The surveillance state scored a major propaganda win this week in the northern Spanish village of Tajueco when a Google Street View camera recorded a man arranging a suspicious parcel in the trunk of his car. The recording led to his arrest for murder, as the parcel turned out to be the body of Jorge Luis Pérez Ochandarena, who had dropped off the radar a year ago. Police had managed no progress in what was considered a missing persons case, though suspicions of foul play had been raised back then by Ochandarena’s cousin, who said he received text messages supposedly from Ochandarena saying he was leaving Spain and would not return.
He didn’t return, right enough. At least not in whole. Allegedly, Ochandarena’s ex-wife conspired with her new lover Manuel Isla Gallardo to murder Ochandarena, dismember him, and bury him in the cemetery of an adjacent village. Our first thought was that Gallardo should have looked both ways before moving a corpse from house to car, but then we figured, well, human bodies can be awkward to move, so once you break cover with it you’re probably committed no matter what happens next. Gallardo doubtless heard a car coming and we imagine he did two things: first, crap himself copiously; and second: continue to casually load his grisly cargo.
Actually, he probably did a third thing, which was double-take at the Street View car, which we bet he’d never seen the like of before. If you haven’t seen one, they look like this:
As a pulp site we first have to see this from the murderer’s perspective. What a fucking bummer. Whether or not Gallardo had seen a Street View car before, there would be no mistaking what it was doing. He had to know he was screwed. His best hope was that whatever photos or video had been taken ended up in the digital equivalent of the artifact warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark, forgotten forever. Next best hope: the data is uploaded without actual human supervision, and his cadaver-loading star turn sits in Google’s Street View interface unremarked upon by users. No such luck.
In a vintage crime novel Gallardo might have been fine, but in our locked-down digital reality he was toast with jamón iberico. It took a year, but he was done the moment that car turned down the street. We could go into the usual surveillance warnings after a tale like this, but that horse bolted from the barn and disappeared over a distant hill ages ago. New York City has 124,000 surveillance cameras. London has 627,000. Shenzhen has two million. And everybody with a front stoop has a doorbell cam. They’re Orwell’s three-hundred million people all with the same face. But Tajueco, we’re willing to bet, had virtually no cameras. Yet on that day,
on that dusty backstreet, at that precise moment—boom. The driver reported nothing; the camera saw all. And to add irony to insult, Google hadn’t photographed the streets of tiny Tajueco—full time population fifty-six—since 2009.
Since surveillance is pervasive, we guess an argument could be made that it’s really no big deal to be recorded outdoors, indoors, every time you ring a doorbell, every time you go online, and even—many times—when you use your appliances. And sometimes, yes, unambiguously good things happen. Like when a killer is caught, and victims are avenged. Big Brother is here to help you. So is Big Mother, Little Sister, Casual Acquaintance, and Nosy Neighbor. Don’t do anything wrong, and you’ll be fine—usually. Just remember to keep a fully updated, officially vetted, notarized list of what qualifies as wrong, and don’t be surprised how expansive and mundane the index of violations eventually becomes.
