Paranoia over Privacy

By Chris Fitzpatrick, PopMatters. Posted April 24, 2002.

For the first few seconds of September 11th 2001, it seemed as if the end of the world was being televised. Buildings were burning, people were dying, and the American social psyche moved immediately into a state of widespread terror-paranoia. This fear extended to nearly every facet of life causing many subsequent invasions of privacy and infractions upon civil liberties that would previously have been condemned without the jingoistic tolerance created and sustained by the tragic events. The normalization of this paranoia continues to affect the way in which security measures are conducted, which was precisely the case when my own apartment was searched due to my artwork having been taken out of its intended context and translated through systems of power. The ensuing dilemma created by this unwarranted intervention highlights the immediacy in the tense struggle between personal security and personal privacy reintroduced and amplified in America's new climate.

Something didn't feel right in my apartment when I returned from a short trip, things looked out of order as if someone had been inside. This feeling of violation was confirmed when Tami, my neighbor from across the hall, informed me that policemen had been looking for me and had searched my apartment. She and other neighbors were individually interrogated about me by the officers and asked to try and decipher a stack of "strange" photographs. After multiple agitated phone calls to the Daly City, California police department (who initially lied to me) it was revealed that a Walgreen's photo clerk had made a duplicate set of photographs they had just developed for me, which were turned in to the police.

Within an art context, these projects commented on a variety of issues anywhere from social displacement through technology to the spectacle and power relations inherent in musical performances and the spaces in which they occur, but the pairing of these disparate images without their intended contexts elicited an abject reaction from the clerk who read them as a potential "bomb threat."

This situation was resonant of a recent news story, in which a photo clerk notified the police of a roll of photographs containing pictures of a young man posing with guns and bombs. He had planned to murder his classmates and teachers by blowing up De Anza College in Cupertino, CA. When he came to get his photos, the police took him into custody and the clerk received instant notoriety -- the media's new vigilante hero! At the time of the De Anza bomb scare, I had no idea that it would soon parallel my own life.

The first on the roll of my photographs was a still from a Takuji Murata film entitled Ash that I was commissioned to compose music for. Consisting of a young child's face covered in blood from a terrorist attack, this image, along with the De Anza case, must have contextualized my other photographs in the mind of the photo clerk, such as The Quiet Between Silences. The flash of light in the photographs documenting this performance, in which sound and light are synchronized in a changing pattern, was assumed by the clerk to be a detonating bomb and was followed by similar bomb-paranoid analyses for each of the other projects.

Photographs in hand, the police were dispatched to question me, but I was not at home so they returned an hour later with the same outcome. On the third trip, with the forced aid of my landlord, they entered and searched my apartment without a warrant, my presence or my consent, dressed in bomb gear and armed with a clause called "welfare" as a key for entry. Depending on the situation, "welfare" (which essentially allows authorities to override one's right to privacy if another's welfare is suspected to be in danger) is indeed something for which to be thankful or fearful. It shows law enforcement as being far less fragmented or hierarchically tiered than is commonly believed; individual police officers can operate as judges. Their verdict was wrong.

The police officers of course found nothing and retreated, admittedly embarrassed by the mistake, but left me with a concerned landlord and frightened neighbors. On top of that, when questioned, an upper-division manager of Walgreen's said that it is simply their "unspoken policy" to report anything unusual to the authorities. How is a sense of security retained in an environment embedded with hidden policies and clauses that come to the foreground only after the fact? The same security measures put in place to protect our privacy have the capacity to strip them from us.

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