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BS ‘n’ About…
Big Brother
Technology is the enemy of freedom. Virtually everything fought for by our Founding Fathers is at risk here at the dawn of the Information Age. To paraphrase Ben Franklin, ‘when a man sacrifices his liberty for security, he deserves neither’. Unless We, the People actively do something to curtail the surveillance capabilities and actions of our government and its minions, we face the prospect of living in the police state nightmare foretold in Orwell’s 1984.
As our every movement, conversation, and keystroke is monitored and recorded by the NSA, we can’t help but be changed: as a people, as a nation, as neighbors, and as individuals. Courage will be replaced by fear. Trust will be replaced by suspicion. Freedom will be replaced by tyranny. America won’t be America anymore.
Those of us old enough to remember the days before we drowned ourselves in technology need to reconnect with that past and make sure the young know the heavy prices they are paying for what we dare to call progress. We all remember borrowing the car and sneaking out of the house to spend some time with friends not on Mom’s approval list. We all remember flaunting authority, asserting our independence, and testing our limits. It was a process that had been going on since time began. It was a process that helped make us who we are today. Most of us survived the experience. Some didn’t. It was Darwin in action.
These days Radio Shack wants to sell you a GPS device to slip into your kid’s, (or your wife’s!), purse so you can spy on their every move. We’re not all that far away from them trying to convince us that putting a tracking chip under our newborn’s skin is in our best interests. Being ‘off the grid’ will not be an option.
And what about nanny-cams? A great way to make sure the babysitter is doing her job, you say? But take it only one step further and you have a situation like they already have in Great Britain. Over there, court ordered cameras have been placed in thousands of homes to ensure that the parents are feeding their kids and getting them to bed on time. If the nanny cam was a good idea, then the mommy cam must be a great one, wouldn’t you say? Can you say “Smart Grid”?
And what of the psychological effects of all this surveillance? Not all that long ago us kids were thrown out of the house to “blow some of the stink off” and we had free reign of the neighborhood. We had to “fight our own battles”, “confront our fears”, and running home to Mommy was a surefire way to ruin a childhood. These days we have advice columnists telling us to take pictures of the little ones before sending them off to school so that we’ll have something to give the cops if they are abducted. Are we out of our minds!!! “Mommy, I don’t want to go to school today. Matter of fact, I never want to ever leave the house again as long as I live.” That’s where we’re headed.
Microsoft has recently come up with an application that it says will be able to enter your hard drive from out in cyberspace and destroy child porn. Good idea, you say? Take the intentionally-used, emotionally-explosive issue of child porn out of the equation and start over: Microsoft has recently come up with an application that it says will be able to enter your hard drive from out in cyberspace and destroy (place your worst fear here). Government dissent? Unapproved religion? Unauthorized software? Free speech? This book? Still a good idea?
The War on Terror is being waged against an enemy barely out of the Stone Age. And for a decade they have fought us to a stalemate. They spent a few hundred bucks on some boxcutters and airline tickets and we’ve spent the wealth of three generations turning America into a full-body scanner police state. And 99 out of every 100 people subjected to these methods are us: Innocent American citizens.
Are we really willing to sacrifice our every freedom, not to mention the very essence of what America has always stood for, in return for a police state that still can’t protect us from some nutjob willing to blow himself up in the local Starbucks? For all we’ve sacrificed, we are not one bit safer than we were on 9/11, and a pretty good case could be made that we’re in a whole lot more danger now than back then. Without question, a whole lot more people hate us these days.
But our government is safer, ensconced as it is behind the concrete barriers they built with our tax dollars, looking down upon us from the new federal building high rises sprouting up across the land. And Wall Street is safer, protected as it is behind a Supreme Court that was, in one way or another, bought and paid for. Homeland Security’s definition of a terrorist is “someone who incites others to violence against the government”. That makes virtually anyone who participated in the ‘60’s a terrorist, not to mention Rush Limbaugh. They haven’t gotten around to rounding us all up yet, but as long as the Patriot Act is on the books, they have the legal backing to round up just about anybody.
In the spring of 2010, the Supreme Court upheld the civil commitment of sex offenders if it was determined by some ‘Star Chamber’ that they were a ‘danger to society’. This means that citizens who had served time for their crimes could be picked up at the prison gate and held in custody indefinitely, without judge or jury. Almost 98% of the prisoners in Federal Prison got cheated out of their Constitutional right to be tried by a jury of their peers, but take away the judges too and we’ll find ourselves living in the Soviet Union: a ‘danger to society’ can be broadly defined in a lot of ways, none of them good.
It is almost already too late. Our kids worship at the Alter of technology and can’t remember any other way. We claim we’ve made these sacrifices to keep our kids safe, dirt-poor but safe. But have we?
Data mining is the collection of every bit of data we leave behind us as we go about our daily lives: our every keystroke, transaction, phone conversation, GPS coordinate, etc. Already the NSA collects all this data. The only thing that keeps them from maximizing the effectiveness of its collection is raw computing power, a process that grows exponentially. A great way to sniff out terrorists and keep us safe, you say?
It can keep us safe, not only from the terrorists, but from the arsonists, too. How, you say? Imagine this near future scenario: All of us will have a pic or two of something burning down on our hard drives. But a certain few of us are going to have a LOT of pictures of things burning down. They also ordered Backdraft and other ‘fire’ movies from Netflix. And they sure do buy a lot of charcoal lighter fluid for someone living in a hi-rise.
It sounds like a good idea until Homeland Security knocks on your door and drags away your 13-year-old son to protect us from the danger he represents to society. Far fetched? We’re already there.
Data mining also makes the ‘War on Drugs’ winnable for the first time. Check the GPS coordinates and they drag away your fifteen-year-old for toking up behind the school bleachers one lunch period too many. And as for morals, are you aware of how many Friday nights last month your daughter spent in a backseat over on Lovers Lane? Can’t have that in our town.
It has been said that character is built by what we do when we are alone. In a future where we are never, ever alone, will we ever truly know who we are? Will our lives be defined by the constant struggle to see how much we can “get away with”? Will we be forced to lock our true selves away inside while presenting a nice bland face to the world around us? Will we lie awake at night, awaiting the dreaded 3am knock by the minions from the Department of Homeland Security? The DeHoSe? (It rhymes with Gestapo and has a certain familiar leather trenchcoat kind of ring to it, don’t it now?) Been there. Done that. Don’t we ever learn?
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