The Century of Stupid: How We're Sleepwalking into Surveillance.
Is it too late to reclaim our civil liberties as we sink deeper into a world run by algorithms and smart devices?
Photo by Bernard Hermant on Unsplash
Video cameras, or closed-circuit television (CCTV), are becoming a more and more widespread feature of American life. Fears of terrorism and the availability of ever-cheaper cameras have accelerated the trend even more. The use of sophisticated systems by police and other public security officials is particularly troubling in a democratic society. In lower Manhattan, for example, the police are planning to set up a centralized surveillance center where officers can view thousands of video cameras around the downtown – and police-operated cameras have proliferated in many other cities across America in just the past several years.
Although the ACLU has no objection to cameras at specific, high-profile public places that are potential terrorist targets, such as the U.S. Capitol, the impulse to blanket our public spaces and streets with video surveillance is a bad idea. Here are four reasons why:
READ MORE HERE: What's Wrong With Public Video Surveillance? - The Four Problems With Public Video Surveillance
by framersqool:
Probably the most unsettling and disorienting thing for me about the Century of Stupid is how quickly old norms, some of them very, very old, tend to vanish overnight, and in their place come new ones which just a few years or even days before might have been viewed as unthinkable, and certainly intolerable.
I've spoken often about my intense distress over the sudden emergence a dozen or so years back, of extremely powerful handheld supercomputers connected to the internet (and occasionally used for phone calls too), followed by the rapid collision of this hardware with the still-new but rapidly spreading software calling itself 'social media.'
It wasn't just the breakneck pace at which this deviltry took hold of the entire structure of daily life around the world which gave me pause; it was even more the extent to which any form of life which had preceded this era of 'going mobile' just as quickly came to be seen as ancient history, as though anything that came before a world of people going around half-present like eight billion little Elroy Jetsons, glued to their devices and their attention spans never to recover, was now little more than trivia, of a world hardly even worth remembering other than whatever one's thumbs could bring up on Wikipedia about it for a three-minute summary.
When I was first made aware of the State of Oklahoma having gone into the warrantless surveillance racket in order to bypass the rule of law, and quite conspicuously, my first impulse was to think the bit of mail-fraud I'd just opened had to be just that: some kind of scammers had appropriated the State seal and filled up two sides of a sheet of paper with some lame-assed legalese mumbo-jumbo, and started a postal racket to try and deceive a handful of unsuspecting marks into sending them money.
It was the utter absence of any judge's signature, or any indication of any judicial purview in the least, that first tipped me off. This had to be a very clever, but not quite convincing, grift.
Which of course it was, but what I hadn't been braced for was the idea that this really was the State's doing, and that this kind of brazen anti-constitutional vigilantism, of denying any possibility of due process on a misdemeanor complaint and replacing it with a system of bribes paid to the State's prosecution service for it not to enforce the law, might actually be regarded as a legitimate government program.
I wasn't prepared to accept the possibility that a State run for generations by a single very entrenched and very, very corrupt faction could have become that far-removed from the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, which all add up to quite specific-enough prohibitions on government ever being allowed to amass summary-justice powers absent judicial imprimatur, to such an extent.
But there it was.
Having come from the twentieth century myself, I could still vaguely remember at least a concept, a theoretical construct if you like, which held that what is written in the United States Constitution is actually binding on anything passing as law in this country, and that without any such laws being able to withstand constitutional scrutiny, they must be struck down. Kind of the reason we have a federal judiciary to begin with, I recalled from this distant murky analog past...
So of course my grievance against this laughably, defiantly, unlawful surveillance apparatus began in the form of a civil-liberties beef.
And who is it, again, that has claimed for generations to be the final line of defense against civil-liberties abuses?
The A-mer-i-can Ci-vil (stay with me here...) Li-ber-ties.... etc, etc.
So I contacted them, at both the State and national levels.
I should have known from past experience, from my time as a full-time attempted VAWA whistleblower, that my sex and probably my suspected skin color combined would yield me no more result than a boilerplate disclaimer, to the effect of 'civil liberties casework isn't exactly what we do these days, but we appreciate your concerns....'
And I was right.
So I got to wondering, wouldn't the venerable and much-celebrated ACLU have, at some point, taken a position on the potential for civil-liberties abuses in the realm of surveillance technology, generally?
And I found the article linked above.
Note the date: a mere half a year since 9/11, smack in the middle of the short-lived 'United We Stand' fashion craze, when enemies were around every corner, anthrax was in the mail, and if you weren't for us you were against us, so we're off to full-scale-invade a couple of Muslim countries, just in case some of them are hiding over there, or something. Smoking guns, mushroom clouds, something-or-other...
Bearing in mind as well, that this was written before smart phones or social media were a thing, before 'covid', even before banks started bothering to do any due diligence before writing then selling off hundreds of thousands of wink-and-a-nudge home mortgage contracts worth billions of dollars which turned out never to have existed (still referred to routinely in the realty-flipping trade in those days as 'creative financing'....)
So it does have a certain stamp of innocent naivete to it, when read now, during an era when the idea of privacy is held as an anachronistic joke, and who needs it anyway as long as we can have our SmartPay and our SatNav?
So on the topic of doom and predictions of it, one may well have read this back then as at least a tad overstated, if not downright paranoid, while the US Congress was still in the process of beginning to sabotage any remaining concept of civil liberties with such genius plans as a Patriot Act and a Homeland Defense Department.
These things seemed somehow called for at the moment since, after all, what brought those towers down could not possibly have been explosive charges placed carefully by structural demolition experts well before the planned cover story of multiple airliner hijackings was implemented, could it?
Few could imagine, then, a coming world where the question of where one had first picked up on such 'conspiracy theories' would have your name and data placed in a file, and your internet activity accordingly logged for future scrutiny by whoever could afford to buy the data....
And now, being spied on continually just feels so normal, so it's-not-that-bad. Being able to silence a courtroom and have security called with the mere mention of the Constitution just seems reasonable now, I mean, what are you, some kind of troublemaker? Mentally unstable, for sure.
It really didn't surprise me all that much, though I wish it had, that so few thought to recognize the 'covid' farce as just another nail in the coffin of civil liberties, just one more battle in the decades-long crusade not only to strip the concept of personal freedom out of every detail of daily life, but also to create an atmosphere of reflexive suspicion toward anyone who still demanded, Constitutionally, that their own liberty be upheld.
So in the light of a twenty-one-year-old essay on the dangers of excessive and unchecked surveillance, and the knowledge that it has turned out to be way more pervasive and uncontrollable than its author could possibly have envisioned back then, was this a prophecy of doom?
Or, are we now living under the shadow of its more-than-thorough fulfillment?
But does not life, nonetheless, still go on?
And what does that make me, as a person who knew then and still knows now that such dismantling of the rule of law in trade for the rule of devices is a very dangerous direction to take, but yet life still just goes on anyway?
The hardest part for me is putting up with how easily everyone seems to tolerate these naked outrages, even embraces them, and awaits eagerly the emergence of even more infringements of their freedoms, in the form of more and more devices that know better than they do how to get through each day.
Yes, unsettling, and yes, disorienting: to live every day in the full knowledge that this Century of Stupid is probably even more stupid than I can even grasp, and that it will probably get a lot more so. But that life goes on anyway, and that I can do precious little to make these times even slightly less stupid, and must live with how things are anyway.
It occurs to me that the most hazardous development indicated by this new emergence of urban teen mayhem, for absolutely no reason other than something to do of an evening, is that such goings-on are being eagerly sought out by young people who may have never even contemplated the concept of their own future, and live lives which consist only in the form of a permanently unsatisfying present, ruled day in and day out by behavioral cues delivered by printed circuits smarter than they can be bothered to be, where old-world ideas like right and wrong and rule of law and a social contract have barely even entered their world views, or if they have at all, are now seen as a lame joke.
I'm curious to know what your thinking on such things might be.
Oh, and in case I didn't mention it, my latest thing is to order as many three-dollar pamphlet-sized copies of the US Constitution as I can afford each month from Walmart, and pass them out for free to whoever I can think of around town. I have a strong suspicion that for most, it might well be the first time they have ever bothered to read the thing, if they even do.
A guy has to do something....
framersqool is an aging bachelor of no particular consequence. He is in command of more opinions than facts (but occasionally the facts, or the lack thereof) and can make a thing seem worth writing about.