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WASHINGTON – Don’t look now. Somebody’s watching.
But you knew that, didn’t you? How could you not? It’s been apparent for years that we’re being watched and monitored as we traverse airports and train stations, as we drive, train, fly, surf the Web, e-mail, talk on the phone, get the morning coffee, visit the doctor, go to the bank, go to work, shop for groceries, shop for shoes, buy a TV, walk down the street. Cameras, electronic card readers and transponders are ubiquitous.
Is anywhere safe from the watchers, the trackers?
There, in that quintessentially public space, the Mall, came Michael Thrasher, 43, an ordinary guy, just strolling on a lovely day near an entrance to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, where a tower-high 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 there’s always someone looking at you.”
He’s a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport, so he knows that he’s watched at the workplace. Since Sept. 11, 2001, transit hubs have been laden with layer upon layer of surveillance: cameras, biometrics, sensors, even a new thing called the “behavior detection officer.”
And it’s good, Thrasher says, that someone’s watching out for the bad guys. “Look what kind of world 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 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 the back of my mind, I’m thinking anybody could be listening to whatever I say.”
And just going about one’s daily business, walking down the street, going to the market?
“It just feels like there’s no privacy now at all when you’re doing public stuff.”
Suddenly, he sees the camera, his exclamation point, and throws his hands in the air.
All this surveillance, monitoring and eavesdropping is changing our culture, affecting 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 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 free society take for granted,” says Rosen. Things like going to the park or to the market. The loss of such autonomy is one of the “amorphous costs of having a world where 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.
“I’m not at all suggesting that Orwell’s ‘1984’ is around the corner,” he continues. “But things will change, and some of the changes will be good and others will be bad.”
Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor, writes in his 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? People who are different, who do not fit a preconceived norm.
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 surveillants and enforce a code of conduct, an expected norm, based on what might seem, to them, suspicious, or just different.
The work of the new “behavior detection officers” 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’ facial expressions and their behavior.
In training the BDOs, “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.
“There’s an expected norm or an expected baseline environment. ... We teach the BDOs, in a simplified form, to look for anomalous behavior in that environment.”
Being different? A big problem.
If we know we’re being watched and know there is an expected mode of behavior, how does that change our actions?
Call it “anticipatory conformity.” Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard social psychologist who has studied information technology for decades, coined the phrase in 1988.
Applying that concept to the post-9/11 era, Zuboff says she sees anticipatory conformity all around and expects it to grow even more intense.
“I 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 we’re going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or we’ll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke. It’s within our awareness to self-censor. And that self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom.”
We self-censor, 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.
