Surveillance

Under today's gathering dark clouds, a reread of Nineteen Eighty-Four shows how the otherwise prescient George Orwell was wrong to think people were going to have to be tortured into submission. Half of America (still psychologically locked down, vexed and vaxed) wouldn't have it any other way. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four is grim in a way 2022 would understand. The people of Orwell's future want to be controlled. They have come to prefer it. Freedom from choice makes them feel safe. People accept being monitored, and their media being censored. They think of it all with a sense of the inevitable — the only way to stay safe if they think of it at all. The all-seeing telescreens in their homes and the snitches and spies embedded in their lives are for the better, really.

The New York Times recently ran an article on the dangers of surveillance tech in China. One wishes they would do the same for the US. According to the Times, Chinese authorities implement facial recognition tech everywhere they can, the police seek to connect electronic activity (making a call) to a physical location, biometric information such as fingerprints and DNA is collected on a mass scale, and the government wants to tie together all of this data to build comprehensive profiles on troublesome citizens. The latter is the Holy Grail of surveillance, a single source to know all there is known about a person.

Three American cities now require or likely will soon require businesses to give police access to their private surveillance footage. Leaders of all three cities see it necessary and cite rising crime. But privacy advocates decry the proposals as another example of the USA becoming the United Surveillance States of America. Houston became the first city to enact such rules. It’s part of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s federally funded One Safe Houston initiative. Turner announced it in February following a series of officer-involved shootings coupled with several dozen murders. “I don’t want to see any more carnage on our streets or in front of these businesses,” the mayor told reporters after the ordinance passed in April.

Congresswoman Liz Cheney had a supposedly shining moment this week as she sat on the January 6 committee to lecture the Capitol attackers and anyone in league with former President Donald Trump about the importance of the rule of law. Cheney has long said the committee was about “fidelity” to the Constitution. Seriously? Liz Cheney? Dick’s neocon daughter? People are buying this? I don’t even know where to start. In 2011, when libertarian-leaning Republican Justin Amash and many in the Tea Party movement insisted that President Barack Obama did not have the constitutional authority to bomb Libya, Cheney, Senator John McCain and other establishment politicians said to hell with the Constitution.

Sometimes a thing can be two things at once, one good and one bad. That requires a choice. And in a free society, that choice is usually best made by the individual directly affected. If not, then by an open, democratic process. Yet that is not what's happening with Joe Biden's vaccine mandate and it's why the cure is worse than the disease. I am, by my choice, thrice vaccinated. I understand the COVID vaccine prevents me from getting sick, and it is only a day-by-day smaller population of unvaccinated people who are actually still at risk of dying. We each make a choice. Now the government wants to make that choice for us. Vax mandates are an unhealthy thing for our democracy and represent a willful effort by government to exert additional control over an already cowed population.

In a political era defined by abnormalities, few developments are as bizarre as the newfound liberal admiration for federal law enforcement. Given its rich history of activism and countercultural tendencies, the left has traditionally regarded federal law enforcement with hostility. Looking back, this attitude has been largely earned. Throughout the 20th century, radical leftists were relentlessly targeted under the guise of protecting America from seditious ideologies. For instance, from 1919 to 1920 thousands of suspected communists were arrested in sweeping raids that spanned 23 states. Subsequent attempts to combat 'subversives' would prove no less appalling: in 1964, the FBI hatched at blackmail plot aimed at coercing Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. to commit suicide.