NYT bk. review, "No Place to Hide" --"nonstop scrutiny, as Orwell foresaw"

[DeepModem Mom]

Nonstop Scrutiny, as Orwell Foresaw
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Published: January 25, 2005

Picture "Minority Report" combined with Orwell's "1984" and Francis Ford Coppola's "Conversation": in an effort to prevent future crimes and predict what certain individuals are likely to do, the government has begun working with high-tech titans to keep tabs on the populace.

One company has come up with a digital identity system that has tagged every adult American with a unique code. Another company is intent on gaining control of all records - including state and local files, financial information, employee dossiers, DNA data and criminal background checks - that define our identity. In addition to iris scanners, voice analyzers and fingerprint readers, there now exist face recognition machines and cameras that can identify an individual by how he or she walks. One government group is working on infrared detectors that could register heat signals around people's eyes, indicating an autonomic "fight or flight" response; another federal agency has floated a proposal to assess risk by examining airline passengers' brain waves with "noninvasive neuro-electric sensors."

This surveillance state is not a futuristic place conjured in a Philip K. Dick novel or "Matrix"-esque sci-fi thriller. It is post-9/11 America, as described in Robert O'Harrow Jr.'s unnerving new book, "No Place to Hide" - an America where citizens' "right to be let alone," as Justice Louis Brandeis of the Supreme Court once put it, is increasingly imperiled, where more and more components of our daily lives are routinely monitored, recorded and analyzed.

These concerns, of course, are hardly new. Way back in 1964, in "The Naked Society," Vance Packard warned about encroachments on civil liberties and the growing threat to privacy posed by new electronic devices, and in 1971, in "The Assault on Privacy," Arthur R. Miller warned that advances in information technologies had given birth to "a new social virus - 'data-mania.' " The digital revolution of the 1990's, however, exponentially amplified these trends by enabling retailers, marketers and financial institutions to gather and store vast amounts of information about current and potential customers. And as Mr. O'Harrow notes, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, "reignited and reshaped a smoldering debate over the proper use of government power to peer into the lives of ordinary people."...

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Still, Mr. O'Harrow provides in these pages an authoritative and vivid account of the emergence of a "security-industrial complex" and the far-reaching consequences for ordinary Americans, who must cope not only with the uneasy sense of being watched (leading, defenders of civil liberties have argued, to a stifling of debate and dissent) but also with the very palpable dangers of having personal information (and in some cases, inaccurate information) passed from one outfit to another....


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/25/books/25kaku.html