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Weissman writes: "But freedom is best defended by using it, and continuing to say 'No!' is a damned sight better than giving Big Brother our permission to do with us what he will."

Big Brother is watching us. (illustration: TIME Magazine)
Big Brother is watching us. (illustration: TIME Magazine)



Giving Up Our Privacy?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

08 May 13

 

was delighted when Mitt Romney was caught on 'film' dissing the 47%, and I was impressed at how quickly law enforcement was able to identify the alleged Boston Marathon bombers from video clips," wrote Lenny Siegel, an old friend from my salad years at Stanford.

"Today, millions of Americans carry video cameras in their pockets or purses, while commercial enterprises and government buildings routinely record normal activity on and near their premises," he went on. "I can see how the technology can be used to discourage the pistol-whipping of liquor-store clerks like my late uncle or catch police brutalizing or even murdering innocent citizens."

"But," he added, "I'm worried that the infrastructure is being created to continuously monitor the movements of people who have not committed crimes, making it easier for authoritarian government officials to quash dissent."

In Lenny's view, the problem we face is the willingness of average citizens to let Big Brother do what he will, even at the expense of our personal freedom and privacy. Contrary to the song many of us learned as children, when it comes to protecting our civil liberties, the policeman is not our friend. Nor are the ubiquitous closed-circuit television cameras, or CCTV, which people in England already seem to have accepted.

Lenny is no right-winger obsessed with the threat of government tyranny, the fear that President Obama urged graduates to reject Sunday in his commencement address at Ohio State University. A non-violent activist on the non-communist Left, Lenny works as an environmental specialist advising the Pentagon on cleaning up toxic waste sites – an idealistic rather than ideological calling.

Note that Lenny does not accuse bad guys in government of purposely setting out to create a police state. Some of them might be doing just that, others not. That remains a question of hard evidence, which Lenny does not pretend to have, and he's much too smart to fall back on half-baked conspiracy theories, truther tales, and vague notions of shadowy plotters lurking behind every bush – or Bush.

Lenny's concern, and mine, is more certain. Consider how the Obama administration has threatened journalists and prosecuted Bradley Manning and other whistleblowers under the Espionage Act of 1917, a long discredited law that initially led to the jailing of Socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs for merely speaking out against military recruiting, and to the post-World-War-I Red Scare, Palmer Raids, mass arrests, and mass deportation to the Soviet Union of "disloyal" immigrants like Emma Goldman.

Or think about how the former Constitutional Law professor from Chicago has built on the repressive infrastructure of the George W. Bush years to justify even more warrantless wiretapping, increased surveillance, corporate and government collection of enormous databases on everyone, and even the targeted killing of American citizens without trial.

Future presidents will similarly start from Obama's already over-reaching attacks on our civil liberties. New technologies like surveillance drones over our cities will build on the way police departments have used helicopters to chase suspects or hover over unhappy ghettos. And who knows what lessons other lawmen will draw from the recent lockdown of Boston and shoot-first rampage of our cherished "first responders?" We only know that they will draw the lessons they want.

Repression will always find ways to justify itself in available fears, whether of Communists, terrorists, Blacks, Muslims, Jews, or an octogenarian nun slipping into a supposedly secure nuclear facility at Oak Ridge. And where fears need fueling, police and intelligence agencies around the world have a long, nasty history of deploying provocateurs, as J. Edgar Hoover did with his counter-intelligence program, or COINTELPRO. That was one that Lenny and I knew only too well.

Add the GPS tracking on a gazillion smart phones with personal cameras, on which the police can always call, and all the personal information on the social networks, and not even North Korea has such an invasive security system. As Lenny puts it, "the Genie is already out of the bottle. Americans (and the English, to be sure) seem to accept that 'Big Brother is watching.'" We "have given up the presumption of privacy."

That, I'm afraid, is spilt milk and we gain nothing by crying over it. But those of us who demand the right to dissent can still have faith by drawing on our own past. When antiwar activists were building opposition to America's war in Vietnam, we regularly defied the Espionage Act of 1917 and other laws by stopping troop trains and burning our draft cards. We did not wait to ask the Supreme Court for permission. We did not always ask the American Civil Liberties Union. We just did what we had to do and generally got away with it.

Similarly, when serious journalists find a story they think worth risking prosecution, they tell government to "Go to Hell!" And when whistleblowers Left or Right think the people have a right to know, they spill the beans at whatever risk to themselves.

This anti-authoritarian spirit can pose enormous problems, as the diehards at the National Rifle Association remind us ad nauseam with their tedious defense of the rights of gun manufacturers. But freedom is best defended by using it, and continuing to say "No!" is a damned sight better than giving Big Brother our permission to do with us what he will.


A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he writes on international affairs.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

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