Sermon: Shabbat Shuvah – Va Yelech 2015
Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 19 September 2015
The technology began being used during the Iraq war in Fallujah a city racked with violent insurgency. A company called Persistent Surveillance Systems began flying a Cessna aeroplane 10,000 feet above the City following a strict pattern 24 hours a day. Attached to the plane was an array of cameras able to take and relay to the ground via satellite a picture each second. The images were unable to distinguish a face or see any detail about someone but they could trace that a person is moving or that a car is driving.
Soon the system began to pay off. A bomb was planted in a shopping area – an occurrence that would happen every few days in violence racked Fallujah. The camera in the plane caught the explosion. It continued running forwards taking its photos one per second of the whole city. As soon as the explosion happened, the monitor of the photos, tracked back in the images to see what activity there had been around the site. He saw a car arrive a few minutes before a person got out and leave a package where the murderous explosion then happened. He then tracked that car forwards to see where it went. He saw it going to a suburban area of the city and then being stored by a house. The operator was able to dispatch troops to the house where they surprised the bombers and were able to arrest them.
In 2012 they tried the system in Dayton Ohio, a depressed American Midwestern city with a high crime rate. During one of the company’s demonstration flights over Dayton in 2012, police got reports of an attempted robbery at a bookstore and shots fired at a Subway sandwich shop. The cameras revealed a single car moving between the two locations.
By reviewing the images frame by frame, analysts were able to help police piece together a larger story: A man had left a residential area at midday and attempted to rob the bookstore, but fled when somebody hit an alarm. Then he drove to the Subway sandwich shop, where the owner pulled a gun and chased him off. His next stop was a bargain goods Store, where the man paused for several minutes. He soon returned home, after a short stop at a petrol station where a video camera captured an image of his face.
A few hours later, after the surveillance flight ended, the bargain goods store was robbed. Police used the detailed map of the man’s movements, along with other evidence from the crime scenes, to arrest him for all three crimes.
The system has been trialled in other cities too. Notably in Jaurez, Mexico where it has been used to put an end to the murderous activities of drug cartels – by spotting shooting and tracking back and then forwards where the perpetrators came from and went to.
The developer and promotor of the system, a man called Ross McNutt says: “It’s like opening up a murder mystery in the middle, and you need to figure out what happened before and after.”
Though persistent surveillance from 10,000ft succeeds in prosecuting crime and may well be very successful in preventing it through deterrence in the future, none of the cities where it has been trialled, in America, where it was invented or abroad have actually taken it on permanently. Except in Falujjah which was a war zone and where no-one was given a choice, citizens who have voted or been consulted on the system have persistently said no to 24 hour monitoring – even at such a level where their faces cannot be distinguished.
Technology can – but the people have spoken and have said that it shouldn’t.
This year past the number of Facebook users who use their account at least monthly reached 1.4billion. That’s one quarter of the world’s population sharing with the world who they are, what they are doing and what they think and what they like and don’t like. Though I became an adult at the beginning of the technological explosion, I know that I use this and other social media technologies differently from those a generation younger than me.
As I grew up the assumption was that everything is private except for that which you wished to make public. When I was younger it was actually rather difficult to make anything much public, no social media to be noticed upon – perhaps that’s why in my youth there were so many tribes of young people wearing the same or similar clothes to show who they publicly wished to be – punks, second generation mods, skinheads, goths.
Today’s young generations seems to me to work the opposite way. The technology that they have such easy access to makes everything public (and of course therefore commercially exploitable) except for that which you wish to keep private. Keeping things private is nowhere near as much in your control as you might hope that it would be. In theory for example, the snapchat photo sharing service deletes permanently the photos you send through it within 1-10 seconds – however people have found their way around this, keeping screenshots of what were meant to be private images.
As we enter 5776 there is little doubt that the technological genius and inventiveness of the human mind, and the amount of money to be made from finding the next big thing to connect all our human minds together, will make it even easier to share and connect our formerly private selves.
Who knows what it will be? The rate of change is staggering. There was no Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram etc ten years ago and what I believe but I am probably already out of date, is the current most popular sharing app around for our teens – What’s app – is just five years old. The trend, be it persistent surveillance or social media, is to turn humanity into a village where everyone knows everyone else’s business and everyone is connected to each other, and we are all watched by one another.
The technology itself is morally neutral. It can be used for good or it can be used for bad. That’s where the oldest piece of social media and surveillance technology comes in. When we read Torah, and read and hear it well, we connect ourselves with every person who has ever heard this message and with every person who is hearing it now and with God. As Moses says in our portion today: “Take this book of the Torah, and put it in the side of the ark of the covenant of your Eternal God, that it may be there for a witness of who you are. (Deuteronomy 31:26).”
The Torah though is anything but morally neutral. It’s there to help us negotiate whatever our world confronts us with. Its principles help us to know what to do with the possibilities of each technology that humanity develops. Simple basic principles like not taking from another person what is rightfully theirs – whether it be their physical possessions or their private information which you put a value on. Like not spreading gossip about a person, for you do not know the affect that this might have, something so easy to do carelessly with today’s technology. Like never bearing a grudge or taking vengeance against people, irrelevant of what technology you might use to do so. Like finding ways to be aware of the plight of those excluded from the benefits of society, in biblical terms the stranger, orphan and widow who are encouraged to come into society and to find the help they need. Through our connected world we know they exist and we can connect directly to them.
As Bachya Ibn Pakuda wrote in 11th Century Spain: “Days are like scrolls of the Torah, write on them what you want to be remembered.” Our generation has witnessed an extraordinary explosion in ways to connect and to see each other. We can do great things with this power, or we can invade each other’s rights and persons. Let us be remembered as the people who always used this power with care, following the principles laid down by our Torah and created a society where connected and seen meant cared for and included, not exploited and made unwilling public property.