Private Peeps

My funny dicks.

I stood before the customs agent as neutral as I could. A blank piece of paper. Like an unthreatening swath of undyed muslin. I took nothing, I gave nothing. I had been fairly anxious about going through US customs for a work trip given everything being reported and rumoured. The anxiety was soon quelled by boredom after several frustrating lineups. If the anxiety doesn’t get you the boredom will. After two or three benign questions, I was directed to stand in front of a camera, remove my hat and glasses and stand still. My photo was then taken. No one asked me. I was told.

A similar thing occurred coming back in Toronto going through Canadian customs. Remove your hat and glasses and hold still for your unrequested portrait. Then the kiosk produced a small portrait of me on a slip of thermal paper. In the week in between those photos my picture had been taken numerous times by work colleagues at restaurants or by the government of California as I drove south on the 101 as I tried to avoid the toll lanes. Who knows how many other times I was in the background of someone else’s photos or surveilled by some other government’s camera.

My point is your privacy is dead and gone. There was no celebration of life, no book of condolences, no flowers and worse of all, no autopsy. What we casually give away every time we use our phones we have simultaneously acquiesced to authorities. At least I can guess that Google and Facebook are trying to sell me something or sell me to someone, but I have no idea how governments use my information and to what end.

You might think, “So what? I’m not breaking any laws.” It turns out you don’t have to break any laws. Look at what’s been happening Stateside. A man married to a citizen without any criminal activity is deported to a country he fled. Another detained for having “UnAmerican Ideas”, and yet another for co-authoring an article discussing viewpoints opposite of the government’s position. One of those three was in the right place at the wrong time. He showed up at his job. Another was taken from his home and the last person was abducted from the street. How did a government know so much about them, where they were and when they would be there? Surveillance. It’s far too easy to find someone and track their movements and now their opinions. Using a goofy avatar doesn't help you. Using a funny nickname or handle doesn't help. You leave traces wherever you go, and if those traces overlap, you're found like an agoraphobic arsonist. Where there's smoke, there's fire. Once whoever is tracking you identifies you, they could freeze your bank accounts, credit cards, ruin your credit score and interrupt your life indefinitely. Oh, and they have your dick pics and yes, they are pointing and laughing. Now are you so sure it’s OK because you aren’t doing anything illegal?

What must it be like for an authority to track my life? Pretty dull I would imagine. Absurdly quotidian and curiously verbose they might say. "This guy really likes cheese.", might be their most insightful analysis. What would be my dark secrets? The stash of cheap milk chocolate I nibble on throughout the day? That when I announce I’m going to go to the gym I rarely do but when I don’t say anything I’m more likely to go? That I really do have Dick Picks on my phone and they are hilarious? That I sit to urinate (even at a urinal… no, of course not, that's an absurd lie, what happened was, I had been enjoying some sweet, sweet edibles, and there's this… you know what, there's nothing to tell, end of story)? There’s probably something shocking that they could find …or fabricate. In any case, I thought I was so used to the idea of being watched that I had become accustomed to it. Yet being photographed so often on this last trip, and seeing border agents assess a low-fi, thermal printed image of me, has made me reconsider it and made me considerably uncomfortable.

There was a time when I discovered how many people shared my indistinct Anglophone name. From Canada, US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand there were so many of us, I felt safe in anonymity. Yet, there are so many people with my name in Toronto it can be frustrating to prove I’m me. What I thought would make it challenging to steal my identity (just by sheer ubiquity) also made it harder to prove my identity. Basically having a unique middle name rather than none at all can come in handy. Your kid may wonder why you gave them a name like Xavier or DonkeyKong but trust me it could be useful.

For all my normality, blandness and commonness, which I had assumed was my camouflage, it turns out you can't hide from Big Brother. You can’t avoid being photographed in public anymore, from traffic cameras to door bells, you will be photographed. Again you could argue, “Who cares?”, but there is something fundamentally odd about our own complacency to living in cities of both literal and figurative glass houses. Sometimes I think about how in a small town, everyone seems to know you and your business even if you don’t know them but in a big city it’s easy for no one to know you and still know your business. You can be tracked by your face, your fingerprints, even your walking gait. Somewhere there are copies of my fingerprints (taken when I applied for a job as a security guard), my blood type and DNA (with apologies). For years, I've left hair dispersed wherever I go, but try getting a sample from my head nowadays! I wish!

I'm currently reading a book highlighting walks through London that were part of a fascinating decade in the life of Samuel Pepys (pronounced "Peeps"). Pepys kept a detailed daily diary from 1660 to about 1669. In that time he witnessed the death of Thomas Cromwell, the restoration of Charles I, the Great Plague of London and the Great Fire of London. Along the way he recorded not only those events like a citizen reporter but also many private moments, such as his and his wife's relations, his health, his affairs - both failed and successful - along with amusements such as theatre, concerts and the friends he met for drinks. The more private intimate details, he wrote in an amateur encrypted script and shorthand, indicating that he knew all along that one day he would bequeath these fascinating journals along with his own library to the public. What secrets he kept, we'll never know, but of his opinions and observations, he recorded what he thought. While Pepys expected his public life to be remembered I doubt he thought his private life would. Maybe in that way, Samuel Pepys was ahead of our era of social media. He held high positions in the government so there are portraits of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London but of course, no photos printed on thermal paper.