Annoyance, concern, fear, and outrage -- December 30, 2005

Carlton Vogt's

Enterprise Ethics

Volume 3 Number 33 December 30, 2005

Annoyance, concern, fear, and outrage

Or: My brush with the American Gulag

This holiday season for me has been marked – other than by a touch of the flu – by an interesting confluence of annoyance, concern and fear, with a smidgen of outrage thrown in for good measure.

Things that annoy me are those that don't go the way I want them to go, and which I think could go differently, if everyone did what they're supposed to do. Poor customer service and stupid driving fall squarely into the annoyance category. Things that concern me are those that, if they proceed down the path they seem to be going, have the potential to create a danger to me or to other people. Things that make me fearful are those that I think do present a danger. When the three come together, then my outrage begins to flare up.

First, let's talk about what it is that annoyed me, but we have to rewind the tape nearly a year, because it was something I'd almost forgotten about.

Many months ago, I received – out of the blue – a bill from a long-forgotten long distance carrier, a company with which I hadn't done business since I moved from the east coast in the spring of 2001. Listed on the invoice were a handful of calls from 2001 and a whole new bunch that were more recent. The bill totaled several hundred dollars.

Now, when I had moved, I cleared up all old accounts and dutifully left a forwarding address. However, this long distance carrier claimed it couldn't find me – despite the fact that no one else seemed to have had that problem – and further claimed I still owed them money for the $17 worth of calls made in 2001, as well as hundreds of dollars for the new ones.

It was conceivable that I could have made the calls they said I made in 2001 and for the few dollars involved, I wasn't inclined to argue too long or hard. However, there was no way I was going to pay several hundred dollars for the recent calls I couldn't conceivably have made, primarily because I hadn't had the number to which they were charged in nearly four years. Someone else had that number.

The "customer service" person to whom I first spoke couldn't grasp that concept. Eventually, though, I thought I had the matter cleared up and I sent in the money for the disputed 2001 calls, mostly because I was in the process of buying a new home and didn't want a mark on my credit report for a measly $17. However, the next month I received another bill for the outstanding balance on the recent calls, as well as more calls that had been made since I received the first bill.

No matter what I said, the "customer service" drone insisted I was the responsible party despite my telling them who the responsible party was, as I had taken the initiative of calling the old number and finding out. Finally getting to speak to someone who could help me, I eventually cleared the matter up, although even that person was originally convinced I was the responsible party for the number. I was annoyed, but I thought the matter was now a dead issue. Just another "customer service" horror story. I pretty much forgot about it.

Now, the concern. I, along with most other people have been dismayed to learn that the current administration has broken the law by spying on Americans and intercepting -- without proper court oversight -- tens of thousands of international electronic communications.

Anyone who reads this column with any regularity knows that I am always concerned about privacy issues. I'm concerned about the massive databases that are compiled on every aspect of our lives. I'm concerned about widespread government surveillance. I'm concerned about both corporations and the government "data mining" these databases to construct profiles of us. I'm concerned about the intrusion into areas once thought private.

I find the current trends have us on a dangerous slippery slope, and that while we see our civil and human rights stripped away on a nearly daily basis, the security increases they're supposed to provide simply don't materialize.

Whenever I express my concern, there is usually someone close by who will try to tut-tut me into submission. "Tut tut," they say, some figuratively and some actually patting my arm in the most condescending way. "You're getting all worked up about nothing. It's all for your own good, and besides, there are safeguards in place to protect you."

I don't find the Tut-Tutters convincing, mostly because I see the continuing erosion of privacy and I see the safeguards constantly being avoided or ignored, much like the court that was to oversee the wiretapping done for "national security."

One tut-tutting acquaintance recently tried to assure me that the most recent orgy of domestic spying was of no harm because "it was done by computers, and they only acted if they heard words or phrases that triggered an alert."

Anyone who has had any experience with how accurately computers can do that sort of pattern recognition will share my lack of reassurance. I'm sure that someone talking about their vacation pictures and their desire to "blow them up," might sound the alarms. So would someone complaining about a co-worker who was "poisoning the well," or who was alarmed that the national debt that was "exploding."

Humans, just for the record, aren't any better. Does anyone remember the medical students who were hunted down, jailed, and temporarily denied their hospital assignments because an overexcited and overzealous would-be citizen/spy completely misread their very innocent words and phrases?

The Tut-Tutters can tut-tut all they want, but I've seen nothing in the last few years that I find reassuring, as the safeguards built into our system are systematically torn down.

Alongside the Tut-Tutters is another group for which I don't have a formal -- or even polite -- name. These are the people who will say, with zombie-like zeal, "If you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to fear." Although I lack a name for this group, P.T. Barnum has been credited (incorrectly it turns out) with saying that that one of them was born every minute. So, there must be a lot of them. Let's call them the PT Barnum Believers.

My concern, however, turned to fear when I connected a couple of very large dots. One was the revelation that the electronic communications that had been monitored were those that were to and from countries that were suspected of harboring terrorists.

The other dot was my experience with the long distance carrier's inability to correctly determine the "responsible party" for my old number on the east coast. Oh -- did I mention that the recent calls for which they were trying to bill me were made to Pakistan? There were a lot of them, and some of them were very long. Until sometime in 2005, the long distance company was convinced that I had made those calls. And who knows how many came in the other direction from Pakistan -- and heaven knows where else? What we do know is that they were monitored.

Then I began to muse. What if those calls had contained words or phrases that the "ever-efficient" and "never-wrong" computers found alarming? What if the human interveners had discovered that the calls were indeed jeopardizing national security? What if the callers were some faux patriots from the Middle East blowing off steam -- like the American faux patriots who suggest we should "just nuke Mecca." What would happen then?

They would, of course, call long distance company to find out who was making the calls. And some very efficient, very dutiful lower echelon drone at headquarters would go to their mighty computers, where they would find out -- and report incorrectly -- that it was Yours Truly.

What would happen then? Would the drones at Homeland Security put the pressure on the long-distance drones to find out who really, really was the responsible party, or would they simply take them at their word? I suspect the Homeland Security drones would take the first name they got as the real one.

What if the Homeland Security drone, like Michael Brown (aka "Drownie") at FEMA, had gotten his sinecure because of cronyism or political connections? What if he decided that it would be a feather in his cap to be able to announce that he had broken up a "terrorist" ring that "ran from New England to southern California to Pakistan?"

Then, what would happen to me? Would I be greeted outside the supermarket some night by six men with a black van, who would hustle me off to some undisclosed location in the American Gulag, leaving my chocolate chip ice cream to melt into a puddle in the parking lot? Would I be subjected to what some of the PT Barnum people like to refer to as "fraternity pranks," until I told my interrogators what they wanted to hear? Or would I be stuffed into a CIA-chartered jet and sent to a friendly country that had no qualms about more aggressive interrogation techniques? Would I be shipped out to one of the CIA's secret prisons in eastern Europe? Would I merely languish in a stateside military brig, cut off from family and friends and the Constitutional guarantees we used to take for granted?

Would I become just another name that would run endlessly across the scroll at the bottom of the screen on cable television's propaganda "news" channels -- until my name became synonymous with the bogus suspicions about me, despite any lack of credible evidence?

There is still a part of me that would like to think -- as the Tut-Tutters and the PT Barnum Believers like to tell me -- that this "can't happen here." But, of course, it is happening here, only to other people. We are assured that they are, as we're told in a folksy drawl, "bad guys." But we're never allowed to see any evidence of that, and the accusation is supposed to be self-proving. We have arrested them because they're "bad guys," and the proof that they're "bad guys" is that we have arrested them.

Couldn't my lawyer get me out? No, not if I, like so many others, was denied the Constitutional right to a lawyer. Couldn't I simply explain the mixup to a judge? No, not if, like so many others, I was denied my basic rights under habeus corpus, which until recently granted suspects the right to be brought swiftly before a judge for arraignment. If you haven't been paying attention, that bedrock of our legal system no longer protects you.

Was I ever in any real danger? I don't know. Am I over-reacting? I don't know. Am I currently being watched? I don't know. Am I on any kind of list? I don't know. Can I find out? I don't know. I grant that the probability of personal danger may be low, but that is more wishful thinking than demonstrable fact. I simply don't know.

It's that not knowing that creates the fear. And, that kind of fear is the engine that drives totalitarian governments. And, the very fact that I have to consider the possibility that I might have become a victim -- regardless of the actual probability -- sparks my outrage.

So, my fears about assaults on our privacy -- often tut-tutted -- have come home to roost. As I've said before: The issue is privacy, and the outlook is grim.