Google in the Tower

UPDATE, DEC.14, 2009: LiberalWatch has now been renamed "KeyWiki."

Since Professor Dan Ryan slowly wrote the word "GOOGLE" in the observation tower of the Panopticon on our chalkboard, I've been telling everybody about it. Revealing the "panopticization" of our everyday lives is a staggering, endless activity (and so collegiate..), and focusing on the internet alone provides plenty of meat. I've been thinking a lot about whether people will reach a tipping point with the freakiness of the internet, the speed with which we lose control over what of ours is sacred and private, and how it stays that way.

The other day, I Googled myself to find a radio story I'd done, and play it for a friend. The first result? A link to all of the notes I'd posted to Facebook--no login needed, full text. This includes a summer address from a few years ago and a plea for letters, a goofy survey taken by my roommate and I, a roommate posting, and various political links. ANYONE could see this?!

I tinkered with my Facebook settings, and tonight, set out to re-google myself. On the third page of results, I found this link:

http://www.liberalwatch.org/index.php/Sonya_Rifkin

It's a wiki, and the information on me is a rearranged, categorized version of a bio from the website of an organization where I interned last spring and summer. With certain omissions, and some things italicized as direct quotations, it remains verbatim. The source link is from that organization's website. There is no other information about me there. But it clearly was pulled from an arbitrary scan, not a meaningful search for my associations and history.

Before I go on--a word from the anonymous wiki-ers at LiberalWatch:

Our mission

Liberal Watch promotes liberty and freedom through the free and open sharing of information about the radical left.

What we do

Liberal Watch is a wiki, which means anyone can improve it. By adding your knowledge and fixing mistakes, the quality and depth of Liberal Watch information improves over time.

Why we do it

We believe in the power of information to transform politics, and we're committed to making the most knowledge available to the greatest number of people. We believe that the more informed we are as voters, the better our government becomes.

Liberal Watch isn't a part of any political party and we don't support candidates. We're simply a community of users dedicated to transparency in politics, on both sides of the aisle. Our users welcome responsible, knowledge-building contributions from anyone who wants to participate.

Ok. So I began searching LiberalWatch. People I knew. The entire city of Oakland. Organizations.

It became clear right off the bat that the content was generated according to a narrow, somewhat arbitrary set of search interests, collected from select websites, and run through some kind of format that arranged information from preexisting bios and membership lists into familiar wiki categories: early life, education, and so on. Profiles represented things like membership on the boards of organizations, and all of the members' profiles would be similar. The pool of associations seemed relatively small.

I searched my father. He is a prominent executive vice president at a progressive labor union, and has hundreds of internet hits. No profile. Neither the past nor present presidents of that union has a profile--and all three are certainly more prominent "liberals" than I. Interestingly, though, all the members of the staff and board of the organization where I interned have profiles, all sourced from the same web page.

To expand on the fishiness of the methodology behind the wiki, I searched Angela Davis. No doubt there would be a wealth of information on her--anything ranging from her arrest in 1970 and the mobilization that followed, to her academic work teaching at UC Santa Cruz. What constitutes her profile on LiberalWatch? To start, it's shorter than mine. It mentions her positions with the Committees of Correspondence, the Rosenberg Fund for Children, and the Women of Color Resource Center, as well as the names of other (past and present) board members of that organization. The source list is comprised of the three websites of the organizations cited.

I searched more. It became clear that either the wiki automatically trolled certain sites, or the users were highly selective--the people and organizations profiled almost exclusively involve connections to communist or socialist organizations, ideals, or affiliations. If this is, as the "About" section claims, an unaffiliated site in pursuit of "liberty and freedom" via transparency, it's awfully particular.

The kicker is almost too obvious to report--search Barack Obama, and any questions about the selectivity of the wiki's users' definition of "liberal" are put to rest. The information exclusively focuses on his supposed affiliation with various known "communists" and "socialists".

There is, it should be noted, a User List for the LiberalWatch wiki. The only user with an active link goes by the username Russell19. His one line profile?

"G'day, the name's Russell. The need to expose socialist extremists is evident, and this wiki proves very useful towards that end."

Well, LiberalWatch wasn't lying when they said they don't support candidates or political parties. Sure, their understanding of "both side of the aisle" may be a little fuzzy. They just represent the roiling right wing keyboard-tappers and their increasingly vocal presence in anonymous politicking. They've always been around--let's not forget that. I don't want to contribute to fear-mongering of any sort by speculating about their rise under Obama, and the potential for violence, although I believe there's truth to that. But the coincidence of their appearance on the national radar (whether masked as the interests of the public, or exposed) and the increasing ease of obscuring and dispersing accountability through technology warrants attention.

The rising internet, media and organizing presence of far-right conservatives masquerading as freedom crusaders is still noteworthy, but certainly not new. What continues to be startling is the degree to which these technologies allow people--and their interests--to hide. The process of verification and sourcing keep getting more complex, and the public persists in being pretty lax about screening this information.

There has been some (not enough) pushback to the radical right wing media's assertion of objectivity and straightforward reporting (thank you, Rachel Maddow...), but where is the toehold for accountability with wikis, PACS, or advocacy groups that form overnight? When I was growing up, my grandparents and parents told me cautionary tales about the FBI knocking, and left me to imagine the girth of their individual files in the bowels of Washington D.C. I understand the pervasiveness of government surveillance, especially of leftists, however defined.

As a child of the Internet generation writing this, and a leftist who knows her history, I feel a bit like a wacky alarmist and a prude at the same time--we all know the Internet is watching us, and if we knew the government was anyway, what's the big deal? And furthermore, my generation is quite comfortable with the former reality. So while we shouldn't panic about our Facebook settings, or our Google results, or reinvent the wheel about surveillance, perhaps we should remember that as organizers, we have to keep up with these things. They sure keep up with us. Maybe be more vigilant, or maybe not squander our energy, I'm not really sure....but eyes peeled, people. The tower is watching.