Personal Surveillance – Renaissance Guy

This is the second installment in a continued multi-part series entitled Personal Surveillance. To read the other parts once they become available, click here.

Our modern surveillance system is not the totalitarian paradigm foreseen by Orwell, but a decentralized, and in the strictest sense, voluntary, though practically compulsory network. The goal and means are different, but the ends, a society with total insight into the very thoughts of its inhabitants, are the same.

Which brings me to last week. Last week, I was approached by a parent concerned about the conduct of her daughter. Specifically, her daughter has one of the same diagnoses I do, and had been struggling awfully to keep to her regimen, and suffering as a result. When I was contacted the daughter had just been admitted to the hospital to treat the acute symptoms and bring her back from the brink. This state of affairs is naturally unsustainable, in both medical and epistemological terms. I was asked if there was any advice I could provide, from my experience of dealing with my own medical situation as a teenager, and in working closely with other teenagers and young adults.

Of course, the proper response depends inextricably upon the root cause of the problem. After all, treating what may be a form of self harm, whether intentional or not, which has been noted to be endemic to adolescents who have to execute their own medical regimen, or some other mental illness, with the kind of disciplinary tactics that might be suited to the more ordinary teenage rebellion and antipathy, would be not only ineffective and counterproductive, but dangerous. There are a myriad of different potential causes, many of which are mutually exclusive, all of which require different tactics, and none of which can be ruled out without more information.

I gave several recommendations, including the one I have been turning over in my head since. I recommended that this mother look into her daughter’s digital activities; into her social media, her messages, and her browser history. I gave the mother a list of things to look out for: evidence of bullying online or at school, signs that the daughter had been browsing sites linked to mental illness, in particular eating disorders and depression, messages to her friends complaining about her illness or medical regimen, or even a confession that she was willfully going against it. The idea was to try and get more information to contextualize her actions, and that this would help her parents help her.

After reflecting for some time, I don’t feel bad about telling the mother to look through private messages. The parents are presumably paying for the phone, and it’s generally accepted that parents have some leeway to meddle in children’s private lives, especially when it involves medical issues. What bothers me isn’t any one line being crossed. What bothers me is this notion of looking into someone’s entire life like this.

That is, after all, the point here. The mother is trying to pry into her daughter’s whole life at once, into her mind, to figure out what makes her tick, why she does what she does, and what she is likely to do in the future. Based on the information I was provided, it seemed justified; even generous. As described, the daughter’s behavior towards her health is at best negligent, and at worst suggests she is unstable and a danger to herself. The tactics described, sinister though they are, are still preferable to bringing down the boot-heel of discipline or committing her to psychiatric care if neither may be warranted.

This admittedly presupposes that intervention is necessary in any case, in effect presuming guilt. In this instance, it was necessary, because the alternative of allowing the daughter to continue her conduct, which was, intentional or not, causing medical harm and caused her to be hospitalized, was untenable. At least, based on the information I had. But even such information was certainly enough to be gravely concerned, if not enough to make a decision on a course of action.

The goal, in this case, was as benevolent as possible: to help the daughter overcome whatever it was that landed her in this crisis in the first place. Sometimes such matters truly are a matter of doing something “for their own good”. But such matters have to be executed with the utmost kindness and open-mindedness. Violating someone’s privacy may or may not be acceptable under certain circumstances, but certainly never for petty vendettas.

It would not, for example, be acceptable for the mother to punish the daughter for a unkind comment made to a friend regarding the mother. Even though this might suggest that some discipline is in order to solve the original problem, as, without other evidence to the contrary, it suggests a pattern of rebellion that could reasonably be extrapolated to include willful disobedience of one’s medical regimen, such discipline needs to be meted out for the original violation, not for one that was only discovered because of this surveillance.

Mind you, I’m not just talking out of my hat here. This is not just a philosophical notion, but a legal one as well. The fifth amendment, and more broadly the protections against self-incrimination, are centered around protecting the core personhood- a person’s thoughts and soul -from what is known as inquisitorial prosecution. Better scholars than I have explained why this cornerstone is essential to our understanding of justice and morality, but, to quickly summarize: coercing a person by using their private thoughts against them deprives them of the ability to make their own moral choices, and destroys the entire notion of rights, responsibilities, and justice.

Lawyers will be quick to point out that the fifth amendment as written doesn’t apply here per se (and as a matter of law, they’d be right). But we know that our own intentions are to look into the daughter’s life as a whole, her thoughts and intentions, which is a certain kind of self incrimination, even if you would be hard pressed to write a law around it. We are doing this not to find evidence of new wrongs to right, but to gain context which is necessary for the effective remedy of problems that are already apparent, that were already proven. By metaphor: we are not looking to prosecute the drug user for additional crimes, but to complete rehabilitation treatment following a previous conviction.

In government, the state can circumvent the problems posed to fact-finding by the fifth amendment by granting immunity to the testifying witness so that anything they say can not be used against them, as though they had never said it, neutralizing self-incrimination. In our circumstances, it is imperative that the information gathered only be used as context for the behaviors we already know about. I tried to convey this point in my recommendations to the mother in a way that also avoided implying that I expected she would launch an inquisition at the first opportunity.

Of course, this line of thinking is extremely idealistic. Can a person really just ignore a social taboo, or minor breach, and carry on unbiased and impartial in digging through someone’s entire digital life? Can that person who has been exposed to everything the subject has ever done, but not lived any of it, even make an objective judgment? The law sweeps this question under the rug, because it makes law even more of an epistemological nightmare than it already is, and in practical terms probably doesn’t matter unless we are prepared to overhaul our entire constitutional system. But it is a pertinent question for understanding these tactics.

The question of whether such all-inclusive surveillance of our digital lives can be thought to constitute self-incrimination cannot be answered in a blog post, and is unlikely to be settled in the foreseeable future. The generation which is now growing up, which will eventually have grown up with nothing else but the internet, will, I am sure, be an interesting test case. It is certainly not difficult to imagine that with all the focus on privacy and manipulation of online data that we will see a shift in opinions, so that parts of one’s online presence will be thought to be included as part of one’s mind. Or perhaps, once law enforcement catches up to the 21st century, we will see a subtle uptick in the efficacy of catching minor crimes and breaches of taboo, possibly before they even happen.

This is the first installment in a multi-part series entitled Personal Surveillance. To read the other parts once they become available, click here.

George Orwell predicted, among many other things, a massive state surveillance apparatus. He wasn’t wrong; we certainly have that. But I’d submit that it’s also not the average person’s greatest threat to privacy. There’s the old saying that the only thing protecting citizens from government overreach is government inefficiency, and in this case there’s something to that. Surveillance programs are terrifyingly massive in their reach, but simply aren’t staffed well enough to parse everything. This may change as algorithms become more advanced in sifting through data, but at the moment, we aren’t efficient enough to have a thought police.

The real danger to privacy isn’t what a bureaucrat is able to pry from an unwilling suspect, but what an onlooker is able to discern from an average person without any special investigative tools or legal duress. The average person is generally more at risk from stalkers than surveillance. Social media is especially dangerous in this regard, and the latest scandals surrounding Cambridge Analytica, et. al. are a good example of how social media can be used for nefarious purposes.

Yet despite lofty and varied criticism, I am willing to bet the overall conclusion of this latest furor: the eventual consensus will be that, while social media may be at fault, its developers are not guilty of intentional malice, but rather of pursuing misaligned incentives, combined with an inability to keep up, whether through laziness or not grasping the complete picture soon enough, with the accelerating pace with which our lives have become digitized.

Because that is the root problem. Facebook and its ilk started as essentially decentralized contact lists and curated galleries, and twitter and its facsimiles started as essentially open-ended messaging services, but they have evolved into so much more. Life happens on the Internet nowadays.

In harkening back to the halcyon days before the scandal du jour, older people have called attention to the brief period between the widespread adoption of television and the diversification; the days when there were maybe a baker’s dozen channels. In such times, we are told, people were held together by what was on TV. The political issues of the day were chosen by journalists, and public discourse shaped almost solely by the way they were presented on those few channels. Popular culture, we are told, was shaped in much the same way, so that there was always a baseline of commonality.

Whether or not this happened in practice, I cannot say. But I think the claim about those being the halcyon days before all this divide and subdivide are backwards. On the contrary, I would submit that those halcyon days were the beginning of the current pattern, as people began to adapt to the notion that life is a collective enterprise understood through an expansive network. Perhaps that time was still a honeymoon phase of sorts. Or perhaps the nature of this emerging pattern of interconnectedness is one of constant acceleration, like a planet falling into a black hole, slowly, imperceptibly at first, but always getting faster.

But getting back to the original point, in addition to accelerating fragmentation, we are also seeing accelerated sharing of information, which is always, constantly being integrated, woven into a more complete mosaic narrative. Given this, it would be foolish to think that we could be a part of it without our own information being woven into the whole. Indeed, it would be foolish to think that we could live in a world so defined by interconnectedness and not be ourselves part of the collective.

Life, whether we like it or not, is now digital. Social media, in the broadest sense, is the lenses through which current events are now projected onto the world, regardless of whether or not social media was built for or to withstand this purpose. Participation is compulsory (that is, under compulsion, if not strictly mandatory) to be a part of modern public life. And to this point, jealous scrutiny of one’s internet presence is far more powerful than merely collecting biographical or contact information, such as looking one up in an old fashioned directory.

Yet society has not adapted to this power. We have not adapted to treat social media interactions with the same dignity with which we respect, for example, conversations between friends in public. We recognize that a person following us and listening in while we were in public would be a gross violation of our privacy, even if it might skirt by the letter of the law*. But trawling back through potentially decades of interactions online, is, well… we haven’t really formulated a moral benchmark.

This process is complicated by the legitimate uses of social media as a sort of collective memory. As more and more mental labor is unloaded onto the Internet, the importance of being able to call up some detail from several years ago becomes increasingly important. Take birthdays, for example. Hardly anyone nowadays bothers to commit birthdays to memory, and of the people I know, increasingly few keep private records, opting instead to rely on Facebook notifications to send greetings. And what about remembering other events, like who was at that great party last year, or the exact itinerary of last summer’s road trip?

Human memory fades, even more quickly now that we have machines to consult, and no longer have to exercise our own powers of recognizance. Trawling through a close friend’s feed in order to find the picture of the both of you from Turks and Caicos, so that you can get it framed as a present, is a perfectly legitimate, even beneficial, use of their otherwise private, even intimate, data, which would hardly be possible if that data were not available and accessible. The modern social system- our friendships, our jobs, our leisure -rely on this accelerating flow of information. To invoke one’s privacy even on a personal level seems now to border on the antisocial.