Glass Maze Every jumbled pile of person

The Patriot Act is Watching You

The thing that we need to understand about Big Brother is that he isn’t fictional: he’s not a villain from our past or a bogeyman in our future. He’s here and now: he’s a constant and burgeoning possibility. Every government has within it the makings of a police state. Just add a dab of magic fascist pixie powder and bang! out pops the eye of Sauron.

Actually, it’s not that easy, really. The only way to get a true dictatorship going in a country as large as ours is by acquiring information on pretty much everyone, and then using it against them. But a government intent on bootstrapping the apparatus necessary for this kind of operation can’t do its work alone: it needs the help and the tacit cooperation of the people whose secrets it’s trying to acquire. It needs its victims to believe that the accumulation of massive databases of personal information is not only harmless but also essential to their continued happiness and well-being.

The easiest way to get the ball rolling here is to manufacture an enemy: some sort of threat to our freedom and our most cherished civil liberties so terrible and so insidious that the only way to defeat it is to strip away our freedoms and our most cherished civil liberties.

The PATRIOT act is at the vanguard of this effort. It rolled easily through congress right after 9/11, and has been steadily, quietly eating away at our basic rights ever since. Imagine throngs of hapless citizenry standing in thigh-deep water going about their business while schools of piranha/leech creatures anesthetize and then devour their legs, feet-first, bit by bit, so that eventually they’re chin-deep sputtering just over the waterline and don’t quite know how it happened. That’s us.

This smacks of paranoia, and it may well be. But you have to agree that our government is doing all it can to at least appear Big Brotherish. One of the provisions of the PATRIOT act allows law enforcement to issue information-gathering devices called National Security Letters. These can be presented to libraries, hotels, airlines, etc, which are then required to divulge all manner of information on the people whose records they maintain. Unlike wiretaps, say, or subpoenas, the FBIs can issue these things without asking permission from any sort of oversight body, and they can do it to anyone: they just have to claim you’re somehow associated with terrorists. And we’re not just talking about names and phone numbers here:

The records it yields describe where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

But it gets better. All of this information is stored in databases, forever, and the content of these databases will soon be widely available:

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincides with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks — and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. … Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined.

Note the word “unannounced” in the paragraph above. Then note the words “state”, “local”, and “tribal”, followed closely by the phrase “private sector entities”. Our government is now in the business of collecting information about our private lives and disseminating it to anyone they see fit.

No problem! you say. I’m not associated with any terrorists. But, then again, maybe you are. It all turns on the meaning of the word “associated”. It could mean, oh, let’s say, just hypothetically, being on vacation in the same city as some bad guy.

Oh wait! That’s not hypothetical at all! It turns out that about a million people visiting Las Vegas during a four-day period at the end of 2003 were unwittingly associated with a terrorist the FBI thought might be hiding somewhere in that city:

An interagency task force began pulling together the records of every hotel guest, everyone who rented a car or truck, every lease on a storage space, and every airplane passenger who landed in the city. Grigg’s unit filtered that population for leads. Any link to the known terrorist universe — a shared address or utility account, a check deposited, a telephone call — could give investigators a start.

No terrorists were found. The leads led nowhere. But the data are still in FBI databases, just sitting there, like a million ticking time bombs.

Entities presented with National Security Letters aren’t allowed to refuse, or take their case to the courts, or anything. They have to give up the information; it’s a criminal offense not to. It’s also a criminal offense to tell anyone that they did so, and the FBI doesn’t have to tell anyone about it either. They do issue a grudging report to congress once a year, with an incomplete tally of the number of NSLs they’ve issued. The last report showed that number increased 10,000 percent in the last year alone.

The good news is if you feel that your privacy has been unjustly compromised by one of these NSLs, you can always lodge a complaint. Of course, the process of doing so is complicated somewhat by the fact that there’s no way for you to know that it’s happened.

“We do rely upon complaints coming in,” [Inspector General Glenn A.] Fine said in House testimony in May. He added: “To the extent that people do not know of anything happening to them, there is an issue about whether they can complain. So, I think that’s a legitimate question.”

To rephrase, then: if you (a) are not a terrorist, (b) are not related in any way to a terrorist, (c) have problems with us secretly gathering your personal and private information and storing it in databases and showing it to anyone we feel like showing it to, and (d) have supernatural clairvoyant powers that enable you to divine that this is happening to you, then, by all means, lodge a complaint.

If this wasn’t so terrifying, it would actually be really, really funny.

the idea of ‘privacy’ is really, obsolete in this day and age. look at us – posting on the World Wide Web!

I’ve been out of touch for a while, so i’m catching up on your postings, and i just found this one, which appear to be excerpts from wp article on the nsl’s which i saw the other day.

This Act is one of the more – if not most – dangerours things to come out of Congress since all of the anti-Communist stuff of the ’50’s. Again, it came out of Congress, the elected representatives of the people, and one can only wonder as to the state of mind of the American citizenry when they elect such representatives.

The first thing I noticed at the end of this posting was that there was only one comment – j-a’s, and true, I’ll say – and that in itself validates your comments on the passivity of our citizenry. While the odds say that there are lots of people that feel like you and I, Ramseys, within the 300-odd million that we are now, I’d say that there aren’t a lot of us (relatively speaking) , let alone anything close to numbers that could change the mentality of our Congress.

En fin, as we say in South America, I suspect that we’ll have to wait until we the people are up to our chins in the water before we do something about this.

The one hopeful note is that the Iraq disaster seems to be resonating more (negatively) in the minds of Americans, and that may prompt more of them to reflect on the real need for something as invidious as the Patriot Act; we’ll see….

L – I agree, the patriot act is one of the scariest things we’ve seen in a while. Long after Bushco is gone, it’ll still be with us, trampling on our civil rights. It’s the gift that keeps on giving.

But I take some heart from Bush’s crappy approval ratings, the country’s burgeoning awareness of the Iraq disaster, the administration’s lies and deceptions. Too late for it to do much good, but still. It’s something.

In the best possible scenario, we win back one or both houses of congress in 2006, and start the long and arduous process of blowing the lid off of 6 years of bad dealings in the white house; in 2008 we elect someone honest and capable and courageous enough to start putting the country back together.

Wishful thinking? Maybe. But not nearly so crazy as it seemed just last year.