Let me begin by saying I am not a paranoid person. I don’t own guns, I don’t horde food, I don’t have a cabin in mountains of Montana. In general, I do not believe anyone is out to “get me”. I am not — by my own account — some leftist radical; at worst I have a healthy distrust of authority. I am suspecting, however, our present government is under control of the paranoids.
Yesterday, the Bush adminstration announced some its plans for The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Within this announcement is a plan to monitor all Internet traffic within the United States. This idea is so anathama, it is nearly surreal. It is difficult to believe that those who have sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and laws of our country could allow their fears to grow to such a level that they feel they must monitor all electronic communications between citizens. This is analagous to promoting the idea that all postal mail must be copied by the government prior to delivery, and that all telephone conversations recorded. The fact that we have arrived a such a point as to even suggest this gross violation of our privacy occur beseeches us to cry: “There’’s something rotten in the state of America”.
Our civic society depends upon private communications. The notion that every online transaction we perform will be stored and monitored by our government destroys the civic trust. For how can we maintain an open discourse amongst ourselves when we know a greater authority is listening? We cannot. We will, like Stalinist citizens, be forced to censor ourselves, stifle our disagreement, or distrust, in fear of some potential reprisal. Our words, our thoughts, are what allow our society to live. The Internet allows us reach beyond our neighborhood and through open dialogue build a greater civic society. To allow our government to monitor what we read, what we write, what we do with our online time, is the equivalent of padlocking Gutenberg’’s press.
Some other Internet operators have suggested that the task of actually collecting and monitoring all data within America would be nearly impossible to achieve. I disagree. There are many ways the task could be accomplished, either through cental exchange points, or packet mirroring at network edges, or numerous other ways. The suggestion that it can”t be done allows us to sleep comfortably through the night. But it is only a matter of time before we awaken to the nightmare. The fact is that we must take a stand now, while we still can. We must stand and say: This is Wrong. — sjk
With the passage of the Homeland Security bill and the the US Patriot Act, I am becomming ever more concerned about our government’s relationship to us — the people. The times we live in tend to dictate our reactions and emotions. Troubled times, such as those we are now experiencing, tend to fire our baser instincts: the need for safety, the need for order, the desire for vengeance, etc. Yet, the freedoms or privacies given up to make us feel safer are very difficult to re-obtain once relinquished. Such is my concern regarding the Information Awareness Office (agency logo above). Created by the Homeland Security Act and slated to be run by John Poindexter, the IAO sole mission is to gather and analyze all the information it can — who goes where, who buys what, who speaks to whom, etc. and search for patterns of questionable activity. To accomplish this goal, the IAO cannot simply target individuals; rather, it must cast the broadest net possible; for how can you establish what is abnormal activity, until you have set a baseline for what is normal. Yet, that is not the full intent of the agency. In the 19th century, philospher Jeremy Bentham devised a penal housing system in which gaurds sat in the center of an great circle and prisoners on its periphery. Windows in the cells allowed the gaurds to monitor the acivity of prisoners at all times, yet the prisoners would not be able to view the gaurds due to lighting conditions. Thus, prisoners were expected to behave, as they would never know when they were under observation. This is the panopticon. It is not a system in which we are all scrutinized all the time, but one in which we know that one of us may be under scrutiny at any moment. This is the essance of the IAO. Not to inform us that we are being watched, but that they are watching. There are those who suggest that unless one is doing harm, one should not be concerned about governmental surveillance. I suggest that history has shown us otherwise. It has shown us time and again that those willing to abuse the powers of their office eventaully find themselves in positions of enormous power. In other words what we may believe to be a benevolent goverment of today, may become the dictatorship of tomorrow. Governments, particarly representational governments, adapt and change on a regular basis. Where one interation of state authority may search for one pattern of behavior a different interation may search for another. But always we will know that we may be under observation, and expected to act accordingly. \r\n\r\nBy the way the logo displayed at the top is the IAO logo — I orginally believed it to be a parody, until I saw the IAO website.
