He's sitting at the bar in Sedona restaurant. Dark shirt, baldish, drinking a draft beer. Early evening. There's something interesting about him. Fascinating. Something that keeps a person watching. He reaches for his beer. He's going to take a sip, I just know it. Yep. There he goes. Ssssssip. He doesn't know I'm watching him. Online. In my office. On a small screen on my laptop.
Two weeks after the holidays—hangovers nursed, radium nuggets removed, toxin-sniffing dogs kenneled, flying gunships disengaged, overtime FBI and Homeland Security and National Guard officers thanked whole-heartedly and sent packing, privacy editorials written and read—you have the luxury of looking back, and you get a picture in your head of what it must've looked like:
A scrum of federal sleuths in some bad-coffee office, shirtsleeves rolled up, poring over lists of Las Vegas visitors: Joe Husseini of Indianapolis arrived at McCarran on December 29th, checked in at the MGM, called a friend in Paris, rented a porn flick …
And you think, was that really necessary? Did the government have the right to collect personal information? Isn't this Orwellian? And isn't that bad?
Las Vegas was the first city to undergo this level of surveillance with the new powers granted by the Patriot Act. In addition to demanding hotel guest lists, the FBI had access to records from car rental agencies, banks and credit card companies, pawn brokers and any number of other businesses—access to records of some 270,000 visitors. Under the Patriot Act, law-enforcement officials could also decline to say whether they will continue to track those people, and require the companies that coughed up records to refrain from telling anyone—say, the subject of the investigation or the media—what information they provided.
Snappy critics pounced on the irony of all of this going on in Las Vegas: what happens here sure as hell doesn't stay here, it goes into a federal dossier.
But so what?
You get another picture in your head: It's a skittish paranoiac yanking the living room shades closed, cuddling with his document shredder, waiting out eternity. You wonder, is that any way to live?
And here's another picture: It comes from one of 70 million cell-phone cameras: It's you. Picking your nose. While shooting a cell-cam photo of a hot chick's backside. And the whole thing is going to be on reality TV tonight, because she's some kind of hybrid celebrity, one of those people who's been craving her 15 minutes for 20 years, someone who's going to eat worms for fame.
Most of us are already living as both a performer and voyeur. And it's exponential-izing daily: life as a photoblog, a streaming surveillance video, a montage of candid shots from all sides, a work of pointillism by the point-and-click masses, reality TV and TV-dictated reality.
If it seems like one big clusterf--k of watching and being watched, bingo. And stranger than fiction, Vegas appears to have a seminal role—more than one—in the further unveiling of surveillance society.
In addition to the FBI's broad use of the Patriot Act here over the holidays, and the not-so-related-to-patriotism use of it in investigating G-Sting, Vegas excels at surveilling and being surveilled. For a wild-child destination, it's notoriously controlled; cameras in casinos have long provided an international model for enforcing desired behavior—cheaters and card-counters get collared and booted out.
Additionally, Vegas is a bona fide Place People Love To Watch. It's a paparazzi haven—the world is constantly looking at Vegas for celebs or shooting Real World reality TV here. It's one of the quintessential places to see and be seen. This summer, we can expect to see two new shows—The Casino and American Casino, reality TV about casino surveillance. A few years ago, UPN's The Watcher focused on a Las Vegan watching people through casino surveillance cams.
We're pretty good at watching ourselves, too—the 311 Boyz made a destructive sport of it. Plentiful Las Vegas-based look-at-my-hair-follicle photoblogs clog the web. There are dozens and dozens of webcams in Las Vegas' public places, from the Strip to Mount Charleston. We can check out the swimmers in the Hard Rock's pool or the newlyweds at the Little Chapel of the Flowers. They're everywhere.
And ultimately, we're in a place built on visual referents: image over substance, visual cues that supplant experience, a community constructed for the purpose of being watched.
But back to you in that picture: Your grandmother and your girlfriend and your company president are watching you take that picture of the girl. Will you opt for different behavior? Is this transparency a good thing? Collectively, do we just decide oh hell, everybody does it and shrug off the constant scrutiny, or will we begin to internalize the gaze, and values, of onlookers and relegate our unpleasantness to deeper, darker caverns?
The man on cam is really nursing that draft beer. But wait. Here comes …somebody. The plot thickens. Hmmm. It's a waiter. Here he comes. Here. He. Comes. He's almost adjacent to the man in the dark shirt. He's there! And … there … he … goes. Yep. That was a waiter, all right. The man in the dark shirt reaches for his draft. Sssssip. I am watching.
Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel for the Southern Nevada ACLU, seems vexed by latest use of the Patriot Act. He and other ACLU representatives have been all over the local press lately—trying to keep people watching the watchers. But we're so laid back. And we're so much the product of generations of increasing, thrill-seeking Tom-Peepery, and we're so afraid of terrorists, and we're so afraid of losing our comfortable, entertained lifestyles and/or our easy political apathy, Lichtenstein's job isn't always easy.
"The ability of the casinos to keep their transactions private is compromised due to the Patriot Act and its progeny. [The Patriot Act] is a frightening law. It's Orwellian," he says.
"The laws these days seem to be going the wrong way—there is less and less protection for privacy." In Nevada, Lichtenstein notes, the Supreme Court has gone so far as to rule that people do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a public restroom. The court supported police videotaping through a small hole in a Northern Nevada park bathroom stall to catch people engaged in sex acts. The Nevada Supreme court has also ruled that the police can legally put a tracking device on your car, but stopped short of allowing police to use infrared photography to find out what's going on inside your home.
"These things really are quite frightening," Lichtenstein says. "This stuff isn't all about terrorism. Cameras in the bathroom isn't about terrorism. It's about the government wanting to keep tabs on us. For all sorts of law-enforcement purposes. It makes it easier. And if we only care about police efficiency, it's a great idea. But if you believe, as I do, as the ACLU does, that you have the right to be left alone, then these changes are disturbing."
References to Orwell flip easily off of tongues these days. But in 2004, the watching isn't all done by Big Brother; ours is a far broader culture of watchers.
"The folks at the ACLU would say there's more and more encroachment of civil rights, but the millions of visitors who visit here every year don't seem to mind," Matt Wray, UNLV sociology professor, says.
"Then there is the group who says, 'If you're not doing anything wrong, you've got nothing to hide.' I think the people who make that argument are only looking at the effects, not the principles.
"It takes courts and political institutions a long time to catch up," Wray says. "We tend to embrace technology and worry later."
I can't take it any more. I jump in my car and head for that restaurant. It's across town. Immediately, I'm caught in rush hour traffic. Crap! Should've checked the traffic cams! I stop 'n' go all the way to the restaurant, hoping my man on cam will still be there.
At a local Sprint store on a Thursday morning, there are 28 customers crammed into the building, lining up for sales and service. By far, the most attention is devoted to the camera-phones and videophones, the latter of which record 15 seconds.
"It's very popular—$380," the salesman says of the videophone. "It came out at the beginning of December and we're selling them fast." He's got one himself, and when asked what he takes pictures of, he says, "Friends, family, pets …
"But people also use them for job-related stuff—realtors can show houses, taxi drivers can record accidents, designers can show products. And then there's your more salacious pictures …" With that, he picks up a camera phone with an even smaller eye.
"This one is a little more covert—it's a barrel-cam," he says, surmising that I'm interested in taking the more salacious pictures.
"We have a two-phones-for-$150 deal right now on this model."
To some degree, it seems ridiculous that the cell-phone camera is the technology that would raise our national concern about privacy. So much of the surveillance happening every day in our lives seems to go on uncontested—from credit tracking to drug testing to Internet cookies. Tiny cameras have been available to us for years, and now camera-pens are available for about $50; you can also get camera watches, camera key chains—scores of other embedded-in-common-object cameras.
But the ubiquity of the cell phone makes simpleton surveillors out of mainstream people. Suddenly, we've got the power to shoot and instantly send clandestine photography—without shopping at a spy store or having an advanced degree in technology. It's tantalizing. "I think it could fuel widespread acceptance of surveillance," Wray says. "We are already a society that has embraced our own entrapment."
My cell-cam salesman is still pitching the video phone over the barrel-cam picture phone. "The flash is kind of weak on these, but the flash on this guy—the video cam—this whole front becomes a flash, and that light is pretty bright when you're like at a bar or a night club. You can turn it off, though …
"Also it has a photo album lock, so that if you have issues of people taking your phone and looking at the pictures, you can lock it, and it's private."
Industry analysts project that another 2 million cell-cams will be sold in U.S. this year. Some argue that cheap, handy, instant-e-mail cams are the democratic antidote to the tyrannical eye in the sky. If everybody is armed with a covert camera, isn't this a fair game? We all know what a well-placed camera can do to bust corrupt authority figures; remember Rodney King? The ubiquity of cell phones could make policing the police more likely, as well as aiding the police—this fall, a New Jersey teenager used his cell cam to take a photo of his kidnapper, leading to the bust.
"The video cell phone is the continuation of American idea of citizen involvement," says Gary T. Marx, a sociologist from MIT. "It's an idea that goes from participation in the volunteer fire brigade through this."
Already, cell-cams have been used as political tools in grass-roots activism. When President Bush visited London last fall, protestors who worried that their opposition to the Bush agenda wouldn't be covered by mainstream media circulated a plan to use their cell-cams to take and post online hundreds of pictures of him passing protest lines—shots that weren't likely to make the evening news.
The interior of Sedona is dim and delicious. There he is. I walk up and say, "Excuse me. Did you know you're on a webcam right now?" He looks me over. I feel like Allen Funt, Ashton Kutcher and a really creep Peeping Tom all rolled into one. It's not often that the watcher directly confronts the watched. "I am?" he says. "Yes. I've been watching you from my office. Does that bother you?"
Thing is, we're not all terribly civic-minded. And that cell-cam, it has a tiny, savage eye. Its identity as a camera is surrepetitious. You don't hold the lens up to your eye to shoot a photo; you hold it down in front of you and view the screen as if you were you dialing the phone. The shutter noise can be silenced. No click, no flash, no indication whatsoever that a photo has been taken, and then, with the push of a button, sent. Anywhere. To anyone who has digital photo capability. It eludes—eliminates—the pre-photo dialogue we're familiar with: look, smile, snap. Instantly, whole chapters of social norms dissolve: Upskirt Shots R Us! Locker rooms! Private documents! No accountability!
While Nevada law requires that both parties on a telephone line consent to a conversation being recorded, that does not apply to recording and transmitting images. Photography, at least in public places, is a one-party-consent medium.
A federal bill sponsored by Ohio Representative Michael Oxley is ambling through Congress that would make taking and distributing pictures of people in "sensitive or compromising states" in federal areas such as national parks illegal. But we're not all so tidy as to confine our compromising states to national parks. So a slew of other attempts to legislate a social accountability with picture-taking are in the making—First Amendment notwithstanding.
Although there's no broad-scale effort among Vegas policymakers yet, fragmented attempts to govern the use of cell-cams are popping up here and around the nation. The Chicago City Council proposed an ordinance to make use of camera phones illegal in public bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers. In a suburb of Chicago, Elk Grove, park district officials banned cell phones in public bathrooms—not just cameras, but all cell phones. That could provoke lawsuits if individuals find themselves in an emergency situation and cannot call for help.
Employers are also banning the use of cell-phone cameras on the advice of industry groups that say rogue employees could be snapping photos of sensitive documents or technologies and e-mailing them to competitors. In Japan, magazine vendors are having trouble with teenagers snapping photos of fashion pages and sending them to friends and never buying the magazines—so cell phones are now prohibited in such stores. Saudi Arabia banned the cell-cams altogether.
Local gyms have probably fielded more calls from reporters about the privacy of locker rooms than from angry, naked, compromised people, but they're taking action nonetheless: 24 Hour Fitness in Las Vegas issued a new rule on January 1 that forbids the use of any kind of cell phone inside the locker room; already photo-taking is prohibited anywhere in the clubs without written permission.
Local hospitals, too, have covert camera use on their upcoming agendas. Sheryl Persinger, spokesman for UMC, said photography is not allowed without consent, but as of now, cell phones are still allowed. "I can see it being a concern in the future," she said. "Especially with patients and patient records. That's protected." Persinger noted, however, that the hospital itself—like many gyms, offices, and retail stores—has surveillance cameras throughout, on all floors. "So if someone is taking pictures inside, we can keep track of who's keeping track," Persinger said.
"No, it doesn't bother me," the man on cam says. "Do you want to sit down?" We talk for a few minutes. He asks where the camera is. I know because I know the vantage point. It's up, to the right. There. As we converse, we both keep looking up at it. Like it's listening. After giving the whole issue some thought, he says, "It wouldn't hurt them to put up a sign ... Because I just dropped somebody off, and I might not want people to necessarily know that I am here right now…"
At the heart of the proliferation of surveillance is a power struggle. To a great degree, the watcher has long been perceived as having power over the watched. The gravity of that power is multiplied when the watcher is a giant institution—says Lichtenstein, "Here's the distinction [between a government watching people, and people watching each other]: the government has a systematic gathering of information, which gives it tremendous power over people. It's about government power limits, and the founders of the country were very concerned about limiting the power of the government—so this [use of the Patriot Act to surveil] is contrary to their aim." Maybe it's not exactly Orwellian, but when you add in the prejudices of the administration, it might raise the stench of McCarthyism.
So more than a hundred municipalities have passed resolutions rebuking the Patriot Act and asking for portions of it to be limited, including the Tucson Arizona City Council, the Broward County (Florida) Commission and the Atlanta City Council.
Still, institutionalized surveillance continues to increase, in the hopes that it will deter misbehavior or aid in apprehension of evil-doers or, at the very least, provide the kind of symbolic safety measure that thwarts lawsuits.
At Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C., administrators use an electronic ID system for roll call, library books and lunches. A school district in Biloxi, Mississippi, implemented Internet-wired video surveillance cams in hallways and classrooms.
In 1996, British authorities installed 300 cameras in East London to catch IRA bombers. The overall crime rate fell 30 percent, and an additional 34 percent in 1998 when face-recognition software was hooked up. England has spent more than $350 million installing 300,000 cams around country. Wired magazine reports that the average London resident can expect to be taped every five minutes.
Meanwhile, Glasgow, Scotland, authorities installed cameras in 1994, and by 1999, the Scottish Office Central Research Unit concluded they had little effect on crime.
Tampa, Florida, police added face-recognition software to its public surveillance cameras in 2001—technology that screens faces against photo files of known, wanted criminals. The city ditched the program last August because it failed to recognize anyone.
Metro spokesman Sgt. Rick Barela said Metro uses some surveillance cameras in investigating crimes, but declined to provide details. "We have camera capability in our helicopter that we can use in a chase … Any other types of that equipment we use, we wouldn't discuss with the media at all, so it's real difficult to say whether it exists. But we don't have that type of system where we monitor target areas like they have in London."
A decade ago in Paradise Valley, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, police began using covert cameras to issue speeding tickets. Drivers received a photo and a ticket in the mail. In addition to criticizing the video-cop as unfair play, some people were irate because the photos disrupted home life. One man was mailed a ticket and the photo. Trouble is, his wife opened the mail, and saw that seated next to him in the car was another woman. That's the kind of thing that makes people find their political voice.
"As more people are aware of how their movements are being traced, they hopefully will express it politically," Lichtenstein said.
They also learn more creative ways to thwart the watchers, Marx says. "You'll start to see people wearing masks more, dark glasses, etc.," as well as technologies to counter perceived violations of privacy. "Encryption, for example, is a level of privacy greater than it's ever been."
In addition to adapting, others have created new ways to protest. A group in New York called the Surveillance Camera Players explains their protest on notbored.org: "We protest against the use of surveillance cameras in public spaces because they violate our constitutionally protected right to privacy. We manifest an opposition by performing specially adapted plays directly in front of the cameras."
The more he thinks about the webcam watching, the more my man on cam gets antsy. The more I stand there looking up at the camera, the more I like it. I can't stop looking at it looking at us. I want to wave. I try to call a friend to look at me online; no answer. I wonder how I look. I'm being broadcast around the world! I should call my sister in Arizona. I wonder how I look.
Some of us, probably more of us than admit it, like it. We take pictures of ourselves and put them online for the world to see. We line up to audition for TV shows in which Lorenzo Lamas is going to use a laser pointer to highlight our figure flaws for all of America. And we watch. We spent season after season watching Big Brother, watching Real World, flitting from one webcam and photoblog to another, watching each other do a whole lot of not much.
"It's an extraordinarily ocular culture, and one that rewards the looked-at, so it ought not be surprising that lots of people are ready to be watched," Joshua Gamson a Yale University sociology professor, wrote in The American Prospect in November 1998. "Being looked at, being visible, being known about, is a currency."
"The culture is really schizophrenic, basically," Gary Marx says. It's rife with voyeurism, narcissism, exhibitionism, congenital nosiness—and paranoia—simultaneously.
Thinkers from Plato to Karl Marx to Michel Foucault have offered theories on the behavioral effects of images and surveillance: It is at least as much a form of psychological control as an actual tool for catching wrongdoers. The idea that we're being watched changes us.
But the proliferation of suveillance, both institutional and personal, doesn't just curtail bad behavior. Scholars say watching makes Gatsbys out of all of us—people leading lives made of symbols; lives constructed from visual cues. We develop based on how we imagine that we are seen—we may even be slowly changing our values to meet the approval of whomever is watching.
And we use those perceived values and the popular palette of visual iconography to create ourselves.
Eventually, says culture critic Neal Gabler, the mind begins processing life the way it processes images—and people learn to accept their own "high gloss on reality." In his 1998 book Life: The Movie, Gabler says the image "ultimately supplants the self."
"Every American has become a performing self …" Gabler says. "In a culture of personality, playing one is just as good as being one, which threatens to make us a faux society of authors without books, artists without art, musicians without music, politicians without policies, scholars without scholarship."
Or, in its larger manifestation, Paris without Paris, New York without New York, Venice without Venice … otherwise known as Las Vegas.
Will Kobyluck, manager of Sedona, says the webcam is a security measure. "And for people to have a look at the restaurant," he says. "And I can use it when I'm off-property, to see what's happening." But should you post signs, warning people that they're online? "No, we don't post anything as far as that goes … It's just kind of a trendy thing to do now." Fair enough.
So Las Vegas emerges with a bit part in the dawning of a sloppy version of 1984 in 2004. It is both a vivid manifestation of a life controlled by surveillance and a life built on symbols.
"Vegas is taken as hyperreality's ground zero for postmodern social theorists," Wray says. "The idea that the original is forgotten and the copy is taken as the original is common here."
"It's an old question philosophically, between appearance and essence … I would definitely argue that appearance has triumphed over essence," Wray says. "And that's a way that Vegas stands out.
"I think that there are links between surveillance society and the postmodern hyperreal … On the most basic level, we do become fascinated by the image, by appearances," Wray said. "And we become consumed by the surveillance of things. If that's the day-to-day consciousness that we carry around with us, then of course the Venetian is more fun than Venice, which has stinking canals and they don't speak English."
Did Orwell say anything about casinos? Maybe not. But local scholars have been saying it for years: Vegas is a prototypical futuristic city. Although the appeal of Vegas for many visitors is the opportunity to run amok—drink, gamble, and fornicate willy-nilly—the Strip is actually a very contained environment. A surveillance society.
It's a microcosm of the tradeoff in the push-and-pull of surveillance politics: Dictate our behavior—even, apparently, investigate our personal lives—but let us have our party. Control us as much as you would like, as long as we're entertained; as long as we like the image we're living.