I’ve always wanted to write my own autobiography. Maybe it’s narcissistic, but I thought it would be a good chance for me to think back, reflect, introspect, and remember both the good and bad things that happened to me throughout my life. I could then maybe figure out what went right, and in some cases, what went horribly wrong. But I told myself that I would save this personal task until I was older and also until I had enough stories and experiences to share and write about. Otherwise, if I wrote my autobiography today, it would be a story about a girl named Cynthia, who went to school, who then decided to go to more school.

I then came across McAdams’ “Life Story Theory” of identity [1] and realized that I didn’t have to wait until I was old and experienced to write my autobiography. I was already in the midst of writing one and in fact, I had been writing and contributing to this autobiography my whole life. According to McAdams, the individual is the primary author of his or her autobiographical narratives and the individual’s memories link together the past, the present, and the future in order to provide a sense of identity and also to provide a sense of purpose for one’s thoughts and behaviours.

This means that all the memories that I formed (both consciously and unconsciously) have helped to provide me with my sense of identity and that I’m continuously evaluating my experiences and integrating them into the larger narrative of my life.

But what would happen if I experienced something so horrifically terrible that I didn’t want it to form part of my life story. Would I have the option of ensuring that I no longer remember this event and that the memory of the event no longer forms part of my autobiography? If so, and I can start actively meddling with my autobiography, would this change who I am?

Memory and Drugs

Because of the importance of memory and its role in defining one’s identity, scientists in the realm of psychology, neurology, and neuroscience have been investigating methods of enhancing or preserving different types of memory. [2]

More recently, scientists have started to focus on developing pharmacological agents that inhibit or dampen the strength of memory formation and recall. These memory dampening agents are currently being investigated for the treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

PTSD and Autobiographical Memories

PTSD is a psychiatric anxiety disorder that can develop in response to traumatic experiences. [3] One hallmark characteristic of this disorder is the alternation between re-experiencing and avoiding trauma-related memories. In some cases, the disorder can be so debilitating that the individual can no longer function in society due to the involuntary and continuous recall of the horrific event.

Currently, researchers are investigating the interaction between autobiographical memories and PTSD. According to Bernsten (2001), traumatic memories are important in that they become reference points to other experiences in one’s autobiographical memory database. More specifically, traumatic memories become significant landmarks, which represent a major threat that is perceived by individuals with PTSD. [4]

By inhibiting the formation of certain autobiographical memories with the use of these memory dampening agents, the potential formation of these important landmarks may be circumvented.

Pharmaceutical Forgetting

Research has shown in both animal and human studies that emotionally arousing experiences are better remembered than those that are emotionally neutral. [5] Arousal is dictated by the level of adrenaline in the body; a higher level of adrenaline results in increased arousal, and therefore, stronger memory formation. Propranolol, which is already being prescribed for the treatment of hypertension, is used to block the effects of adrenaline. Scientists hypothesize that propranolol could help to dampen the recall of traumatic experiences by dampening arousal. Propranolol is currently being tested in multi-centre clinical trials for the treatment of PTSD.

More interestingly, researchers have recently shown that propranolol can also blunt previously formed memories in humans. [6] In a double blind, randomized study, persons with chronic PTSD were asked to recall their traumatic experiences. The mere recall of these previously experienced traumatic events caused adrenaline to be released and resulted in increased arousal. Upon experiencing arousal, half of the participants were administered propranolol; the other half were administered a placebo. Results showed that propranolol retroactively blunted the recall of previously formed traumatic memories.

Once approved for the treatment of PTSD, what would be the legal implications of using these agents in society?

Legal Issues

Propranolol is known as a “beta-blocker” and was developed in the 1950s and has been prescribed for the treatment of hypertension since the 1970s. In both volunteer studies [7] and clinical trials [8] the use of beta blockers was found to impair memory recall. Interestingly, a similar dose (120 mg-160mg/day) is being prescribed for both the treatment of hypertension and for the treatment of memory dampening. [9] Results from these experiments suggest that individuals who are prescribed propranolol for the treatment of hypertension may be subject to memory impairment; perhaps without their knowledge or consent. Of concern to the legal system is that the reliability and accuracy of the testimonies given by these individuals taking propranolol will be called into question. When deliberating future cases, it will be important for Canadian courts to be mindful of the potential effects that propranolol and similar drugs could have on a witness’s testimony.

Another legal issue arising from the use of these agents is the extent of informed consent that would be required when prescribing these memory dampening drugs. After experiencing a traumatic event, individuals will likely be rushed to the emergency room in order to be treated for both mental and physical distress. Upon reaching the emergency room, a tending physician may recommend the treatment of propranolol in order to help minimize the chances of developing PTSD in the future. Despite being informed of the potential risks and uncertainties associated with these agents, it is questionable whether individuals taking these drugs would be in a legitimate position to give their informed consent because 1) their decision making skills would be significantly compromised as they are in times of distress [10], and 2) they would not know the potential role these dampened memories would have played in their future lives and identities.

Some Final Thoughts

Currently, memory dampening agents are not available to the general public. The quickly advancing field of neuroscience, however, may be able to provide new, more specific, and safer agents to help dampen the painful memories associated with traumatic events. In the near future, some of these newer technologies could be potent enough to allow for memory deletion to occur. Recently, the drug, U0126 (not yet available in humans), was able to selectively delete a particular fear-induced memory in rats. [11] Perhaps these memory deleting agents will become available for use in humans.

In conclusion, it will be necessary for the courts and the government to be informed of all of these new pharmacological developments so that they will be in a legitimate position to weigh both the legal and social implications of using these interventions in the future.

Some Final Final Thoughts

By the time I get around to writing an autobiography, I could have gone through some experiences that may have tempted me to take one of these memory dampening agents and artificially blunt some of my memories.
Maybe it’s just me, but if I do decide to write an autobiography, I want to be able to look back and remember both the good and bad times; the times I’ve laughed and sobbed. I want to be confident that the memories I’m recalling and writing about are genuine and that my memories aren’t pharmaceutically modified in any way, shape, or form.

[1] D.P. McAdams, “The Psychology of Life Stories” (2001) 5:2 Review of General Psychology 100-122
[2] Farah, M. J., Illes, J., Cook-Deegan, R., Gardner, H., Kandel, E., King, P., Parens, E., Sahakian, B., & Wolpe, P. R. (2004). Neurocognitive enhancement: what can we do and what should we do? Nat Rev Neurosci, 5(5), 421-425
[3] Vasterling, J. J., Brewin, C. R. (2005). Neuropsychology of PTSD. New York: Guilford Press.
[4] Bernsten, D., Willert, M., Rubin, D.C. (2005). Splintered memories or vivid landmarks? Qualities and organization of traumatic memories with and without PTSD. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 17, 675-693.
[5] McGaugh, J. L. (2006). Make mild moments memorable: add a little arousal. Trends Cogn Sci, 10(8),
345-347.
[6] Brunet, A., Orr, S. P., Tremblay, J., Robertson, K., Nader, K., & Pitman, R. K. (2007). Effect of post-retrieval
propranolol on psychophysiologic responding during subsequent script-driven traumatic imagery in post-traumatic
stress disorder. J Psychiatr Res. (in press).
[7] Frcka, G., & Lader, M. (1988). Psychotropic effects of repeated doses of enalapril, propranolol and
atenolol in normal subjects. Br J Clin Pharmacol, 25(1), 67-73.
[8] Blumenthal, J. A., Madden, D. J., Krantz, D. S., Light, K. C., McKee, D. C., Ekelund, L. G., & Simon, J.
(1988). Short-term behavioral effects of beta-adrenergic medications in men with mild hypertension. Clin
Pharmacol Ther, 43(4), 429-435.
[9] Pitman, R. K., Sanders, K. M., Zusman, R. M., Healy, A. R., Cheema, F., Lasko, N. B., Cahill, L., & Orr, S. P.
(2002). Pilot study of secondary prevention of posttraumatic stress disorder with propranolol. Biol Psychiatry, 51(2), 189-192.
[10] Hammond, K. R. (2000). Judgments under stress. New York: Oxford University Press.
[11] Doyere, V., Debiec, J., Monfils, M. H., Schafe, G. E., & LeDoux, J. E. (2007). Synapse-specific reconsolidation
of distinct fear memories in the lateral amygdala. Nat Neurosci, 10(4), 414-416.

I recently, for the first time in my life, set up my own wireless router in order to connect my laptop, as well as my roommate’s, to the Internet. This was not a user-friendly experience, and my stress level was heightened by my need to safeguard my wireless signal from outside intruders. I was creating a code of identity for my actions through my computer network: I had to name my signal and trust that it will safeguard my IP address which is now, through my actions online, an extension of my self and identity.

By giving a name to my Internet network, I was sending a secure signal of my own personal identity out into cyberspace. This is a name that anyone in my physical world close enough to pick up on my Internet signal will be able to see. The Internet, as a social system, is a lot less anonymous than many people seem to still think; whether consciously or unconsciously, we are constantly sending out signals of our identity online. From postings on a blog to a wireless network name, our physical life-based identities seep out to the cyber world.

It’s an alarming trend to notice how oblivious people are to their cyber identities, and how careless they are with cyber information that can have a massive affect in their physical world. The online psyche is now a permanent aspect of most people’s lives.

With such a plugged in world, people live and communicate endlessly via online routes. However, like an unguarded Internet signal, many people leave themselves open to cyberintrusions that endanger both their cyberidentites and their physical life identities. Two women have recently been in the news for such open intrusions into their private lives through seemingly safe online channels. Neither Jessica Coen, nor Allyson Stokke intended to victimize themselves through innocent online actions, yet both had their identities and privacy victimized and destroyed through the very avenues they left open to the cyberworld.

Jessica Coen is an online blogger who is now deputy online editor for Vanity Fair magazine. In a previous job, however, she was a popular blogger on the snarky Manhattan-based gossip website, gawker.com [I]. Coen wrote aggressive observations about people’s looks, loves and lives in New York City through the online medium. Coen wrote to receive a reaction, which she received in hordes. Emails, phone calls, letters in the mail, false email accounts set-up under her identity were just some of the reactions she caused from her caustic writing. All were, of course, anonymous. All were invasions of her privacy. None of which would have been so easily acted upon in the physical world. What was a wake-up call to Coen and her lifestyle should be a wakeup call to us all. Just because the anonymity of online actions makes it easier for many people to do or act in ways they are not comfortable in the physical world, does not mean the actions do not have an affect in the physical world. Voyeuristic tendencies have increased in popularity of negative online actions. The Internet has increased many people’s freedom of expression, both positive and negative. In this “me” generation, where the staged reality show, “The Hills,” is a hit, men and women not only feel that it is alright to comment and act as they desire in the online world, but seemingly get approval of their actions through physical world reactions such as media social relations. In today’s world, it is just as common to end a relationship through online or cellular means as it is in a physical world situation.

It is interesting to note that Coen is still active online. She is currently working online and still maintains a blog. A quick search on Facebook brings up a profile that appears to be hers as well. While Coen has been awakened to the threats that are online regarding her own privacy, as well as the malleableness of her identity in the online arena, she has continued to safely traverse the online realm as well as educate other women about both her experiences and her suggestions.

Allison Stokke is young woman with a similar story [II]. However, Stokke’s online privacy invasion began innocently with a sports blogger posting a picture of the young track and field athlete on his website. Rapidly, Stokke received an overwhelming amount of friend requests on her Facebook profile, and YouTube montages made in her honour. More online and even real-life harassment followed in the wake of that one posted picture. Today it is very easy to still find pictures of Stokke online, but not her physical cyber self. Stokke, as an individual, has all but disappeared online due to her experiences.

Online voyeurism has, I dare say, become more dangerous today than in the early days of the Internet when adults were arrested for meeting minors they had met online. You see, online voyeurism has gone beyond something that both appals and frightens us as it was in the past: online voyeurism has gone mainstream. While neither Coen nor Stokke were physically harmed by their attacks, not all individuals have been so lucky. Indeed, the separation between people’s physical world actions and their cyberworld actions is becoming more apparent by the more vicious people become online. Indeed, many people feel comfortable acting out online in ways they would never do in the physical world. As the cyberworld becomes more “real” in our daily lives, our ethics and responsibilities online must be reassessed. The separation of self and ethics must cease to exist. Verbally tearing into someone online may be exhilarating, but has “real life” affects on people’s lives. We need to keep in mind the humanist aspects of the online world. To continue to be wired we must keep it real.

In short, we must redefine the real to fit our new dimensions of our world. What is the real experience? How do we feel the real in cyberworld? How do we let the cyberworld fully compliment the physical world? Finally, how far do we let the two worlds go?

[I]I See Jessica Coen, Online Bullies Back Off. Glamour Magazine. Oct. 2007: 227-228.
[II] See Rebecca Webber, Give This Girl Her Life Back! Glamour Magazine. Sept. 2007: 80.

Wikisurveillance: a genealogy of cooperative watching in the West
By: Michael Arntfield

October 2, 2007 

As the duly elected Liberal government currently serving the Province of Ontario stands poised to infuse one of the largest revenue collection and fine levying agencies in the Western hemisphere—the Ontario Provincial Police—with $2 million (Can) to fund the operation of a state-of-the-art spy plane ostensibly required to identify “racers” or “stunt” drivers using the King’s Highways (Cockburn & Greenberg 2007), all while police in Britain continue to append audio-video recording equipment, or “Bobbie-Cams,” to the helmets of their patrol officers in the vein of Paul Verhoeven’s dystopic 1987 film Robocop (Satter 2007), one is prompted to take a look back at the corpus of police surveillance devices suborned by modernity, that have in aggregate given way for what might be called the golden age of voyeurism.

The mechanical metamorphosis from Althusser’s (1971) Ideological State Apparatus, into the more palpable “technical apparatus” (Ellul 1964: 101) of the police as we know them today, has been achieved in large part through a process of technological determinism, or the means by which human culture and history are simultaneously rendered and reified by our machines. In other words, the ubiquity of those police surveillance and reporting tools that have pervaded urban life for well over a century, has in turn propagated a mimetic response in occidental consumer culture whereby the general public is increasingly enamored by the “democratization of surveillance” (Staples 2000: 155) made possible by portable, affordable, and elegant devices that, through their egalitarian accessibility, make “coercion embedded, cooperative, and subtle, and therefore not experienced as coercion at all” (Ericson & Haggerty 1997: 7). As public and private interests ultimately converge through a phenomenon I call wikisurveillance, the denizens of this self-supervising panoptic state cooperatively pen the requiem for once valued tenets of privacy through the normalization, even fetishization, of corporate and private data mining, cell phone videography, security camera ubiquity, home “monitoring” systems, the proliferation of spy stores, and systemic Facebook cultism.

As such, I define wikisurveillance as the manner in which the community at large has been seduced by, or at the very least summarily acceded to, the idea of watching, recording, reporting, and even the expectation, or exhibitionism, of being watched, as the new de facto social contract for the post-industrial age. Ergo, the computing neologism “wiki” is an appropriate prefix to denote and describe this present Zeitgeist of freelance information brokering in which we presently live, as not unlike any open-source wiki-based text that is publicly inclusive, accessible, modifiable, and even corruptible in its design, the commercial surveillance technologies that define the new historicism of Western media have fostered an age of consensual spying and reporting perhaps best described as the Vichy state of late-capitalism. As conventional law enforcement’s monopoly on surveillance has consequently been muscled out by a veritable coup d’état spearheaded by free unlimited video messaging, Dateline hidden camera specials, and “how’s my driving?” bumper stickers, we must to some extent acquiesce to the troubling truism that Orwell was wrong: that “[t]here is no Big Brother…we are him” (Staples 2000: 153).

From the discreet distribution of “Constable keys” in the early 20th century to select citizens who could then access locked police signal-boxes and secretly report on the activities of their neighbors, illegal or otherwise, through to the efforts of the Ontario Green Ribbon Task Force in the early 1990s to have affluent commuters armed with what were then nascent and comparatively costly cell-phones report on the movements and identifiers of any vehicle similar to that believed to have been driven by serial killer Paul Bernardo, to modern AMBER-Alerts that function under this same basic pretense, and ultimately to the use of virtual communities like You Tube to solve crimes as serious as murder in some instances (Quintino 2006), there is indeed a long standing confederacy between hegemony and communications technology—even a co-constitutive evolution—which is being increasingly co-opted by private citizens and private enterprise as the state’s observational authority is deregulated.

As Western law enforcement continues to increasingly assert itself through largely privately owned and definitively for-profit entities whose loyalty remains to its capital interests in earnest, the “technical apparatus” of the police is diffused amongst an untrained, unaccountable, and largely anonymous civilian populace who mimic the police methodology by not only buying the compatible hardware, but also buying-in to the associated mindset that all human activities have an inherent intelligence-gathering value.

Whether it be the regular use of clandestine listening devices in Dunkin’ Donuts stores throughout the US (Staples 2000), or the Argus Digital Doorman maintaining and potentially selling off a facial recognition database containing the images of all visitors traveling to and fro any subscribing condominium or apartment building, we see that wikisurveillance allows the Western narrative on both privacy and paranoia to be scribed by a cabal of agents provocateurs who, in working for purely commercial interests, transform the thin blue line into a proverbial Maginot Line of strategic technical installations that expedite the erosion of human agency in not only the management, but also the manufacturing, of law and order.

Wikisurveillance has shown us that the rise of the dreaded police state in the West will not come with the terrifying, sweeping reforms of some new radical and totalitarian government that somehow seizes power, nor from under the boot of some fascist despot, but rather, with the efforts taken in the here and now largely to protect actuarial assets. While police agencies are generally subject to public oversight and accountability, and to archival audits and the eventual de-classification or disclosure of some information, where, when, and how the fragments of unregulated and individually mined data presently floating around will ultimately be used becomes the nagging query written into the code of wikisurvillance. As all human activities become increasingly part of a permanent and quantifiable record that is in large part privately owned and maintained, the Monday morning quarterbacking of historical surveillance data will consequently ensure that “[a] crime can always be found” (Solove 2007: 5) amongst the assorted images, as the floating definition of deviance ensures that crime becomes the last truly renewable Western resource.

Michael Arntfield is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Information & Media Studies, University of Western Ontario.

BIBLIOGRPAHY

Adlam, Robert C.A. (1981) “The Police Personality.” In: Pope, David W. & Weiner, Norman L. (eds) Modern Policing. pp. 152-162. London: Croom Helm Ltd.

Chu, Jim (2001) Law Enforcement Information Technology: A Managerial, Operational and Practitioner Guide. USA: CRC Press

Cockburn, Neco & Greenberg, Lee (2007) “Ont. to Impose $10,000 Fines for Street Racing.” National Post on-line, Aug 15, 2007. Electronic document: http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=6b7d070b-7d48-466c-96db-586d2a5f6def&k=10512. Retrieved Aug 16, 2007

Dandeker, Christopher (1990) Surveillance, Power and Modernity: Bureaucracy and Discipline from 1700 to the Present Day. Cambridge: Polity Press

Ellul, Jacques (1964) The Technological Society. New York: Knopf

Ericson, Richard V. & Haggerty, Kevin, D (1997) Policing the Risk Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

Lind, Laura (2007, August 18) “Hysteria Lane” The National Post, Toronto Weekend Magazine, p.14

Mann, Steve (1998) “’Reflectionism' and 'Diffusionism': New Tactics for Deconstructing the Video Surveillance Superhighway,” Leonardo, 31(2): 93-102.

Manning, Peter K. (1992) “Information Technologies and the Police” In Tonry, Michael & Morris, Norval (eds) Modern Policing. pp. 349-398. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Marx, Leo (1964) The Machine in the Garden: The Pastoral Idea in America. New York: Oxford University Press

Maxcer, Chris (2007, March 6) “Cops Nab Crooks Using YouTube” Tech News World.com. Electronic document: http://www.technewsworld.com/story/56108.html
Retrieved July 10/07

Morgan, Rod & Newburn, Tim (1997) The Future of Policing. Oxford: Oxford University Press

North, Dick (1978) The Lost Patrol. Anchorage: Alaska Northwest Publishing Co.

ODMP (2006) Officer Down Memorial Page. Fallen officer directory. Electronic document: http://www.odmp.org/agency.php?agencyid=2758. Retrieved June 14/06

Packer, Jeremy (2002) “Mobile Communications and Governing the Mobile: CBs and Truckers,” Communication Review, 5(1) pp. 39-58

Phillips, Alberta (2005, March 17) “After Club Fire Police Comments Still Smolder” Statesman.com. Electronic document: http://www.statesman.com/opinion/content/editorial/stories/03/17phillips_edit.html. Retrieved May 2/06

Quintino, Anne-Marie (2006, December 15) “Police Discovering Power of YouTube” Globe and Mail.com. Electronic document: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20061215.gtcopsyoutube1215/BNStory/Technology/home. Retrieved July 17/07

Richardson, Mark (2005) On the Beat: 150 Years of Policing in London Ontario. Canada: Aylmer Express Ltd.

Rubinstein, Jonathan (1973) City Police. USA: Hill & Wang

Satter, Raphael G. (2007, July 13) “Britain’s surveillance to new levels with video cameras strapped to police helmets.” CBC Newsworld. Electronic document: http://www.cbc.ca/cp/world/070713/w071347A.html. Retrieved July 14/07

Seltzer, Mark (1992) Bodies & Machines. New York: Routledge

Smith, Merritt Roe (1994) “Technological Determinism in American Culture.” In Smith, Merritt Roe & Marx, Leo (eds) Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism. pp. 1-36. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press

Solove, Daniel J. (2007) “I’ve Got Nothing to Hide and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy,” The San Diego Law Review (44), pp. 1-23

Staples, William G. (2000) Everyday Surveillance: Vigilance and Visibility in Postmodern Life. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield

Stewart, Robert W. (1994) The Police Signal Box: A 100 Year History. Glasgow: University of Strathclyde. Electronic document: http://www.eee.strath.ac.uk/r.w.stewart/boxes.pdf. Retrieved April 25/06

Vanderburg, Willem H. (2000) The Labyrinth of Technology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

In this particular historical moment of fetishized “security” and state-sponsored surveillance carried out “for our own good,” it is tempting for some of us to think that we are reaching some low point in the history of privacy, where new technologies already allow the deployment of an Orwellian omniscience by states and corporations. This may indeed be so, but some research I did some years ago on the history of nursing education (of all things) has inclined me (a privacy advocacy neophyte) to wonder if the drive for total surveillance is neither novel nor dependent upon new technologies. In the spirit of Heritage Canada’s iconic television spots, I offer my own “Privacy Heritage Minute,” with all the skeletal theoretical framework, carefully-selected facts and simplistic moral that such an approach implies.

Prior to the 1950s, most Canadian nurses (who were predominantly young, white, unmarried women) were trained through an apprenticeship system, learning their craft by working for three years unpaid on hospital wards. This training was extremely arduous and strictly regimented, and was overseen by a limited number of paid nurse overseers and by senior nurse apprentices. The vast bulk of nursing labour in hospitals was completed by students, who lived on the hospital campus and seldom left the site until their training was complete.

Beginning in the late 19th century, it was understood that moral rectitude (read virginity) and feminine deference (read unquestioning obedience) were key characteristics of the ideal nurse. In part this was because prevailing models of health contained an unmistakably moral component (as arguably they still do – see the rhetoric around obesity, heart disease, HIV, etc.). Likewise hospitals, which were in competition for the dollars of wealthy patients and donors, used the image of the physically and morally clean (female) student nurse as advertising to convince the well-to-do of the safety and efficacy of institutional health care. [1]

Hospitals posted extensive lists of rules intended to ensure the proper behaviour of their student nurses. Obedience was far too important to be entrusted simply to sets of rules, however. As was explained in one nurses’ orientation manual, each individual would be “carefully watched to ensure strict obedience.” Surveillance, embodied in the policies, procedures, and the very architecture of the training school and Nurses’ Home, provided the disciplinary backbone for nursing training. Michel Foucault described similar developments with respect to 18th-century reform schools and prisons in Discipline and Punish: “We have here a sketch of an institution ... in which three procedures are integrated into a single mechanism: teaching proper, the acquisition of knowledge by the very practice of the pedagogical activity, and a reciprocal, hierarchised observation.”

Surveillance of student nurses began from the moment they applied to their training. Candidates underwent gynecological screening tests, which allowed hospital management to determine whether the candidates showed signs of sexually transmitted diseases, previous pregnancy, or loss of virginity. Applicants who showed evidence of such indiscretions were likely to be rejected as “not suitable to become a nurse.” This managerial anxiety over sexuality permeated the apprenticeship program. Of particular concern in these all-female spaces was homosexuality, a “vice” that dared not speak its name but that nevertheless attracted careful scrutiny by managers and hospital trustees. As one former nurse explained to me,

In some residences, bath doors were designed like the swinging doors of saloons with spaces above and below, a technology of observation noted by Foucault at Paris-Duverney's Ecole Militaire. [2]

Surveillance was also trained upon the movements of apprentice nurses in their leisure time and private spaces. Purpose-built Nurses’ Homes were designed along panoptic principles, situating the Matron’s quarters adjacent to the main exit, an arrangement that gave the impression that the foyer was under constant supervision. Anyone entering or exiting the residence was required to sign a log, and bedrooms were checked for absent (or extra) bodies every evening. Strict curfews were enforced with the threat of dismissal, and reinforced with the possibility of character assassination for young women seen “out on the town” after curfew. In this latter area, the hospital enlisted the aid of the surrounding community as observers and judges of nurses’ conduct, and upright citizens regularly informed managers of suspected infractions by students.

On the hospital wards, surveillance took its shape via the ideology of scientific management. By the 1910’s, hospital managers had joined the cult of efficiency, and strongly believed that minute regulation of workers’ time and motion would lead to increased production and lower costs, concepts which fit awkwardly into the provision of health care but which nevertheless persist in hospital management to this day. [3] To this end, nurses were monitored carefully as they learned nursing tasks in a deskilled [4], routinized manner, with harsh discipline as the reward for lapses of technique or behaviour. A fundamental goal of this system was that students would internalize the observing eye, and like Jeremy Bentham’s panopticized prisoners, govern their behaviour according to the priorities of the institution.

Although there were obvious functional reasons for hospitals to maintain strict control over their unpaid labour force, the diligence with which such controls were implemented cannot be explained without attention to the larger discursive webs in which hospitals and nurses were caught. Rapid urbanisation and economic change in Canada, with the attendant increases in single women's urban employment and public visibility, fostered in the imaginations of civic leaders the spectre of the 'woman adrift', the young working girl living in unsupervised residences in an urban environment, untended by patriarchal authority. Promoting women's chaperoned boarding houses, the Toronto Star-Weekly prodaimed in 1917: "It would seem to be but our duty, from an economic as well as a humanitarian stand-point, to see that [the working girl] lives under conditions which tend to make her more efficient, as well as a worthy citizen. It is not too much to say that the future of our country lies in the hands of these girls.” This disingenuous language reflects (in part) anxieties about “degeneracy” that brought us such historical highlights as eugenic sterilization and the Chinese head tax. Regulation of the young female student nurses was thereby elevated to the level of a patriotic duty. Hospitals as major Canadian institutions bought into this wholesale, boasting that their system of discipline and training worked to produce “the best type of Canadian womanhood.”

With the future of the nation apparently at stake, there was little or no concern expressed about the privacy or autonomy of student nurses. [5] No privacy laws governed the surveillance of these young women – there were compelling moral, economic, political, medical, and other reasons to watch them, and so they were watched.

Without overstating the case, I wonder whether this Heritage Minute tells us a couple of things about reasonable expectations of privacy. To me it says that where fear and prejudice coalesce into social panic, surveillance is a ready tool for the identification and punishment of deviance, and privacy rights will be among the first in a long line of casualties. It also implies that surveillance technology takes the form of whatever is at hand. Hospitals used architectural techniques, documents, holes in walls, and human eyes to watch nurses, and socialized their students to watch themselves and each other. So although resisting the development of new methods of surveillance is important, it’s maybe just as important to keep our eyes on the core reasons why our privacy comes under constant assault. The longevity of the hospital system of nursing training suggests that where serious abrogations of privacy rights have apparent social or economic utility, or where they support the societal status quo, they may persist invisibly or unremarkably for decades.

Thank you. This has been a Canadian Privacy Heritage Minute brought to you by the idTrail.

I recently received news that my friend Kelly was found dead in her single room occupancy [1] hotel in Vancouver, several days after she had died. [2]

I knew Kelly as a great force working to improve the lives of street level sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). Feeling far away and alone in my grief, I googled her to see whether anything had been written about her death. To my surprise, I found a handful of references to her (full name included) as a participant in a free heroin trial program, and identifying her as a woman living out of a shopping cart in Canada’s poorest postal code. I was frustrated and angry that this one-dimensional sketch of Kelly, involving incredibly private details about her life, was so accessible. My first instinct was to wonder whether she had consented to having her name published in these articles. But then a different, and rather more pressing set of questions struck me.

Why, when so few people took notice of her daily existence and suffering, when she was allowed to die almost invisibly – was it possible for me to access information about her health, [3] her poverty and her homelessness on the World Wide Web? I couldn’t shake the idea that Kelly had too much of the wrong kind of privacy.

For Better, For Worse, or Until I Decide to Spy on You
By: Dina Mashayekhi

September 11, 2007

Being recently married, I still haven’t quite adjusted to the idea that you can’t change certain traits in your spouse. For example, my other half tends to view cell phones as a leash, and he regularly “forgets” to call me when he’s going to be late, or going out after class or work. As a result, I end up panicking, thinking he has been in a terrible accident and is unconscious somewhere, and I promptly begin my routine of repeatedly calling his cellphone (which is usually off or at the bottom of his bag on silent mode). By the time he finally gets to the phone and sees 18 missed-calls from me, I’m usually anxiety ridden and he calls me laughing, telling me I’m crazy, and that he’s on his way home. This conversation is usually followed by certain expletives and ends with my threat that I’m going to implant him with a GPS tracking device.

Of course, when I raised this idea, I was completely joking. For the sake of fantasy, my ideal device would be a microchip and to my knowledge, the Verichip doesn’t operate as a GPS device for commercial use (yet). Such a use would also run contrary to my convictions as a privacy advocate, but at times, I feel as though my sanity is at stake. I decided to inquire further into the practical aspects of my GPS threat (after all, there’s no point in a threat without any substance), and to examine the idea of spousal surveillance in general. [i]

Credit cards and databases/data-mining/data aggregation. How does the database nation get affected by a cashless society?

I recently had the opportunity to dwell upon the loss of anonymity as we continue the path to cashless-ness. It was on one of those west coast road trips that seem like the perfect way to cap off a summer.

Driving to South Bay

This August, a couple of friends and I drove down to the Bay Area of California from Vancouver to visit with friends working there. An interesting exercise we got caught up in was to see how difficult it would be to “stay off the radar”. Although we realized that giving out personal information itself is not dangerous, but rather simply provides a possibility for misuse, the recent discourse on domestic spying and the Patriot Act in the US got us to think deeper about sharing our spending habits with US businesses and the US government.

Like any good conspiracy theorist, travel begins by taking large wads of cash out from under the mattress - or a Canadian bank, if your mattress is rather thin. Minimizing our use of credit cards was the obvious step. This was also facilitated (others say caused) by the midsummer drop in the Canadian dollar and our desire not to be gouged by Visa’s exchange/conversion rate. [1]

So we used cash, and lots of it. All of our food, hotel rooms, and activities were anonymous transactions. When we stopped for gas, we prepaid the attendant in $20s. As Canadians, we had never seen so many green bills. Because realistically, although not quite to the level of a wheelbarrow or a duffel bag, carrying enough money for three guys on an 11 day trip is a significant task in itself and more than a little inane.

For the most part, our experiment was successful. Although frustrated by the inefficiency of their monotone bills, our system seemed to work as cash equalled anonymity in most situations encountered. But one time it didn’t was when we came up against the dreaded loyalty card.

Safeway and the Loyalty Card

Loyalty cards are a common occurrence in today's consumer driven world. It seems like everything from airline tickets to cups of coffee have a mode of tracking your purchases and collecting detailed information regarding your personal shopping habits. [2]

But loyalty systems also seem to “work”. The collection of points almost seems like a North American sport. Canadians seem to do anything for their points. [3] And sometimes using the loyalty system is almost forced upon you.

While at the local Safeway trying to buy some supplies in California, we encountered an insidious ploy to force shoppers to self-identify. It has always been part of the loyalty system to offer discounts to those who sign onto the system; discounts of 5% to 10% are not uncommon. But at this particular Safeway, oranges were over $1/lb cheaper for those showing a Safeway card. 1$/lb or more than 30%!

With this kind of price differential, how can you resist? How can you compare the intangible benefit of remaining anonymous with the prospect of saving money on fresh fruit? Although I knew about the privacy implications and why Safeway was operating in such a manner, my biggest concern wasn't about data mining but rather me not having an American Safeway account to be able to take advantage of this offer!

Luckily, or scary depending upon your point of view, the Safeway databases in the United States and Canada are linked and my Canadian account worked just fine. And on top of that, I didn't even need my physical card. Supplying my phone number was enough for the clerk to identify me by name and recite my home address. I'm sure in some way it is useful for Safeway to know that while on vacation in California I enjoy oranges, bananas and croissants for breakfast.

But data collection can go far beyond that. Demographic shopping information is big business in today's always-on marketing environment. Companies like Choicepoint and Acxiom aggregate and sell personal information to government and businesses on everything from health and insurance records to consumer purchasing information. [4] The US government even claims that these aggregators fill a necessary role in the “war on terror” by allowing the government to search for specific purchasing trends and monitor suspicious activity. [5] Vast databases are being filled and very few seem to mind that there are numerous instances of databases being hacked or leaked due to shoddy security practices and inadequate protections.

Adam Greenfield says in his book Everyware that

But, seriously? Identity or oranges. The red pill or the blue. They were good oranges.

Final Thoughts

The beauty of technology is its ability to make life easier. A GPS system and a cell phone were lifelines in trying to navigate the complicated mass of streets and highways of California's Bay Area. But, there are always trade-offs. Simson Garfinkel's Database Nation [7] draws a picture of a frightening dystopia where identifiers such as credit and debit cards, cell phones and surveillance records link to vast databases of personal information that can track you from dawn to dusk and from birth to grave. It is already a reality. There are billions to be made. [8]

But, it doesn’t have to be this way. Besides better laws to control the transfer of personal information, there are electronic alternatives to large wads of money. Electronic e-cash or smartcard systems are making the rounds. They can be programmed with privacy in mind.

An example of an effective privacy respecting system is the Octopus Card system implemented in Hong Kong. The Octopus Card, in one of its selectable iterations, allows its users to anonymously access the transit system in addition to purchasing items from a wide variety of stores. All this is done with a contactless RFID embedded in the card that boasts a 95% penetration rate. [9]

By not requiring any information to purchase, the Octopus Card has many of the same privacy benefits as cash. But not all implementations of this ubiquitous technology are so benign. [10] When done without sufficiently respecting privacy concerns, electronic cash is an effective form of surveillance allowing marketers to tie purchase and travel history to other demographic information.

Even more effective is comprehensive legislation protecting consumer privacy. But it's difficult for legislatures to keep up with advancing technology. Safeguards need to be put in place where the convenience and benefit of a cashless system benefits consumers and is not a tool for marketers and data aggregators. Without that framework, and the penalties to compel adherence, corporations will continue with policies that are in their best interests, in an environment where the majority of consumers are unaware and uninterested in personal data protection.

By the end of our trip, a little bit sunburned and a little bit poorer with cash supplies depleted, we broke down and resorted to credit. We were pretty good, though. Over an 11 day trip and 4000km, 10 days went by without using credit – although there were numerous instances where we had to self-identify. The fact of the matter is that credit is just too easy, and that's how they like it.

Privacy law is increasingly important in litigation in Canada. Contemporary litigants routinely file requests for access to their personal information under PIPEDA and its provincial counterparts. Such requests can give a party a partial head-start on litigation discovery, or aid a party in rooting out information held by an opponent or potential opponent.

That said, with some possible room for improvement (at least in the case of PIPEDA), [1] data protection law in Canada takes a relatively hands-off approach when it comes to legal proceedings. Parties in legal proceedings are generally required to disclose information in accordance with long-standing litigation rules and are largely exempted from restrictions that might otherwise be applicable under data protection laws in other contexts. Yet, this does not mean that privacy considerations are not relevant or applicable to discovery in legal proceedings. This short article identifies some existing and emerging privacy-based limits in litigation discovery at the intersection between privacy interests and the need for full disclosure in litigation.

I. The Implied Undertaking Rule

As a starting point, it is important to note that privacy protections are built into discovery at a fundamental level. Information obtained through discovery is generally subject to an implied undertaking of confidentiality. This prohibits parties from using or disclosing information obtained during discovery for purposes outside of the litigation. The implied undertaking rule is based on a recognition by Canadian courts of the general right of privacy that a person has with respect to his or her own documents. [2] Many Canadian decisions cite the English text Discovery by Matthews & Malek for the principle behind the rule:

A party may apply for relief from the implied undertaking rule where a party's interest in using information outweighs the privacy interest protected or where the document is otherwise available. However, the courts do not take the principle of privacy behind the rule lightly, as such applications for relief are frequently denied, for example, on the basis that it would be “an unwarranted intrusion on [the party’s] privacy rights”. [5]

Privacy has similarly been invoked as a limitation in defining what is and is not reasonable in discovery. For example, in Fraser v. Houston, the court declined to order production of the plaintiff’s financial documents on the basis of privacy concerns, despite concluding that the documents had “at least marginal probative value” to an allegation of economic duress:

Information potentially subject to disclosure in legal proceedings could be held directly by a party to the litigation or by a third party, such as an Internet service provider (ISP). In each of these categories, discussed in turn below, courts have balanced privacy considerations against the interests of full disclosure in litigation.

II. Information Held by a Party

A. Motions for Production

In Park v. Mullin, [7] a party applied for discovery of its opponent’s computer. Relying on earlier Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence, Dorgan J. expressly drew on privacy considerations in refusing to order disclosure:

Privacy also played an integral role in the leading case Desgagne v. Yuen [9], where the Court balanced the relevance of the information sought against other considerations, including privacy. The plaintiff had been injured in an accident, and the defendant sought production of her hard drive, Palm Pilot, video game unit, and photographs (both electronic and hard copies) taken since the accident. The plaintiff argued that the information was relevant since it would shed light on the defendant’s post-accident cognitive abilities and quality of life. Myers J. refused to order production of the plaintiff’s photographs because of privacy considerations:

Access to the plaintiff’s video game unit, Palm Pilot, and Internet Browsing history were also denied on the basis of their probative value being outweighed by the plaintiff’s privacy interest and the invasiveness of ordering their production. Similar reasoning was applied in Goldman, Sachs & Co. v. Sessions, [11] Ireland v Low [12], and Baldwin Janzen Insurance Services (2004) Ltd. v. Janzen. [13]

B. Motions for Preservation

In the context of preserving evidence for discovery, ex parte orders for the seizure of evidence (such as Anton Piller orders) allow litigation opponents access to documents that may contain personal or confidential information. Although such orders relate to the preservation of evidence, they form part of the overall process of document discovery. Given the invasiveness of such orders, privacy considerations can play an important role in Anton Piller cases. Courts urged taking a cautionary approach to Anton Piller orders as early as 1981. In the words of Browne-Wilkinson J. (as he then was) in Thermax Ltd v. Schott Industrial Glass Ltd: [14]

In Harris Scientific Products Ltd. v. Araujo, [16] the Court found that an Anton Piller order had been improperly obtained and improperly executed. The plaintiff had misrepresented a material fact in its application for the order, and the court found numerous and serious breaches of the order’s execution by the plaintiff. Two of the more serious breaches included the seizure of material subject to solicitor-client privilege and the seizure of an audio cassette that clearly had no relation to the proceedings (“a state-assisted major invasion of Mr. Araujo’s privacy on an unrelated matter”) [17]. When considering the quantum of damages to be awarded, the court reiterated how seriously such breaches of privacy are taken:

Finally, in CIBC World Markets v. Genuity Capital Markets, [19] an order in the nature of an Anton Piller order was made for full preservation of “computers, Blackberries and other types of similar electronic devices of every nature and kind” including all devices “owned or used by others including spouses, children or other relatives”. [20] An order for a seizure of this magnitude obviously has a broad privacy impact. However, the order provided that a technical consultant would perform the imaging and indexing of information and that the imaged drives and information would not initially be shared with the plaintiffs. [21] The court addressed the matters of relevance and confidentiality in a subsequent order, holding that if there were confidential or irrelevant documents contained in the devices imaged, then the defendants could apply to have the full index of documents sealed and one made public that only contained relevant material. [22]

IV. Information Held by a Non-Party

Privacy also plays an important role in contouring limits to discovery from non-parties in litigation. A great deal of personal information is held by non-parties such as ISPs and banks; it is increasingly sought out by parties in litigation.

In BMG v. Doe, [23] the Federal Court of Appeal considered an appeal by music providers who were seeking disclosure of the identities of customers alleged to have infringed copyrights by sharing music on peer-to-peer networks. Sexton JA, for the court, held that plaintiffs must conduct their initial investigations in a way that minimized privacy invasion; failure to do so could justify a court refusing to order ISPs to identify potential defendant customers as requested by the plaintiffs: