July 4, 2007

Abbas is the esteemed Iranian-born, Paris-based photographer for the Magnum photo agency, who, since the 1970s, has made breathtakingly poetic images in zones of conflict. This week, when I told him about Watching the World Change, he agreed to send me an account of his 9/11 experiences, describing how he had happened to be in Siberia that day, in the company of several shamans. These particular mystics, according to Abbas, are said to be able to cast hallucinatory spells on people.

Abbas e-mailed the following journal entry:

“Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva - Sept. 11, 2001. For two weeks now, I have been photographing shamans and their rituals which [are making] a spectacular comeback in this Siberian republic.

“When Vera, my dinner host, switches the television on, I wonder if one of the shamans I met in the afternoon, did not play a prank by programming a hallucination: the two World Trade towers in New York are in flame and they soon crumble down!

“Like many others throughout the world, I stay glued to the screen, fascinated by what is happening in New York, thirteen time zones away.

‘Who but Islamists could plan, organise and carry out such a sophisticated terrorist action? I see their violence as an act of desperation, because their utopia, Islamism, has failed everywhere. Their power of nuisance is made greater by their willingness to sacrifice their own lives for their cause. These 'martyrs' are spiritual heirs to [Iran’s Ayatollah] Khomeiny.

“How will the Umma, the world polity of Muslims, react? Will they, once again, engage in an exercise of exorcism by pretending Islamist terrorists are not Muslims, as they did when this ideology was violently defined as an alternative model in their own societies? How much longer will Muslims be hostages, sometimes willingly, to the rhetoric of Islamists with whom they share common values and an equal belief the Koran is sacred as the word of God?

“Does Islamism not feed on Islam?”

MANY THANKS, BJR. Nice review of Watching the World Change, by Patrick Sutherland, in the new edition of the British Journalism Review. He calls the book “impressively-researched. . . revealing. . . Friend communicates a profound knowledge and love of photography.” Since the article is unavailable online, I’m providing it here, in miniature, just in case any amoeba or deer ticks are curious.

SPEAKING OF ENGLAND. In Watching the World Change (pages 122-123) I am extremely critical of Britain’s surveillance culture: “A person out for a walk in the city of London – which bristles with a half million [closed-circuit TV’s], the largest such concentration in the world – is likely to have his or her picture taken three hundred times.”

The book goes on: “While [CCTV’s] helped in the arrest of plotters tied to the London Transit bombings of 2005, the cameras didn’t prevent the attacks, nor the deaths of fifty-two civilians, in the first place. . . . Sociologist and surveillance expert David Lyon, of Queen’s University, Ontario, has noted that in combating terror better money might be spent not on unmanned cameras but on tried and true human interdiction: the use of agents to infiltrate cells and informers to gather information, and intensive screening by trained professionals at airports and the like....

"Watchdog groups hold that there is little proof to suggest that a network of ubiquitous cameras makes an urban environment any safer. Britain’s own National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders noted in a post-9/11 report that ‘the extent of CCTV coverage and the government’s funding of new systems has increased dramatically over the last decade with very little substantive research to suggest that CCTV works.’ According to The New York Times, ‘the study suggested that low-tech measures, like money for better street lighting, could have a more pronounced effect.’"

And yet British authorities this week were able to swoop down on eight terror suspects in the London and Glasgow bomb-plots through a combination of surveillance cameras (at air terminals and on motorways, revealing faces and license plates), confiscated cell-phones (which contained telltale phone numbers of suspects' contacts), voluminous tips, and dogged investigative work by dozens and dozens of detectives, police, and intelligence experts. One could argue that, in this instance, camera-saturation – and the swift and highly publicized arrests – were crucial tools for law-enforcement and might serve as strong deterrents to future would-be terrorists.

While I agree that it makes sense to place cameras at major transport hubs and gathering spots (airports, bridges, key highways, key monuments and squares), I’m still troubled by the presence of such devices on virtually every street corner. The camera’s ubiquity erodes one’s sense of privacy and individual freedom in an open society. In addition, a vast surveillance network is too easily abused; given a horrific sequence of events, a nervous government would be able to evolve in a relatively short time from a security-conscious entity into a police state.

And now, of course, Senator Joe Lieberman is calling for more cameras in this country! Right in time for the 4th of July (when we're supposed to be celebrating our release from England's shackles)!

EVERYONE'S A PAPARAZZO. I neglected to point out a perceptive Thomas Friedman column from the June 27 edition of The New York Times. (It's available only to those who subscribe, online, to Times Select). And it's apty titled, “The Whole World is Watching.” In it, Friedman notes:

“When everyone has a blog, a MySpace page or Facebook entry, everyone is a publisher. When everyone has a cellphone with a camera in it, everyone is a paparazzo. When everyone can upload video on YouTube, everyone is filmmaker. When everyone is a publisher, paparazzo or filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. We’re all public figures now. The blogosphere has made the global discussion so much richer — and each of us so much more transparent.

"The implications of all this are the subject of a new book by Dov Seidman, founder and C.E.O. of LRN, a business ethics company. His book is simply called How. Because Seidman’s simple thesis is that in this transparent world “how” you live your life and “how” you conduct your business matters more than ever, because so many people can now see into what you do and tell so many other people about it on their own without any editor. To win now, he argues, you have to turn these new conditions to your advantage....

"'The persistence of memory in electronic form makes second chances harder to come by,' writes Seidman. 'In the information age, life has no chapters or closets; you can leave nothing behind, and you have nowhere to hide your skeletons. Your past is your present.' So the only way to get ahead in life will be by getting your 'hows' right…..'We do not live in glass houses (houses have walls); we live on glass microscope slides ... visible and exposed to all,” he writes. So whether you’re selling cars or newspapers (or just buying one at the newsstand), get your hows right — how you build trust, how you collaborate, how you lead and how you say you’re sorry. More people than ever will know about it when you do — or don’t.”