Welcome to part 4 of ThePete.Com's Big Brother Week! Today, I'm going to cover how our technology can be turned against us. Well, it's not always "our" technology as you'll see.
One of the sucker plays big brother pulls in order to get us to give up our freedoms is by telling us something is for our own good. Remember when you were a kid and your parents told you how you had to eat your spinach? I remember mine telling me it was for my own good. Then they used Popeye as a reason for me to do what they told me.
Well, as adults we need things to be a bit more subtle before we fall for this kind of scheme. One of the things big brother is always said to be horny for is playing the uber-voyeur. In George Orwell's book,
1984, the government would place these view-screens in everyone's homes. Citizens could be looked in on, but they couldn't look back out at those watching them. After 911, cameras started popping up all over the place. We were told they were for our own good--they'd fight crime, lower traffic accidents and keep us safer. Of course, we didn't think of these cameras as the view-screens from
1984 because we all own cameras and these were all in public places. If you didn't want to be recorded, you just don't go to where these cameras are.
The catch is, these cameras could be anywhere. Hell, reasonable quality cameras are in almost every cell phone now. They use nightvision cameras in movie theater to stop bootleggers (but don't get frisky with your date!) and cameras almost intentionally hidden in traffic light posts to allow authorities to keep an eye on high crime areas--or where lots of people travel on foot.
The reason this is bad is because it turns us all into suspects. Each one of us are looked at as potential criminals and should the people watching us make a simple mistake of misidentification, it is the citizen who pays the price. Sure, he may not be convicted in a trial, but it's totally unjust that he got arrested and detained in the first place, isn't it?
What's even worse is that some people want to see even more of an uber-voyeuristic reality come true. Check out this cutting from [http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/14/smile-youre-on-big-brothers-in-plane-camera/|a February 14, 2007 post] at Engadget.com:
The folks in the UK aren't laissez-faire about this Big Brother thing one bit, them and Germany are throwing £25 million (bout $49 million US) at the "problem" of monitoring airline passengers with small cameras and microphones in every single seat back to monitor for suspicious behavior. The system will be able to detect rapid eye movements, excessive blinking, twitches, whispers or other symptoms of somebody trying to conceal something, and check the data against individual passenger profiles for alerting the crew to a potential terrorist.
Nice, so not only can you not sneak a little nookie from your significant-othery travel companion, but if you exhibit signs of nervousness or fidgiting, you just might get tagged as a terrorist. Too bad you were only upset about the dead uncle whose funeral you were flying to Bristol for, or perhaps you just got fired and are flying home to mom's. You could even be
afraid of flying and find yourself showing off the symptoms of being a mad bomber.
But you know, it's for your own good. Their might be a terrorist on the plane. Don't you want him to be caught?
Of course, odds are that you will NEVER EVER fly with a terrorist aboard the same plane as you. Once again, cameras and microphones in every seat turns every single person who flies into a suspected criminal.
Switching gears back to a technology I blogged on [http://thepete.com/big-brother-week-real-id-act-and-states-rights/|earlier in the week], [http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/14/hitachis-rfid-powder-freaks-us-the-heck-out/|another February 14, 2007 post] at Engadget.com reports that RFID chips are about to get smaller. MUCH smaller. Check out this cutting:
As if the various other permutations and teensyness of RFID weren't wild enough, here comes Hitachi with its new "powder" 0.05mm x 0.05mm RFID chips. The new chips are 64 times smaller than the previous record holder, the 0.4mm x 0.4mm mu-chips, and nine times smaller than Hitachi's last year prototype, and yet still make room for a 128-bit ROM that can store a unique 38-digit ID number.
Yeah, that's right--they're calling it
powder. You could dust a donut with this stuff and make a fat cop trackable anywhere there is a RFID chip reader without him even knowing he's being tracked. Once again, according to the Engadget post, we are told this powder is for our own good--it will be used to help prevent counterfeiting. However, the potential nefarious uses are obvious.
Speaking of cops and tracking people without there knowledge, check out a cutting from [http://www.engadget.com/2007/02/04/court-rules-that-sly-gps-tracking-isnt-unlawful/|a February 4, 2007 post] at Engadget.com:
Earlier this month, the Seventh Circuit of the US Court of Appeals "ruled against a defendant who claimed that the surreptitious placement of a GPS tracking device amounted to an unconstitutional search," essentially giving the coppers the green light to add a GPS module to a suspicious ride sans a warrant. While we're sure the privacy advocates out there are screaming bloody murder, the district judge found that they had had a "reasonable suspicion that the defendant was engaged in criminal activity," and it seems that a well-placed hunch is all they need for lawful placement.
The quote from the Engadget post says it all. If they think you're up to something, they can track you. Forget the fact that they are humans and that all humans can make mistakes. These guys can follow you where ever you go because, well, it's legal now.
Don't forget that bigbrotherists don't have to be members of the government. In the ultimate nightmare scenario corporations and government are one in the same, only appearing to be separate. In that brand of bigbrothery you will see corporate folks wanting to "keep prices down" by "foiling bootleggers", aka, doing it for your own good. A recent example of a corporation overextending it's reach into it's customers privacy is reported [http://www.internetnews.com/xSP/article.php/3659401|in a February 12, 2007 article] at InternetNews.Com:
Google's YouTube and a company called Live Digital will offer no refuge to users who uploaded pirated copies of Fox Television's "24" and "The Simpsons" onto their video platforms.
In an e-mail to internetnews.com, a 20th Century Fox Television spokesperson said that Google and Live Digital complied with subpoenas issued by the U.S. District Court in Northern California and disclosed to Fox the identities of two individuals who illegally uploaded entire episodes of "24" prior to its broadcast and DVD release.
So, to protect Fox's copyrighted material, they're willing to go to the government and get them to demand that Google, a company that promises to do no evil, give up the names of anyone who posts said copyrighted material. And for what? Can Fox prove how much money they're losing when someone uploads an episode of
24 to YouTube.com? They can't. Yet they're able to go after you like it's a crime anyway. Imagine if you told the police that someone had stolen a painting of yours. You painted it and you saw it through the living room window of your neighbor. Yet, you still have your painting on the wall of
your living room. So, how have you lost money, exactly?
So, in the end we see that the very technology we thought would help our lives is actually turned against us by the very companies that provide said technology to us in the first place.
OK, be sure to swing by tomorrow for the final installment of ThePete.Com's Big Brother Week where I present ways how Hollywood is worshiping at the temple of Bigbrothernity.
