The problem with trying to demonize surveillance is there isn’t actually anything wrong with it. In times past the search itself was a form of “punishment” in that it was invasive and extremely inconvenient. To this day, police are not required to put things back the way they found them if searching, and that I think is as much if not more of a concern to me than the “invasion of privacy” that goes on when someone inspects something of “yours” that is stored on someone else’s computer or traveling along someone else’s communication equipment or across the open airwaves.

Does everyone, absolutely EVERYONE, violate society’s expectations of how we should behave in private? I doubt it. There have always been situations where something that is not alright to do in public is perfectly ok in private. The real issue is that the government and media are both complicit in using this sort of information to demonize a person before any actual legal issue is brought into play.

I remember “Wide Stance” Larry Craig “caught” trolling for gay sex in a public bathroom. His “solicitation” however was basically to touch someone’s foot with his own foot and to sweep his hand under the stall partition. This only happened after a couple of foot tappings that were purportedly a signal for gay men in that area. Did the police officer not respond? If he did, how was this a violation of any sort? Are people not allowed to communicate back and forth in public restroom stalls? Who was being harmed?

It seems likely that all he did was to respond to the solicitation of an undercover police officer. This would under any normal circumstance be entrapment, but because of his position the information that he had been involved in such a thing at all destroyed his professional life and probably deeply disturbed his private life as well.

No high tech was involved…….

The issue is not that you are being watched. The issue is what we allow people to do with that information. If we establish that lying about people or sharing personal information about them without their consent is a crime, what I think will follow is that it will become counterproductive to do all this surveiling because by law it will be inadmissible to court and a violation of law to publicize without the express consent of the individual involved.

This has implications for art, and therefore copyright, as well. It has become accepted that a person does not have any rights over images of them taken by other people in public places, but as this line between public and private places is slowly destroyed by technology and (it is to be hoped) replaced by concepts of personal privacy, the right of a person to control what is done publicly with their own words and images will take center stage, and be set up against the rights of “artists” and “journalists” to their supposed “work” of merely capturing images, likenesses, or snippets of conversation.

I think we have had this exactly backwards for generations, and part of our trouble is we are straining to protect two mutually exclusive concepts – that a person creating an image or capturing the likeness or words of another has more right to decide what to do with that product than the subject of that image on the one hand, and that people have a right to be free of government or private harassment on the other.