Watching is getting easier

An unpopular truth

[Reprinted from Issues & Views April 7, 2003]

Does advanced technology make a police state feasible, or even inevitable? Writer Fred Reed suggests that it might. In "Surveillance State" (The American Conservative, 3/24/03), he reasons that the government will increase its tracking of citizens, simply because it can. Here are excerpts:

The freedom Americans have enjoyed has been less the result of American character than of governmental incapacity. In the past, the government didn't watch us carefully because it couldn't. In 1950, the FBI could open your mail, or tap your telephone, but only with effort and risk of being caught. Consequently, it did so only in cases of importance.

The staggering capacities of today's computers and networks change things utterly. These are so powerful, offer such convenience, and fill so many benign purposes that their penetration of society, already great, will increase. We can't stop it. Perhaps more correctly, we won't stop it. An unintended consequence is to establish detailed surveillance of our entire lives. . . .

Five years ago, if I had spoken of chips implantable beneath your skin to transmit your social security number silently to listening devices in your surroundings, you would have suggested Thorazine and a strait jacket. They exist--for benign purposes. . . .

[E]ver-increasing capacity to watch provides the machinery of a Stalinism beyond Uncle Joe's most libidinous dreams. For a while, requirements for warrants (already weakened by the Patriot Act) and such may prevent the more horrendous forms of abuse. But there is nothing magical in the American character to reject a creeping totalitarianism. If you doubt this, go to an airport.

Watching is getting easier, fast. And what is easy is usually done.

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