Big Trouble
One of the chilling dimensions of the actual day of September 11, 2001, was the sense that the inevitable retaliation was going to be audacious and unrelenting, and that it was not going to be limited to the groups that actually organized the attack. In subsequent days, some of us speculated that these events were going to have a profound effect on the shape and function of government authority, particularly clandestine activity and military operations. Part of the tragedy was going to be that the attack was the ultimate blank check.
For a few moments, perhaps, when world opinion was sympathetic, there was hope that the government would take the best possible route out of the tragedy, solidifying political power by governing wisely. Now, within sight of the five year anniversary, it appears that virtually every decision subesequent to the attacks advanced the most intrusive, autocratic impulses of the men then in power. [Rumsfeld on Sept. 11: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not." Cheney a few weeks later: Surveil all calls, foreign and domestic, regardless of warrants or laws.] Many people are willing to accept intrusions and curtailing of civil liberties for their own safety. But there has been no serious discussion about what that signifies, what processes and practices are being followed, what values are being abandoned, and what the long-term effects might be.
For that reason, this post by Billmon comes highly recommended. Anyone interested in political philosophy, systems of the state, and the consequences of unregulated bureacracy should settle in and give it a good going over. It’s a tremendously valuable piece of writing. A few highlights:
… It’s understandable that Hobbes would downplay the dangers of an overly strong, excessively centralized state and maximize the risks of a weak, fragmented one, given that the police powers of even the most powerful monarchs of his time were weaker than those currently available to the sheriff of a medium-sized U.S. county. The process by which the state first monopolized the tools of social control and then expanded them to their current monstrous size was still in its infancy. The gulag and the wiretap weren’t even conceivable yet, not even as nightmares. But riots and sectarian hatred were as common in the slums of London and Paris as they are today in the streets of Baghdad, although without the heavy explosives. Hobbes’s Leviathan – for all his attempts to build up its confidence – was really just the largest piranha, swimming in a pool filled with piranhas.
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One reason for that shift in the balance of dread is the rise of a new form of state organization – the bureaucracy, which exists partially inside and partially outside of Hobbes’s three categories of government, borrowed from Aristotle, and their modern equivalents: monarchy (or dictatorship), aristocracy (or oligarchy) and democracy (or the representative republic.) In his introduction to Leviathan, Hobbes describes the state as “an artificial man,” in which the sovereign is the mind, public officials the joints, the justice system the nerves, etc. But the modern bureaucracy (and I would include the modern megacorporation in that category) functions more like a machine, or perhaps a colony of one-celled organisms like a coral or a sponge. It’s essentially mindless, driven by a set of basic imperatives, of which the most relentless is the urge to grow, to expand both in size and power. To paraphrase Edward Abbey: It has the ideology of a cancer cell.
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Some of these data sources are in the public record, and many of the tools listed are standard commercial packages. But when you add it all up — in its Totality, so to speak – you can see the Pentagon is amassing an internal surveillance capability that could, if put through all its paces, outclass anything the old Soviet Union ever brought to bear on its own citizens – at least in terms of the ability to aggregate and analyze vast amounts of personal data very quickly. It may not be quite as good as putting two-way telescreens in every living room (or bedroom) but this warning, from the IT journal Ars Technica, does not sound implausibly paranoid:
The NSA has the tools and the will to compile a shockingly thorough profile of the communications and habits of every American citizen, not at some point in the future, but right now. Go back and read everything you can on Poindexter’s TIA, and know that it is now a reality and has been for some time.
Again, this is alarming not because – or at least, not just because – it’s part of a deliberate conspiracy to turn the United States into a high-tech police state, but because it reflects some powerful, built-in trends that are driving the national security Leviathan in that very direction. …
It’s not merely the intentions of an individual or group of individuals in power that threaten our best ideals. It’s the system of information aggregation, institutional imperatives, hyper-secrecy, and the human psychology of the fear of the other. These systems can be cultivated or restrained by individuals or groups in power, and they can be accepted or resisted by the public at large.
So, are you doing your part yet? My own best guess (considering the vast sphere of influence that is my desk and my PowerBook) is that what we can do is educate ourselves and participate in the political process. We can learn how to organize citizen campaigns and participate in debates online and, more importantly, in real life. The tendency is always toward institutional agglomeration, but in this country, here and now, the public has a chance (and, I believe, a duty) to push back and defend the best of our liberal democratic tradition—which, I will note, includes big-L Liberals and big-C Conservatives, along with everyone else who wants a say the political processes that govern them. A good place to start is right here.
