On Barcodes and the Rise of the Surveillance Society — by Polydamas
In her May 22, 2012 BBC column, titled “Barcode Everyone At Birth”, (http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120522-barcode-everyone-at-birth?selectorSection=section), notable science fiction and fantasy author Elizabeth Moon proposed the following:
“If I were empress of the universe, I would insist on every individual having a unique ID permanently attached – a barcode if you will; an implanted chip to provide an easy, fast, inexpensive way to identify individuals. It would be imprinted on everyone at birth. Point the scanner at someone and there it is. Having such a unique barcode would have many advantages. In war, soldiers could easily differentiate legitimate targets in a population from non combatants. This could prevent mistakes in identity, mistakes that result in the deaths of innocent bystanders. Weapons systems would record the code of the use, identifying how fired which shot and leading to more accountability in the field. Anonymity would be impossible as would mistaken identity, making it easier to place responsibility accurately, not only in war but also in non-combat situations far from the war.”
Off the top of one’s head, many more items can be added to create a most appealing list of tangible cradle-to-grave benefits of such a system. Starting with childbirth, the incidence of babies switched at birth at the hospital would plummet to zero. A parent whose toddler or child disappeared from sight even for a second could almost instantaneously locate the missing child. Kidnappings of children, whether by estranged parents, child molesters, or ransom-seeking criminals, could be prevented. Runaway teenagers would be a thing of the past. Identity theft and cases of mistaken identity would become a rarity. Solving crimes of violence would be child’s play, a simple determination of whose transponder ID chip was in proximity to the victim at the relevant time period. Medical malpractice due to adverse drug interactions would be markedly reduced. The system would track elderly people suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. Considerations of space limit a full discussion of the benefits.
In contrast, in her June 1, 2012 article in the New York Daily News, titled “‘Human Barcode’ Could Make Society More Organized, But Invades Privacy, Civil Liberties” (http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/human-barcode-society-organized-invades-privacy-civil-liberties-article-1.1088129), Meghan Neal discusses some of the shortcomings. She quotes a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union who said, “To have a record of everywhere you go and everything you do would be a frightening thing. . . .Once we let the government and businesses go down the road of nosing around in our lives . . . we’re going to quickly lose all our privacy. ” Yet, despite warning about the creation of a “check-point society” where “everyone carries an internal passport and has to show their papers at every turn” as in totalitarian countries, the senior ACLU analyst cautioned not to “throw the baby out with the bathwater”. He believed that a solution can be found and that “We can have security, we can have convenience, and we can have privacy. We can have our cake and eat it too.” This notion would be laughable if it were not so tragic.
We here, at The Cassandra Times, believe that, ultimately, the decision to implement the Surveillance Society will not be premised upon the plethora of seemingly marvelous benefits that such technology would bestow upon the citizenry or halted by considerations of the dangers of the so-called “check-point society”. Rather, the Surveillance Society will be implemented because it makes perfect sense to the leaders of governments everywhere and to zealous law enforcement agencies whose function is to protect the populace from enemies foreign and, most especially, domestic. The operative question here is not whether the Surveillance Society will be implemented, but, how soon it will become an unassailable fact of modern life.
There will be many human ostriches who will succeed at persuading themselves and perhaps misleading many others that these are paranoid rantings by the tin-foil hat crowd. Yet, before blithely ignoring the creeping inevitability of the Surveillance Society, one should consider the following examples from the not-so-distant past. Despite vigorous denials by respectable government officials that this nine-digit number would not be used as a de facto identification number, the social security number has become exactly that. Similarly, despite governmental assurances that the federal government will never maintain a gun registry of firearm owners and a permanent record of their weapons purchases, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (BATFE) and other governmental law enforcement agencies most assuredly have fed the contents of every Form 4473 into a supercomputer “just in case”. Those who do not believe that such a de facto database of gun owners truly exists need to open their eyes and ask themselves exactly how law enforcement officers manage to trace the serial numbers of guns to all of their registered owners when crimes involving firearms are suspected. It should be especially noted that governments have a special incentive for tracking both social security numbers and firearm serial numbers. The first facilitates taxation and the funding for governments. The latter is paramount for tracking potential enemies of the state. After all, all armed citizens must be deemed an existential threat to the security of the Surveillance Society because they have the lethal tools to recall a tyrannical government. Also, to borrow from Benjamin Franklin, self-reliant citizens are sorely deficient in the sheep-like fear that has always provided governments with their desired trade of precious liberty for ephemeral safety.
Another reason for the inevitability of the Surveillance Society is that it is already happening all around us and not only in the United States. Richard Thomas, Great Britain’s Information Commissioner expressed in 2006 that his fears that the United Kingdom would “sleep-walk into a surveillance society” have become a reality. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6108496.stm). Britain is estimated to have 4.2 million closed circuit television cameras, approximately one camera per 14 people. The author of the report was quoted as saying, “We have more CCTV cameras and we have looser laws on privacy and data protection. We really do have a society which is premised both on state secrecy and the state not giving up its supposed right to keep information under control while, at the same time, wanting to know as much as it can about us.” In other countries, the electronic monitoring of the populace appears limited only by a country’s technological level and by its available budget to do so. A Wikipedia article makes for a most sobering reading about the various countries’ efforts to spy on their citizens. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance#cite_note-yougov1-2).
The notion that people would vociferously object to having such a government barcode on their person that would allow their positive identification is belied by the growing trend of people finding self-expression through tattoos. According to a June 2006 survey by the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, 36% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have tattoos as do 24% of Americans between the ages of 30 and 40, and 15% of those between 41 and 51. A 2006 Pew Research Center survey found that 36% of Americans between 18 and 25 years of age, 40% of those between the ages 26 and 40, and 10% of Americans 41-64 years of age had at least one tattoo. Notwithstanding the intrinsic aesthetic merit of tattoos and the emotional satisfaction they bring to their proud owners/wearers, this practice is extremely useful to governments and law enforcement agencies. According to an article by Amy L. Edwards, in the August 15, 2010 Orlando Sentinel, titled “Inflammatory Ink: Law Enforcement Takes Advantage of Suspects’ Tattoos”, (http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2010-08-15/news/os-inked-criminals-20100815_1_tattoos-law-enforcement-donte-hall), “more than 45 million Americans sport at least one tattoo, according to one report, giving themselves — and everyone else — a permanent, unmistakable tag. And for those in the criminal justice system, that ink can be vital.” Law enforcement officers throughout the country routinely photograph the people they arrest, enter the identifying tattoos into computerized databases, and post them on their agencies’ websites. It would appear, therefore, that the path to barcoding every person is made much easier by the rising popularity of tattoos and the reduced ideological resistance to enhanced positive identification by government that they represent and, in fact, enable.
We here, at The Cassandra Times, predict that full implementation of the Surveillance Society in the United States will be precipitated, however, by an appropriate tragedy so as to provide the necessary galvanizing force. Such a tragedy will be true to the sentiment attributed to Rahm Emanuel, the former White House Chief of Staff, who once said, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. . . . This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before”. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122721278056345271.html). Here is an entirely plausible scenario:
The beautiful teenage daughter of a beloved Hollywood leading lady and an equally dashing and debonair Hollywood leading man will be kidnapped by dastardly blackmailers. There will be a massive manhunt and tearful, televised appeals by the Hollywood leading lady to the minuscule humanity of the blackmailers. For the greatest dramatic effect, the teenage daughter will turn up dead, which will prompt a massive outpouring of grief-stricken people who will organize candlelight vigils in every city on a scale reminiscent of Britain’s Lady Diana’s tragic death. Outraged politicians will convene congressional hearings wherein burly law enforcement officials with steely eyes and strong jaws will testify before them. They will ask for more more laws, cutting-edge technology, human resources, and sizable budgets. Congress will pass new laws, named after the martyred teenager, and will appropriate the budget requests. Talk shows will expound about how, if the Surveillance Society saved even one life, such an effort will have been well worth it. Needless to say, both conservatives and liberals will milk this tragedy for all it is worth and will definitely make sure it does not go to waste as a golden opportunity for the grand social engineering that would not have been imaginable beforehand.
With 21st century technology at the ready, once every individual has a barcode and an implantable identification chip that will allow government to identify and to track him or her at a distance, we will truly understand what Pierre-Joseph Proudhon meant in his famous 1851 essay “What Is Government?”
“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so.
“To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished.
“It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”
When the Surveillance Society becomes a fact of life next year or the year after that or within the next five years, you, the discerning readers and patrons of The Cassandra Times, will understand why. You will also remember where you read it first.
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June 7, 2012 Update
In an article dated June 6, 2012 and titled “San Francisco To Get Pre-Crime Surveillance Cameras”, (http://www.infowars.com/san-francisco-to-get-pre-crime-surveillance-cameras/), Paul Joseph Watson reports that the City of San Francisco plans to install throughout its public transportation system 288 surveillance cameras manufactured by BRS Labs. BRS Labs’ cameras have also been installed at “tourist attractions, government buildings and military bases in the U.S.” What these cameras do is:
“The cameras are programmed with a list of behaviors considered ‘normal’. Anything that deviates from usual activity is classified as suspicious and guards are immediately alerted via text message or a phone call. Equipped with the ability to track up to 150 suspects at a time, the cameras build up a ‘memory’ of suspicious behavior to determine what constitutes potential criminal activity.”
Watson’s article also reports that law enforcement agencies in Washington, D.C.:
“are already using a software database developed by the University of Pennsylvania that they claim can predict when crimes will be committed and who will commit them, before they actually happen. The technology sifts through a database of thousands of crimes and uses algorithms and different variables, such as geographical location, criminal records and ages of previous offenders, to come up with predictions of where, when, and how a crime could possibly be committed and by who. The program operates without any direct evidence that a crime will be committed, it simply takes datasets and computes possibilities.”
How the mighty have fallen. The City of San Francisco, the capital of the 1960s counterculture, has surrendered its vaunted ideals of liberty to single out for arrest and interrogation its former heroes, its cornucopia of rebels, hippies, eccentrics, flower children, beatniks, weirdos, granolas, and basically everyone whose behaviors are not considered by technocratic algorithms to be “normal”. Washington, D.C., the capital city of the nation that was founded on the lofty ideas of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, has sadly dispensed with individual liberties in favor of the totalitarian nightmare decried in Philip K. Dick’s science fiction stories.
