George Orwell’s
“1984” is the expression of a mood, and it is a warning. ... We
present our society as being one of free initiative, individualism
and idealism, when in reality ... we are a centralized, managerial
and industrial society, of an essentially bureaucratic nature, and
motivated by a materialism which is only slightly mitigated by truly
spiritual or religious concerns.
— Erich Fromm, 1961
Under construction
by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah
Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A
project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex
puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept,
decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s
communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the
underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and
domestic networks.
The heavily
fortified, $2 billion center should be up and running in September
2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in
near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication,
including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls
and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails —
parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other
digital “pocket litter.” It is, in some measure, the realization of
the “total information awareness” program created during the first
term of the Bush administration — an effort which was killed by
Congress in 2003 after it caused an outcry over its potential for
invading Americans’ privacy.
— Jonas Bamford, Wired
online magazine, March 15, 2012
Just as F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby” is back on the best-seller list
because of the movie remake, Orwell’s “1984” is popular again,
probably because of people who’ve been thinking about it while
watching the news. I still have my aged paperback version, one of
the books I read when I was young and first acquiring my fear of Big
Government.
I relaxed for a while
when Ronald Reagan was our president and Margaret Thatcher the
leader of George Orwell’s homeland; when the Berlin Wall came down
and the Cold War with communism ended. But our Government kept
getting Bigger.
In the early ’90s, my
partner, Chip Ford, wrote “High Tech and the Age of Intrusion,” in
which he deplored the broken promise that our Social Security card
would never be used for general identification and warned that
database marketing can someday be used against us.
In 2002, I wrote in a
column opposing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security:
“According to the American Civil Liberties Union, the
Pentagon is building a system called ‘Total Information Awareness’
that would effectively provide government officials with immediate
access to our personal information: all of our communications (phone
calls, e-mails and web searches), financial records, purchases,
prescriptions, school records, medical records and travel history.”
The “total information
awareness” that was supposedly “killed by Congress” in 2003 has been
creeping back. A year after the Bamford story was published in
“Wired,” National Intelligence Director James Clapper was asked by a
congressional committee about collection of American-citizen phone
data: He said it wasn’t happening. Later, when we learned from a
young whistle-blowing NSA employee that indeed it is, Clapper said
he had given the “least untruthful” answer possible.
The whistle-blower,
Edward Snowden, told the British newspaper The Guardian the truth —
which wasn’t news so much as a challenge to official lying. Now
Snowden is hiding out in Hong Kong, with supporters of data-mining
doing their best to discredit him: He was called a traitor by former
Vice-President Dick Cheney, and in case you don’t immediately agree
with that characterization, there’s been a suggestion that he might
sell secrets to the Chinese — or maybe he’s been a spy for China all
along!
Please. Do we all look
that stupid?
Maybe we do. Maybe we
are. Let’s have a test. Which of the following arguments by
political/bureaucratic leaders do we believe?
1. The IRS didn’t
target conservative groups for delay on getting tax-exempt status.
2. If it did,
this would only be the action of two low-level employees in
Cincinnati, and no one in Washington, D.C., knew anything.
3. National
security requires the government to secretly monitor reporters’
phone calls to learn their confidential sources.
4. The assault on
the consulate at Benghazi was caused by an anti-Mohammed video.
5. No one knows
what really happened and why: not the president, not Hillary
Clinton, certainly not the CIA, which was there.
6. There was no
fraud during the 2012 election, so there’s no reason to have
photo-identification to vote. And according to the U.S. Supreme
Court, the states have no right to demand that those who vote are
even citizens.
7. We need to get
involved in the civil war in Syria. John McCain has met with some
rebels and knows which ones aren’t likely to turn against us if they
win, the way the “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan did.
8. We should
raise the national debt limit again. We can get the money from
“quantitative easing” (i.e, inflation), or we can borrow it from
those same Chinese who we fear are trying to get data from Edward
Snowden.
9. Orwell’s Big
Brother was right: “War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is
strength.”
