Vancouver Riots and the Era of "facebook Surveillance"

Wow...almost 10 months since my last post. All my writing energy is going toward my research. Had a short paper published in a major journal in my field this month, and have two more in review.

Anyway, just wanted to say a word about the Vancouver riots following the Canucks-Bruins game. I was disgusted by it. I want to see rioters brought to justice and prosecuted. But beyond the immediate damage to Vancouver, the incident raises some interesting questions about privacy in the digital age.

You've probably heard that many of the rioters have been identified via facebook. In an age where everyone has a camera in their pocket in the form of a cellphone, and where everyone routinely uploads photos and tags faces, it was inevitable that the worst of the rioters would be caught in image form for the world to see. While the riot was originally blamed on a small group of armed thugs prepared to cause trouble before the game even started, facebook photos have shown that most of the rioters were middle class males that just took the opportunity to unleash when it seemed like the regular rules no longer applied.

Websites with pictures of rioters caught in the act have sprung up asking people to anonymously identify their friends, co-workers and acquaintances.  Some social media experts have pointed out that while this may be the first time this has been done, it is very unlikely to be the last. We may be entering an era of "mutual surveillance", where everyone is watching everyone else, all the time.

Some people are uneasy about the online lynching taking place before due process or fair trials. Other see facebook and online photos as an emerging weapon of the police state.

The interesting thing to note is that we, the citizens, have become the police state. Orwell envisioned a centralized form of surveillance that only those in power would have the money and infrastructure to make use of, leaving the ordinary person with nowhere to hide. Instead, the cameras are held by all of us.

It should be pointed out that until now, many publicized uses of cameras have been to expose abuses of authorities, not citizens, the first being Rodney King's beating in Los Angeles in the early 90's. The consequence of this is that authorities are every bit as susceptible to surveillance. You can see the ubiquity of photographs and video in the public domain as analogous to the wikileaks philosophy that in a world where nothing is private, those who are the most honest have the most to gain. For example, suppose you are a food company that routinely checks your product for problems, despite the fact your competitors do not. Either you must abandon the practice yourself, or face difficulty in competing them due to the costs they cut by behaving that way. Only if their secrets are brought to light is it possible for you to behave ethically and still survive as a business.

Since the taping is decentralized and distributed amongst the population, it is unlikely it can be stopped at this point. Attempts to prevent it by law run the risk of making things more Orwellian, not less. It should be noted that attempts to curtail public videotaping will likely do more to empower the authorities. When videotaping is challenged legally, it is usually by the police who attempt to cover up abuse by pressing bogus charges on the tapers.

The best possible solution may be to see to it that if public taping and photographing is going to happen at all, legal protections should be put in place to enforce the right of people to do it, to prevent the power from falling on one side. Whether we like it or not, a bargain along the lines of "you show me yours, I'll show you mine" has been forced upon us. And we just have to hope that if we are more ethical, we will have more to benefit from the arrangement.