From Citizen to Subject: The Perils of Privacy (pdf available here)

Margaret Kohn

University of Florida, Gainesville

 

The Dover Ban: Wartime Control over Images of Public and Private Deaths

also: pdf paper

Brian Gran

Sociology Department and Law School ~ Case Western Reserve University

 

Breaking Windows from Baghdad: Insurgent Video and the Case of Juba

Josh Guilford

Department of Modern Culture and Media ~ Brown University

 

Kevin Bankston, Commentator

Electronic Frontier Foundation

 

 

Margaret Kohn

From citizenry to subject

Citizen (a grad student she knew) Charles Gratsky: met with a city manager about a lawsuit. Manager confirmed he knew he was being recorded during the interview.

Later the citizen was arrested, on the issue of 2-party consent, one party had not consented to the recording.

CG: public biz with a public official is public.

 

Asymmetrical relationship between the citizen of the state. State can spy on us but not us on them.

 

Is surveillance normalization?

The inverse panopticon? Watch the guards?

 

Foucault is not good at explaining what’s wrong with docility.

“on being watched and known” essay Kateb (?)

personhood and dignity are harmed by surveillance because they are an object of social control and normalization

 

1. tech of surveillance forecloses possibilities of innocence. (but what if innocent aren't affected?)
1. Turn individual into an object of observation, pathological

 

1. Creates an unauthorized biography of the individual.
1. Databases are synedochal, only part of us

 

1. Individual should control access to her person
1. Tautological argument, a definition of privacy

 

1. Harm is overall asymmetry between those who watch and those who are watched.
1. Law enforcement will work as bad social sciences
2. Turns people into manipulable animals. Govt control of citizens. Treats adults as if they were children. Means to an end, not an end.
3. Anti-autonomous, sacrifices it for an unidentified collectivity

 

A humanist conception of the self.

• Aristotelian : become virtuous by inculcating good behavior
• Kant: we must choose to make ethical behavior for rational reasons. If we don’t choose then it’s not moral
  • Challenged by accounts of constraint
  • Althusser – interpolation. Cop says “hey you”
  • implausible

 

Absolutism about individuality and autonomy is not actually sensible.

 

New understanding of human dignity. Contextual understanding of harms involved

A slippery slope

State has more powerful tools, can lead to tyranny.

Techniques initially separate the innocent from guilty

Drift, start separating other things

Apparatus of generalized suspicion

 

Surveillance can be used by citizens to monitor students in power

Did Gratsky harm Watson’s dignity and personhood?

Rights are dependent on a notion of the state , as a check on the state.

He was taping a representative of the state,

So privacy should not be used on behalf the state

The context of power relation is important

 

Jurisprudence in murky – journalists undercover to reveal issues of corporation

 

Cache – marriage falls apart under constant notification of being surveilled

Secrets, what is hidden in peoples lives, and from their lives

Two points

Right to privacy is not absolute because it is social, cannot be used to cover actions that affect other people

 

Implicated in the violence in the rest of the world.

 

__Brian Gran__

War and The Dover Ban – why it applies to public soldiers but not to private soldiers

 

Who: Nation states, groups, UN, NGOs, Businesses

 

Department Of Defense (DOD) policy: There will be no arrival ceremonies for or media coverage deceased military personnel retuning to or departing from…

Most coffins arrive at Dover airforce base in Delaware: The Dover Ban

 

Why does the DOD have a ban?

 

1. Privacy “concerned about the privacy of the deceased and their loved ones”
2. Hardship –hard to organize ceremonies. DOD would have to deal with that
3. National security – prevent enemies knowning the number of military dead

 

--> The Dover “Test” : Is the American public prepared for the sight?

 

Criticisms

1. censors free speech
2. prevents public awareness
3. control public support of the war

 

Brian Gran: This DOD requirement of respect and dignity – in relation to being filmed. One question that keeps coming up, is, does respect and dignity depend on being filmed or not filmed?

Issue of complicity when we are viewing – also because we DO dignify things by watching them

 

Dover ban has been in existence since 1991, but DOD has ignored it at times

• When Ron Brown’s plane crashed
• Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya
• USS Cole
• 2001 Pentagon
• 1st soldier killed in Afghanistan
• march and april in 02
• DOD: 11/03 – Korean war remains
• DOD: Russ Kick (FOIA)
• DOD: Ralph Begleiter (FOIA)

 

April 2004 – Seattle times published this photograph take by an employee of a military contracting company. Got into trouble for violating the ban. She was fired.

 

Russ Kick got a CDR from the DOD. Photos of coffins. He had a website called the memory hole. Filed a FOIA and got it

 

Russ Begleiter – asked DOD. His photos have the faces of the soldiers blacked out.

 

The Ban appears to be discretionary consideration of factors:

• small # of deceased
• prominent person
• DOD not at fault

 

They have stopped taking photos, so FOIA is not relevant

 

Dover Ban apply to private contractors?

Blackwater, KBR, Aegis, Polish co, Norwegian Co

Protection (including of US govt officials!!), minor construction, food delivery

 

DOD directive says the remains “deserve the same dignity and respect afforded military remains”

 

What does dignity and respect mean?

Private soldiers do not fail the dover test?

 

__Josh Guilford__

Bizarre video – serialized videos of snipers hitting US soldiers. verite style, slow, hidden. Framed by pretty slick musical and visual images of various US and European leaders being targeted and shot, plus other footage of war

 

Keenan: privacy + publicity, interior and exterior: interruption and intrusion

Publicity tears uf from ourselves, exposure: entrance of alterity. Vioelnec, potential of the exchange.

 

Violence makes possible the communication. (?)

 

In public we are a hostage of the other.

 

Is the security of publicity accessible to anyone?

Entrance into political space.

Videos are an effort on insurgency to transform to public space, not to speak but to be understood as speaking?

 

-not a call for entrance, they insist on recognizing their message of alterity. Use the violence of publicity to achieve civility?

 

A leaked letter: a presentation of violence more conducive of public opinion. Not like Pearl video

 

Voyeuristic presentation of unverifiable violence. (similar to video games)

 

Decline in visual legitimacy from digital imagery?

(interpenetration of digital imagery into our lives, makes it all equally legitimate?)

 

A celebrity sniper: Juba

Dependent on a preconceived and predivided audience. Those in the muslim world and those in the west. (maybe those sympathetic to the snipers and those not?)

“our images are no longer our own but that of a community”

Burk considers each side as a preexisting view. But those who can identify with Juba, and those who cant. Not implication, but also direct involvement and total exclusion (separation from the POVcontrol)

Kevin Bankston Comment(EFF)

Recording tech are not always instruments of the state, tools for news reporting, propaganda

 

In considering how to restrain abuse of these tools we have to consider how they should not impinge

 

Tension between privacy and first amendment

 

Civil libertarians fail to property balance need for societal needs for privacy. They concern themselves with free speech

 

Endorsement: a transparent society – surveillance tech should bloom. (?). Ubiquitous tech needs to be balanced in the state and against it

 

Government’s tools for surveillance will have better funding and have better equipment than the people, technology alone cannot balance the power relationship.