Orwell's Revenge: The 1984 Palimpsest
by Peter Huber
Reprinted by permission of The Free Press.
Chapter 2: The Machine
"Big Brother has the telescreen. The telescreen is the key to everything else in 1984. The word "telescreen" (or "screen") occurs 119 times in Orwell's book, which is to say, on almost every other page. "Big Brother" appears only 74 times. Other related words get far fewer mentions ...
... Big Brother has the screens, which convey everything.
You have Newspeak, which conveys nothing.
Big Brother is watching, always watching, watching everyone, watching you.
And you? You are blinding yourself on Victory Gin."
Blinding ourselves with
gin, to be sure, along with dozens of other alcoholic beverages;
marijuana and various other street drugs;
prescription psychoactives, notably antidepressants such as
Paxil, Prozac, and Zoloft;
trivial movies; violent computer games; spectator sports;
and I would say above all else, television.
A pretty impressive smorgasbord, wouldn't you say?
Comparing the options available to modern people with our actual choices and behavior, I'd have to call us the most thoroughly self-blinded people in history.
"Across the country, police are using GPS devices to snare thieves, drug dealers, sexual predators and killers, often without a warrant or court order. Privacy advocates said tracking suspects electronically constitutes illegal search and seizure, violating Fourth Amendment rights of protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and is another step toward George Orwell's Big Brother society. Law enforcement officials, when they discuss the issue at all, said GPS is essentially the same as having an officer trail someone, just cheaper and more accurate. Most of the time ... judges have sided with police.
... many analysts believe that police will increasingly rely on GPS as an effective tool in investigations and that the public will hear little about it.
'I've seen them in cases from New York City to small towns -- whoever can afford to get the equipment and plant it on a car,' said John Wesley Hall, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. 'And of course, it's easy to do. You can sneak up on a car and plant it at any time.'
Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program, considers GPS monitoring, along with license plate readers, toll transponders and video cameras with face-recognition technology, part of the same trend toward ' an always-on, surveillance society.'"
"The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online.
Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets -- corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers -- would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out. ...
Without proactive intervention, the values and issues that we care about -- civil rights, economic justice, the environment and fair elections -- will be further threatened by this push for corporate control. Imagine how the next presidential election would unfold if major political advertisers could make strategic payments to Comcast so that ads from Democratic and Republican candidates were more visible and user-friendly than ads of third-party candidates with less funds. Consider what would happen if an online advertisement promoting nuclear power prominently popped up on a cable broadband page, while a competing message from an environmental group was relegated to the margins. It is possible that all forms of civic and noncommercial online programming would be pushed to the end of a commercial digital queue. ...
At the core of the new power held by phone and cable companies are tools delivering what is known as "deep packet inspection." With these tools, AT&T and others can readily know the packets of information you are receiving online -- from e-mail, to websites, to sharing of music, video and software downloads."
China's All-Seeing Eye
"With the help of U.S. defense contractors, China is building the prototype for a high-tech police state. It is ready for export."
by Naomi Klein
Rolling Stone, 29 MAY 2008
"Thirty years ago, the city of Shenzhen didn't exist. Back in those days, it was a string of small fishing villages and collectively run rice paddies, a place of rutted dirt roads and traditional temples. That was before the Communist Party chose it -- thanks to its location close to Hong Kong's port -- to be China's first "special economic zone," one of only four areas where capitalism would be permitted on a trial basis. The theory behind the experiment was that the "real" China would keep its socialist soul intact while profiting from the private-sector jobs and industrial development created in Shenzhen. The result was a city of pure commerce, undiluted by history or rooted culture -- the crack cocaine of capitalism. It was a force so addictive to investors that the Shenzhen experiment quickly expanded, swallowing not just the surrounding Pearl River Delta, which now houses roughly 100,000 factories, but much of the rest of the country as well. Today, Shenzhen is a city of 12.4 million people, and there is a good chance that at least half of everything you own was made here: iPods, laptops, sneakers, flatscreen TVs, cellphones, jeans, maybe your desk chair, possibly your car and almost certainly your printer. ...
China today, epitomized by Shenzhen's transition from mud to megacity in 30 years, represents a new way to organize society. Sometimes called "market Stalinism", it is a potent hybrid of the most powerful political tools of authoritarian communism -- central planning, merciless repression, constant surveillance -- harnessed to advance the goals of global capitalism. ...
Over the past two years, some 200,000 surveillance cameras have been installed throughout the city. Many are in public spaces, disguised as lampposts. The closed-circuit TV cameras will soon be connected to a single, nationwide network,
an all-seeing system that will be capable of tracking and identifying anyone who comes within its range -- a project driven in part by U.S. technology and investment. Over the next three years, Chinese security executives predict they will install as many as 2 million CCTVs in Shenzhen, which would make it the most watched city in the world. (Security-crazy London boasts only half a million surveillance cameras.) ...
The security cameras are just one part of a much broader high-tech surveillance and censorship program known in China as "Golden Shield." The end goal is to use the latest people-tracking technology -- thoughtfully supplied by American giants like IBM, Honeywell and General Electric -- to create an airtight consumer cocoon: a place where Visa cards, Adidas sneakers, China Mobile cellphones, McDonald's Happy Meals, Tsingtao beer and UPS delivery (to name just a few of the official sponsors of the Beijing Olympics) can be enjoyed under the unblinking eye of the state, without the threat of democracy breaking out. With political unrest on the rise across China, the government hopes to use the surveillance shield to identify and counteract dissent before it explodes into a mass movement like the one that grabbed the world's attention at Tiananmen Square.
Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric. And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. ...
This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country's notorious system of online controls known as the "Great Firewall." Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder's personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces. ...
You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you. Few companies have collected as much sensitive information about U.S. citizens and visitors to America as L-1: It boasts a database of 60 million records, and it "captures" more than a million new fingerprints every year. Here is a small sample of what the company does: produces passports and passport cards for American citizens; takes finger scans of visitors to the U.S. under the Department of Homeland Security's massive U.S.-Visit program; equips U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan with "mobile iris and multimodal devices" so they can collect biometric data in the field; maintains the State Department's "largest facial-recognition database system"; and produces driver's licenses in Illinois, Montana and North Carolina. In addition, L-1 has an even more secretive intelligence unit called SpecTal. Asked by a Wall Street analyst to discuss, in 'extremely general' terms, what the division was doing with contracts worth roughly $100 million, the company's CEO would only say, 'Stay tuned'. ...
One of the first people to sound the alarm on China's upgraded police state was a British researcher named Greg Walton. ... Walton's paper did have an impact, but not the one he had hoped. The revelation that China was constructing a gigantic digital database capable of watching its citizens on the streets and online, listening to their phone calls and tracking their consumer purchases sparked neither shock nor outrage. Instead, Walton says, the paper was "mined for ideas" by the U.S. government, as well as by private companies hoping to grab a piece of the suddenly booming market in spy tools. ...
The U.S. currently has more people behind bars than China, despite a population less than a quarter of its size. ...
The Fourth Amendment prohibition against illegal search and seizure made it into the U.S. Constitution precisely because its drafters understood that the power to snoop is addictive. Even if we happen to trust in the good intentions of the snoopers, the nature of any government can change rapidly -- which is why the Constitution places limits on the tools available to any regime. But the drafters could never have imagined the commercial pressures at play today. The global homeland-security business is now worth an estimated $200 billion -- more than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Any sector of that size inevitably takes on its own momentum. New markets must be found -- which, in the Big Brother business,
means an endless procession of new enemies and new emergencies: crime, immigration, terrorism.
... during my time in Shenzhen, China's youngest and most modern city, I often have the feeling that I am witnessing not some rogue police state but a global middle ground, the place where more and more countries are converging. China is becoming more like us in very visible ways (Starbucks, Hooters, cellphones that are cooler than ours), and we are becoming more like China in less visible ones (torture, warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detention, though not nearly on the Chinese scale).
What is most disconcerting about China's surveillance state is how familiar it all feels. When I check into the Sheraton in Shenzhen, for instance, it looks like any other high-end hotel chain -- only the lobby is a little more modern and the cheerful clerk doesn't just check my passport but takes a scan of it.
'Are you making a copy?' I ask.
'No, no,' he responds helpfully.
'We're just sending a copy to the police.'"
Under Surveillance: Q&A With Naomi Klein
"The author of Rolling Stone's examination of China's high-tech police state talks about her experiences reporting the story"
Rolling Stone,
Posted May 29, 2008 3:20 PM
'Shocking' Truths
"
The star of the anti-globalization movement returns with a new book that explains Bush's real agenda"
Will Dana interviews Naomi Klein
Rolling Stone,
13 DEC 2007
"What are the most profound changes the U.S. faces in the next twenty years?
... Our world could look more like Baghdad — a green zone guarded by Blackwater and everything provided by Halliburton and then just a raging red zone outside. ...
What will be the lasting effect of the Bush administration?
People haven't fully grasped the revolutionary nature of the Bush years. They are leaving a hollow shell to their successors. It's like what happens in Third World governments, where the reformers take over the presidential palace, only to realize that the power lies elsewhere. That's what's going to happen to whoever comes in after the Bush administration. They will find out how much power resides in this parallel contractor economy."
"Call me all the rude versions of “paranoid liberal” you want, but I’m getting very distressed at my homeland’s propensity for spying on its own citizens."
