The Great Unwatched

All these years I've thought Safire was intelligent! What a letdown.

He tries to turn the incident where George Wahsington defused the hotheads in his military staff, who thought they should seize the government and declare him king, by putting on his spectacles with the comment that he had impaired his vision in the service of his country. It was a simple and clever way of reminding them of their duties as patriots and the fallibility of any human, even himself. Safire wants it to be a warning against Big Brother, but it turns out to be just a puzzling aside to a hysterical rant.

He's not really trying to draw a lesson from the life of our first president. He only mentions him because it's Presidents Day (Should be Washington and Lincoln Day).

The real concern of this piece is the attempt by security officials to marshall technology in the pursuit of homeland protection.

What I find most absurd is the assertion that "the tradeoff [for safety] is government control of individual lives."
How greater surveillance equates to control he doesn't say. All he can say is "To be watched at all times, especially when doing nothing seriously wrong, is to be afflicted with a creepy feeling. That is what is felt by a convict in an always- lighted cell. It is the pervasive, inescapable feeling of being unfree." (Italics are mine)

Ooooh--a creepy feeling! Of course, a convict in a cell has lots of other reasons for feeling unfree than the mere fact that he is being watched, but we're not supposed to make that connection.

What it all boils down to is the canard that we have a right to be anonymous. Where that supposed right comes, of course, is rhetoric, not law. We live in society, not isolation. If you want to be anonymous, go live as a hermit in Montana. The rest of us benefit greatly by seeing and being seen by others. Most of us would love to be famous and popular, but now there is this strange idea that while we're out there in public places, we should be able to pick and choose who sees us. We are becoming more and more exhibitionistic and voyeuristic that it seems sometimes that only prudes want privacy. But if those we expect to protect us try to keep track, it's BIG BROTHER, ignoring the fact that the U.S. is constitutionally unable to be a totalitarian state like that portrayed in 1984. They should go back and read the book. To implement such a system, the government would have to employ half the population to watch the other half.

In one exchange about the use of cameras in public areas, a woman wrote that she liked to wear revealing clothes, but was disgusted by the possibility that there could be police officers back at the station leering and drooling over her image. Apparently, the possibility that some rapist on the scene might be having the same thoughts didn't bother her.

But, Safire warns darkly:

When your government, employer, landlord, merchant, banker and local sports team gang up to picture, digitize and permanently record your every activity, you are placed under unprecedented control. This is not some alarmist Orwellian scenario; it is here, now, financed by $20 billion last year and $15 billion more this year of federal money appropriated out of sheer fear.

Think about it. The fact that there are cameras around, does not mean that anyone is looking at the pictures. Most of the videos taken in stores and ATMs are never reviewed. They are recorded over after a few days go by without incident. The only time a human actually looks at them is after an incident occurs which makes them valuable. There is no "permanent record of your every activity." It would take a lot more than $20 billion, or even $35 billion to operate a system that could do what Safire describes.

The truth is that most of our feeling of privacy comes from the fact that all but a tiny percentage of us are just uninteresting. There is no reason to focus on us longer than it takes to determine that we aren't anybody to be concerned about. This is why we feel fine going out in public and why agoraphobia is considered a mental health problem.

But a lot of people feel a chill whenever they see a cop, or even someone who might be a cop. They have been brainwashed by activists and protesters into believing that the people we hire to protect us are actually there to prey on us. Blacks, not unjustifiably, see police as bullies who assume the worst about them because of their skin color. Racial profiling is certainly a problem which is in the process of being resolved, but it is not the same as the privacy issue.

It may seem jejune and unsatisfying to say, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about," but it is nevertheless true. I'm sorry to telly you, but the police and the FBI have too much important work to do to waste time keeping track of you and me, unless you're a terrorist or a criminal.

The most important thing to remember is that the first step towards finding the bad guys is to eliminate all the good guys from consideration. The new technologies can help do that. It is true that there could be abuses, but that is true with all authority. We will deal with this as we always have, through the courts. No nation has ever gone to the lengths America has to protect legitimate rights, and that is not going to change, but we know now that there are greater villains among us than the police, and we should not dupe ourselves into thinking that we can have safety and good intelligence without cooperating with measures that will achieve those ends.