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• Thursday, June 18, 2009 06:58 PM

  @ondelette @11:59am

  Informing is more chilling in the long run. Let the politician's mind run wild. They don't know precisely what they said, exactly when they said it, and they will be careful in the future, knowing the tape is running. It's the same as torturing without scars. It can often be worse and more damaging.

  Sort of an Orwellian nightmare, yes? In this case, it's nothing quite so crude as visible cameras and monitors in our homes and places of work (though there are certainly plenty of monitors and cameras in work places and public spaces.) Instead it is an insidious, out of sight, out of mind apparatus working in the background to suck up electronic communications from telephone, cell phone and the net, combine all that data into a database so scary that even John Ashcroft wouldn't sign off on it and make it available to (at the least) our "security" infrastructure.

  Bin Laden is our version of Orwell's Goldstein. We have evidence from the torture memos that were released earlier this year that we have incorporated the "room 101" methodology from 1984 into our intelligence and interrogation gathering. And you raise the specter of a vast trove of every email, every web post, every phone call and every text message that anyone has participated in since these surveillance programs were put in place potentially being mined for remarks long forgotten which can then be used as a method of control.

  Imagine that you are an elected representative with a taste for walking on the wild side in your personal life and you have made some entrenched power uncomfortable via crusading against public corruption. Might these databases be helpful to those that have access to them if they should desire to rein you in? (Elliot Spitzer might be an example of someone that would fit that profile, which is not to say that this is what happened in his case.)

  Imagine being confronted with excerpts from emails or texts or transcripts of long forgotten communications with no recourse to view the entire record (State secrets!) or challenge it in any way. Imagine in a moment of frustration or anger you'd said at one point that you wished (blank) were dead, or that you were so angry that you could kill (blank) yourself, and now (blank) is in fact dead. Or maybe you've admitted to a close friend that you once stole something, or that you have a sexual fetish that would be publicly embarrassing, or that you didn't report some income on your taxes, or that you cheated on your spouse with their sibling. Get's interesting, it does.

  I don't know what is going on. I just know that it feels to me as if it is all spinning out of control.

  They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. - Ben Franklin

  I think old Ben had a pretty fair point there. When I look around the world and see people of other nations in the streets standing up for what they believe is right and then I think about December 12, 2000 here in the US, or I think about a nation being led to war against another nation that had not attacked us on 9/11 because of 9/11, or I think about my country descending into torture, or spying on its citizens and all the while the masses remain passive and ensconced in homes and SUV's and discount shopping centers, I am not optimistic for the future.

  Tomorrow is a new day. Maybe tomorrow will be better...

  —Roman Berry Read Roman Berry's other letters
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