For three days last month, an artist named Kyle McDonald secretly programmed computers at two Apple stores in Lower Manhattan to shoot a webcam picture every minute. As people squinted, frowned, glared, grinned, grimaced, snarled and other ways looked at the screens, their pictures were snapped, silently. Then the photos were automatically sent to Mr McDonald's server.
Having collected 1,000 pictures, Mr McDonald, 25, created another little program and returned to the two stores, one on 14th Street and the other on Prince Street. This time, after a picture was taken, it was immediately put into an array of older photos that would begin running across the screens.
Suddenly, people sitting at the computers were looking at pictures of themselves that dissolved into photos of others who also had gazed into the screens.
"Most people instinctively quit the app less than 10 seconds after recognizing their own face," Mr McDonald wrote on a Web site for the project, titled, "People Staring at Computers."
No one in the stores got angry, he said: "During the exhibition, people were just confused and laughed."
Apple, however, was not amused.
On July 7, two days after Mr McDonald posted his project on the Web, he was awoken by Secret Service agents at his home in Brooklyn. They had a warrant to search for evidence that he violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and they left with his laptop.
Then lawyers for Apple contacted websites that hosted video made by Mr McDonald, including Vimeo and Tumblr, and told them the material might violate the law, that a criminal investigation was going on, and that they'd better take down "People Staring at Computers." They did.
Cyberspace may be vast, even infinite, but every centimeter of it is being contested by businesses, botnets, governments, lawyers, artists, technologists, ethicists, soldiers, scientists and spies, among others. So far, the territory appears to be ungoverned by any power except brute force or ingenuity, and then only fleetingly. Invisible hackers can take over the Web sites of Murdoch papers for a few hours; Apple's lawyers can shut down an art exhibit with sternly worded letters to server hosts; pirates can confiscate music, movies and writing without the slightest nod to intellectual property rights; big businesses can force the removal of parodies that embarrass them. Hosni Mubarak can try to unplug the Internet, but a disconnected country quickly turns out to be as unendurable for the powerful as it is for the powerless.
What about taking pictures of people without their permission in the Apple stores? On the Mashable website, where Mr McDonald's story has been closely followed, many commenters debated the ethics or etiquette of taking pictures of unsuspecting people.
Was it reasonable for people in a commercial space - private property - to expect privacy? Websites are always collecting data on users without telling them, as an extraordinary series of articles in The Wall Street Journal showed last year. Yet these were Apple's computers: Did Mr McDonald have the right to use them for his own project? Well, the Apple retail stores in New York are filled at all hours with people who have come in to try out the latest and greatest, but also by wandering armies who use the stores, with their broadband connections, as free auxiliary offices.
"There are no limitations or conditions when you use those computers," said Gerald Lefcourt, a prominent lawyer who is representing Mr. McDonald. "He was using that which was available to him or to anyone else. He didn't violate the law, and he certainly had no intention to violate it."
Apple did not reply to a request for comment, and a spokesman for the Secret Service said the agency would not discuss the investigation.
The main host of the "Staring at Computers" project was the Web site of a group of artists, Free Art & Technology, and it, too, received the letter from Apple demanding that it be removed. "I don't want to unduly put Kyle in any more trouble than he already is in, and it didn't seem like the time to fight a free speech issue that we don't have the money to fight anyway," said Evan Roth, who administers the site.
Forced to censor the project, Mr. Roth came up with a low-cost response.
He kept the pictures from the stores on the Web site - but posted a mask on each one. The face on all the masks: Steve Jobs.
Having collected 1,000 pictures, Mr McDonald, 25, created another little program and returned to the two stores, one on 14th Street and the other on Prince Street. This time, after a picture was taken, it was immediately put into an array of older photos that would begin running across the screens.
Suddenly, people sitting at the computers were looking at pictures of themselves that dissolved into photos of others who also had gazed into the screens.
"Most people instinctively quit the app less than 10 seconds after recognizing their own face," Mr McDonald wrote on a Web site for the project, titled, "People Staring at Computers."
No one in the stores got angry, he said: "During the exhibition, people were just confused and laughed."
Apple, however, was not amused.
On July 7, two days after Mr McDonald posted his project on the Web, he was awoken by Secret Service agents at his home in Brooklyn. They had a warrant to search for evidence that he violated the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and they left with his laptop.
Then lawyers for Apple contacted websites that hosted video made by Mr McDonald, including Vimeo and Tumblr, and told them the material might violate the law, that a criminal investigation was going on, and that they'd better take down "People Staring at Computers." They did.
Cyberspace may be vast, even infinite, but every centimeter of it is being contested by businesses, botnets, governments, lawyers, artists, technologists, ethicists, soldiers, scientists and spies, among others. So far, the territory appears to be ungoverned by any power except brute force or ingenuity, and then only fleetingly. Invisible hackers can take over the Web sites of Murdoch papers for a few hours; Apple's lawyers can shut down an art exhibit with sternly worded letters to server hosts; pirates can confiscate music, movies and writing without the slightest nod to intellectual property rights; big businesses can force the removal of parodies that embarrass them. Hosni Mubarak can try to unplug the Internet, but a disconnected country quickly turns out to be as unendurable for the powerful as it is for the powerless.
What about taking pictures of people without their permission in the Apple stores? On the Mashable website, where Mr McDonald's story has been closely followed, many commenters debated the ethics or etiquette of taking pictures of unsuspecting people.
Was it reasonable for people in a commercial space - private property - to expect privacy? Websites are always collecting data on users without telling them, as an extraordinary series of articles in The Wall Street Journal showed last year. Yet these were Apple's computers: Did Mr McDonald have the right to use them for his own project? Well, the Apple retail stores in New York are filled at all hours with people who have come in to try out the latest and greatest, but also by wandering armies who use the stores, with their broadband connections, as free auxiliary offices.
"There are no limitations or conditions when you use those computers," said Gerald Lefcourt, a prominent lawyer who is representing Mr. McDonald. "He was using that which was available to him or to anyone else. He didn't violate the law, and he certainly had no intention to violate it."
Apple did not reply to a request for comment, and a spokesman for the Secret Service said the agency would not discuss the investigation.
The main host of the "Staring at Computers" project was the Web site of a group of artists, Free Art & Technology, and it, too, received the letter from Apple demanding that it be removed. "I don't want to unduly put Kyle in any more trouble than he already is in, and it didn't seem like the time to fight a free speech issue that we don't have the money to fight anyway," said Evan Roth, who administers the site.
Forced to censor the project, Mr. Roth came up with a low-cost response.
He kept the pictures from the stores on the Web site - but posted a mask on each one. The face on all the masks: Steve Jobs.
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