Skip to main content

Now the government wants to define privacy for us

This is certainly indicative of where we are going in this society, a November 11 story, "It's Time to Rethink Privacy, Official Says,":

A top intelligence official says it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy.

Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people's private communications and financial information.


One of the more heavy-handed ironies of the war on terror is that the government's mandate to protect us all from external enemies has now been extended (by that same government) into a mandate that all other rights and privileges guaranteed under the Constitution shall now be sacrificed to "homeland" security.

This now includes a not-so-subtle shift in emphasis: instead of being an entity from which we want our privacy protected, the government becomes the entity that both guarantees and defines the amount of privacy we will be allowed to have.

Big Brother is not only watching you, he's doing it for your own good.

I thought about this before I saw this story, actually. I was returning from New Mexico this weekend, and making the usual pilgrimmage through the security checkpoint, when I become more than unusually ticked off about removing my shoes and testifying that I wasn't attempting to carry deadly shampoo onto a plane.

(By the way, for an engineer's explanation of just why the liquid ban on airplanes is another "Feel Good" overreaction by officials who either don't know chemistry or don't care, see Psy in the Sky by noted science fiction writer James P. Hogan.)

There is an almost universal consensus that September 11 represented a "watershed" in American history equivalent to Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima. The problem with that understanding, from an historian's viewpoint, is that there are two underlying dynamics generally at work in any society: continuity and change. When we declare an event to be a watershed, almost all interpretations and understanding center on what's changed, not what has remained the same.

Those forces within our society who alwasy value collective security over individual liberty did not suddenly spring into existence in 2001 and write the Patriot Act. Aside from being a Christmas shopping list for intrusive law enforcement, the Patriot Act and subsequent moves to weaken personal privacy evolved out of a group of pre-neo-con analysts and scholars working between the original Gulf War and GW Bush's election. They argued that the RMA ("Revolution in Military Affairs") that allowed us to destroy the Iraqi Army in the Gulf had made all earlier forms of "low-tech" war irrelevant, and that our greatest threat in the 21st Century would not come from conventional military forces but "rogue states" with nuclear weapons. Viewing this through the prism of "homeland defense" (where did you think the name "homeland security" came from, anyway), they emphasized that traditional American ideas of privacy would have to be sacrificed to preserve our country, because otherwise our intelligence-gathering process would be hindered.

To these people, in a bizarre way, 9/11 represented a vindication of their argument, and an opportunity to craft a complete change in the relationship of the US government to privacy and its own citizens.

Try googling "homeland defense" and time-limiting your responses to before 2001.

What you'll find is, to say the least, interesting.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Comment Rescue (?) and child-related gun violence in Delaware

In my post about the idiotic over-reaction to a New Jersey 10-year-old posing with his new squirrel rifle , Dana Garrett left me this response: One waits, apparently in vain, for you to post the annual rates of children who either shoot themselves or someone else with a gun. But then you Libertarians are notoriously ambivalent to and silent about data and facts and would rather talk abstract principles and fear monger (like the government will confiscate your guns). It doesn't require any degree of subtlety to see why you are data and fact adverse. The facts indicate we have a crisis with gun violence and accidents in the USA, and Libertarians offer nothing credible to address it. Lives, even the lives of children, get sacrificed to the fetishism of liberty. That's intellectual cowardice. OK, Dana, let's talk facts. According to the Children's Defense Fund , which is itself only querying the CDCP data base, fewer than 10 children/teens were killed per year in Delaw

With apologies to Hube: dopey WNJ comments of the week

(Well, Hube, at least I'm pulling out Facebook comments and not poaching on your preserve in the Letters.) You will all remember the case this week of the photo of the young man posing with the .22LR squirrel rifle that his Dad got him for his birthday with resulted in Family Services and the local police attempting to search his house.  The story itself is a travesty since neither the father nor the boy had done anything remotely illegal (and check out the picture for how careful the son is being not to have his finger inside the trigger guard when the photo was taken). But the incident is chiefly important for revealing in the Comments Section--within Delaware--the fact that many backers of "common sense gun laws" really do have the elimination of 2nd Amendment rights and eventual outright confiscation of all privately held firearms as their objective: Let's run that by again: Elliot Jacobson says, This instance is not a case of a father bonding with h

The Obligatory Libertarian Tax Day Post

The most disturbing factoid that I learned on Tax Day was that the average American must now spend a full twenty-four hours filling out tax forms. That's three work days. Or, think of it this way: if you had to put in two hours per night after dinner to finish your taxes, that's two weeks (with Sundays off). I saw a talking head economics professor on some Philly TV channel pontificating about how Americans procrastinate. He was laughing. The IRS guy they interviewed actually said, "Tick, tick, tick." You have to wonder if Governor Ruth Ann Minner and her cohorts put in twenty-four hours pondering whether or not to give Kraft Foods $708,000 of our State taxes while demanding that school districts return $8-10 million each?