For a while, in a brief fit of paranoia, I decided to use only cash whenever I bought something. That way, any person or persons who might want to track my movements throughout the day (I don't know who—the FBI? The NSA? Walt Disney's frozen head? Like I said, I was paranoid) would know only what ATM I'd used to get cash and at what time. No one could take the information produced by regular use of a debit card and compile a map of my movements. Even if the bank assures you that all personal information is secure, it's become clear that anyone with the means and the skill can get at it if they please, and do with it as they see fit. I wanted to take measures to prevent that from happening in my case.
The problem, obviously, is that one has to remain eternally diligent in the computer age in order to accomplish such a goal, and I'm a little bit lazy. It took me less than two weeks to drop the idea. I went right back to using my card, scattering all kinds of data into the unforgiving world, the same as any other debit or credit card holder. Those of us with bank accounts sow the seeds of our own potential downfall.
Or consider that Google keeps a detailed database of its users containing a record of every site they've visited using the search engine and--who knows?--maybe every action they performed while on those sites. Google claims it only does so to tailor searches to individuals, but they can do what they like with the information they amass, and the legislation that might stop them from doing so has a nagging tendency to lag far behind advancements in technology.
The documentary Erasing David centers on the issue of privacy in the information age, and does so by making use of a poorly planned stunt. Journalist David Bond (he could not have a more perfect last name) decides to try to go underground, making himself as invisible as possible to the scrutiny of two private investigators charged with finding him, all to see if it is even possible for a person to go completely off the grid when so much about us has been recorded electronically.
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| The target |
As far as the stunt goes, he makes a huge mistake by attempting all this while his wife is nearing the end of her pregnancy. They have a low-key argument about it early on when he tells her that he intends to be gone for a month, meaning he'll be off playing espionage games while she's making repeat trips to the doctor to deal with the complications of an impending birth. Why is it that so many men in relationships are prone to pulling this kind of shit?
Apart from Bond's apparent cluelessness, he does a great job analyzing the nature of privacy in a time when, in the name of convenience and security, privacy is constantly eroded. The setting of the experiment is the U.K., so Bond takes a look at the ridiculously huge security culture of England, which has one of the most heavily spied-upon populations in the world. Evidently, it's close to impossible to go anywhere in London without being caught on camera. Londoners are always being watched, ostensibly as a crime-prevention measure. According to Bond, the ubiquitous cameras actually do little to cut down on crime. The implications of how else the cameras might be used is left meaningfully hanging.
He also touches on a trend in some British schools to use electronic fingerprinting as a way of keeping track of student activities. Students come in for class? They lay a finger on a classroom scanner. Check out a book from the library? Scanner. Ideally, children would be scanned everywhere they go at school, and fingerprint scans connect to a database of information about the students. While some may feel that such a technology will help with problems such as class attendance and keeping track of school materials, the same technology could be applied to life in the general community, meaning that that average citizen might one day find themselves required to be scanned in order to take part in government or private services.
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| The scanner in action |
As far as Bond's time on the run is concerned, he plays it smart at the beginning, and then just falls apart from there. He starts by heading over to France, and in so doing confounds his two pursuers by going well outside the net they cast for him. But not long after, he decides he needs to visit his parents' home in the country, working from the assumption that because it's in the middle of nowhere, he'll be able to see if anyone is trying to sneak up on him. It doesn't seem to occur to him that a relative's home is one of the first places investigators would look. From there, he heads off into a rural area in Wales, holing up for a night in an abandoned hut. It's here that we see the first signs of the intense paranoia that will plague him throughout the remainder of the experiment: Bond agonizes over every unidentified sound over the course of a drizzly night, seemingly in the grip of an almost painful anxiety. Later, in a hotel room, he becomes convinced that his portable camera equipment has been bugged or tagged with a tracking device. His behavior starts to mirror that of a paranoid schizophrenic, with Bond continually looking over his shoulder, certain that imaginary agents hired by the investigators are around every corner.
The funny thing is, apart from going online to gather some basic information, the two private eyes don't use any technologically special techniques to track their target. Most of the skills they apply appear to be old-fashioned investigative tools. They even go through Bond's garbage to gather intelligence on where he might turn up. Not surprisingly, they also go out to the countryside where Bond's parents live and spy on the house. They call the hospital where his wife is being treated, pretending to be him in order to find out when her appointments are scheduled. I don't want to give too much away, but when they do finally catch up to Bond, it's while he's doing something that could have, under different circumstances, been easily avoided. I can only assume that by this time in the experiment, stress and sleep deprivation had taken their toll on his cognitive functions.
I came away from this film with a disturbing impression. In most fiction dealing with distopian, totalitarian societies, the assumption is that government agencies vested with the power to spy on citizens will be the ones to finally exterminate civil liberties. So many conspiracy theories ground themselves in an overwhelming mistrust of government. And while we should always be aware of the degree to which government affects our quality of life, I find that relatively little attention is turned toward the motives of the private sector. It's as if people forget that the larger a corporation becomes, the more it is like a federal agency. And rather than privacy being taken away by a nosy government, people appear content to sign away a lot of their privacy, entirely of their own accord, to privately owned social networks such as Facebook. Why have security cameras mounted on every streetlight and telephone pole when so many willingly post photos and footage of themselves doing things they'll wish they hadn't in a few years? When we use the internet, we put a lot of ourselves out there for someone else to snatch up, and we do it freely.
Who would have thought we'd be inclined to give away so much of what we claim to be inviolable?
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