[AGL] an amusing read - Attn. Ginger V

[Michael Eisenstadt]

    *Goodbye to All That *
    *A Private Investigator on Living in a Surveillance Culture *
    By Judith Coburn <http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/judithcoburn>

    Now that we know we are surveilled 24/7 by the National Security
    Agency <https://tcrn.ch/2FIGZLf>, the FBI, local police, Facebook
    <https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/07/26/how-years-privacy-controversies-finally-caught-up-with-facebook/?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.f3972ae90d54>,
    LinkedIn
    <http://fortune.com/2015/10/05/linkedin-class-action/?utm_source=fortune.com&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=social-button-sharing>,
    Google, hackers, the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, data
    brokers, private spyware groups like Black Cube
    <https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/israeli-operatives-who-aided-harvey-weinstein-collected-information-on-former-obama-administration-officials>,
    and companies from which we've ordered swag on the Internet, is
    there still any "right to be forgotten," as the Europeans call it?
    Is there any privacy left, let alone a right to privacy
    <https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/14/magazine/facebook-google-privacy-data.html>?

    In a world in which most people reveal their intimate secrets
    voluntarily, posting them on social media and ignoring the pleas of
    security experts to protect their data with strong passwords --
    don’t use your birth date, your telephone number, or your dog's name
    -- shouldn't a private investigator, or PI, like me be as happy as a
    pig in shit? Certainly, the totalitarian rulers of the twentieth
    century would have been, if such feckless openness had been theirs
    to abuse.

As it happens, tech -- or surveillance capitalism -- has disrupted the 
private investigation business as much as it’s ripped through 
journalism, the taxi business 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/17/nyregion/uber-taxi-drivers-struggle.html>, 
war making, and so many other private and public parts of our world. And 
it's not only celebrities and presidential candidates whose privacy 
hackers have burned through. Israeli spyware 
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/amnesty-international-israel-spyware-human-rights-nso-group-a8473266.html> 
can steal the contacts off your phone just as LinkedIn did to market 
itself to your friends. Google, the Associated Press reported recently 
<https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/google-location-data-privacy-android-sundar-pichai-a8490636.html>, 
archives <https://www.apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb> your 
location even when you’ve turned off your phone. Huge online database 
brokers like Tracers <https://www.tracersinfo.com/>, TLO 
<https://www.tlo.com/>, and IRBsearch <http://irbsearch.com> that law 
enforcement and private eyes like me use can trace your address, phone 
numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, family members, 
neighbors, credit reports, the property you own, foreclosures or 
bankruptcies you’ve experienced, court judgments or liens against you, 
and criminal records you may have rolled up over the years.

Ten years ago, to subscribe to one of these databases, I had to show 
proof that I was indeed a licensed investigator and pass an on-site 
investigation to ensure that any data I downloaded would be protected. I 
was required to have a surveillance camera and burglar alarm on the 
building where my office was located, as well as a dead bolt on my 
office door, a locked filing cabinet, and double passwords to get into 
my computer. Now, most database brokers just require a PI or attorney 
license and you can sign right up online. Government records -- federal 
and state, civil and criminal -- are also increasingly online for anyone 
to access.

The authoritarian snoops of the last century would have drooled over the 
surveillance uses of the smartphones that most of us now carry. 
Smartphones have, in fact, become one of the primo law enforcement tools 
other than the Internet. "Find my iPhone" can even find a dead body -- 
if, that is, the victim left her iPhone on while being murdered. And 
don’t get me started on the proliferation of surveillance cameras in our 
world.

Take me. I had a classic case that shows just how traceable we all now 
are. There was a dead body, a possible murder victim, but no direct 
evidence: no witnesses, no DNA, no fingerprints, and no murder weapon 
found. In San Francisco's East Bay, however, as in most big American 
cities, there are so many surveillance cameras mounted on mom-and-pop 
stores, people's houses, bars, cafes, hospitals, toll bridges, tunnels, 
even in parks, that the police can collect enough video, block by block, 
to effectively map a suspect driving around Oakland for hours before 
hitting the freeway and heading out to dump a body, just as the 
defendant in my case did.

Once upon a time, cops and dirty private eyes would have had to attach 
trackers to the undercarriages of cars to follow them electronically. No 
longer. The particular suspect I have in mind drove his victim’s car 
across a bridge, where cameras videotaped the license plate but couldn't 
see inside the car; nor, he must have assumed, could anyone record him 
on the deserted road he finally reached where he was undoubtedly 
confident that he was safe. What he didn't notice was the CALFIRE video 
camera placed on that very road to monitor for brush fires. It caught a 
car’s headlights matching his on its way to the site he had chosen to 
dump the body. There was no direct evidence of the murder he had 
committed, just circumstantial, tech-based evidence. A jury, however, 
convicted him in just a few hours.

*A World of Tech Junkies*

In our world of the unforgotten, tech is seen as a wonder of wonders. 
Juries love tech. Many jurors think tech is simply science and so beyond 
disbelief. As a result, they tend to react badly when experts are called 
as defense witnesses to disabuse them of their belief in tech's magic 
powers: that, for instance, cellphone calls don’t always pinpoint 
exactly where someone was when he or she made a call. If too many 
signals are coming in to the closest tower to a cell phone, a suspect's 
calls may be rerouted to a more distant tower. Similarly, the FBI's 
computerized fingerprint index often makes mistakes in its matches, as 
do police labs when it comes to DNA samples. And facial recognition 
systems, the hottest new tech thing around (and spreading 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/16/technology/china-surveillance-state.html> 
like wildfire across China 
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/24/business/dealbook/china-facial-recognition.html>), 
may be the most unreliable 
<https://www.wired.com/story/when-it-comes-to-gorillas-google-photos-remains-blind/?mbid=email_onsiteshare> 
of all, although that certainly hasn't stopped Amazon 
<https://wapo.st/2IBYO0P?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.6ecca127211a> from 
marketing a surveillance camera with facial recognition abilities.

These days, it’s hard to be a PI and not become a tech junkie. Some PIs 
use tech to probe tech, specializing, for example, in email 
investigations in big corporate cases in which they pore through 
thousands of emails. I recently asked a colleague what it was like. 
"It's great," he said. "You don't have to leave your office and for the 
first couple of weeks you entertain yourself finding out who's having 
affairs with whom and who's gunning for whom in the target's office, but 
after that it's unspeakably tedious and goes on for months, even years."

<https://www.amazon.com/dp/1608469018/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20>When 
I started out, undoubtedly having read too many Raymond Chandler and Sue 
Grafton novels, I thought that to be a real private eye I had to do the 
old-fashioned kind of surveillance where you actually follow someone in 
person. So I agreed to tail a deadbeat mom who claimed to be unemployed 
and wanted more alimony from her ex. She turned out to be a scofflaw 
driver, too, a regular runner of red lights. (Being behind her, I was 
the one who got the tickets, which I tried to bill on my expense report 
to no avail.) But tailing her turned out to make no difference, except 
to my bank account. Nor did tech. Court papers had already given us her 
phone and address but no job information. Finally, I found her 
moonlighting at a local government office. How? The no-tech way: simply 
by phoning an office where one of her relatives worked and asking for 
her. "Not in today," said the receptionist helpfully and I knew what I 
needed to know. It couldn’t have been less dramatic or /noir/-ish.

These days, tech is so omnipresent and omnivorous that many lawyers 
think everything can be found on the Internet. Two lawyers working on a 
death-penalty appeal once came to see me about working on their case. 
There had been a murder at a gas station in Oakland 10 years earlier. 
Police reports from the time indicated that there was a notorious "trap 
house" where crack addicts were squatting across from the gas station. 
The lawyers wanted me to find and interview some of those addicts to 
discover whether they'd seen anything that night. It would be a quick 
job, they assured me. (Translation: they would pay me chump change.) I 
could just find them on the Internet.

I thought they were kidding. Crack addicts aren’t exactly known for 
their Internet presence. (They may have cell phones, but they tend not 
to generate phone bills, rental leases, utility bills, school records, 
mortgages, or any of the other kinds of info databases collect that you 
might normally rely on to find your quarry.) This was, I argued, an 
old-fashioned shoe-leather-style investigation: go to the gas station 
and the trap house (if it still existed), knock on doors to see if 
neighbors knew where the former drug addicts might now be: Dead? Still 
on that very street? Recovered and long gone?

In a world where high-tech is king, I didn't get the job and I doubt 
they found their witnesses either.

You'd think that, in a time when tech is the story of the day, month, 
and year and a presidential assistant is even taping 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/omarosa-manigault-newman-releases-purported-recording-of-her-white-house-firing/2018/08/12/004d7cc6-9e46-11e8-93e3-24d1703d2a7a_story.html?utm_term=.6ac6407d9332> 
without permission in the White House Situation Room, anything goes. But 
not for this aging PI. I mean, really, should I rush over to a 
belly-dancing class in Berkeley to see if some guy's fiancée and the 
teacher go back to her motel together? (No.) Should I break into an 
ex-lover's house to steal memos she'd written to get him fired? (Are you 
kidding?) Should I eavesdrop on a phone call in which a wife is trying 
to get her husband to admit that he battered her? (Not in California, 
where the law requires permission from every party in a phone call to be 
on the line, thereby wiping out such eavesdropping as an investigative 
tool -- only cops with a warrant being exempt.)

I certainly know PIs who would take such cases and I’m not exactly 
squeaky clean myself. After all, as a journalist working for /Ramparts 
/magazine back in the 1960s, I broke into the basement of the National 
Student Association 
<https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/23/a-friend-of-the-devil> 
(with another reporter) to steal files showing that the group’s leaders 
were working for the CIA and that the agency actually owned the very 
building they occupied. In a similar fashion, on a marginally legal 
peep-and-trespass in those same years, another reporter and I crawled 
through bushes on the grounds of a VA Hospital in Maryland where we had 
been told that we could find a replica of a Vietnamese village being 
used to train American assassins in the CIA’s Phoenix program 
<http://www.douglasvalentine.com/index.htm>. That so-called pacification 
program would, in the end, kill more than 26,000 Vietnamese civilians. 
We found the “village,” secretly watched some of the training, and filed 
the first piece about that infamously murderous program for New York’s 
/Village Voice/.

Those ops were, however, in the service of a higher ideal, much like 
smartphone videographers today who shoot police violence. But most of 
surveillance capitalism is really about making sure that no one in our 
new world can ever be forgotten. PIs chasing perps in divorce cases are 
a small but tawdry part of just that. But what about, to take an extreme 
case in which the sleazy meets the new tech world big time, the FBI's 
pursuit of lovers of kiddy porn, which I learned something about by 
taking such a case? The FBI emails a link to a fake website that it’s 
created to all the contacts a known child pornographer has on his 
computer or phone. It has the kind of bland come-on pornographers tend 
to use. If you click on that link, you get a menu advertising yet more 
links to photos with titles like "my 4-year-old daughter taking a bath." 
Click on any of /those /links and you’ll be anything but forgotten. The 
FBI will be at your door with cuffs within days.

Does someone who devours child porn have a right to be forgotten? Maybe 
you don’t think so, but what about the rest of us? Do we? It’s**hardly a 
question anymore.

*The Good and Ugly Gotchas of This Era*

When all the surveillance techniques on those information databases 
work, it's like three lemons lining up on a one-armed bandit. Recently, 
for instance, a California filmmaker called me, desperate. She was 
producing a movie about the first Nepalese woman to climb Mount Everest. 
Her team had indeed reached the summit, but were buried in an avalanche 
on the way down with only one survivor. The filmmaker wanted to find 
that man.

Could I do so? She didn't have enough money to send me to Nepal. (Rats!) 
But couldn’t I find him on the Internet? His name, she told me, was 
Pemba Sherpa. What's his family name, I asked? That's when I found out 
that "sherpa" isn't just a Western term for Nepalese who guide people up 
mountains; it's the surname of many Nepalese. Great! That's like asking 
me to find John Smith with no birthdate, social security number, 
address, or even the Nepalese equivalent of the state where he lives. In 
my mind’s eye, I could instantly see my database search coming up with 
the always frustrating "your search criteria resulted in too many 
records found." I also had my doubts that, despite the globalization of 
our tech world, most Nepalese were on the Internet.

Amazingly, however, checking out “sherpas,” I promptly found a single 
Pemba in my search, unfortunately with -- the bane of a PI's life -- not 
another piece of information.

Okay, Google, I thought, it’s all yours. No Pemba on the first five 
pages of my search there. (Groan.) But it was late at night and I was 
feeling obsessive, so I kept going. (Note to home investigators: don't 
give up on Google after those first few pages.) From earlier research, I 
had discovered that one of the main Nepalese communities outside that 
country was in Portland, Oregon, where many mountaineering companies are 
also based. On maybe my 28th Google page, I suddenly saw a link to a 
Portland alternative newspaper story from the mid-1990s. (Who was even 
scanning in such articles back then?)

I clicked on it. The piece was about a Portland Pemba Sherpa who had 
gone back to his native village to help its inhabitants get electricity. 
The article went on to say that he had left Nepal "because too many of 
his friends had died on the mountain." Hmmm. It also reported that he 
was married to a mathematics teacher at a Portland community college.

We’re talking about a more-than-20-year-old article! Still, the next 
morning I doggedly called the college and yes, his wife was teaching 
math there. I was patched through to the math department where, yes 
again, the wife picked up and, yes, her husband /was /the sole survivor 
of that climb, and she was sure he'd want to be interviewed for the movie.

Bingo! The actual wonders of the Internet and a heartwarming story about 
someone who needed to be found. Finding an ancient nanny to invite to 
the wedding of a guy she had raised -- after they had been out of 
contact for decades -- proved a similarly happy search. But that’s rare. 
The question, not just for PIs but for all of us, is this: Should 
everyone be so track down-able, even if they don’t wish to be? Some 
investigators, in the spirit of the moment, think that if there's an 
unknowable about anyone, it should be uncovered. The journalist who 
outed 
<https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-unmasking-of-elena-ferrante> 
novelist Elsa Ferrante really thought he'd done something, but it was 
just another in an increasing number of mean-spirited gotchas of our era.

Why do people need privacy anyway? The freedom and community that 
Internet utopians promised us has led instead to the scraping open of 
our lives by law enforcement, social media, hackers, marketers, and the 
world's governments. Now we're left largely to our own devices when it 
comes to what little we can do about it and the global surveillance 
culture that it’s enmeshed all of us in.

Back in the late 1960s, Erwin Knoll, editor of the /Progressive/ 
magazine, made President Richard Nixon's enemy list. That qualified him 
to be wiretapped by the FBI, so he asked his wife Doris to call female 
friends every day and discourse on grisly gynecological matters to 
disturb the listening agents (mostly male in those days). Erwin wondered 
if they wouldn’t think it was some kind of code.

Alexa <https://wapo.st/2J6FRqw?tid=ss_mail&utm_term=.648baab4b593>! I 
just got back from my gynecologist and...

/After 40 years as a journalist for a variety of media outlets, none of 
them fake, /TomDispatch/regular/ 
<http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176175/tomgram%3A_judith_coburn%2C_on_the_mean_streets_of_america>/Judith 
Coburn became a private eye, specializing in death-penalty cases and 
searches for people whom filmmakers and writers want to find for their 
movies and books./

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