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The Eye of Sauron
Something New Under the Sun

The pieces come together. Within the last week I have read:

1) New software, associated with Google, will recognize customers in
stores so as to offer them discounts; having your photos uploaded to
allow this service will (for now) be voluntary. 2) A new surveillance
system in New York will store footage from cameras in, for example,
the subway, so that when an unattended package is discovered,
the police can look back in time to see who left it. 3) TSA is
perfecting a laser that will allow detection on travelers of trace
amounts of drugs, explosives, and doubtless a wide variety of other
things. 4) The government is moving toward mandating black boxes on
cars to record information thought to be useful in ascribing blame
in crashes. 5) Various police departments are beginning to use
"drone" aircraft to monitor the population.

These are recent pieces of the coming world. They have not yet all
been completely deployed and linked. Some are voluntary, for the
moment. Others are in development. All are coming.

Add the now-routine tracking of passports, cameras that read every
passing license plate and record the time, NSA's automated monitoring
of email, Google's and therefore the government's knowledge of your
searches, GPS tracking of cell phones, detailed records of bank
transactions, and so on. Not all of these are instantly accessible
by the police. They can easily be made accessible, and they move
in that direction.

In short, the technology exists for a detailed, unblinking,
unforgetting watchfulness of the entire population beyond anything
imagined, or perhaps imaginable, a few decades ago. This is not
Fred-drank-too-much-coffee. It is happening.

The capacity of hard drives is now essentially without limit, the
power of computers to sort and search infinite, and the speed of the
internet no longer a bound. Almost microscopic cameras, wireless
concealable microphones, face recognition, voice recognition,
recording GPS: You can buy all of this in consumer stores. The
government has far better.

People speak of the onrush of the police state. I think that many
do not understand how fast it comes, or how thorough it will be.

The political framework falls rapidly into place. Few or no
safeguards exist, and probably few are possible. A growing
authoritarianism rapidly erodes what protections we had. The courts
allow random searches of passengers of trains and subways without
probable cause. Warrantless tapping of personal communications
is rampant, or done with secret warrants from a secret federal
judge. TSA has Viper squads that stop cars at random for searches. In
many places it is against the law to video the police, who everywhere
become more militarized and less accountable. For practical purposes,
citizens have no recourse.

At a higher level of generality, America is no longer a democracy. If
you think this a rash assertion, ask yourself whether you have the
slightest influence over policies that matter to you. Suppose that
you want to end the wars, shrink the military, end affirmative
action, genuinely change education, or reform a hostile and
unworkable bureaucracy. Who do you vote for? Important policies are
made in faceless bureaucracies immune to public influence. National
politics employs a sort of political price-fixing, in which you are
permitted to choose among a number on indistinguishable candidates
and told that you are having an election.

None of this is going to stop.

Why is it happening? Some suspect a vast conspiracy to Sovietize
the country. I doubt it. Don't look for a conspiracy when human
nature is an adequate explanation. Presidents never want to suffer
the restraints on constitutionality, the agonizing slowness of
a congress that often has little understanding of the issues;
if presidents can do things by fiat, or secretly, they will.

We have now had two consecutive presidents with less than normal
respect for the constitution, one a brown Plantagenet but with
little grounding in European civilization, the other a privileged
rich brat of limited intellect and schooling. Such as they will
take any shortcut they can get away with, and there is no longer
anyone to tell them no.

Men grab power when they can. Once grabbed, it stays grabbed. A
police operation like DHS will always try to grow. People in power
always think they know best. When a federal department has money,
industry rushes to sell it things. In the case of TSA, this means
new and more advanced scanners, then upgrades, and maintenance
contracts, training contracts, and then a new kind of scanner,
and the process repeats.

The people doing all of this are not thinking of installing
totalitarianism. They are thinking dollars, promotions, power, ego,
and perks.

The FBI?  NSA? Federal officials in general? They know best. They
are, they think, just fighting crime, terrorism, maintaining
national security, what have you, and the more power they have,
they better they can do this. Further, intimidating people is
pleasurable. If citizens have nothing to hide, say all these cops,
they have nothing to fear. If you torture terrorists, or those you
think may be terrorists, well, the real world is like that. Do you
want more terrorism?

A conspiracy would be preferable. You can crush a conspiracy. Human
nature, which inherently drifts toward corruption, is a far
tougher nut.

What difference will it make to live in a country in which the
government knows everything whatever about everybody, and few
safeguards against abuse exist? For most people, at first, probably
not much. At first. But for people the government doesn't like,
a lot. Reporters, writers, whistle-blowers, activists, dissidents.

And we are all vulnerable. Knowledge, as someone said, is power. Few
of us have spotless lives, or want them. Did you once check into a
cheap motel with someone else's spouse or a lady of the night? What
do the porn sites you visit say about you? If you are, say, a
politician, do you want these things to come out? Have you written
compromising emails about shady deductions on your taxes, or about
your boss ("a weasely dickhead and probably a latent girly-boy")?
You have bar bills or liquor purchases of $300 a week? What if you
show positive on a marijuana scan at the airport, which becomes
justification for a full search of your house, or dismissal from
work?

Things have already reached the point at which writers of my
acquaintance, who do not have the power of the Washington Post
behind them, have stopped criticizing the government. Whether
they are in fact in any danger of persecution-I don't think they
much are yet-almost doesn't matter. The mere knowledge that your
email can be read is intimidating, like being closely followed by
a police car even when you are doing nothing wrong. We are daily
being followed by more police cars, both literal and figurative.

The above article by Fred Reed
<http://www.fredoneverything.net/Saurons_Eye.shtml>

Until our next issue, stay cool and remain low profile!

Privacy World

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