Sleepycatz

Reality & Surreality

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

This entry was posted by steve on Saturday, December 21st, 2002 at 4:18 pm and is filed under Internet, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.