In Canada there was a lethal armed robbery of a money-carrying security truck, resulting in the death of three guards and the injury of one more. Charged with the crime is one of their coworkers, 21 year old Travis Baumgartner.
Upon the discovery of Baumgartner's Facebook account, people have begun wondering whether or not the content of the site should have brought Baumgartner under suspicion.
The first thing to notice about Baumgartner's page is his profile picture and cover photo:
Photo courtesy of National Post
Baumgartner here is clad in a balaclava and with a Gears of War themed background picture.
More specifically are posts from Baumgartner such as this:
I wonder if I’d make the six o’clock news if I just starting popping people off
Obviously both sides of an argument can been seen. The camp in favor of increased online surveillance that could lead to additional arrests and possibly prevent other crimes and tragedies.
The other camp is against online surveillance, believing that privacy is a right in the online age.
So here are my thoughts on the debate.
There does exist a need for privacy, not just to give individuals a break from the real world, but also a place to vent. But through the nature of the internet, the amount of privacy that one can have is limited.
Ultimately there are varying degrees of privacy online, just as there are varying amounts of privacy in real life. If I make a painting in my house, than the only ones that are privy to it are the people who I let into my house. Though my house may be burgled, but that is a direct violation of my privacy rights. If I wanted to make the picture public, I could put it on display in a gallery or leave it laying around somewhere.
And if I wanted to keep the painting secret, I could keep it in a safe.
Is there some amount of privacy in public though? And I think the answer is yes, to a degree. If I were to go to a large gathering, there are two types of anonymity, I could wear a mask or cover my face. But perhaps even better is to merely be another face in a crowd. And the internet is a much larger crowd.
Even if governments were given authority to comb through the personal accounts of people like sanctioned burglars, it would be difficult to sift through all the information. And the better that police get with searching through people's personal pages, the better criminals will be at finding how to hide information, even if it means moving offline.
As good as it would be to be protected from the chance of violence from lunatics such as Baumgartner, it is worth the gamble to keep some room to ourselves.
In the end, my view is that it is safer to side with some privacy and being aware that individuals like Baumgartner are out in society, than it is to sacrifice privacy for the wishful thinking that the government will manage to find those individuals at all.
Perhaps the better question of the situation is this, where were the friends who had permitted access to his page?
-Hutch
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