Camera Phones Give Flashers Unexpected Exposure
NEW YORK — When the stranger on the subway car unzipped his fly and started fondling himself, Thao Nguyen, 23, did what any woman confronted by a flasher might like to do.
She took out her cellphone, snapped him in the act with its built-in camera, then posted the image online. The smirking fellow on the uptown R train with his hands in his lap was displayed in the digital pillory of a photo-sharing website called Flickr.com as "pervert081805."
In this city of surveillance, where more than 5,000 video cameras monitor the mean streets, it was the perfect tale of tables turned, of public shaming in the Internet Age and the swift justice of the smart mob.
The incident prompted blog commentaries from Spain to Australia and a splash of front-page tabloid outrage. By Thursday, within a week of the photo being posted, a suspect had been arrested and charged with four counts of lewd behavior.
It was the third time this year that women had used cellphone cameras to expose flashers on the nation's largest subway system, until now Manhattan's last reserve of public anonymity.
Several analysts of social networks and online community considered the subway incident an empowering example of how people could take technology -- and justice -- into their own hands in an act of citizen journalism. Digital cameras and websites have given people an ability to distribute images widely that not so long ago was the province of professional news organizations.
"This is a fascinating phenomenon that evolved through the unexpected use of technology," said Cory Doctorow, European affairs coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who helps edit Boing Boing, a weblog with 1.3 million readers that had highlighted the subway photo. "It classically illustrates the way people find their own uses for technology."
Even as they applauded Nguyen's quick thinking, however, some scholars were troubled by the unintended consequences of a world in which almost no action seems to go unrecorded by cellphone cameras, spy cams and security monitors. It is the next step, they said, in the creeping "paparazziation" of society.
In the four years since camera-equipped mobile phones reached the market, the devices have changed the way many people look at the world. By the end of this year, 500 million people are expected to own a telephone with some sort of image-capturing device. That number could swell to 3 billion by 2010, according to cellphone manufacturer Nokia.
