Anonymity in the surveillance state

There was a surreal moment captured on a camera and disseminated through the usual social media channels last week. As the Cleveland Cavaliers were leaving the court at Oracle Arena in Oakland, Calif., after upsetting the Golden State Warriors in the second game of the NBA final series, a female fan sitting in some very expensive seats hurled an unprintable insult at Cavs' superstar LeBron James (who had just played a magnificent game).

In itself, that's not unusual. If you've ever sat near the court during an NBA game, you've probably heard some lyrical obscenities. Players curse. Fans heckle. In the press and scrum of masculine endeavor, rhetorical niceties are more honored in breach than observance. Part of the deal of being rich and famous in this country is tolerating the inevitable "haters" who feel entitled to express themselves.

The fact that words were shouted was not remarkable. What's remarkable is that James seemed to acknowledge them.

On the video, you can see him stop and turn his head to glare at the fan after he hears her remarks. And a security guard immediately reacts, telling her to "watch your mouth, woman ... I'll remember your face."

Then the camera pans to the woman, decked out in Warriors gear and looking suddenly abashed. She meekly responded, "I'm sorry, I can't hear you."

I hope she was as embarrassed as she looked. People ought to take responsibility for the things they say, and she obviously had no reasonable expectation of privacy. She was shouting at a very public figure at a televised event surrounded by a crowd armed with smartphones. What she did was ugly and foolish. She deserved no less than a moment of shame.

Can we hope that's all it amounts to? That she will not be outed by someone with the time and wherewithal to research her online? Because we can be sure the security guard who reprimanded her will not be the only one who remembers her face.

It could get worse. They call it "doxing" when someone uses the Internet to investigate and post online a target individual's personal information, such as home address, phone number and workplace information, as an invitation to harassment or worse. Sometimes credit card information is compromised. Sometimes doxers take control of a victim's social media accounts.

Last year, in the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., a Twitter user calling himself TheAnonMessage--purportedly operating as a member of the decentralized hacking collective Anonymous--posted the name and information of a police officer he said was responsible for Brown's shooting. It turned out he had the wrong name.

Other members of Anonymous immediately distanced themselves from the doxing, acknowledging that TheAnonMessage's recklessness could result in dire consequences--"lynching" of an innocent man. Yet since all one needs to do to become a member of Anonymous is to want to align with the group (and adopt the stylized Guy Fawkes icon as your social media avatar) it's difficult to see the utility of disavowing the actions of anyone who claims membership. By its very nature, the "hacktivist" group is anti-hierarchical. There are no leaders, no organization, no discipline. Anonymous exists to lend moral comfort and support to those willing to use digital tools to rake muck and protest injustice, but it can also be used as cover by the petulant and cruel. We might behave differently when we are anonymous. We lose our inhibitions when consequences are uncoupled from actions.

Anyone can create a Twitter handle and start firing off uncensored messages into the void. Part of the allure of cyberspace is the opportunity to jettison your fixed real-world identity.

Yet at the same time we're able to adopt fictive personalities online, we've never been as monitored as we are now. There was a time when sci-fi writers worried about a surveillance state--a Big Brother peering over our shoulders. As it turns out, it's not so much the government that's watching us as our fellow citizens; we find ourselves in a world filled with private cameras servicing millions of voyeurs. If you aren't in your own home, then you probably should behave as though you're being watched. (And if you are in your own home and you're sitting in front of a computer screen, maybe you ought to be mindful of the tracks you're making in cyberspace. And the camera that's staring you in the face.)

You'd think the possibility of ending up an Internet meme would make us less likely to act like jackasses, but if you pay attention at all to social media you'll likely reject this theory. Much of what goes on online involves the shaming of people who have done stupid things in public--or at least in electronically monitored spaces. Do something dumb in a parking garage or a convenience store and there's a chance you'll wind up on YouTube.

This development seems like a great thing when someone catches a police officer abusing his power, shooting an unarmed man or manhandling a teenage girl. We construct narratives to support our pre-existing points of views--we've seen enough movies to believe we can recognize villains and heroes on sight. But all a video can contain is what happens within the physical and temporal confines of the frame. It is selective, it tells us nothing about the monsters just outside. (Were I a police officer, I'd want to wear a body camera in self-defense.)

One of the scariest things about the way we live now is how various technologies have altered the human relationship with memory, shifting us from a society where the default was to forget (and consequently forgive) to one where it is impossible to avoid the ramifications of a permanent record. The Internet has become a limitless warehouse for storing any and all sorts of information, no matter how trivial or potentially embarrassing. Essentially, the explosion of easily searchable digital memory makes it possible to compile a dossier on almost anyone with a few clicks.

This has some rather obvious implications; most of us have already learned to censor ourselves in emails and any other communications we imagine might be stored eternally on the 'Net. But more importantly, the digital offloading of recollection from our fallible imperfect minds to cybernetic sources threatens to change the relationship we have with our memories. We might begin to trust them less, to impute more power to the digital record than the emotionally encoded ones. We might begin to recognize our memory for what it is--an unreliable, self-aggrandizing witness susceptible to self-pity and rationalizations.

I think about the woman who shouted at LeBron James, and the security guard's promise to remember her face. I hope he doesn't keep it.

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 06/14/2015

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