The Power of Being Watched

Why hitting the "record" button is an act of moral courage.

One of the ubiquitous parental fears of the 1980s was child abduction. I’m guessing other Gen X’ers had this experience with their parents: Talks and protocols about what to do if some stranger rolled up next to you, offered you candy, and asked you to get into their car. For some reason my mom always imagined that they’d physically grab me and hold a gun to my head. (I think this happened in a lot of movies.) “If someone grabs you, scream as loud as you can,” she would tell me. “Whatever he wants to do will be much worse if he takes you somewhere, but if you scream at least people will see him and he will want to get away.” (For what it’s worth, I still think this is good advice.)

What my mom was articulating was actually two themes that are coming out in my research into complicity and courage. One is that corruption and misconduct thrive in darkness: transparency is Kryptonite for pedophiles and fraudsters and dictators alike. It’s why Elizabeth Holmes kept her marketing team away from her engineers, why Bernie Madoff operated a secret second floor, why Harvey Weinstein enforced NDAs and Donald Trump got the National Enquirer to catch and kill bad stories about him. Creating your own story is much easier when no one can see what you are really doing.

The second is that rules only work if they are accompanied by an independent enforcement system. That probably seems like an obvious principle, but you’d be surprised at how many of the scandals we see in the news aren’t because there weren’t rules or laws that addressed the illegal behavior, but because no oversight mechanism existed to ensure compliance with them. You might be surprised to know, for example, that Enron had a 92-page ethics code; the company’s board and accountants just weren’t too concerned in adhering to it. We’re seeing this play out in real time now with ICE. I’ve written about DHS’ deadly force policy, which exists but clearly wasn’t followed. Yesterday, a federal judge in Minnesota issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting ICE from using tactics like pepper spray or arresting protesters who are following them at a reasonable distance. This is great, but people are right to ask, What happens if ICE doesn’t comply?

We are in a moment where the administration is engaged in an active propaganda campaign to vilify any segment of the population that opposes it and make those individuals legitimate targets for investigation, abduction, deportation, torture, or even murder. The administration also has subverted our primary independent enforcement mechanism, the Justice Department, and converted it into a weapon in this campaign. The ultimate goal here is to get citizens and communities to buy into this propaganda and turn on their neighbors — this kind of complicity is really the only way that the dystopian vision that Steven Miller has in mind can actually become a reality. We have seen this movie before, and yes, it is being attempted here.

So at this point, we need a way to keep sunlight on the administration’s actions and an oversight body somewhere outside the government itself.

Enter the cellphone. In his book Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How it Changes Us, Professor Brian Klaas writes that one of the most effective ways to reduce corruption and illegality is to make sure the people who are exercising power are being watched. It’s therefore not surprising that ICE agents are doing everything they can to prevent this, from wearing masks to conceal their identities to firing rubber bullets at journalists covering their activities to engaging in violence and even threatening deadly force against protesters who are recording them.

In my discussion earlier this week with psychologist and professor Catherine Sanderson on how to turn bystanders into moral rebels, we discussed why one of the most powerful acts of resistance in our current moment is for ordinary people to record what is happening in front of them. It’s because it does the following three things that make it harder for people to become complicit in what is taking place:

Awareness

If you’re like me, you probably have well-meaning people in your life who absolutely don’t support what the Trump administration is doing, but also seem…kind of disengaged. I’m fascinated by these people, and I’ve realized that they are just very good at compartmentalizing. “I just don’t watch the news anymore,” they say, as though that means it’s not happening. The truth is, they don’t want to be morally inconvenienced — to know what is happening is to then be faced with a decision to do something about it. It’s easier to placate themselves that “things are always bad” or “nothing can be done until the next election,” etc.

This is why it’s important to shove reality in front of their faces to wake them up. Constantly.

That’s what has happened with the video of ICE’s shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis. Greg Sargeant writes in The New Republic that videos of the shooting have made a significant impact on the public, with 76% of national voters having seen video footage and 86% saying that they have heard at least “a little” about it. In our oversaturated information environment, that is a LOT. And it is driving opinion: Sergeant writes that among young and working class voters — major segments of the MAGA base and ones that Democrats have had trouble breaking through to — 51% (working class) to 70% (young voters) disapprove of ICE’s actions.

Condemnation of ICE is now even coming from Joe Rogan, a major influencer node on the right. Sergeant writes, “All this suggests again that ICE’s brutality—and Trump’s—has achieved an extraordinary level of penetration into the culture, reaching into online spaces where people who aren’t fixated on politics hang out.”

All this is happening because of bystanders with a cellphone.

Empathy

In my Substack course on disinformation, I have written about how propaganda and disinformation campaigns seek to provide people with narratives that help them rationalize either going along with, or at least not objecting to, unethical/illegal/corrupt actions. Some of these propaganda narratives are psychologically manipulative strategies designed to dampen people’s empathetic response (which then makes them more passive and less inclined to take action). These strategies include dehumanization (e.g., comparing people to vermin that have to be exterminated), distortion of consequences (denying that the actions being taken are really that bad), and attribution of blame (e.g., blaming victims/claiming they are deserving of what happened to them).

Suppressing people’s empathetic response is also useful in generating the complacency and apathy I described above. Historians have noted, for example, that contrary to the prevailing view following the war, ordinary Germans in Nazi Germany were aware of Hitler’s concentration camps, which were widely publicized but to which people were desensitized through consistent and prolonged exposure to propaganda. Over time, news reports matter-of-factly characterized those imprisoned in the camps as “race defilers, rapists, sexual degenerates and habitual criminals,” providing a convenient justification for ordinary Germans to not be particularly concerned about them. Sound familiar?

Video footage is powerful in countering and neutralizing these propaganda narratives because visual images, by their very nature, not only show the truth, but also evoke emotional and visceral responses. As we have seen in the aftermath of Renee Good’s murder, official “accounts” simply don’t match up with what people can observe directly and they quickly realize that they are being asked “to reject the evidence of [their] eyes and ears,” to quote George Orwell.

More importantly, they are able to see that people like themselves are being victimized, which reduces the “othering” necessary for propaganda to be effective. Activating this empathy, in turn, is a critical element in driving people to take action and stand up against corrupt actors, something we are seeing play out now in Minnesota communities.

Accountability

Finally, because our federal justice system has been compromised, bystander videos are, by and large, our only accountability mechanism at the moment. Before you dismiss that as being completely meaningless, consider how we have seen their importance in the past.

Let’s be clear: Derek Chauvin was held accountable for George Floyd’s murder largely because bystanders — who otherwise had no realistic ability to intervene — recorded it. It’s true that there was body camera footage from some of the officers, but being able to show the jury exactly what took place in full context was crucial to Chauvin being convicted.

The same will be true in the murder of Renee Good, I predict. For one thing, the sheer number of angles of video footage that have been released — including this synchronized footage by The New York Times — provide visual proof of a number of legal issues related to liability. This becomes especially important in light of the Justice Department’s obstruction of a state criminal investigation, as it opens up the possibility that state prosecutors may be able to move forward even without the feds’ help.

Video documentation also creates accountability for those who choose to stand by and do nothing, and are counting on having some plausible deniability later. Mark my words, when this is all over (and I do believe one day we will be on the other side of this, and have some sort of truth commission if not criminal trials), there will be sooooo many people who have conveniently “forgotten” or “had no idea” what was really going on. To return to the German example, in her 1950 essay “On the Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany” (which is worth reading in its entirety), Hannah Arendt writes:

In view of the very complicated moral situation of the country at the close of the war, it is not surprising that the gravest single error in the American denazification policy occurred in its initial effort to arouse the conscience of the German people to the enormity of the crimes committed in their name and under conditions of organized complicity. In the early days of occupation, posters appeared everywhere showing the photographed horrors of Buchenwald with a finger pointing at the spectator, and the text: ‘You are guilty.’ For a majority of the population these pictures were the first authentic knowledge of what had been done in their name. How could they feel guilty if they had not even known? All they saw was the pointed finger, clearly indicating the wrong person. From this error they concluded that the whole poster was a propaganda lie.

Thus, at least, runs the story one hears time and again in Germany. The story is true enough so far as it goes; yet it does not explain the very violent reaction to these posters, which even today has not died down, and it does not explain the affronting neglect of the content of the photographs. Both the violence and the neglect are called forth by the hidden truth of the poster rather than by its obvious error. For while the German people were not informed of all Nazi crimes and were even deliberately kept ignorant of their exact nature, the Nazis had seen to it that every German knew some horrible story to be true, and he did not need a detailed knowledge of all the horrors committed in his name to realize that he had been made accomplice to unspeakable crimes.

As I wrote in my complicity cheat sheet last week, connivance (looking the other way) is a form of complicity, and being forced to confront reality, in real time, makes the plausible deniability of connivance harder.

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I am writing this one day after the Justice Department has reportedly opened criminal investigations into Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. The crime they allegedly committed has not been specified (surprise!), but I suspect it has to do with this speech from Walz to Minnesotans two days ago, providing guidance on how to respond. Among the things he asks them to do:

[A]nother way you can help: Witness. Help us establish a record of exactly what’s happening in our communities. You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities. So carry your phone with you at all times. And if you see these ICE agents in your neighborhood, take out that phone and hit record. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.

For this administration, the mere act of documenting what is happening is a threat, for all the reasons I laid out above. It was inevitable that the next step would be claiming that a moral rebellion is the same as a legal one.

You can watch Governor Walz’ entire speech here: