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PANOPTICON: Government and Privacy in the New Millenium

by Richard Garrard (garrard55 [at] aol.com)
The erosion of civil liberties by the "war on terrorism"
Panopticon:
Government And Privacy In The New Millenium
January 2003


Panopticon: a word from the early 18th century. An idea from the mind of Jeremy Bentham, English civic philosopher and designer of prisons. An idea that has become central to American life in the 21st Century.


Panopticon: a prison system, whereby the jailer can keep in view all of the inmates, all of the time. The dream of fascists.

Panopticon: the ambition of many of the present leaders of the United States Government, ostensibly to fight a war against terrorism.

It is the stuff of dystopian novels like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, movies like Brazil and THX 1138, the fevered conspiracist fantasies of the black helicopter theorists who rant from cryptic websites and on late night talk radio shows.

But this time is different. This time the fears are couched in the words of conservative journalists like William Safire, Republican stalwarts like Dick Armey and Bob Barr, let alone the urgent warnings from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

For example: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Information Awareness Office administers a program known as "Total Information Awareness"(TIA). The aim of TIA is to gather data from all available signal intelligence sources and compile it into a mammoth, ever-churning database. Expert system and fuzzy logic software would search for patterns in the data, patterns which would flag possible terrorist activity. The scope of the data would include transaction data contained in current databases, such as financial histories, medical records, communications, travel records and commercial and other private transactions.

This outrageously intrusive, intimate, unconstitutional (see the Fourth Amendment) project is supervised by none other than Iran-Contra conspirator, liar to Congress and convicted felon, Vice Admiral John Poindexter. As of this writing, a coalition of over thirty civil liberties groups have urged Senate leadership to "act immediately to stop the development of this unconstitutional system of public surveillance."

Not only does TIA aim to cull together the data already described, but also to develop biometric technology for the identification and tracking of individuals by various means, including gait and face recognition.

TIA is only one part of a host of new measures which sacrifice individual privacy--guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution--in order to combat terrorism. The list also includes:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows for the circumvention or suspension of standard criminal procedures as required in tracking suspected terrorists;

The USA PATRIOT Act: Section 215 allows for, among other things, the review of library and bookstore records;

The Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government in over half a century, a domestic intelligence agency involving more than 170,000 new employees, unprecedented organizational mandates, of labyrinthine complexity;

The Critical Infrastructure Protection Board, which is drafting a proposal for requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to allow for government monitoring of all traffic through their gateways;

In addition, already underway are more extensive surveillance techniques, such as expanded video surveillance and the use of so-called "backscatter" imaging which permits the viewing of persons and items inside of vehicles and possibly even buildings.

The current administration has argued that these measures are necessary in order to combat terrorism. At the same time, the operative definitions for terrorism are vague and ambiguous, and we are also asked to accept the premise that the war on terrorism could last indefinitely, perhaps for decades, perhaps even half a century.

So--when will the "war on terrorism" be over? How will we know when to call a halt? There will be no Berlin Wall to dismantle; there will always be threats, dissent, enemies, those who are critical of U.S. foreign policy or even American culture.

What will become of the vast apparatus of government power, commercial interests, and confidential information even if an end is declared? Will all of these entrenched political and financial entities simply evaporate?

What has happened to our Constitution? What about our perception of ourselves, our rights, our identities, our relationship to our government and to each other?

The Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham represented the ultimate imbalance of power between the State and the Prisoner. All power resided with the State. The State was omniscient and omnipotent; the Prisoner was completely powerless. As Michel Foucault described it from the inmate's point of view, "He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication."

In our day, the White House has closed off access to presidential records going back to the Reagan-Bush era, has refused to divulge information on policy formation as requested by the General Accounting Office, and has directed federal agencies to expand rejections of Freedom of Information Act requests. The imbalance between private and public power grows steadily, all in the name of national security.

As surveillance of individuals increases--whether by video, wiretap, internet or other means--intimidation increases as well. According to Foucault, "Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power." Government control becomes internalized.

For the time being, the "war on terrorism" has meant the radical escalation of power in the Executive Branch of our government. Money and manpower are being pumped into an impending war on Iraq as part of a "pre-emptive" strategy to eliminate threats to the U.S., while domestic spying increases unchecked.

What about Congress? Congress has approved, with little debate, extraordinary actions which will undermine individual rights for years to come.

The Judiciary? Last August, the American Bar Association Task Force on the Treatment of Enemy Combatants, found that "The government has taken the position that with no meaningful judicial review, an American citizen alleged to be an enemy combatant could be detained indefinitely without charges or counsel on the government's say-so."

James Madison, writing in The Federalist Papers, stated that, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny."

Civil liberties, once given up, are difficult to recover. Unlimited government surveillance--the Panopticon--and unlimited government power, for whatever justification, will lead us to a very dangerous place.

"This (TIA) is a program that incorporates all of the 'Big Brother' operations that the American public has feared from its government all these years and that the Constitution has protected us from--spying, invasion of privacy, you name it," said Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "And Admiral Poindexter, of all people, is now in charge of that program."

"If the Pentagon has its way, every American--from the Nebraskan farmer to the Wall Street banker--will find themselves under the accusatory cyber-stare of an all-powerful national security apparatus," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the Washington office for the American Civil Liberties Union.

"So much for the presumption of innocence and the right to privacy," said George Getz, a spokesman for the Libertarian Party. "Unless this Orwellian project is dismantled, innocent Americans will suffer under the kind of high-tech, 24-hour surveillance that the Stasi and the KGB would have envied."

"This could be the perfect storm for civil liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act, the technology is DARPA and the agency is the F.B.I. The outcome is a system of national surveillance of the American public."

"...this (Homeland Security) is one of the most far-reaching pieces of legislation I have seen in my 50 years..." said Senator Robert Byrd. "Never have I seen such a monstrous piece of legislation sent to this body."

"A lot of my colleagues are uncomfortable about this and worry about the potential uses that this technology might be put, if not by this administration then by a future one," said Barbara Simon, a computer scientist who is past president of the Association of Computing Machinery. "Once you've got it in place you can't control it."


--Richard Garrard
by already here
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