OLEAN -- In George Orwell's frightening masterpiece, "1984," future television viewers were watched right back by their TV screens, which transmitted images to a malevolent government.
"The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously," is the way Orwell described it. Later in the book, he wrote, "It was even conceivable that they (the Thought Police) watched everybody all the time."
Most Americans -- if they'd ever heard of George Orwell -- laughed at the nonsense of it all. Well, it seems the great English novelist was off by only 18 years on the timeframe of serious government intrusion into our private lives -- pretty close call in the cosmic scheme of things.
Since Sept. 11, the federal government -- in the name of a righteous war on terrorism -- has taken some seemingly drastic steps to learn enough about residents and visitors to the United States to attempt prediction of the next big attack.
Most Americans -- polls indicate -- don't give a rat's patootie about this. They'd rather feel secure than unwatched. In fact, they're all for the Big Brother act by the feds. When a California dive shop refused to turn over scuba gear rental records to the FBI last summer, the owners received several phone calls from people who indicated they would be pleased if the dive shop would be the target of the next big terrorist bombing.
Oh, sure, Americans grouse about delays in the line at the airport, but when a discussion ensues, they'll actually comment, "Well, it makes me feel safer, and we have to do something."
Heck, I'm even that way.
But now, dear reader, you should be made aware of some developments.
A relatively new agency at the Pentagon -- carrying the innocent-sounding name of the Information Awareness Office -- is cobbling together a huge new surveillance network and data analysis system that could pretty much figure out, quickly, what you did all day or night, and whom you did it to or with, what you did in the near and distant past, and how you did it, and where, when, and even why. In other words -- your life as a goldfish.
The mammoth computer project uses hardware developed for a Navy space project in combining over 20 federal, state, and local databases that will be dumped into one big mother-of-all-computer systems. The whole shebang should be ready before snow melts. Once it's up and running, your friendly government investigator should be able to click his little mouse once and mine routinely updated material on everything about you -- from whether you violated any immigration laws lately to whether you checked out from your local library a book on crocheting for fun and profit or one on making chemical weapons in your kitchen. Credit card usage, mortgages, loans, defaults, real estate and sales tax records, marriage and divorce, bank accounts, liens, judgments, IRS transactions (what tax you dodged and how you dodged it), movie rentals, travel records, medical data, mental health data, shrink visits, car insurance, house insurance, health insurance, stuff you wrote, stuff you read -- even the bridge tolls you paid. The computer mouse becomes a private detective.
The people who run this Total Information Awareness system insist individual privacy rights will be strictly protected, but they acknowledge the Pentagon will turn over all this "product" to newly merged intelligence agency data-gathering offices for assessment and who knows what all.
The great liberal columnist and hell-raiser Nat Hentoff calls this "an electronic dragnet" designed almost solely to "create a nation of suspects."
The Information Awareness Office's official motto is "Knowledge is Power" and the emblem is one of those all-seeing, constantly scanning eye-over-pyramid things on the back of the dollar bill. Talk about driving home a message.
And in the Bush administration's typical bow to high irony, the man appointed to run all this is pipe-smoking John Poindexter -- President Ronald Reagan's national security adviser who was convicted for, among other things, falsifying and destroying information. (Poindexter was mixed up with Ollie North in the Iran-Contra scandal, but was freed because an appeals court found he had been granted all-encompassing immunity for his testimony.) Not that we shouldn't have seen this coming. Many citizens seem unaware that Congress and President Bush changed the civil liberties template drastically a month after the Sept. 11 catastrophe when Congress passed and Bush signed the USA Patriot Act. This allows the FBI and other law enforcers to make all sorts of previously prohibited intrusions into private life -- even going so far as making librarians and bookstore clerks fork over the borrowing and purchase records of patrons.
Wait, it gets worse. If a reporter asks the librarian or bookseller if the FBI has demanded such records -- and the librarian or bookseller tell -- then THEY (the librarian and bookseller) can be prosecuted under the anti-terror law.
In the old days -- the last 35 years or so -- a reporter would usually try accessing withheld information by citing in writing the Freedom of Information Act (like Julia Roberts in "The Pelican Brief," a movie in which a trembling court clerk hands over a secret file at the mere mention of the FOIA).
But the Freedom of Information Act is moribund and the current Bush administration has made it clear it will cite the national security exemption to the FOIA for just about any queries. (Another superb irony: One of the original sponsors of the original Freedom of Information Act in 1966 was a young Republican congressman from Illinois named Donald Rumsfeld -- currently the stern Secretary of Defense, who routinely tells inquiring reporters to take a flying leap. Today, Rumsfeld is the ultimate overseer of the Orwellian-like Information Awareness Office, but in a floor speech 36 years ago, he complained the federal government "is becoming involved in more and more aspects of every citizen's personal and business life.")
Roll tape forward. The Bush administration's current argument that we are in a time of war, and drastic measures are needed, holds a lot of legal water -- no one is sure just how much. George W. Bush isn't the first president to trash civil liberties during wartime.
The president generally conceded national champion at this tactic will surprise you. It was Abraham Lincoln. When the South fired on Fort Sumter in 1860, Lincoln wasted no time. He immediately declared war on the rebellious states without waiting for Congress; he immediately ordered provision of monies for equipment, weapons and uniforms instead of waiting for the House of Representatives to appropriate the funds; and most infamously, he suspended habeas corpus, the safeguard of liberty that dates back centuries to English common law and which is specifically provided for in the Constitution. His action meant individuals suspected of rooting for the other side could be arrested without charge and held indefinitely, even without bail or the tender mercies of a lawyer.
This may sound familiar to the 900 or so Muslims still imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
The Chief Justice of the United States later ruled Lincoln had violated the Constitution, but Old Abe replied (on July 4, yet) that he considered it his duty to let his commanding general "suspend the writ of habeas corpus, or in other words, to arrest, and detain, without resort to the ordinary processes and forms of law, such individuals as he might deem dangerous to the public safety."
The beleaguered Lincoln -- whose war was going badly at the time -- asked, "Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?"
Nor was Lincoln the only one. Woodrow Wilson, generally considered one of the most democratic of all presidents, after declaring war on Germany in 1917, made it a five-years-in-jail offense to send anything through the U.S. mail that would encourage "insurrection or forcible resistance" to ANY law on the books. The feds even banned magazines that expressed sentiment against World War I.
This continued after that war was over. In 1919, Wilson's attorney general (who had a young and zealous aide named J. Edgar Hoover) repressed dissident views by rounding up and deporting just about anyone considered unpatriotic -- including feminists, union laborers, birth control advocates, and avant-garde art lovers.
A New England haberdasher got six months in the hoosegow for merely stating he considered Nikolai Lenin intelligent.
To say nothing of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's executive order internment of West Coast Japanese soon after Pearl Harbor in order to prevent sabotage. (Some 46 years later, they got $20,000 apiece in redress under legislation signed earlier by President Jimmy Carter.)
One could ramble on about the evaporation of privacy privileges and civil liberties during wartime, and about the question of whether we are truly at war. Liberal commentators keep saying it doesn't FEEL like war, the more that time passes since Sept. 11. But it will, when the next big terrorist attack occurs -- an event the intelligence community terms almost inevitable.
Perhaps we are left to console ourselves with the words of the great Roman orator and philosopher Cicero, about 70 years before Christ. The great Cicero observed, "In time of war, the laws are silent."
Not much consolation, is it?
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | December 17 2002 |