EDITORIAL: Like it or not, we live in a surveillance society
The movie version of “The Godfather” has a scene where mob boss Vito Corleone is shot and wounded by two anonymous hit men decked in fedoras and trench coats. They swiftly carry out their deed and then blend back into the hurlyburly of New York’s Little Italy.
That scene unfolds in the 1940s, and it’s not hard to imagine that a real-life Mafia hit might have been carried out in a similar fashion in those days, with the identity of the two perpetrators never known. Who would want to rat out members of the mob, first of all. But, more importantly, in a city full of men in trench coats and fedoras, how could you really identify them?
Not anymore.
The arrest in Altoona Monday of Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan on Dec. 4, has highlighted many Americans’ dissatisfaction with the health care system and insurance industry, even though vigilantism should never be an acceptable avenue to express that discontent. But it has also brought to the fore the depth of the surveillance within 21st century American society.
During the manhunt for Mangione, The New York Times reported on the thousands of surveillance cameras that permeate the city, and that allowed police to track his movements before and after he allegedly assassinated Thompson. They had images of Mangione in a hostel, at a Starbucks, walking to the scene of the shooting, carrying it out, on a bike, in a taxi and, thanks to the surveillance cameras, they knew he fled the city within an hour or two of the shooting. It was the dissemination of these images across the country that led to one sharp-eyed customer identifying Mangione in an Altoona McDonald’s restaurant and summoning the police.
Mangione might have eventually been nabbed without so many images of him circulating, but it stands to reason that it would have taken a whole lot longer.
Another point to consider: In a world awash in absurd conspiracy theories, one of the more ridiculous had it that the COVID-19 vaccines that were introduced in late 2020 and early 2021 contained computer chips that could track people’s movements. Of course, how these millions of computer chips could have been manufactured and inserted into vials of vaccine without anyone speaking up about it is a question the conspiracy theorists never got around to answering. More importantly, though, there would be absolutely no need for the federal government to take such a step, since we happily surrender all the details of our movements thanks to the smartphones we cart around with us.
Have an E-ZPass transponder in your car? That can tell the authorities where you were and when you were there. Use a laptop? A tracking program can be installed in that. Use a credit card? Well, you get the idea.
Surveillance cameras started to crop up in more places after 9/11, and in the case of Mangione, as well as the Boston Marathon bombers more than a decade ago, they were critical tools for law enforcement. Experts believe that, generally, they are effective for deterring crimes like burglaries, but less so for things like street brawls.
Alana Saulnier, a professor of sociology at Queen’s University in Canada, told The New York Times, “A camera probably isn’t going to be a deterrent to someone who is not going to be thinking rationally. … That’s why it could be useful in some contexts and less useful in other contexts.”
Even for those who go about their lives engaging in mundane, everyday tasks, the realization of how much can be discovered about where we traveled to and what we were up to can be unsettling. For all its benefits, we have lost a share of privacy that we once took for granted. We need to guard that privacy carefully in the surveillance society we have created.