -- I'm well aware of the source of the quotation (as well as its acquired meaning over the centuries in exactly the same context I used it). But in any event, don't you think Juvenal would have wonderful material in this story?

Max -- I didn't suggest that it was a violation of privacy, just that we're on the road to a surveillance society, where far more information is recorded about us than we might think...and that information is increasingly becoming available not just to government or credit agencies but to the general public. There are entrepreneurs taking advantage of this as well -- just look at zillow.com, for example.

  Max Lybbert [08.11.06 09:09 AM]

I didn't mean to imply that Tim had said it was a violation of privacy. I did mean to imply that many readers upset about this may think it was. And I wanted to point out that the woman in this case was collecting information about what people did in public places where our laws recognize they don't have much of a reasonable expectation of privacy.

I think that little fact changes the nature of the debate. Should I be able to bug your phone on a whim, given that it's not state monitoring? OTOH, should I be able to review store security tapes if I have proof some crime was committed against me and the police won't investigate something small like that?

  Tim O'Reilly [08.11.06 01:21 PM]

Max -- You've hit on the interesting bit, namely the boundary between public and private, and the fact that public space is increasingly being instrumented in ways that change the expectations and potential of what can be known. Whether it's security cameras in more locations than you expect, or your car's GPS or your cell phone, or even FastPass or equivalent, being used to track where and when you drive, or information in public databases that were originally protected by obscurity or inaccessibility (a la the dbs that Zillow or fundrace.org have now made public at the click of a mouse rather than a visit to a physical office) -- the world is changing, and people take time to catch up with the changes. So these young men's expectations of what they could get away with led them to a rude awakening.

  michaelholloway [10.20.06 09:21 AM]

If the foundation of the enlightenment is a schematic that creates continuation; or the production of the next generation(which takes aprox. 18 years) then community is the basis of the enlightenment. The fear of the unknown (of what your friend is Really thinking) is the basis of sycosis and a-social acts; the foundations of war. If we'd talk and listened or watched more, wouldn't we all be better off?

  michaelholloway [10.22.06 02:58 PM]

My comment on the foundations of enlightenment as it relates to the surveillance society has a bad URL. This one works.

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