Freedom Cannot Exist Alongside a Massive Surveillance Industrial Complex: They Are Incompatible

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Freedom Cannot Exist Alongside a Massive Surveillance Industrial Complex: They Are Incompatible

Friday, 23 August 2013 09:19
By Heidi Boghosian, City Lights Books | Book Excerpt

Heidi Boghosian, executive director of the National Lawyers Guild, heads an organization that knows, from history, that a government allowed to spy with few limits will inevitably use them to control resistance to the elite status quo. The distance from tracking alleged Al-Qaeda terrorists to monitoring climate change activists is only a change of target, not a shift in technology or perhaps even a dramatic change in collected data. Once a massive spying apparatus is in place that functions with minimum oversight, who is to keep it from being used for domestic and political and economic agendas in the name of combating terrorism?

These are the kind of questions that Boghosian explores in "Spying on Democracy: Government Surveillance, Corporate Power, and Public Resistance."

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Normalizing Cultural Obedience through Surveillance

Every day you leave your home, your image is caught on surveillance cameras at least two hundred times, it is estimated. Little public debate has addressed the possible consequences of nearly continuous surveillance. Cameras monitor us while we shop, ride elevators, tour museums, stand in line at banks, use ATMs, or merely walk down streets, desensitizing us to unceasing observation and recording.

People growing up in the digital age may have a hard time imagining life without the self-consciousness and self-censorship prompted by today’s surveillance state. Others may recall a time when the nation expressed outrage when its citizens were “bugged,” trailed, or tracked. Today, only those living off the grid in rural areas of places such as Montana or Alaska are exempt from being monitored all the time. If they are determined to be “persons of interest,” however, they too can be tracked down and monitored.

A new generation of advertisement-driven Americans is persuaded from an early age to buy cell phones, tablets, and computers with built-in monitoring capability. Disney and McDonald’s, along with many other corporations, lure children into online worlds or amusement parks where personal information is collected in exchange for special rewards. At the same time, policymakers, quick to approve sweeping counterterrorism measures, have dismantled many levels of legal safeguards that evolved over time to protect individuals’ civil liberties.

Normalization is the process by which we accept and take for granted ideas and actions that previously may have been considered shocking or taboo. Michel Foucault wrote that modern control over society may be accomplished by watching its members, and maintaining routine information about them. Foucault emphasized that Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century panopticon, a continuous surveillance model for prisoners who could not tell if they were being watched, exemplified an institution capable of producing what he called “docile bodies.” ...............................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/18356-freedom-cannot-exist-alongside-a-massive-surveillance-industrial-complex-they-are-incompatible