With modern surveillance techniques and technologies, it is possible to physically go missing but impossible to disappear digitally

We are being digitally tracked and monitored today more than ever before.  Some argue that society is heading in a direction that would end in George Orwell's 1984 dystopia.  In a story coming out of Minneapolis, a father walked into Target and demanded to see the manager.  He had discovered that her daughter had been receiving coupons for baby clothes and cribs, and accused the manager at Target of encouraging his daughter to get pregnant.  A few days later the manager called to apologize, but it was the father who apologized, as he had found out that his daughter was actually pregnant.  Target, with the use of prediction models, formulas and collected data from the girl’s past purchases, knew that the girl was pregnant before her own father did.  Technology today is so advanced that everything we do is collected by computers and processed.

Today stores have infrared cameras to watch your eyes and what you look at in the store, machines pour coffee when they sense you yawning, and laser-based scanners that can tell what you ate for breakfast are being developed.  These sorts of technologies are developed by companies mostly to make better business decisions and by governments for surveillance, and are being implemented all everywhere, including the University of Maryland Campus.  The university police are using student’s phones as tools of surveillance for emergencies explained Captain Marc Limansky, former University Police spokesman.

The world today is under 24/7 CCTV surveillance, browser cookies, traceable debit cards and cell phones, fingerprinting and DNA analysis.  Despite all of these technologies, in the United States alone 327,000 go missing, more than 2000 of them never to be found again, dead or alive according to a report by BBC.  These people usually may have been victims of unsolved or unknown crimes, had an accident and possibly tried to start a new life elsewhere.

In spite of the surveillance technology today, people go missing every day.

It might appear to be impossible to disappear when a crime like kidnapping or murder is not involved since to disappear, even for a month, one would have to evade family and friends, work, and bills to name a few.  Earlier this year, Janet Veal passed away in her apartment in Ringwood, Hampshire, UK.  Her pet cats had eaten portions of her body while she was laid in her kitchen floor, undiscovered.  She went missing for a couple of weeks. In another case, 7 years ago, Joyce Carol Vincent was found dead on her sofa in London, or at least her skeleton was found, as she had been dead for at least 3 years.  Her TV was still on when she was found, meaning that she had managed to go 3 years without being checked on, by friends, family, or bill collectors for the electricity, rent or cable TV. 

In both the cases above, the people who were missing were eventually found, but in some cases, people are not.  4 days after Timothy McVeigh bombed a building in Oklahoma City killing 168, one left legwas found in the rubble. The legs of all the victims had already been counted for and nobody else had been reported missing.  DNA analysis leads to the body of someone who already was buried with both legs, and when they switched the legs they could not do a DNA analysis test on the other leg as it had been embalmed.  18 years later, no one knows who the leg belongs to, leaving the 169^th victim of the Oklahoma City bombings an unresolved mystery.

Disappearing physically is feasible, but to disappear digitally however, is impossible.  

A database with your digital fingerprint, as mentioned by Thomas Mauriello, a Laboratory Instructor for the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice for the past 35 years, is used when dealing with missing people.  The case of a young man who appearedto people in Berlin claiming he did not know who he was.  He lied about his name, age and past but was then identified as Robin van Helsum.  He had left his home in Hengelo and went to Berlin to try and start a new life by claiming he was someone else, living in the forest for a while and making up a story that would hopefully change his life.  It is because of the permanent database that Professor Mauriello talks about that this young man’s original identity was discovered.

This digital database is not always correct however.   In the Canary Islands in 2001, an employee at a store mistook a 35-year-old woman for her best friend because she looked exactly like her.  This similarity was due to the fact that her best friend and this look a like where actually identical twins, separated atbirth.  These two twins both had been misplaced at the hospital, meaning that the person they thought was their fraternal twin was actually a complete biological stranger.  Their whole lives they had been living as someone else, with the wrong names and identities, and they probably could have lived their entire lives that way too if it wasn’t for one persons observation.

The only way someone can disappear digitally is if they never existed digitally in the first place. 

People exist that do not have an official identity or that are a part of any mass database.  Outpostforhope.org mentions children thatare off the grid.  They approximate that an amount of nearly one million kids who are missing without anyone knowing.  This might be because they are not registered anywhere as they might have been born to homeless mothers.  These "invisible"children are also considered the easiest targets for trafficking.  While this is a very unfortunate reality, some wish they were invisible and untraceable like those kids.

It is not against the law to go missing under your own volition as long as your an adult.  People might have debts to pay or contracts to honor, but if that someone is an adult, the act of disappearing is not illegal in it of itself.  Some argue that all of this technology that is tracking their every move is a violation of their right to privacy.  These people might have to practice their right to disappear to protect their right to privacy, but as the cases mentioned in this post, it is proven that although physically disappearing is achievable, disappearing digitally is something that isn’t known to be possible. Theories like the ones presented in “How to Disappear: Erase YourDigital Footprint, Leave False Trails, and Vanish without a Trace,” by Frank Ahearn, only make it harder to track someone, but not impossible. No matter how long someone has been missing, they can always be found somewhere in a database.

listen to ‘Final ePorfolio Audio Summary on Surveillance and Disappearances’ on Audioboo

With modern surveillance techniques and technologies, it is possible to disappear physically but not digitally

I.               Intro:

a.     Talk about digital surveillance

                                               i.     Example of Target knowing about pregnancies

                                             ii.     Talk about panopticon as a metaphor

1.     Example of this would be Douwe Egbert’s coffee machine

                                            iii.     Surveillance technologies at University of Maryland (INTERVIEW CLIP 1)

b.     Transition: 327,000 people went missing last year worldwide –BBC Published Report (SUBHEAD)

II.             Body:

a.     How people disappear

                                               i.     They are victims of unsolved or unknown crimes.

1.     People reported missing on the back of milk cartons

                                             ii.     They may have suffered accidents

1.     Oklahoma bombing unknown victim case

                                            iii.     They may have taken their own life and haven’t been found

1.     Story of girl who died at her home and was eaten by her cats

2.     Story of woman who died and was found 3 years later in her apartment

                                            iv.     Attempted to escape their old life to start a new one

1.     (VIDEO CLIP 2)

                                             v.     Some may have been born missing

50 million children are born missing without hopes of being found since they aren’t known to be lost in the first place –outpostforhope.org (SUBHEAD)

b.     How authorities attempt to find them. (INTERVIEW CLIP 3)

                                               i.     Conclude that people can disappear physically but their digital fingerprint can’t

c.     Although digital fingerprints are permanent, they may be misleading (SUBHEAD)

                                               i.     Incident of girls in car crashed, doctors miss identifying them with each other

                                             ii.     Story of twins separated at birth in the Canary Islands

III.           Conclusion: Although physically disappearing is possible, disappearing digitally is something that isn’t known to be possible. Theories like the ones presented by Frank Ahearn, only make it harder to track someone, but not impossible.

listen to ‘Audio Summary Final ePortfolio’ on Audioboo

Audio Summary

listen to ‘Audio Summary of ePortfolio post on Arab Spring and Social Media’ on Audioboo

Twitter's active role in the Arab Spring revolutions a good example of the influence of micro social networks in today's society; While twitter's move to open up private messaging helps those in fear of censorship

Social networks today are part of everybody's daily lives.  This is partly due to the fact that almost everyone can access their Facebook, twitter, YouTube, or any other type of application or social network from basically anywhere through their smartphones, tablets or laptops.  Social networks today have therefore kept improving and growing as their use continues to grow.  Today, almost every website or application connects to some sort of social network, encouraging sharing their information, product, or service through Facebook, twitter, instagram, MySpace etc. 

Keith Urbahn's Tweet on Osama

When Osama bin Laden died in May of 2011, every single media outlet reported the news.  The event was on every news channel and website, including ESPN.  The first place where the story was reported, however, was twitter.  A Pakistani twitter user began to tweet about a helicopter raid and explosions approximately 7 hours before the Obama’s official announcement of Osama’s death.  The first announcements of Osama’s death came around 10:25, by Keith Urbahn, the chief of staff for the former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, when he tweeted “So I’m told by a reputable person they have killed Osama Bin Laden. Hot damn.”

"One could easily argue that twitter’s power and influence has been growing without signs of slowing down."

Twitter's Monthly Active Users Worldwide

In a “Mashable” poll consisting of somewhere around 20,000 of the website’s readers on how one found out about Bin Laden’s death, the majority (consisting of 31% of the votes) answered with twitter.  Other stories that broke out through twitter were the announcement of the royal wedding, Whitney Houston's death, the Hudson River Plane Crash, and Newt Gingrich's decision to run for president to name a few.  This poll, taken May 1^st of 2011 demonstrates the informative power twitter had two years ago when the amount of monthly active users was somewhere around 70 million.  Today the amount of monthly active twitter users has grown to over 218 million, more than 3 times what it was when Osama died.  One could easily argue that twitter’s power and influence has been growing without signs of slowing down.

Twitter today, as shown above, can be the main source of information to many.  Twitter and other social networks can do a lot more than just inform.  While many can use twitter and other networks to share jokes, organize parties, and start trends, today these social networking platforms can even be used to organize and start revolutions.  Countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen and Libya have looked to twitter to jump start revolutions that today some are calling the “twitter revolutions.”

"We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world." - Arab Activist

Citizens of Egypt Fight President Mubarak with Social Media

Although the start of the revolutions cannot necessarily be accredited to twitter, everyone can agree that twitter held an important role during them.  Domestically, twitter and other social networking sites helped groups organize themselves, while internationally, twitter allowed the outside world to learn about what was going on and then put pressure on governments.  An Arab activist tweeted: "We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.”  Susan Rice, an American U.N. Ambassador, said "The power of this technology, the power of social networking to channel and champion public sentiment, has been more evident in the past few weeks than ever before,” when talking about the Egyptian revolution.  Twitter's influence was so powerful that the Egyptian government attempted to censor what was being said, and ended up blocking twitter completely, as was reported by twitter.  Despite censorship, the amount of tweets in Egypt went from 2,300 up to 230,000 in the week before President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation.

Recently twitter decided to open up private messages to everyone.  The move seems to be business oriented, as this would allow companies to directly contact twitter users in hopes of advertising and promoting their products and therefore allowing twitter to start making some profit as it gets ready to offer its stock publicly. 

Although a good amount of people are reacting negatively to the news because they fear being spammed by companies, a lot of good can come out of this, especially if anyone is trying to start another movement or revolution.  Before people could only send private messages to those who followed them, but now that anyone can communicate with anyone privately, people can begin to communicate with other people they haven’t met before without fear of censorship or punishment as has happened in Egypt, Iran, and Syria to name a few.

The Washington Post, The Miami Herald and the Seattle Times all differ from each other greatly due to their emphasis on current local news

The Washington Post in D.C.

The Washington Post is one of the most popular news outlets in the United States and across the world.  The Miami Herald and the Seattle Times are both very popular and well respected news outlets within their respective cities but they fail to achieve the same type of acclaim and popularity nationally and internationally that the Washington Post receives. This lack of broader appeal is due to the online newspapers' focus on local news.  While the Washington Posts' local news revolves around politics and other national concerns, the Miami Herald's and the Seattle Times' local news is just that, local news.

The Washington Post covers local news, like the other two websites, but since the city they report in happens to be the capital, the news is of national importance.  The Washington Post covers politics extensively, with stories about Republicans, government policies, and reforms.  The Miami Herald on the other hand puts emphasis on their entertainment.  The stories or articles that have the biggest fonts and use pictures are stories about “laughs via twitter” or “Dwayne Wade’s Fashion Event.”  The Seattle Times appears to be your regular local newspaper with top stories like “Giraffe babygets his official name” and “Carnation murder trials in limbo as costs soar.”

Despite their massive differences they do cover similar stories.  All three homepages covered the agreement in the U.N. over Syria’s chemical weapons.  There was however, a huge difference in the way they promoted the story.

In the Washington Post, their story on the U.N.’s agreement was found to the left in medium sized font with a small abstract underneath, and right above another story about Syria’s weapon situation.  In the Miami Herald, their U.N.’s agreement story was found underneath the breaking news section in small font next to a big picture of a Miami Dolphins player celebrating.  The Seattle Times' story was second in the breaking news section behind a 1 million dollar theft story.

What I found to be very interesting was that at the bottom of the Seattle Times’ story on the U.N.’s agreement they acknowledge that they used material from The Washington Post, while the Miami Herald credits Vladimir Isachenkov and Mike Corder from the Associated Press for being contributors to the article.  This must be due to number of skilled writers in the field of politics in the Washington Post staff.  The three online newspapers displayed where there focus is with the stories they try to get you to read the most.  For the Washington Post it’s politics, for the Miami Herald it is entertainment, and for the Seattle Times it’s the regular all around local news.