Visibility Is A Trap

Can you report on surveillance tools without using surveillance tools?

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Can you report on invasive surveillance without being invasively surveillant? Wrestling with this at The New York Times, Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson seemed to decide: sort of. Warzel and Thompson used a leaked data file that “included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones” to trace the movements of thousands of people near the Capitol on January 6. The data traced “around 130 devices inside the Capitol exactly when Trump supporters were storming the building.”

The data itself is the kind smartphone apps silently collect all the time, and which is commonly used for advertising and customer tracking. “Most consumers don’t know it is being collected and it is insecure and vulnerable to law enforcement as well as bad actors — or an online mob — who might use it to inflict harm on innocent people,” they wrote. They were firm in their position on it, theoretically. “None of this data should ever have been collected,” they wrote.

Yet, as Chris Gilliard and Albert Fox Cahn wrote at OneZero, here we are, all looking at it anyway, on the homepage of one of America’s biggest newspapers. To Gilliard and Fox Cahn, showcasing and using the data — even for journalism — is hypocritical. “If the data is truly toxic and should…