Eyes are everywhere
There is little place to hide in a surveillance society.
Acity shut down. Schools closed. Transit halted. Business shuttered. Residents told to stay home and lock their doors. People, including children, killed at a sporting event. Such, it seems, are the consequences western societies must confront in the Age of Terrorism when would-be mass murderers live among us.
Hundreds of law enforcement agents — FBI, police, transit officers and even campus security staff — were engaged in a manhunt Friday that saw the Boston area under martial law conditions. All this for the purpose of capturing the remaining suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings earlier this week, a 19-yearold youth of Chechen origin, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was captured alive late Friday. The other bombing suspect, brother Tamerlan, 26, had been killed earlier in a street shootout with police. Apparently the dead man had a homemade bomb strapped to his body when he was killed.
With Dzhokhar still on the loose, heavily armed law enforcement officers conducted a houseto-house in a residential area of Watertown, a community outside of Boston. They blocked off a 20-block residential area. And then, concerned that Dzhokhar might have already escaped the area, they effectively shut down Boston, one of America’s most populated cities. Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick urged residents to “stay indoors, with their doors locked.” Boston police commissioner Edward Davis justified the authorities’ action, saying “We believe this to be a man who’s come here to kill people, and we need to get him in custody.” They finally have.
It was, perhaps, an unprecedented reaction to a terrorist threat, 9/11 aside. When British authorities were hunting for the perpetrators of the 2005 bombings on the London Underground, they didn’t order residents to stay indoors or businesses to close. They didn’t even shut down the rest of the Underground. To make this observation isn’t to suggest American authorities overreacted, but rather to highlight the extraordinary situation we face in our post-9/11 world. We live, as the Chinese curse goes, in interesting times.
But then there are other “interesting” aspects to this latest terrorist assault. The search for the two bombing suspects and their near-capture four days after the attack certainly demonstrates how rapidly we’ve become a society of surveillance. Investigators made heavy use of CCTV images, cellphone pictures submitted by spectators and social media devotees to identify and track down the suspects.
It’s surely extraordinary to think that the simple presence of a video camera and monitor in a convenience store was the essential element in the authorities’ finding who they were looking for and then disseminating the fuzzy images to the public. No surprise, the images went viral on the Internet. Nor should it surprise anyone if the final nail in putting names to the suspects’ faces was driven home by a neighbour or acquaintance who recognized the suspects either from TV or social media.
Many people have well warranted concerns about the increasing pervasiveness of video cameras — anyone who’s visited an English city in recent years will note their almost ubiquitous presence on the streets — and their potential abuse by authorities. In this case, however, we’ve seen the positive side of technological surveillance. It’s hard to “disappear” nowadays when your appearance can be tracked electronically.
The brothers’ presence on the Internet also appears to have been a factor in their quick identification. One of the reasons it took so long for the CIA to track down Osama bin Laden was because he and his cronies avoided using cellphones and other electronic devices for direct communication. But these two young men made heavy use of social media, and that, it seems, helped expose them.
The younger brother, Dzhokhar, used a popular Russian social media platform, Vkontakte, to describe his views as “Islam,” although when asked to identify “the main thing in life,” he responds saying “career and money.” He also lists various Chechnya-related affinity groups, and quotes the Koran: “Do good, because Allah loves those who do good.”
The older brother, Tamerlan, left a list of his favourite video clips on YouTube. They included Russian rap videos as well as a testimonial from a young ethnic Russian man titled “How I accepted Islam and became a Shiite.” There was also a clip titled “Seven Steps to Successful Prayer.”
According to news reports, intelligence analysts were examining the brothers’ emails, cellphone records and postings on Facebook and other social media in an effort not only to uncover the details of their lives, but also to determine whether they had accomplices still at large and any links to terrorist organizations.
In the Age of Surveillance, you can run but you cannot hide. That is a necessary thing in the Age of Terrorism.