\n\tIn Steve Spielberg\u2019s 2002 futurist Minority Report Tom Cruise plays a policeman in 2054 on the run. Though he\u2019s trying to be incognito, the surveillance
\n\tstate has so much biometric data on its citizens that, as he rushes through a mall, the stores and billboards not only beckon him by name but also
\n\tfine-tune their advertisements to address his immediate stress and anxiety.<\/p>\n
\n\tThough Minority Report was science fiction, who hasn\u2019t been creeped out by the first experience of browsing a Web site, only to later find ads related to
\n\tthat site pop up on your screen when you are looking at something else entirely? You think it\u2019s just a coincidence that Gawker knows your obsession with
\n\tWaterford Crystal or Beretta M9s?<\/p>\n
\n\tIn our technodigital society we are being watched, monitored, categorized, and parsed. When you surf the Web, you leave a trail that will remain long after
\n\tonly your teeth do. Your smartphone reveals where you\u2019ve been, even if you turn it off while it\u2019s in your pocket. When you walk down a city street or into
\n\ta store, you\u2019re likely being taped and uploaded to the cloud. Every online purchase remains etched in silicon. And if we can carry Google Earth on our
\n\tphones (technology that 20 years ago was probably top secret), do you think that when hiking the Grand Canyon, or lolling on a beach in southern France,
\n\tyou can\u2019t be seen by someone in Fort Meade?<\/p>\n
\n\tIf Uncle Sam isn\u2019t watching you yet, he can when he wants to.<\/p>\n
\n\tOr, maybe, he already is? In a 2013 book called A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State—which was given a cover endorsement by \u201c12-term
\n\tU.S Congressman and former presidential candidate Ron Paul\u201d—constitutional scholar John Whitehead paints a chilling portrait of post September 11 America.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWhen you buy food at the supermarket,\u201d he writes, \u201cpurchase a shirt online or through a toll-free number, these transactions are recorded by data
\n\tcollection and information companies. In this way, you are specifically targeted as a particular type of consumer by private corporations. And if that were
\n\tnot worrisome enough, government intelligence agencies routinely collect the records—billions of them—about what you have done and where you have lived
\n\tyour entire life: every house or apartment, all your telephone numbers, the cars you\u2019ve owned, ad infinitum.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAccording to Whitehead, when you use your phone, your ATM card, your GPS, all this information is being \u201cfed to the U.S. government intelligence agencies.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tEven if things are not as bad as Whitehead argues, or if they are even worse—many Americans shrug their shoulders: Well, if I am not doing anything wrong,
\n\twhy should I care?<\/p>\n
\n\tThat\u2019s an understandable sentiment, but dangerously shortsighted. What happens if what\u2019s deemed \u201cwrong\u201d changes? What happens if your religious practices
\n\tbecome suspect? Or your ethnic background? Or your politics? The fact that what you might be doing is not deemed \u201cwrong\u201d now does not mean that in two, 10,
\n\tor 20 years hence some judge on a bench, or politicians in office, or voters in voting booths might decide that, indeed, it is wrong and make it illegal or
\n\tinclude it in your present profile?<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIn the 1920s and 1930s,\u201d wrote Joan Acocella, \u201cStefan Zweig was an immensely popular writer, a man who had to barricade himself in his house in Salzburg
\n\tin order to avoid the fans lurking around his property in the hope of waylaying him. . . . By 1933 the Hitler Youth were burning his books; in 1935 Richard
\n\tStrauss\u2019s opera The Silent Woman was canceled after two performances because Zweig had written the libretto.\u201d And before we boast that this is America, not
\n\tAustria after the Anschluss, remember the fate of Japanese citizens in America during the war. Though their plight was nothing like the Jews\u2019 in Europe,
\n\tthe internment of the Japanese in America should remind us why the principles of freedom and liberty always need to be protected.<\/p>\n
\n\tProtected, yes. But, one may ask, at what cost?<\/p>\n
\n\tWhitehead\u2019s book is a polemic, and many Americans might not recognize the techno-fascist America that he says we\u2019re living in. At the same time, even
\n\texaggerated arguments are exaggerated only because there\u2019 s still enough truth there to exaggerate. And one thing we should all know by now is that privacy
\n\tin the twenty-first-century American surveillance state is like rotary phones, eight-track cassette players, and Joe Camel ads on billboards. It\u2019s a quaint
\n\tnotion from bygone days that certainly weren\u2019t as quaint as we like to remember them as being.<\/p>\n
\n\tWe are a wired nation, and as you read this article more wires are being placed, more routers are being hooked up, more video cameras are going online,
\n\tmore drones are flying overhead, more spying software programs are being developed, and more data is being scooped up and stored. Satellites are looking
\n\tdown upon us from above, Automatic License Plate Readers (APLR) are monitoring where we drive, and who knows as we stare into our computers who or what is
\n\tstaring back? However much our digital gizmos give us access to the world, they also give the world access to us. It\u2019s like Newton\u2019s third law of motion,
\n\tbut revamped for the digital age: for every action there\u2019s an equal and opposite reaction. To be wired to the world cuts both ways.<\/p>\n
\n\tOn one level, we should be glad. The surveillance state does help authorities catch criminals. From the Oklahoma City bombing to the Boston Marathon
\n\tbombing, video cameras helped provide helpful evidence. Who knows how many criminals, or terror attacks, have been thwarted by technology? And with ISIS
\n\tvideos of beheading and burnings flooding the Internet, our desire to feel safe and secure will only increase.<\/p>\n
\n\tOf course, safety and security come with a price. The question is how to value that price correctly, a process that hardly lends itself to geometrical
\n\tprecision.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThey who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety,\u201d said Benjamin Franklin, \u201cdeserve neither liberty nor safety.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tHowever catchy Franklin\u2019s quip, like all catchy quips it makes too simple what\u2019s anything but simple. Who decides what liberty is \u201cessential\u201d? What
\n\tconstitutes \u201ca little temporary safety\u201d as opposed to a long-lasting and more solid one? What transcendent standard guides us to the right balance between
\n\tfreedom and safety? What if the protection of free speech, certainly an \u201cessential\u201d liberty, costs 500 lives, or 5,000, or 5 million? Who\u2019s going to tell
\n\tthe mother of one of the dead, \u201cWell, your child died, but we\u2019ve protected free speech, and thus Larry Flynt\u2019s Hustler magazine remains secure?<\/p>\n
\n\tNo one wants to tell that to anyone\u2019s mother, which helps explain why, in times of stress, the government has infringed upon our rights in the name of
\n\tsafety and security.<\/p>\n
\n\tWithin a decade of the ratification of the United States Constitution, the government passed the Alien and Seditions Acts in 1798. Signed into law by
\n\tPresident John Adams, the Alien and Sedition Acts consisted of four laws passed by the Federalist-controlled Congress as America prepared for war with
\n\tFrance. Among other things, it made illegal for any person to \u201cprint, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous, and malicious writing\u201d against the
\n\tgovernment. (This was how long after the ratification of the First Amendment right to free speech?) During the Civil War Abraham Lincoln suspended the
\n\t(\u201cessential?\u201d) right of habeas corpus and even arrested members of the Maryland legislature and others he deemed dangerous to the cause of the Union.
\n\tDuring the First World War President Woodrow Wilson severely curtailed free speech, throwing in jail some who dared to question his war policies. We
\n\talready mentioned the Japanese internment, a policy upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, the one body specifically designed to protect citizens from the
\n\tinfringements upon their rights that wartime hysteria can create.<\/p>\n
\n\tQuis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? (\u201cWho guards the guardians themselves?\u201d) is a question that becomes even more pertinent, especially now that the guardians
\n\tare equipped with a host of devices that their predecessors never dreamed of.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cWays may someday be developed,\u201d wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in a 1928 wiretapping case, \u201cby which the government, without removing
\n\tpapers from secret drawers, can reproduce them in court, and by which it will be enabled to expose to a jury the most intimate occurrences of the home.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWell, someday is here!<\/p>\n
\n\tThe question of government snooping on its citizens is not new. Governments have always snooped on their own people. Many times it\u2019s nothing but law
\n\tenforcement. The only problem is that that same technology that can track down drug traffickers, child pornographers, or terrorists can be used on those
\n\twho are not doing anything illegal.<\/p>\n
\n\tHow then does the government find the \u201cright\u201d balance (whatever that is) between protecting the lives and property of its citizens and their privacy as
\n\twell?<\/p>\n
\n\tRight after September 11 the U.S. government faced a lot of hand-wringing and criticism. Why didn\u2019t we stop these fanatics? Shouldn\u2019t our intelligence have
\n\twarned us beforehand? Could not these attacks have been prevented? One thing we didn\u2019t hear, at least in the immediate aftermath, were worries about too
\n\tmuch government intrusion into private lives.<\/p>\n
\n\tIf anything, people were ready for more.<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd they got it, too: the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, the Patriot Act, the Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act, and the Homeland
\n\tSecurity Act. All these acts came directly in the wake of September 11, and all with the same purpose: national security. These were at least the legal
\n\tactions; it took someone like Edwin Snowden to reveal the illegal ones.<\/p>\n
\n\tJohn Whitehead has warned that the Patriot Act \u201cdrove a stake in the heart of the Bill of Rights, violating at least six of the Constitution\u2019s ten original
\n\tamendments.\u201d It does allow for, among other things, \u201csneak and peek\u201d and \u201cblack bag\u201d secret searches of people\u2019s homes, cars, computers, and workplaces. In
\n\tother words, the government can break into your home, snoop around, and leave without ever telling you it had ever been there—exactly what Brandeis had
\n\tworried about back in the 1920s. Whether a liberal or a conservative, one can\u2019t help thinking something is very un-American about a practice like this.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe ACLU warns that the Patriot Act \u201cgranted the FBI—and, under new information sharing provisions, many other law-enforcement and intelligence
\n\tagencies—broad access to highly personal medical, financial, mental health, library, and student records with only the most minimal judicial oversight. The
\n\tcourt must issue a subpoena whenever the FBI states that it is for an investigation to protect against international terrorism. The recipient of the
\n\tsubpoena is prohibited from telling anyone that the FBI has asked for the information. Now the FBI can get the entire database of a credit card company or
\n\tthe records of everyone who has used a certain public library. It can obtain information on everyone registered at a particular hotel, hospital, or
\n\tuniversity. It does not need to show probable cause that a crime is, has been, or will be committed.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWe might not like this intrusive power, but what if—had they been in place before September 11—Patriot Act provisions might have saved the lives of the
\n\tthousands of others who died when the towers fell? Would the provisions have been worth it?<\/p>\n
\n\tHow many lives might these provisions still save? None? Thousands? How much privacy is worth a life, anyway? If letting the United States government read
\n\te-mail or collect phone data saved a life from a terrorist attack, would it be worth it? If it were your life, or your child\u2019s, your mother\u2019s, or your
\n\tsibling\u2019s, the answer would be a no-brainer. Just ask the relatives of the mothers, children, and siblings killed on September 11. The moral ambiguity that
\n\tJohn Whitehead and others face about the dangers of the surveillance state probably isn\u2019t theirs.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut the dangers are, nonetheless, real. In 2011 the American Bar Association warned about our technologically advancing nation.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThese technological advances,\u201d the authors say, \u201ccombined with popular and governmental anxiety about terrorism and other transnational crime, have led to
\n\tthe rise of a massive and secret surveillance-industrial complex—part of what the Washington Post has called the \u2018alternative geography of the United
\n\tStates.\u2019 This alternative geography encompasses what Professors Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson term the \u2018national surveillance state\u2019: the proliferation of
\n\tgovernment technology and bureaucracies that are able to acquire vast and detailed amounts of digital information about individuals with minimal or no
\n\tjudicial supervision and often in complete secrecy. The U.S. government has the capability to single out any American and track his or her movements,
\n\tpurchases, reading habits, and sometimes even private conversations. And it is already using this power.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tIf Uncle Sam is using this power to track down the next Mohamed Atta or Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who\u2019s going to complain? The question is How many innocent
\n\tpeople get their privacy violated in the process? And again, whose political belief or religious practice deemed fine now will become suspect tomorrow? The
\n\tissue gets even more complicated when U.S. security isn\u2019t just looking to catch those who have committed crimes but to stop those who intend to before they
\n\tdo.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis was the theme of Spielberg\u2019s Minority Report. The state had the ability to stop murderers before they committed the crime, even if the technology
\n\tturned out to be flawed and was eventually shut down. Minority Report was an interesting, if not far-fetched, vision of the future. Though decades too
\n\tpremature, maybe George Orwell\u2019s 1984 better captures our potential techno-tyranny.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cThere was,\u201d wrote Orwell of this dystopian society, \u201cof course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. . . . It was even
\n\tconceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from
\n\thabit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWe might not be there yet (some think we already are); and maybe we never will be, regardless of how much the surveillance complex grows. No question,
\n\tthough: the more dangers we face from without, the more we will face from within as well. And the more our consciences will be stage-managed by the
\n\texpectations of the system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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