It’s been expected and feared so long: that, one day, government would develop the ability to watch everywhere we go and record everything we do, say, and read, with the implication that — someday, if it doesn’t want us to be a certain way, or do certain things — it could instantly know and then act on it.
In other words: total monitoring and perhaps even, in the Owellian nightmare of “Big Brother,” total control (including over politics and religion).
That has been the fear, and for decades it seemed a bit of a stretch.
Hopefully, in the end, it will prove to be that — paranoid.
But the fact is that we have reached the point — logistically and technologically — where such control, if orchestrated between governmental agencies, can now be realized.
Recent revelations about the National Security Agency show that along with other intelligence units it has the capability of reading any of our e-mails and in some cases — whereby threats to national security are feared — it has done that.
Rather stunningly, it has also been revealed that government technicians can monitor the keystrokes of a computer that’s online and even turn a person’s computer on (a television reporter who was investigating delicate intelligence information has testified that her own laptop was firing up on its own in the middle of the night).
They can take control of your computer.
They can be there in your iPad as you blithely search the internet.
What else can the government do — and in some cases already is doing?
Agencies have access to our telephone records (everyone we call) and can monitor bank and credit card transactions. Verizon was recently forced, by court order, to provide the NSA (America’s largest eavesdropping agency) with telephone data (on a daily basis).
Meanwhile, we have just about become the cashless society so many “paranoids” warned about: allowing not only for government monitoring but also potential control over our funds (by freezing them).
Our passports have microchips.
So do many people (for medical reasons).
They have these devices under their skin.
Soon, fingerprints will be a means of electronic identification.
There is iris recognition technology (your eyes are like fingerprints).
Our cars can be tracked by satellite.
The auto licenses in our wallets have barcodes.
Airport security is all but totalitarian.
We are “x-rayed” by body scanners at checkpoints (actually it’s a new technique using millimeter waves) and shaken down.
As soon as we buy an airline ticket, or check in at the airport, computers instantly present detailed information about us.
Try crossing the border to and from Canada these days.
At airports, your checked luggage is often inspected.
Much of it only makes sense — and protects us. Who would want to fall from the sky in a bombed plane?
But terrorism has given Big Government a blank check, and that’s of concern when one considers how readily a government such as that in the U.S. could exert itself to a much greater degree than heretofore. To wit:
We all know how many red-light cameras there now are, not to mention private and government security cameras.
When criminals are apprehended these days, it’s often because they have been seen on an array of such cameras, which are in stores, at banks, in parking lots, and even at toll booths and on some highways (such as I-95).
In England a study showed that there are an incredible 1.8 million security cameras (one for every thirty-two citizens). Many of us are photographed dozens of times a day.
One cable television company even wants to put cameras in its television boxes so it can judge audience response to shows.
Such is the technology.
Intelligence technicians can take control of certain smartphones and — using the microphones — listen into conversations that way.
One has only to use Google Earth to realize the capabilities government must have to view us from above.
Decades ago, spy agencies could photograph a license plate from satellites. We can only guess at the capabilities now (including listening abilities). Recent reports have shown that government technicians have been recording car license plates on the road. License plate locations are tracked.
Use a Google GPS on a Droid device and when you come to your destination it will often be able to flash a photograph of the home or business!
There are also drones — miniaturized spy planes that in foreign countries have been used to kill terrorist suspects as cameras record the action live, allowing those remotely controlling them to watch the kill.
What else — and who else — can drones watch?
All these capabilities — and ones we don’t know about — are in wide use in a daunting array of agencies.
The NSA has thousands of employees (the exact number is secret, though there are 18,000 parking spaces at its Maryland headquarters) and the Central Intelligence Agency employs thousands more (the exact number is likewise undisclosed). There are intelligence agencies in each branch of the military (such as Naval Intelligence), and there are also: the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and research, the Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence, the Department of Energy’s Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, and Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis.
To think that such an awesome array of agencies — at least sixteen of them (one, the C.I.A. with an undisclosed budget) — could coalesce into Big Brother is anything but an unreasonable concern.
Approximately $100 billion is spent each year on “intelligence.”
And it is all under the National Intelligence Director.
This doesn’t take into account state intelligence bureaus; there is also the Federal Bureau of Investigation — which is under the national director of intelligence and has more than 30,000 employees.
Who’s watching you? Or will? And where? And how?
And why?
And when?
