. . . . I'll Be Watching You.

Every breath you take
Every move you make
Every bond you break
Every step you take
I'll be watching you

Every single day
Every word you say
Every game you play
Every night you stay
I'll be watching you

     - Gordon Sumner  

In 1984, George Orwell depicted a repressive, totalitarian society under constant surveillance by the government.  We now live in an age in which there is much concern about government surveillance.  In the wake of the revelations of Edward Snowden, no doubt there are fundamental questions for any free society on where the boundaries lie between the right to privacy and the government's responsibility to protect its people.

In the Orwellian world, people expected Big Brother to be watching.  In fear of this, they repressed expression.  It was a world in which secrecy was operative down to the most common elements of daily life.  People lived in fear of reprisal if they freely expressed themselves.  In modern free societies today, the opposite is far more often the norm.  Although the government is watching and listening to us, we seemingly have little restrain in, and only moderately more concern over, what we reveal publicly about ourselves.

There are considerations which may give us pause about such openness of expression.

Some years ago, Great Britain launched a community surveillance system through a closed circuit cable network know as CCTV.  The idea was to place a greater police presence in neighborhoods by using technology to replace manpower.  Instead of more policeman walking the streets, the ever-present cameras would keep watch over public safety.  This prompted cries of "Big Brother" and debate over the scope of government power to watch over what, after all, were public activities.

In 2013, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported that there now was one CCTV camera for every 11 people in the UK.  The Telegraph went on to quote Nick Pickles, the director of the privacy campaign Big Brother Watch, as saying: “This report is another stark reminder of how out of control our surveillance culture has become."

By comparison, the British newspaper The Guardian reported in 2011 that the ratio of surveillance network of closed circuit camera to people was one camera for every 32 people.

In the United States, we may not have reached such ratios yet (if anyone really knows), but we are under surveillance.  An example is a Reality Byte article (Big Brother Part I) from 2013 about cameras and voice recorders on the Baltimore MTA buses.  Baltimore City is also known for the "blue light cameras" that populate corners in some of its neighborhoods.  The closed circuit cameras serve the same purpose as those in the UK, keeping an eye on the streets.  Let's not forget the infamous "speed cameras" that keep watch over intersections for travelers exceeding the speed limit.

When the Chicago police let loose on demonstrators in Grant Park during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the protesters chanted "the whole world is watching" as short-hand means for saying that the "police riot" would not go unnoticed.   Indeed, Mayor Daly was less than happy that his brutal heavy-handed police state tactics were captured on national television.  Hubert Humphrey may have been even less pleased.

Are we becoming a society that wants to share everything? There is the seemingly endless social media barrage of Facebook check-ins, selfies and photographs, Twitter and Tumblr posts, Instagram photographs and Pinterest boards.  The Internet has become the scrapbook of our modern lives.

Harmless you might think, just social interaction on the web.  Are we really thinking at all about how much information about our lives these ubiquitous postings contain?  Locations, associations, random thoughts, opinions, political views.  Photographs of conduct that more reflective thought might suggest we not share, even with our "friends," as they may slip out into wider circulation.

Pause to consider where the legal and societal boundaries should be drawn when we so freely share our lives.  Start with a somewhat more well defined example from recent headline news.  You may recall that "hackers" recently spread across the Internet intimate photographs of actress Jennifer Lawrence.  Reports said that the hackers targeted as many as 101 celebrities. These were not images that Lawrence had shared publicly, but private images stored on a personal device or on the Internet, in the "cloud" (some thought "iCloud"), which the hackers had accessed and made public. Without permission.  Illegally.  That is, the hackers stole them.

Hackers, for lack of a better term, often may seem like, and may often be in many situations, Internet whistleblowers -- revealing information on wrong-doing, violations of rights, including our human rights and rights to privacy.  Fundamentally, they are appropriating information over which they do not have rights.  This may seems useful socially or politically, but it still breaking the rules.

The societal balance here is an uneasy one. Some may applaud Edward Snowden for the revelations that he made, deeming his motive as serving the greater good, but fundamentally, what he did broke the code of secrecy.  Do we feel that same about the hackers that have made off with individual financial information from the computer of Target or Home Depot?  Would we feel the same with regard to someone accused of espionage for a foreign government who stole important government information?  Consider Julius and Ethel Rosenberg or Kim Philby.

And what of corporate espionage?  Do we think that it is noble to undermine legitimate research and corporate business practices by letting trade secrets be stolen or sold without permission?  It may be a stretch far beyond legal fiction to say that corporations are people, but established laws of copyright, patent and trademark protection are designed to preserve the rights of those who develop intellectual property.

So, it is right to judge these "piracies" based on motive?  White hats and black hats?

Let's return to those who hacked and distributed pictures of Jennifer Lawrence.  These pictures were most likely held in storage on a cellphone or in the "cloud".  Apple has flatly stated that its iCloud storage was not hacked.  Clearly, they were not "public," however, and Lawrence had a reasonable expectation that they would remain stored and protected -- in a word "private."

The debate, if there is one here, has nothing to do with why these photographs were taken.  It has everything to do with the expectation of privacy and the violation of that right.  To use a more conventional example, if you put your money in a bank, you have reasonable expectation that it will stay there until you take it out.  We have laws that regulate banks and insure deposits.  If someone robs the bank (or hacks your account) they are stealing your money.

Because we recently have come to look at financial institutions with great skepticism, perhaps there is a better analogy.  Your home is filled tangible items like pictures.  If someone breaks into your home, invades your privacy, and steals your pictures, they have stolen something from you.  The value of the pictures does not matter.  Whether the thief ever profited from the theft does not matter.  Someone has taken something from you.

So too, hackers have stolen what belonged to Jennifer Lawrence, not to them.

How do we draw the lines in this debate, in an open society in which we seem most often to be giving away so much information for free?  In the September 22, 2014 issue of The New Yorker, Nick Paumgarten wrote an insightful article entitled "We Are The Camera," a profile of the Go-Pro phenomena.  

A Go-Pro is a small portable camera used most frequently by athletes and sportspersons to capture their own physical endeavors. Video from these cameras has become ubiquitous in the sporting world and extremely popular on Internet video sharing sites and social media like Facebook.  Go-Pro footage also has made its way into documentary films.

Paumgarten's article is partly a business saga of Go-Pro's rise from a start-up with humble beginnings, its development of the iPhone of first-person video cameras, and its initial public offering on Wall Street.  Wrapped around this business story, however, is another more fascinating examination of extreme self-documentation and self-promotion.

Because of their first-person perspective, Go-Pro cameras are purchased and used to record the user's personal experiences:  a ski or snowboard run, a mountain bike descent, a kayak trip, undersea experiences, skydiving, etc.  Although these cameras can document amateur attempts, the first experiences of novices, etc., the footage most eagerly being sought and shared may be best described as "extreme sport."

The Go-Pro phenomena illustrates several interesting points.  Some footage no doubt ends up only on home computers and private family viewings.  What is driving Go-Pro's business success, however, is not the home video library, but the desire of many users to share their exploits on social networks and beyond.  What emerges is content, which Go-Pro is mining as part of its business model.  As of September 30, 2014, Go-Pro seems to be doing rather well.

As Paumgarten's article pointedly illustrates, athletes who once pursued the personal achievement of their sport now are becoming filmmakers -- on a quest to capture themselves in action with the best, most exciting footage.  We, the armchair spectators are the audience.  It may begin by watching a snowboarding run by a relative or boyfriend, but the Internet is filling up with ever more adventurous footage.

Go-Pro and others are using this Internet video traffic to make money.  Yes, Go-Pro pays some people to be "ambassadors," but largely to promote others to buy cameras and share experiences.  As with much of the social sharing on the Internet, the material being shared (pictures, videos, music, etc.) is largely produced for little or no compensation and the sharing sites are making money off of advertising or subscription fees.  This exhibitionism (in some cases extreme) is being mined to make money.

This is not necessarily new.  This summer I read Bill Bryson's One Summer, a snapshot of the summer of 1927.  A recurring sub-theme is how the events of that summer (Lindbergh's triumphant reception after flying from America to Paris, Babe Ruth setting his home run record, notorious murder trials, flag pole sitting, gangsters, even the prolonged vacation of the seemingly uncharismatic President Coolidge) were constant sources of content for the reigning media (newspapers from The New York Times to the tabloids of the day) and the infant radio and talking picture industries.  We love to devour glimpses of worlds beyond our own.  Since the earliest cave paintings and hieroglyphs we have recorded large and small pieces of our activities.  Mass media simply carries this to broader audiences.

So where does this leave us?  The photographs on our cellphones should have a reasonable expectation of privacy.  (The current SCOTUS may think otherwise, of course.) What we openly share with the world (or a part of it) likely is a different story.

Returning to Nick Paumgarten's article in The New Yorker, he concludes with an instructive story of three "jumpers" -- the extreme sport of jumping off tall structures, in this story, the new World Trade Center One in New York City.  (For some context here, in 1974 French high-wire artist Philippe Petit strung a cable at 1,350 feet above the ground between the original Twin Towers of the pre-9/11 World Trade Center and walked across it a for 45 minutes.  In so doing, he also walked into history (and fiction)).

In Paumgarten's article, in September of 2013, after by-passing security to reach the top of the new World Trade Center One, with Go-Pros mounted and rolling, two jumper leaped from the tower and parachuted to the ground (with a third as a lookout).  A bystander on the ground saw them and called 910.  In a somewhat staggering fact, Paumgarten reveals that the police reviewed video from "more than four thousand working security cameras and license-plate scanners below Canal Street" in NYC and eventually identified the get-away car.  The jumpers turned themselves in.  Only then did they put their video on the Internet.  Also somewhat astounding is that Go-Pro was not interested in the footage.

Perhaps here we have the perfect storm.  Submitted for your consideration: Three individuals clearly intent on doing something illegal, who filmed themselves doing so, although not intending to publicize their acts, only memorialize them.  A police investigation using publicly-placed surveillance camera footage to track down the suspects.  Likely there is little argument that the Go-Pro video, once posted on the Internet, has any expectation of privacy.  In between the extremes, however, there should be much to consider -- by all who "share" their experiences, either intentionally or unwittingly.  You never know who ultimately may be watching you.