ACLU’s National Executive Director Anthony D. Romero recently came into town as the keynote speaker for the local group’s Bill of Rights event. Romero cited the attack on civil liberties as one of the nation’s challenges for 2006. With the recent discovery of domestic wiretapping ordered by Bush playing at commander-in-chief, we are entering the murky waters of national security.
The justification for intruding on our privacy and civil liberties are always to protect us.Americans have been served up every boogey monster possible to scare us into submission. We are afraid of terrorists, black men and Islam. If all of these reside in the same body, there’s tripled fear. Sometimes we’re simply afraid of what lies ahead.
A Los Angeles Times poll revealed that while the juvenile crime rate and victimization was the lowest in 25 years, 80 percent of the respondents said their personal fear of crime had increased dramatically. In the nineties, the national crime rated dropped by 20 percent, yet news coverage of crime increased by 83 percent. I’ve checked out the nightly news in many a city, and I can vouch for the high percentage of grisly crime accounts.
Between domestic crime and international terrorists, the government has convinced us that we need more than ghost busters to keep us safe. Ergo biometrics, ergo electronic wiretapping, ergo geo spatial web, ergo the Patriot Act and there go our civil liberties.
Not only is this sophisticated, high-tech monitoring quietly invading our daily lives, there are average citizens (innocently, but fearfully) asking for them. At one city ward meeting, a concerned citizen innocently, but fearfully, asked if cameras could be put on her street to deter crime. Now, I’m scared!
The government has contracted with four companies to come up with a “Tell-all Chip” for passports that would contain biometric information as well as personal data. Now I’m really scared!
Biometrics is when the flesh meets technology to give us face recognition, hand geometry, retina scanning and other means of data collection. Geo webbing is taking digital mapping to a whole new level. The technology is so savvy that a lot of this surveillance can and does happen during your routine, perhaps even mundane, life. The 100,000 football fans who were scanned as they entered the 2001 Super Bowl game in Tampa don’t know where their biometric information ended up.
The way children are being snatched out of homes, cars and the arms of their mothers, we will see computer chips embedded into infants at birth in the not-so-distant future. Parents will demand it and the public will approve it.
The question becomes: is it necessary to monitor hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens in search of a few terrorists? Some – maybe even many – may say yes. I say let’s negotiate on when, how, why and on whom does spying and data collection happen.
I must admit, it will be a challenge to get a bunch of scary cats to have an objective discussion about fear-reducing techno products that are designed to address fear-producing situations.