Recent geoprofiling has confirmed the identity of Banksy. But more importantly it has opened up a new method of criminalising protests under the guise of the war on terror.
Tagging Banksy
A recent article published in the not-oft-perused Journal of Spatial
Science caught the attention of the world’s press. Well, a couple of the
quality papers and one or two blogs picked up on it anyway. The piece is
called “Tagging Banksy” punning, I presume, on the
practice of tagging or signing your name intrinsic to street art, at the same
time as the mode of digital surveillance that we all submit to when we allow
our pics to be tagged on Facebook. I say I presume the title is punning as the
paper itself is devoid of wit, drear of irony.
Making it sound much more exciting than it actually is, let’s say the
paper tells the story of how four maverick scientists got together and decided
to use a process called geographic profiling, normally the preserve of
criminology and the study of infectious diseases, to instead profile the
anonymous and ‘cool’ street artist who goes by the name of Bansky. There
was no point to this, they admit, in that Banksy was already outed by the Daily
Mail in 2008 as one Robin Gunningham.
They were just a bunch of dudes, havin’ fun.
Not letting intellectual irrelevancy get in the way of a possible
publication as is often the case with modern academia, our envelope-breaching
team set about analysing the location of nearly 200 of Bansky’s works, all of
which are site-specific making him an ideal target for the geoprofiling
technique. The mathematic algorithms of geoprofiling allowed them to map
these 200 works against 'anchor points' pertinent to the life of the suspected
Gunningham, such as where he lived, his school, his girlfriend’s address, his
local pub and so on. Putting the data together in the same way as is used
for other criminals like serial killers, it was found that in all likelihood
Banksy is Paul Gunningham further
suggesting that, going against the grain of most advice, he does tend to shit
on his own doorstep. If the discovery itself was long short of revelation,
that fact that the Mail once published a fact that was correct is itself a
miraculous find I am sure you agree.
One Person’s Protester is Another’s Terrorist
In that we already knew Banksy was Gunningham, and in fact it was
because we knew this that Banksy was profilable in the first place as
geoprofiling needs suspects in order to map their movements when they are
abducting their live victims and abandoning the murdered corpse, the point of
the paper is mainly unclear until you get to the final, to me chillingly
negligent, paragraph. Here we learn that the purpose of this mode of
profiling is to catch bad-guys, in particular those bad-guys that are “so hot
right now”, namely terrorists.
Indulging in two whole sentences of cultural history, the paper reminds
us that Graffiti, acts of vandalism and the like have long been associated with
protest groups. In fact, one of the first applications of protest tagging
was tracing the profiles, in 2014, of known anti-Nazi protesters Otto and Elise
Hampel. The Hampel’s bravely left around 200 protest postcards in Berlin
apartments during the war, urging their recipients to resist the Nazis.
As we tend to forget, one person’s political activist is another’s
terrorist and the practice of low-level protest of these kinds is something
they both share in common, mainly because activists and terrorists are often
the same people, described in different ways. So if one is able to trace
what the authors term a terrorist’s “low level activities”, not just the
headline grabbing bombing and decapitating, then a new front could be opened in
the war of terror, one at street level, one based around the tracking your
daily life. Geoprofiling basically uses surveillance to see how you are
living and thus tag you as a potential committer of crimes. This then is the
authors’ justification for outing Banksy when a) it violated his privacy and b)
it had already been done.
A Load of Gunningam
The paper ends with something of a sense of its own purposelessness with this rather flaccid pay-off: “Of course, all this would be unnecessary if political protest only involved bombs stencilled on building walls”. I find myself a little confused by this I must confess. Are we keeping an eye on protesters in case they become something more? If so, who determines when protest becomes terrorism and does this mean that all forms of social protest should be subject to invasive surveillance? Or are we trying to catch terrorists using the minor acts of protest that they might also indulge in? And what of poor Robinsy, is he a protester who is a terrorist in potential, or is he a terrorist suspect who also protests? Neither would appear to be the answer. We are at war; Banksy is just collateral damage. Sorry Banksy! Shit happens.
What the scientists are arguing, in essence, is that because of
terrorism, we need to use science to improve the surveillance techniques of the
modern virtual police state. What a load of Gunningham. We have had
terrorism for over two hundred years and we have never had at our disposal the
means to track terrorists that we have now. We don’t need more tools; we
need more controls on the abuse of those tools. If you doubt my argument
think for a moment of the Hampels. Didn’t the Nazi’s view them as
terrorists or, using the rhetoric of their age of hate, degenerates? Yes,
they did. It took the SS two years to trace the precise identity and
location of the Hampels, but trace it they did. They were both executed
in 1943.
So what precisely does geoprofiling actually facilitate? It allows
a state to trace its Hampels in a couple of weeks or months, not a couple of
years. And if the paper is successful and its authors can work in concert
with the astonishing developments in data harvesting, face and voice
recognition, digital tagging and so on, that might be reducible to a couple of
hours or a couple of minutes. I am sure they are drafting their funding
bid along these lines as we speak. What this means is that the Hampels
would not have enjoyed two more years of married life. What this means is
maybe 100 or more postcards of protest they would have been unable to leave
behind. What this means is yet another nail in the coffin of our
legitimate right to privacy and protest in the name of a chimerical threat of
terror which is yet to substantially materialise, fifteen years after 9/11.
Weaponising Surveillance
Why should anyone but Banksy and a bunch of doggy Graffiti artists care?
It is not like we are living under a totalitarian regime and most of us are not
criminals or even protesters right? For
the record boycotting Starbucks does not count as protest, not does whining about
the ‘environment’ over a latte bought in Costa.
But let me just make this point. In recent times the UK government
has illegally executed several of its own citizens by drone, in particular
Reyaad Khan, Rahul Amin and most famously Mohammed Emwazi. More than this, in recent
years it has also sanctioned the
rendition and torture of its own citizens, and other people’s for that matter.
All in the name of an entirely bogus War on Terror. Bogus because we are
not at war and so we cannot declare a state of exception and simply disregard
the rule of law. And bogus because we don’t agree what terrorism actually
is in the world—and we are always in the world these days—and accordingly we
don’t know who the terrorists are.
Example, since the commencement of their bombing campaign the Russians
have killed over 2000 civilians in Syria, systematically, openly, with the aid
of digital surveillance techniques. These techniques have been used to
purposefully target civilian life in Syria, such as hospitals and schools, to
demoralise the anti-Assad forces. Calling all anti-Assad protesters
terrorists, the Russians have, effectively, weaponised locations of care and
protection. How have they achieved this? Through the historic
weaponising of the term Terrorist by George Bush and Tony Blair fifteen years
ago, allowing the Russians to use the same word to refer to anti-Assad forces
without anyone in the West being able to say anything because if they did then
we would have to speak about our own dirty secrets in Basra, Guantanamo and the
like. Those children, those doctors, those NGO workers who are no longer
with us, are the Hampels of Syria, and geoprofiling will be a welcome tool, a
welcome weapon, in the arsenal of states who wish to oppress any kind of
protest, and that includes our own.
Bad Impact
For me this paper is an enemy of our freedom now just Banksy’s, and that
is bad, but it is also an enemy of knowledge which is maybe worse, and I will
explain why. I am an academic and am embroiled on a daily basis in the
politics of publication. From an outside perspective it may seem silly to
publish a paper based on identifying a fact we already know, Banksy is Robin
Gunningham, so why did the authors do it? Out of love for Banksy’s
art? One of the authors said they thought Banksy was a cool artist, but
when asked if they had learnt more about his art with this paper they admitted
not. I think it is clear that the paper was not the product of art
lovers. Rather, the choice of Banksy was a cynical ploy on the part of
the authors to attain impact, a plot that has been hideously successful.
Impact is a measure of how widely read a piece of work is and in
scientific research all papers are assigned a numerical impact factor.
This number ties into your reputation as a scientist. If you go to the
Journal website where you can read the paper if you are willing to pay for it,
you will even find a lovely rainbow hoop called the Altmetric. The
Altmetric measures the impact of this paper in real time based on its mentions
in various sources. Not just academic sources but, more importantly for the modern
academic wishing to attain funding, promotion, and a better life, the public
impact of a piece.
Last time I looked “Tagging Banksy” had been mentioned in 60 news
sources and 4 blogs, make that 5 now. It had been referred to on Twitter
over 500 times. In short, in answer to the question what does this paper prove,
what does it add to knowledge, the answer is you are missing the point.
Increasingly, modern academia is not about adding to knowledge. Since the
rise of the internet we are all up to our necks with knowledge, with data, and
we academics are sick of it, overwhelmed by it. The paper is not about adding
to the sum of knowledge in the field but is itself, ironically, an exercise in
profiling, in this case augmenting the profile of its authors. In
choosing to geoprofile Banksy they are piggybacking on Banksy’s cultural
capital to gain visibility, and probably notoriety, for their own work.
Mugging Banksy
If Banksy possesses a lot of cultural capital, and the denizens of The Journal of Spatial Science do not (have you ever heard of it?) then what the paper “Tagging Bansky” actually commits is an act of cultural theft. Banksy has what the authors never will, cultural significance, because he has what they appear not to desire, cultural and social awareness. Banksy’s lawyers are said to be in conversation with the authors of “Tagging Banksy” and so they should be. Not just because they have invaded his privacy but because they have robbed him of a cultural capital which is also, by the way, worth a shed-load of actual cash. It is no use the authors saying they are respecting the privacy of Banksy in an “Ethical Note” tagged on to the end of the piece, when they are at the same time rifling through his private affairs. That’s like a burglar saying they respect your privacy because they only steal the things they can easily see around the place.
For me at least the authors of the paper are not so much involved in
geoprofiling than kleptoprofiling; they are not naming Banksy they are mugging
him. And in that petty theft is one of those low-level activities that
terrorists engage with, and that this paper is clearly a threat to our
freedoms, I ask the powers that be if it is not time that Hauge, Stevenson,
Rossmo and Comber (the authors of the piece), be the target of a new campaign
of geoprofiling? Let’s track them when they go to the pub, when they visit their sexual partners, when
they drop in on their mum and dad. Let’s
assume they are guilty until proven innocent and tag them. Let’s spy on them as they live out their
humdrum lives and see how they like it.
Tag, You're It!
The final grand irony of the piece of course is to do with Banksy’s
quest for anonymity. I could dwell on
the law that the more you seek anonymity in public life, the more obsessed the public
become with finding out who you are. I
could also discuss the means by which a quest for privacy is the quickest way
to guarantee that this right is breached.
But perhaps instead I will go with the observation that this whole
process is based on a layering of anonymity and the quest to be heard that is
really rather fascinating.
Banksy is Robin Gunningham’s tag, his way of making his mark on the
streets where he grew up, a method for all Graffiti artists to say here I am, I
exist, I am worth something. Anonymity
for them is the result of their being painfully aware of being considered low-level
criminals, it is a prophylactic, a shield against reprisal. That the same word is also used by agencies
and scientists alike who want to trace the identity of Graffiti artists, and
not just Graffiti artists but all of us who protest, taking the first step,
apparently, towards terrorism, is a delicious little thing to ponder on
Going further, the relative anonymity of the authors of the article feeds
vampirically almost on the notoriety of their innominate quarry, giving them an
opportunity to make their name by giving a name, Gunningham, and taking an
identity, Bansky. While it is clear that
the scientists have the most to gain from this, surely Banksy is giggling under
his facemask because the whole discussion, in the end, is money in the cultural
bank for him. Although I dislike the
geoprofiling of Banksy, in the end both parties have much to gain, both are
benefitting in a kind of cultural/political game of tag. So they are both winners it is we who are the
losers. We have nothing to gain from
tagging, we have no cultural capital to rely on, nor do we have any kind of
impact. We are not the Banksy’s of this
world, at best we are the Hampels, the little people desperately trying to make
a difference. We are the small change
protesters in the billion-dollar industry of tag which we cannot possibly
win.
By the way, whilst you were reading this you got tagged. How does it feel? Did you notice? Either way, little Hampel, tag, you’re it!
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