Guest post: Panopticon-based policing
Originally a comment by latsot on Put out that light!
The one guy should have just visited his dad without posting about it on social media
Should? Why? He did nothing wrong.
While no harm was arguably done in this case, this kind of oppressive, bullying security theatre should concern us greatly. Panopticon-based policing is always open to abuses of the worst kind and to institutionalised inhumanity.
We tread a fine line with surveillance, particularly when it’s technologically-enabled. Having CCTV cameras everywhere is one thing when they are only used to forensically examine crime scenes (even when they radically expand the notion and boundaries of crime scenes) but CCTV linked to face-recognition software and used for pre-emptive police action is quite another. But the latter inevitably flows from the former unless we’re really, really careful and history shows that we’re not. Hell, that tweet shows that we’re not.
Surveillance inevitably becomes mass surveillance because it’s really useful to governments and because we can achieve it in small, easily defended steps. But it’s on a ratchet, of course, and once we’ve taken such a step, it’s almost impossible to step back again.
Just in case you don’t already think I’m being overly dramatic, here’s the obligatory Orwell reference:
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
And facial-recognition-enabled CCTV technology is already being used that way in Russia. People in Moscow who violate their COVID quarantine orders are being identified on public CCTV cameras and charged. The Panopticon is real.
Artymorty:
Yes. And phones are being used that way too in many places, sometimes with consent, sometimes without. It has been unclear in every case I’ve seen what else the data is going to be used for during the crisis or what is going to happen to it afterwards.
The British police have stealth-introduced facial recognition for pre-emptive policing over the last few years by pretending it is an astonishingly long-running ‘trial’. One with no stated goals which appears to have generated no useful data, let alone conclusions. The number of false positives is very high, the number of crimes solved is zero and the number of crimes pre-empted can not, of course, be measured. In these ‘trials’, the police also detain anyone who refuses to walk past the cameras or covers their face.
The principle that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is increasingly untrue. We all have much to hide – whether we know it or not – and we all have more to fear every day.
It was borderline-ish. Just visit your dad and sing happy birthday to him without posting it to social media.
The very next post after this one is, “Dude, your hand”, about Trump touching some doctor’s shoulder. A lot of people would also find that excessive — weren’t they even advising people to use alternatives to handshakes like touching elbows, and wouldn’t this be something similar? Etc.
I think Ophelia criticizing Trump for that is fine though. We’re being temporarily extremely careful, so it’s good for people in the public eye not to do borderline-ish uncareful things.
Back to the original scenario, do you really think if Trump and Melania posted a picture of them popping over to visit someone, claiming they’d barely been there a minute but the picture showed they’d set up chairs for themselves, that people wouldn’t be complaining? And rightfully so.
This isn’t forever. Yes, cops getting on people walking alone is a field is idiotic, but getting on people for proudly posting themselves how they’re visiting people seems a little more reasonable. And nobody’s saying this will or should continue once we’re out from under the COVID-19 cloud. This is only going to lead to abuses of a slightly nagging kind, and that inhumanity won’t be institutionalized.
@latsot Panopticon-based policing – excellent turn of phrase.
I wonder if making people stay at home and therefore having fewer cars on the road means there are fewer drivers to pull over for speeding and busted taillights? It’s the only reason I can think of for police forces to be wasting valuable time and resources scouring social media for transgressions.
And part of that is because we have no ability to determine what we have to hide. Do I have to hide the fact that I am an atheist? That I donated money to Elizabeth Warren’s campaign? That I like sweet wines? That I don’t like crowds? None of that is something I feel I should have to hide. None of it is illegal or immoral; most of it isn’t even fattening (the sweet wines are, of course). But ordinary behaviors can be misinterpreted through ignorance or willfulness, especially if your behavior is different than the dominant paradigm. So, because of where I live, I have to hide my loathing of Nascar, my absolute bone deep animosity to Donald Trump, my lack of belief in any of the gods presented to me, and my distaste for Catholic schools and hospitals. If my real feelings on these things become known, I become suspect, just like my taste in wine might make me suspect to a food snob, though in that case, just suspect that I am a philistine (I’m good with that).
So, yeah, we all have lots to hide, even if we have committed no crime, hidden no bodies, diddled no kids, or stolen no money from the charity box at the church. We are all guilty of something in the eyes of our neighbors, and, increasingly, law enforcement.
Skeletor:
I find this position incoherent.
If it’s ok for him to do it, why isn’t it ok for him to post about it? Because it’s ok for one person to visit (from six feet away) their parent, but not “too many”? The entire point of these lockdown measures is to make sure that we don’t get into these collective action problems, so if it’s wrong for others to do so, then it wasn’t “ok” for Kinnock.
Because he’s an MP and thus entitled? I doubt you’re suggesting that.
Because what he did was ok, but some stupid people will misinterpret his tweet and do things that aren’t ok? I don’t like where that standard leads.
And the comparison to the Trump photo doesn’t wash, because that photo actually shows Trump doing something that isn’t “ok” — he’s physically touching someone unnecessarily.
Skeletor, I think that tweet should be acceptable. It is a good example of social distancing, and shows people that you need to stay a proper distance away. The police should be congratulating him for leading by example. Stay at least six feet away…and see, this is how it’s done.
Meanwhile, no one is getting on the case of all the people in the grocery store in town who kept ramming their carts down the aisle in a way that brought them within inches of other people. They need pictures like this, so they understand what it looks like.
Once again, you feel the need to explain to all of us here why we are dopes.
iknklast, exactly so. We leak information by the gallon and it gets easier to collect, aggregate and exploit all the time. It used to be the case that significant time and effort was required to find out anything useful about a person and that skill, secret knowledge or special access was required to exploit it. This is no longer true. Data collection is becoming both easier and more sophisticated all the time and overlapping scattergun approaches can appear precisely targeted to a large number of marks.
And that’s just deliberate attacks. There’s also danger in people making incorrect inferences about a person from wrongly-interpreted or aggregated data.
And then, of course, is all the data we unwittingly leak about each other…
All isn’t lost, privacy and safety wise, but we definitely need to get more of a grip.
“It’s not illegal, it’s not immoral, it’s not even fattening” is how I’m going to justify everything I do from now on. Thanks, Iknklast!
Even in lockdown NZ, where the Police sense of humour is rapidly degrading, you are allowed to drop supplies off to your parents and say hi from a few metres away. It’s just authoritarian fuckery with no purpose.
The principle that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is increasingly untrue.
I have never subscribed to that “principle”. My standard answer to those who trot out this line is I have done nothing wrong, therefore I have nothing to prove.
I can probably trace this back to the anti-war groups I was in in the 60’s, where our stock answer to the police, after providing the legally required name and address, was “I have done nothing wrong. I have nothing to say to you.”
@Roj Blake. I agree completely.
My response to those who tout the nothing to hide, nothing to fear principle is – who gets to decide what is and is not considered “bad” or even “hidden”?
I don’t have my birthdate on social media. I’ve never told anyone my PIN. I encrypt all the computers I use so nobody can see what’s on the hard drive.
OMG! WHAT AM I HIDING?
Authoritarian fuckery doesn’t need an extraneous purpose, it is its own purpose.
@13, very much so. Funnily, in my experience, the people who tend to be most inclined to authoritarianism also seem to object very strongly to bowing to the will of anyone they perceive as weaker or less important that them (which in their minds is most people). They’re a special bunch of snowflakes who get quite bent out of shape at being told where to go. Basically control freaks and bullies and/or up to no good.
Authority for thee not for me.
Skeletor @ 3 – just to match you in pedantic nitpickery –
No, it would not. The issue is HANDS. Hands go everywhere, including and especially on the face, and that’s why they transmit infection so readily. You can’t put your elbow in your mouth or up your nose or in your eyes. Trump put his HAND on the guy. Hand, not elbow, not foot, not hip.
Yeah, funny how the guy who complained so much about “her e-mails” refused to release his tax return.
not Bruce, you have to realize that’s her emails and his tax return. He is not only almighty male, he is Trump the great and powerful.
Roj:
Me neither. We humans are seriously lacking in intuition about privacy risks and their consequences online and off. This is especially true now that the landscape has changed beyond recognition but – as you say – it was never true in the first place. “Nothing to hide/nothing to fear” is nothing more than a threat but it sounds reasonable to an awful lot of people because of that lack of intuition. A moment’s thought shows that people who subscribe to the idea are – to be insanely charitable – wrong.
There was a fun time back in about 2008 when violent, unpleasant TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson decided that a vast number of UK people on benefits were idiots when they complained that their details – including bank details – were lost in the wild on unencrypted disks by a government official. It was ridiculous, he claimed, because nobody could use that information to take money out of those accounts, only to put it in. To prove this, he published his own bank details in a national newspaper. It did not work out well for him; someone set up a direct debit which paid £500 into the account of the charity Diabetes UK. I’d have preferred it if the charity chosen were one more personally offensive to Clarkson such as a woman’s charity, but I love every other thing about this story.
It should go without saying that hiding our bank details is a good idea. It’s less obvious that we should obfuscate our browser settings, but here we are. Even kids, born into a world where it is inconceivable to live without things like internets and mobile phones, are seriously lacking in intuition about safe online behaviour and we adults are failing spectacularly in teaching better habits.
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