Who's Naughty or Nice

Surveillance



           It means watching over.



                         It means watching over intensely.

Panopticon

Panopticon was designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1785. This ring-shaped building was designed in a way so that one observer placed in the middle of the architecture could watch over all the inmates. What was unique is that the observed remained oblivious of the surveillance.

The idea of this harsh discipline of not knowing when being watched, leading to careful observation of our own actions was addressed by Michel Foucault's "Discipline and Punish."

Are we puppets tied up to the strings? When are they, and when aren't they watching us? Is the government a mass organization of Santa Clauses, checking whether we've been naughty or nice?



When I first read Livia Bloom's article "Regarding the Pain of Others," an interview to Errol Morris about his film, "Standard Operating Procedure,"my curiosity and shame on ignorance made me look up the picture on the internet right away. Immediately, I felt sick. Who? What? Gross... Human? I went back and reread the article. The heroin in the article, to me, was Sabrina Harman. She was the one who thought something was wrong. She was the one who wanted to document all that she saw, to keep a record of all the horrible things that went on behind the prison gates. She was forced to do things and was used by male authoritative figures.



Then I watched Errol Morris' "Standard Operating Procedure."
I was wrong. She was one of them. She may have felt horrible at first, like how she wrote in the letters to her lover. Well, she was nonetheless taking the pictures with them. There were 2 other cameras coexisting with hers. She was posing with them. In front of the tortured-to-death body.

No matter how much they claimed to have felt emotionally when they first got to Abu Ghraib, in the end, they were equally degrading people. No matter how much camera flashed in front of their eyes, they never thought that such digital surveillance was going to turn into public surveillance. Being a woman is not an excuse. Being so young is not an excuse. What fools. Whatever they said in the film, is merely nonsensical excuses. All is done, and it's a public surveillance now. People shall look at the so-readily-available pictures and shall judge them forever in the history of human stupidity.