Index

“Shocked,” Again

Snowden strikes again, this time talking about the Germans playing the techno-dragnet game with the US.

I suppose the best response I can come up with is to quote Captain Renault in Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”

He didn’t mean it either. How could anybody be surprised that the technocrats in two of the most technical governments in the world are tightly wired together?

Just because the United States was founded on the concept of “a government of laws and not men” (quote John Adams, one of the founding fathers) doesn’t mean that there is any of that ideal left.  Having watched the Nixon and Reagan administrations flout the law in various ways, there is essentially nothing that can surprise me there, but I have to admit that I am surprised that Snowden has survived long enough to take public as much as he has - I keep waiting for news that he was found dead in Sheremetyevo airport, or, more likely, missing without a trace.  The technocrats seemed to have missed a beat, there.  It is possible they are just waiting for the news media to get tired of the story before they deal with him - I am sure that the politicians would rather not make more of a saint out of him.

Or maybe not - perhaps we should be looking beyond Snowden’s revelations to see what is still hidden.  What would the next level of Big Brother look like?  We know, for instance, that great strides have been made publicly in computer human-language processing and speech recognition, so is anybody going to be surprised to learn that not only is all of our communication being scooped up, but actually read or listened to by computers looking for the slightest trace of potential “terrorist activity,” with the expansive interpretation of “terrorist” including all forms of civil rights, anti-war and other politically unpleasant activities per SOP for so-called “law enforcement” organizations?  We are already in territory I grew up thinking of as Science Fiction, so maybe we should mine that area for other possibilities.

How about potential blackmail material?  How many activists’ files now include telephone conversations that could be potential blackmail tools?  Just because the law doesn’t allow wiretaps to be used in court does not mean that they are not useful for extra-legal persuasion.  Why bother with lawyers and jails when blackmail is quieter and cheaper, and the computer time to hunt them up is essentially free - the Aaron Swartz case has shown that the government has no qualms about hounding you to death if you become too inconvenient.

The fact that all of this stuff is stored indefinitely means that should you do anything that makes you a “person of interest” down the road, all of your electronic history is already available with no effort expended, and no legwork necessary.  It is already all filed and cross-referenced, just waiting for you to stick your head up so they can shoot it off, or get you to do it for them.  There’s a cheerful thought.