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Volume 4 Number 12 May
12, 2006 |
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When the hypothetical becomes real It doesn't take long these days to go from scary
fiction to scarier reality A few weeks ago, Bob Lewis posed an interesting hypothetical situation, Lewis, the chief cook and bottle-washer at Keep the Joint Running, challenged me with a scenario in which the CEO of a major online company was approached by the government and asked to help spy on innocent citizens. Lewis wanted me to comment on the CEO's choices when between the rock of ethical demands and the hard place of a government request that seemed to violate ethics. Less than a month later, we have now seen the hypothetical situation become all-too-real, as we've learned that the government, with the aid of some telecom giants has been spying on almost all of us for years, amassing what someone has called the "largest database in history." That in itself is a pretty amazing fact, when you consider some of the massive databases out there. For comparison, just think of the bazillions of records that must be in the Visa and MasterCard data banks. I realize that the situation that's been uncovered -- and what someone has claimed is only the tip of the iceberg of secret police activities by our government -- isn't quite what Lewis had in mind. He innocently, dare I say "naively," assumed that the CEO would be prompted to overcome his moral qualms about spying on his fellow citizens through a court ruling. What we've seen is that not only did some CEOs not wait for a court ruling, they may have actually violated existing laws in their slavish eagerness to become part of the secret police apparatus. We're still sorting out who went along and who didn't. From all reports, AT&T and Verizon were first in line to spy on their fellow citizens. Qwest, at least as far as we know at this writing, told the feds to take a hike, although they cited the law and not ethical considerations in their demurral. I tried to find out whether my provider, Vonage, was part of the scheme, but all I've gotten in response are convoluted "corp-speak" statements that appear to be computer generated and obscure more than they reveal, along with a link to the very unhelpful and uninformative "privacy policy." Now, I don't have any
illusions of administration officials sitting in some windowless room with
headphones on, listening to every phone conversation in However, the database -- given new data-mining technologies -- is an extremely dangerous asset, giving the person or organization that possess it tremendous power over those of us who have been spied upon. Want to run for public office? Isn't it nice to know that your opponent, assuming he has the right political connections, can get lists of all your telephone calls for the past five years, perhaps along with their contents, as well as lists of books that you've bought, videos you've rented, and what you've checked out of the library? This is the stuff that smear campaigns -- and totalitarian dictatorships -- are made of. Worse still, knowing that you are being spied upon, that your calls are being monitored and recorded, that your activities are constantly under surveillance -- video and otherwise -- makes for a fearful, timid, and reticent citizenry. And that is the antithesis of democracy. Bob Lewis, in our frequent communications, sometimes accuses me of being a cynic. He's not the only one. My defense is that I'm a realist. I've just been around too long, seen too many things, and worked too closely with politicians at all levels of government not to be realistic about it. I've seen the abuse of power first-hand. It's not pretty. In fact, I foresaw the current situation in November of 2002 and wrote a column for which I was viciously attacked, some even going so far as to importune my employer to sack me. In talking about the ethically bereft Total Information Awareness program and its even more ethically bereft promoter, I said, in part: "When East and
West Germany were reunited some 13 years ago, those of us in democratic
countries -- not to mention the East Germans themselves -- were aghast at the
amount of private information the state had compiled on average citizens. The
East German Stasi, or secret police, had developed
its spy network so vigorously that according to some estimates there was one
spy for every 6.5 people. " . . . . Some may
complain that the objections to the program are politically motivated.
Privacy, as others have pointed out, is not a partisan issue. It is a basic
human right. If we allow this program to continue, we will have ceded one of
our most important rights and will have taken yet one more step toward
turning our democracy into a loathsome police state. " . . . . It
could be that the danger of terrorism is so great and so pervasive that we
need to sign away our basic rights in order to gain some measure of security.
However, if that's the case, it should be done after careful deliberation and
intense and open public discussion, not at the whim of a disgraced unelected
bureaucrat working in secret. If we are to trade our rights and liberties for
security -- or, as some have claimed, a false illusion of security -- it
should be something we choose through our elected representatives. ". . . . . When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, one of the first things that happened in East Germany was that thousands of citizens stormed Stasi headquarters to seize the records and find out who the spies were and what records had been kept. We have the opportunity to put the brakes on here before the situation becomes that grave. Perhaps it's time for people to shake off their post-9/11 stupor and find out what mischief is being done under the guise of fighting terrorism. You may not like what you see." The TIA program went away, but the idea behind it, and it proponents, did not. The rest of us sat by while things went quickly downhill. |
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© Copyright 2006 Carlton Vogt |