This conversation is being monitored

by M. Stewart
Let me thank ORL reader, Password, for drawing our attention to this Associated Press article about federal government surveillance on U.S. citizens.

According to article,

“[t]he central witness in a California lawsuit against AT&T says the government is vacuuming up billions of e-mails and phone calls as they pass through an AT&T switching station in San Francisco. Mark Klein, a retired AT&T technician, helped connect a device in 2003 that he says diverted and copied onto a government supercomputer every call, e-mail, and Internet site access on AT&T lines.”

My philosophical position on this type of business/government intrusion is that it should not be permitted under any circumstances. Citizens who cannot communicate without arbitrary government monitoring are not exactly "free" people, regardless of the reason cited for intrusion. In essence, the federal government has been able to eliminate one of the key lines of defense a free people has against its government—the doctrine of probable cause. And this is a problem.

Contrary to my philosophical position, the realist in me says that we may already have gone too far to turn back. In the 21st century, religious terrorists have scared Americans into a panic that has allowed Washington to redefine words like “freedom” and “privacy.” To make matters worse, we are told that the so-called War on Terror may never end, which gives the federal government power to chip away at the Constitution indefinitely.

Of course this all started with the 9/11 attacks, which were immediately characterized by the Bush administration as acts of war rather than criminal acts. There is a big difference. Had we decided to respond to the 9/11 attacks as crimes, the last six years would have been completely different. We could have used our resources to track down those responsible rather than setting ourselves up for endless warfare against religious zealots who have no country.

The Islamic terrorists have been so successful that they’ve managed to convince most Americans that it’s actually patriotic to give up their civil and personal rights. The Bush administration has played its part by spending billions in wars that have been utterly ineffective in apprehending those responsible for 9/11. In the meantime, our government has taken to spying on its own citizens.

Osama bin Laden—remember him?—couldn’t have predicted this level of success. I’m sure he wakes up every day with a smile on his face.

Technology has made spying on American citizens easy. The trouble with technology is the ease at which we become addicted to it. For example, those who have never used computers do not need them. Those who do use computers have developed personal and professional lifestyles that make it impossible to function without them. Likewise, those who do not use cell phones do not need them, yet those who use cell phones can’t imagine life without them.

We’ve been addicted to older technologies for so long we don’t even think about them as options. Who among you can live without a car, running water, electricity, television, etc.? So adjusting our lifestyles to new technologies is nothing new; the point is that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to turn back.

Talk to any drug addict, and you will hear the same thing: Once you become dependent on the drug, you adjust your lifestyle to it, thus making it seem impossible to live without it. So once people become addicted to any given technology, they can’t imagine life without it. But how does this apply to the privacy issue?

For one thing, if we were serious about avoiding government surveillance of our communication, we could exercise the option of not using telephones, e-mail, or the Internet. Instead, we could insist on communicating with people face-to-face--Amish style.

At least at this point, we don’t have to conduct business and banking electronically. We can still walk into the bank, make cash withdrawals, and spend our money anonymously. We don’t have to use credit and debit cards. We don’t have to buy things online.

Still we must deal with banks. Where I work, I am not given the option of being handed a paycheck. Direct deposit is mandatory. Who would take me seriously if I demanded my wages in cash? Paying wages in cash already is illegal.

There remain ways to resist, but resistance involves giving up our addiction to convenience and technology, and that’s much easier said than done. How much longer resistance will be an option I can’t say, but I’m not optimistic. By 2025, I look for all cash transactions to become completely impractical (as in businesses won’t accept cash). Business and government data gathering techniques will have become so sophisticated that people will simply assume their communications are being monitored. Even if 2025 seems too soon, it's hard to argue against the general flow of things.

If and when that time comes, the government will cite national security or the desire to eliminate criminal activity as the reason. At some point, I look for all crime to be termed “terrorism.” As our society becomes more and more paranoid, we will continue to hand over our rights out of fear. Those who resist will be considered unpatriotic enemies of the state. This already has started.

Oh my god! What's next? One-World Government ruled by THE BEAST from the City of Seven Hills?

This bleak future is the stuff of dystopic novels and ancient prophesy. In the real word, we manage. I don't think Americans can resist the lure of cyborg life—and I include myself in that equation. Try living off the grid for a single month. Give up all e-mail, all telephone conversations, all net surfing, all electronic commerce.

If by chance you want to extend your resistance to include, say, a protest of foreign outsourcing of American manufacturing jobs, try to avoid discount super marts and attempt to purchase only American-made products at “mom and pop” stores for a month. At the very least, pay attention to the manufacturing origin of everything you purchase for a given period.

We are living in the Information Age. Among other things, that means we place a very high value on information.We must understand that the entire fabric of American life has changed in the last 25 years with regards to information. So unless we are willing to become social deviants or criminals, life in the 21st century means that our daily activities can and will be on the grid and monitored by someone.

We're all open books. “They” know more about us than we do. Thankfully, "they" represent many entities, all of which compete in some way. Because there are so many holders of our data, we have come to think of privacy as the ability to keep those separate entitites from stealing our personal data from one another after they've already stolen it from us.

We can take some refuge in the simple fact that there are a lot of people in the world, and making sense of all of what we say is like trying to discern distinct tones in pure white noise. Modern life is a cacophony of messages, so good luck to the spies. We can play our part by crossing them up whenever we can. The problem (and perhaps the solution) is that, most likely, "they" are not people at all, but machines--computers.