Big Brother Is Watching — Should You Care?
Not long ago, the mere suggestion that the government might be snooping on its citizens was enough to make certain deeply paranoid individuals in the U.S. scuttle around their basements in a panic, checking that the straps of their tinfoil hats were securely fastened and listening nervously for the distant hum of approaching black helicopters. And that was just the mainstream media.
Constitutional lawyers and civil liberties campaigners have also been greatly exercised over the subject, along with those conspiracy theorists deemed too unstable even to hold down a job at the New York Times. These latter groups, though, are reasonably consistent when it comes to expressing concern over the government spying on its citizens.
The media on the other hand, seems to have largely lost interest in the subject.
One reason for this newfound ambivalence is that since a federal appeals court ruled in January that national security trumps privacy where international phone calls and emails are intercepted on U.S. soil, the government and intelligence community no longer appear to have a case to answer in that area. Another reason is that the NSA’s alleged secret program to collect and store records of the phone calls and emails of ordinary Americans, regardless of any overseas link, was reportedly abandoned in 2004.
But the most compelling explanation for the media’s declining interest in government spies is that their concern always had more to do with the political affiliation of those doing the spying than with any high-minded concerns for Americans’ privacy. And a year ago, the issue stopped being a stick with which they could beat the Bush administration. Of course, there is also the embarrassing fact that President Obama, he of the ever-shifting principles and promises that come with expiration dates, is retaining much of the intelligence-gathering apparatus his predecessor put in place.
While revelations about government eavesdropping and data-mining operations are no longer headline news in the U.S., in Britain the debate is just getting started. Gordon Brown’s government is pressing ahead with plans to store the phone calls, text messages, and emails of every citizen for a year, along with details of every website visited.
The information will be made available to public bodies including the police, local councils, and financial regulators. The government insists the proposal — known as the Intercept Modernisation Programme — is vital for enabling the police and security services to combat crime and terrorism in a rapidly changing communications environment. It has sparked predictable outrage from civil liberties groups and opposition MPs, who say it amounts to government spying on citizens.
Similar concerns are being raised in Britain over the government’s plans to keep, for up to six years, the DNA profiles of individuals arrested by the police but not convicted of any crime. Ministers and the police argue that retained DNA evidence has been crucial in solving rapes and other crimes years after they were committed, but opponents say the practice infringes civil liberties and is vulnerable to mistakes or abuse.
Campaigners are also fond of trotting out the statistic that Britain has the highest number of closed-circuit TV (CCTV) cameras in the world, and the proliferation of threats to privacy has British civil liberties campaigners at their wit’s end. Shami Chakrabarti, head of Liberty (the British equivalent of the ACLU) and someone not given to understatement, claims: “We have lived under one of the most authoritarian ages in living memory.”
A common thread runs through the debates over government snooping, DNA profiling, and CCTV surveillance: How can we reconcile individual freedoms with national security and public safety? It’s an area where political distinctions become blurred on both the left and the right.
The left’s desire for the government to take increasing control over the lives of citizens is hard to fathom when set against its often casual disregard for the law. Leftists regard many acts of criminality — throwing a chair through the window of Starbucks, hurling rocks at police officers, disrupting airports in the name of environmental activism, or hacking into government computer systems — as legitimate acts of protest. And when they aren’t actually breaking the law themselves, they’re busy agitating on behalf of everyone from muggers to terrorists, their misplaced concerns born of the Marxist notion that the world is divided into victims and oppressors.
Conservatives are also split on matters of liberty versus security, but while the inconsistency on the left is a result of the profound intellectual and moral confusion that defines “progressives,” the tension on the right is the result of two laudable but sometimes conflicting aspects of conservative thought. The libertarian impulse comes into conflict with the desire for law and order. There are good arguments on both sides, and it’s hard to reconcile them. It boils down to the popular mistrust of authority versus the principle that the innocent have nothing to fear.
There are good practical arguments against the government storing information and spying on people. In the UK there have been several instances of the government losing personal data on millions of people, while opponents of CCTV cameras claim they’re simply not effective in reducing crime. And as the Fort Hood terror attack shows, there’s little point in a government spying on its citizens if for reasons of politics or political correctness it’s not prepared to act when it obtains incriminating information.
The arguments pertaining to invasions of privacy tend to be more abstract. Take this lovingly crafted boilerplate from the Open Rights Group: “Mass surveillance undermines human dignity, which is the value that underpins every other human right.” (Note the photo on ORG’s home page, which features two elderly hippy-like gentlemen who appear to have walked straight out of an episode of The Lone Gunmen.) Then there’s the steady stream of reports and — in the UK at least — news stories in which campaigners and dissenting politicians claim that democracy is being undermined and that (insert the name of your country here) is turning into an “Orwellian” surveillance state.
Missing, however, from all the righteously indignant and supremely principled arguments against surveillance and data collection are examples of individuals who have actually suffered as a result of these policies. Leaving aside the distinct and special case of terror suspects, it is difficult to find examples of ordinary citizens who have experienced even minor inconvenience as a result of official intrusion into their lives. Presumably, if there were such cases then the media and privacy groups would be shouting about them from the rooftops.
The issue of privacy is a bit like the conundrum of the tree falling in the woods: If someone is watching you, but you don’t know you’re being watched, and the person who’s watching you takes no action against you, has your privacy been invaded? Anti-surveillance campaigners would say yes. Personally, I don’t mind if the government reads my emails and follows me with CCTV cameras all day. They’ll soon get bored.
It’s a similar situation with DNA samples. If the government has your DNA, then you don’t really have much to worry about unless you’re thinking of committing a crime. The technology is improving all the time, and the odds of mistakes being made are increasingly remote. The civil liberties argument against DNA retention almost seems to be that a person will lose the “right” to decide whether or not they’d like to commit a crime at some point in the future, because they won’t have a sporting chance of getting away with it. Try telling that to the 245 convicted criminals who have been exonerated by DNA evidence in the U.S. alone.
Governments have always liked to know what their citizens are up to, whether for political gain or for reasons of security. Advances in technology have given the authorities new tools with which to pry, and people can disagree on whether this is a sinister trend or contributes to the greater public good. But until opponents start putting forward concrete arguments, instead of theoretical ones, they’ll have to accept that the general public isn’t going to embrace calls for a mass revolt against Big Brother. (You’d think that if the government really had that much power, it might be able to do something to curtail the activities of those who complain that the government has too much power.)
The fact is that we can never be sure exactly what our governments are up to. Should we sleep more soundly in our beds knowing the government is keeping an eye on those who would do us harm, or should we be worried that the innocent will be swept up along with the guilty? Ultimately, it probably comes down to whether or not you trust your leaders.
Oh — think carefully before you comment on this article. You never know who might be watching.
Good ending for the article. I remember when the Patriot Act was first passed and conservatives cheered while those of a more liberal bent weren’t so happy.Now the most liberal of liberals- the “o” is in charge, and the same people who once cheered govt. intrusion aren’t so happy.Be careful what you wish for- it might end up being used against you.Am I worried about being on a list? I figure as a NRA member , CWP holder, and visitor and commenter on sites like this, Big Brother already knows who I am. What am I going to do? Just keep on keeping on. . .
Is encryption equipment legal in the UK? Sounds like the perfect market for powerful data and phone encryption devices.
It would seem that the British are importing the excuses for their growth of the Orwellian State. Did they have the need for all this when their population was not torn apart with the invasion of third worlders? I think they, like all leftists, are creating a “problem” to create the “solution”. The more people come from areas of the world with their culture clashing with the native born, the more reasons those in power will have to continue this assault on privacy and liberty. Many times the solutions to problems are obvious to all but those in power. This leaves only two reasons for this: either they have an agenda and are deceitful beyond comprehension or they are plain stupid. I suspect it’s the former rather than the latter. Halt the influx of people who have declared a soft war against the host country and maybe, just maybe, the excuse offered for this monstrosity will no longer be enough to justify it. Wasn’t it just revealed the Labour Party deliberately allowed thousands to invade in the interests of “diversity”? That was the public reason. No doubt the private one was too breathtakingly evil to state publicly. Much like what we have going on in America.
“Missing, however, from all the righteously indignant and supremely principled arguments against surveillance and data collection are examples of individuals who have actually suffered as a result of these policies. Leaving aside the distinct and special case of terror suspects, it is difficult to find examples of ordinary citizens who have experienced even minor inconvenience as a result of official intrusion into their lives. Presumably, if there were such cases then the media and privacy groups would be shouting about them from the rooftops.
The issue of privacy is a bit like the conundrum of the tree falling in the woods: If someone is watching you, but you don’t know you’re being watched, and the person who’s watching you takes no action against you, has your privacy been invaded? Anti-surveillance campaigners would say yes. Personally, I don’t mind if the government reads my emails and follows me with CCTV cameras all day. They’ll soon get bored.
It’s a similar situation with DNA samples. If the government has your DNA, then you don’t really have much to worry about unless you’re thinking of committing a crime. The technology is improving all the time, and the odds of mistakes being made are increasingly remote. The civil liberties argument against DNA retention almost seems to be that a person will lose the “right” to decide whether or not they’d like to commit a crime at some point in the future, because they won’t have a sporting chance of getting away with it. Try telling that to the 245 convicted criminals who have been exonerated by DNA evidence in the U.S. alone.”
You should be slapped repeatedly for writing such garbage… privacy has everything to due with the RIGHT to private property… when you remove privacy you are basically saying their is not such thing as private property… add in the massive double standard in which the elites have complete privacy yet are the ones who should be most monitored due to the fact they have power and are likely to abuse said power.
This delusional sense that PRIVATE citizens need to be spied on and thats ok but PUBLIC leaders working for the PUBLIC are given a complete pass is the very basis of an authoritarian state.
Then lets move onto all the government spending thats required to run such a massive system that spends 99.9% of its time spying on people that are zero threat… their are countless argument about why the government shouldn’t be able to maintain such records or powers when most of all those records and powers are used to keep the government in line.
Your arguments are a joke and based on an ignorance of reality that is startling.
4. robotech master:
“Personally, I don’t mind if the government reads my emails and follows me with CCTV cameras all day. They’ll soon get bored.”
How about a camera in your car then? One in your kitchen? One staring back at you from your TV? How about a digital audio recorder in your hat? When does privacy kick in for you?
One wonders if the massive expenditure of time, technology, and man-hours has resulted in a reduction of crime in the UK. I didn’t see that statistic mentioned in the article. If not, is it all justified?
If it had been up to people like Mike McNally, there would never have been an America.
Mike, you may lack the imagination and intellect required to understand the abstract concept of rights, and you may not ‘mind’ if the government snoops on you – your personal inadequacies are not my concern – but I DO.
I do not grant any authority to anyone on planet Earth to snoop on me. Doing so is an act of hostility to my liberty.
And it has no place in America.
Sounds like the logical next step for the warrantless-wiretap strategy. What’s the problem?
Its bull.
Oh Yea, well when authorities lack the gumption and capacity to do anything about what’s being monitored, why care?
The boundary between individual liberty and public safety in a free society is always in flux, swinging back and forth as new circumstances challenge the existing consensus: the Roman Republic recognized the need for the occasional dictator, and President Lincoln exercised powers that some called “tyranny” when he suspended habeas corpus and jailed editors opposed to continuing the Civil War.
In both cases, however, the Roman dictator (such as Cincinattus) and President Lincoln assumed those powers when their country faced an existential crisis – the end was nigh, so to speak. While the threat of terrorism is grave, it’s hard to say that Britain faces a similar immediate threat to its existence – or that the threat to the United States is so severe that all communications must be monitored or stored. Again, it’s a question of balance and where the line is drawn between liberty and security. The Bush Administration monitoring of suspect phone calls that passed through the US seems a reasonable lean toward security, even if it meant recording the conversation of an otherwise innocent civilian in the US. On the other hand, a blanket “all your data are belong to us” approach goes way too far.
A weakness of this article is the lack of any discussion of the evolution of the right to privacy, which is related to the search-and-seizure argument, over the course of Anglo-American legal practice. The controversy goes back several centuries, and it would be worth reviewing a good discussion of it, such as the relevant chapter in Leonard Levy’s “The Origins of the Bill of Rights.” (http://tinyurl.com/ydpm5us)
Mike McNally:
“But until opponents start putting forward concrete arguments, instead of theoretical ones, they’ll have to accept that the general public isn’t going to embrace calls for a mass revolt against Big Brother.”
You can’t be serious with this argument. Are you really ready to say that, because a town has never experienced a burglary the residents won’t accept a law against house-breaking because “it’s only theoretical?” I’d like to have a little more faith in the judgement of the public than that.
The argument over increased government surveillance is just the latest form of old battle over the extent limits of state power, and one should worry about the theory before it becomes reality. A good article overall (with the exception noted above), and you pose good questions, but I think you’re much too sanguine about government preventive surveillance.
Regarding the United States, it is only not in the news because we have the Democrats in control of the White House & Congress…
I remember when the Patriot Act was first passed and conservatives cheered while those of a more liberal bent weren’t so happy.
Nobody who knows me would call me a Liberal and I wrote to my Democrat Congress-critters urging them to vote against both the Patriot Act AND starting another war in Iraq. Sorry buddy the assumption that Conservatives favored the ill-named Patriot Act is wrong. Some may have, but the majority of us that actually thought about it strongly opposed it. Iraq for me was mainly about over extending our forces and leaving us unable to address other threats like North Korean and Iran. I was basically proven correct on that one.
How about a camera in your car then? One in your kitchen? One staring back at you from your TV? How about a digital audio recorder in your hat? When does privacy kick in for you?
N&T making the fool of himself as usual. Reading is fundamental N&T.
RM was quoting the author, had you bothered to read the article OR his entire comment you’d know that.
If the role of Big Brother is played
by Joe Biden, Rather than Joe Stalin,
does that make life in 1984 bearable ?
Britain is well on the way to living
out the plot of “V for Vendetta”, less
the happy ending.
Just recently, a man found a sawed-off
shotgun in his back yard, and turned it
in at the local police station. he has
been sentenced to five years in jail.
The thing about government taking DNA is fine if the only reason for taking it is to establish a database that can only be used to compare evidence. The problem is that we don’t trust them to restrict themselves to that use only, and certainly not if the government is managing health care. I don’t want some government bureaucrat to have the ability to set genocide in motion by targeting people with genetic “defects” (quotes used due to the fact that the genes in question need not necessarily be linked to actual health ailments, but rather any deviation from the norm that may be perceived as detrimental to the collective) for sterilization and/or extermination.
It’s always a question of “what will you do with the information you collect”?
DNA information may seem innocuous until when coupled with government healthcare and global warming implications, the powers that be decide to cull the herd.
One of the first things I learned in life was that I was under constant surveillence by at least three powerful authories whose information-gathering powers could not be seen, yet seemed to know everything This included what happened in Jimmies basement that one time and we had taken extra care to clean up every possible clue, including the broken glass.
I am speaking about the powerful illuminati triad formed by my mother, santa claus and the tooth fairy. I am convinced they worked together somehow.
Problem for the Brits is they are out of this loop now with their oh-so-correct atheistic enlightened neopostmodern approach to everything. Now they have to put up cameras everywhere and collect our sperm samples or whatever when all you had to do in the past was just ask my mom. She would have been happy to spill the beans on stuff I did, even stuff I didnt know about.
It is for this reason that the US has never elected a mother as president – they know too much.
Spindok
at every opportunity MOON ‘EM
god help them if i’m ever president i’ll fire the whole federal government and rehire from scratch and refuse to sign any bill that isn’t expressly called for as a federal responsibility under the constitution.
thats my pitch for 2022.
I would worry less if the government applied these same principles against itself. I like the idea of webcam installation in every elected official’s office, and a general requirement that all public business be conducted in front of the same, while carving out limited exceptions for national-security requirements.
Imagine if every lobbyist had to lobby in front of an internet audience….
Funny thing about the whole debate is in 20 years england will require that all food have mixed in monitoring “RIFD” chips or such so that when eaten they test your stomach to make sure your: eating the “right” foods, Not eating to much food, Not eating “black market” food and a number of other things… then they simply get pissed out and collected in the water treatment planet. Then they match your stomach info to the data base and update it… How? Through that wonderful DNA database that they keep on all their lovely slaves.
If one child is rescued from an abusive family…if one animal companion’s life is saved…if one endangered plant species is helped to survive…privacy is a small thing to sacrifice. (The innocent have nothing to fear. Got something hide, do you?)
The foregoing, of course, is intended as a reductio ad absurdum–but make the language more agreeable and you’ll find plenty of people who will go along and not a few who will enthuse.
Missing, however, from all the righteously indignant and supremely principled arguments against surveillance and data collection are examples of individuals who have actually suffered as a result of these policies. Leaving aside the distinct and special case of terror suspects, it is difficult to find examples of ordinary citizens who have experienced even minor inconvenience as a result of official intrusion into their lives. Presumably, if there were such cases then the media and privacy groups would be shouting about them from the rooftops.
Camel’s nose, meet tent. Frog, meet comfortably warm water.
“If we are monitoring against terrorism, why aren’t we monitoring against ______?”
The answer is that terrorism threatens society as a whole whereas (most) other terrible crimes do not. But I doubt that such a distinction can be maintained in today’s democracies.
I like Britain. I really do. I look upon her as the motherland. My people trance their ancestry to England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. But you couldn’t get me to live there at gunpoint. It’s become too much of a surveillance state. I need to write more nasty letters to my representatives in the hope that they will at least slow down the march toward such a state over here.
Bill
“The technology is improving all the time, and the odds of mistakes being made are increasingly remote.”
Agreed. The odds are that what seem to be mistakes are completely intentional. In the US, laws proliferate. They are not enacted to protect society so much as they be available to single out undesirables, opponents, etc for punishment. For example, suppose you have the audacity to run for public office against, say, a Kennedy. You can be conveniently ticketed for DUI a few days before the election, even though you weren’t in the country. The NYT and related media will see to it that you get maximum exposure, reported in the most biased manner possible. After the election, the charge will be dropped when it turns out the camera or breathalyzer or DNA or whatever was faulty. Apologies will be issued, but the damage is unreparable. No, the authority to invade your privacy eventually passes from a matter of security to a matter of control (at best) and enslavement (at worst).
Obama denounced the security apparatus while Bush controlled it, but has decided to keep and even strengthen it now that the “good guys” are in charge of it. Herein lies the problem. It’s easy to believe that you have nothing to hide and that the benign government won’t actually *do* anything untoward with your personal information. But what about the next administration? What about 20 years from now? Are you that confident that the government will stay polite? The political sphere could lurch to the right. What if someone comes knocking, wanting to talk about all of the hemp sites you visited 5 years ago? Or an invigorated and powerful Hillary administration decides that the IRS should choose audit targets based on personal spending habits?
Never mind the idea that someone in your state or city bureaucracy could use your personal information to conduct a vendetta against you, and there would be precious little you could do about it. The fate of at least two of Obama’s political opponents in his Chicago days comes to mind.
This is why we have the fourth admendment, and why we must vigorously defend it.
robotech master…You forgot the perfect illustration of the government dog chasing its’ tail: TSA!
This is what modern Progressive government has come to:
the complete subjugation of substance by style.
I worry a lot less about this stuff than maybe I should? I figure we have the ACLU to do the worrying and launch the law suits for us, meanwhile I would worry more about private corporations since they have so much more information and freedom to use it than the govt, but even that i dont worry about.
We all have our quirks and I am sure that we don’t want big brother looking into them. I for one have a kinky side and have an ongoing relationship with a dominatrix. I don’t want some bluenose or gossipy bureaucrat watching me come and go from her house.
What is happening in the UK is far more intrusive then anything in the Patriot Act. You have to interest someone to get attention from US authorities. Increasingly in the UK passive sensors collect data on citizens that will be archived and subject to review. In former case my relationship probably won’t even be noticed whereas in the UK it will be recorded for anyone to see.
“I don’t want some bluenose or gossipy bureaucrat watching me come and go from her house.”
They won’t bother you “private person;” unless of course they want campaign contributions from you, or want you to spy on someone else, or lie about someone else, or not support their opposition, or…but you get the drift. Once they can intrude into your privacy they can run your life. The poor fools that believe their innocence will protect them are the saddest of them all.
Thinking carefully before I comment, I’ll use a nome de plume.
The issue with the tools like DNA and CCTV, not to mention reading your emails and other private documents isn’t just that the government could misuse them, but that they will make mistakes in collecting and collating the data. Just imagine that DBA who changes that one feild in the DNA database that bumps the correlations off by one and now your name sits beside the DNA pattern of a child rapist. That won’t matter much now will it. You can no doubt get that fixed after you are arrested and held in jail and pay huge fees to a lawyer to get the DNA test reperformed to prove there was a mistake. Won’t cost you anything since the government WON’T be paying for their mistake.
But hey, you go on thinking it’s just harmless. Good trusting fool that you appear to be.
The expansion of the surveillance state under the Bush administration (not counting its maintenance under the Obama administration) has done more to damage my loyalty to the Republican party in the voting booth than any other factor in the last 8 years. Basically, true small government conservatism is dead as a political ethos in the Republican party. Its been replaced by a desire to fearmonger and surveil while spending a bit less money than the Democrats.
Sure–”only the guilty have something to hide”, but in the face of government bureaucracy that’s rubbish. Something like 1 million Americans are on the terrorist watch list. Besides potentially making them miss a flight that could in turn cause them to miss an important business or personal engagement, we have no real idea about how these lists are being used. What is the impact on someone or their relations when it comes to applications for government jobs or benefits? Are any of these lists being fed to the IRS so they can increase auditing of the tax returns of listed individuals?
And what about unintended uses? In an age when Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are denouncing anti-Obamacare protesters as “unAmerican”, DHS is warning that returning veterans might be extremists in disguise and President Obama is willing to take on Fox News (and by extension a lot of Fox’s audience), how might all this data be used in unexpected ways? Will some kind of database info or “threat scoring” be used against you in routine legal matters? In law enforcement encounters? In custody cases? To set your government healthcare premiums? If you want to protest a Wal-Mart opening up down the street? If your better-connected/less controversial neighbor wants some kind of rezoning or demarcation of your property line?
The fact of the matter is that we don’t know what is being done with this data, and the history of governmental domestic surveillance efforts is that they inevitably turn politcal (J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, McCarthyism).
So yes, innocent people are hurt by government surveillance all the time!!
From the article: “And as the Fort Hood terror attack shows, there’s little point in a government spying on its citizens if for reasons of politics or political correctness it’s not prepared to act when it obtains incriminating information.”
Sure. If they scanned every cell phone call in the US and found another Fort Hood shooter their track record suggests that they’d probably hesitate to act. But let your 17-year-old daughter send a lewd photo of herself to her boyfriend and you can bet they’d be charging her with producing child pornography. And you’d better hope she didn’t use your cell phone..
Of course governments should not have the right to snoop on us. Government should be deemed malignant until proved otherwise. Most of them are, especially New Labour.
In any case the rights are not reciprocal. Government can snoop on us, but are remarkably secretive about their own business. If they want to snoop on us, then they should let us snoop on them. Which they won’t.
The only reason they are getting away with all this snooping is because we foolishly imported a lot of Muslims, many of whom wish us harm.
This issue will not go away; the information which Visa holds on me would probably exceed Stasi best practice from 1960… and the Internet has fundamentally changed the concept of privacy: who has not received targeted advertising when visiting a web page?
It is certain that the major political parties maintain extensive data bases on potential voters, recording information that is gleaned in the public domain (letters to the editor, mentions in the press, etc.) This then facilitates targeted campaigning, even many years after the events recorded. This is not illegal, but many folks would find it creepy.
Those countries with socialised medicine have patient health records in the government’s hands; it is impossible to imagine that this is comprehensively quarantined from other government agencies.
Any police work involves breaching privacy: just think about the undercover policeman posing as a Hell’s Angel; that is a massive breach of the club members’ privacy, many of whom are not suspected of involvement in any criminal activity. Yet most people here in Australia accept that this is legitimate. I think that the British practice of using surveillance cameras to catch and fine people who drop litter in the street is far less legitimate; but presumably the British people largely accept it, or one of the major parties would take it up as a campaign issue.
Given this pervasive surveillance already in place, both private and governmental, we are only discussing fiddling at the edges. All but a small minority accept the premise that massive amounts of data are gathered and used by various interested parties; the question is where to draw the line. And I don’t have an answer to that, just personal preferences.
Communists have pushed for so many laws that at any given time, a good, reasonable person could be breaking a law.
You want to monitor me? Well first do away with 90% of the laws on the books and have only common sense ones first. Otherwise, it wouldn’t take more than a week of spying for me to be fined or jailed for some “infraction”. Selective law enforcement then means you can fine or imprison anyone that opposes the government.
Then of course there’s the curious case of political rivals searching a restricted criminal records data base to dig up dirt on each other during the last Colorado gubernatorial campaign. Anyone with any pretensions of running for political office certainly ought to be a bit worried about the idea of their rivals listening to every phone conversation they have or watching their every move on surveillance cameras.
Having an affair? Do you really want your wife’s attorney ringing up his friend at the police station to download all the phone calls and videos showing what you’ve been up to? That’s just unsporting.
Then there’s the recent case of the guy who took his brand-new sports car down to the drag strip to find out what it would do. He’d barely cleared the 1/4-mile mark before the nice lady from On Star was calling to ask what the devil he thought he was doing. Want the police tapped into that system?
When you think about it, not being worried about the uses all this data could be put to shows more a lack of imagination than a clear conscience.
With the surveillance currently installled throughout our country, it strikes me that a federal census is redundant.
The government has the data, all they need to do is sort it.
Oh, and let’s not forget the Total Information Awareness program with their creepy all-seeing eye logo and “knowledge is power” motto. They wanted to collect and collate every scrap of electronic data on every person in the US. Thank goodness they got shut down (mostly) as that database would have been a gold mine for all manner of snoops, ninnies, and nannies.
Do you really want the nice people from Social Services showing up on your doorstep to scold you because you spend too much money at the liquor store? Or Child Protective Services checking you out because you drink and have a 15-year-old child in the house? Or the authorities turning that information over to your church (it happened in Utah)?
Spend too much on fatty foods? The Office of Government Health Care would know. Ever buy a smutty magazine or sexy undies for the GF? Better not run for political office unless you want that to become front-page news. Better not ever buy ammunition for a gun and then go anywhere near anywhere a big shot politician might be, even if you didn’t know he was there.
Give them enough information about you and there’s just no end to the mischief they could make, especially when they tell the computer to look for patterns of behavior or crosscheck all known associates of some shady charactor. Knowledge is power indeed.
“If the government has your DNA, then you don’t really have much to worry about unless you’re thinking of committing a crime”
That is not true. It is very far from true, for a great number of reasons far beyond the scope of a reply in a blog. Just a brief description of a few.
1. Statistics. A large database (the UK keeps people on the database even if never charged with a crime; the police arrest people just to be allowed to take DNA and then keep it) distorts the statistics. The probability of a false conviction rises well beyond a linear relationship with the size of teh database.
2. Coincidence. So I have visited the crime scene, or dribbled on an item that ends up there. My DNA is there. Maybe I also had opportunity and motive.
3. Simple framing. I sup a pint of old ale at my favourite pub. Someone who stands to gain by taking me and another person out of the picture takes the glass, kills that third party in a location I have never visited and leaves the glass there.
4. Advanced framing. It is now possible in any well-equipped university to make a DNA sequence that will match any chosen database entry. So with the stolen pint glass or even just the data from the police computer they manufacture it. Carefully placed around the crime scene it will convict me. Even more clever, if you have that sort of access then get some sperm-free seminal fluid (various ways of achieving that if you have a lab to hand), add DNA sample. Rape a girl, using a condom. Murder her. Introduce that fluid as required. Conviction for certain.
Sorry but DNA databases should be strictly limited. The large UK one has not even helped significantly in fighting crime!
“38. Burt:
With the surveillance currently installled throughout our country, it strikes me that a federal census is redundant.
The government has the data, all they need to do is sort it.”
Well yeah. All they need to do is search the IRS records. Of course that would leave out all the politicians..