A house divided against itself can not stand.
Nor can a people, half slave, half free, long endure.
Or we might say in a network-centric world: a society divided between those who manage surveillance, intrusion and data-mining on behalf of the rest of us – and the rest of us, who lack access to the output of that universal engine – will not last forever.
In the meantime, though, we’re in for a bumpy ride. As our President said, freedom doesn’t come cheap.
Make no mistake, these are perilous times, and the stakes are high. There are legitimate needs for intelligence and secrecy but that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about the ripening of a surveillance society that suggests that even prophets like Orwell, Huxley, and Philip K. Dick were not sufficiently paranoid to prepare us for the twenty-first century.
Scott McNealey’s glib admonition about the loss of privacy – “Get over it!” – is no longer the flip realism of a Silicon Valley seer but a sinister warning. Those who have access to information and know what to do with it are free. Those who do not are slaves.
Transparency of political and economic processes is the only way to ensure accountability, but we live in a world in which transparency is increasingly a one-way street. The power to drill down into the data, map patterns and see deviations, the ability to see, period, is vested in fewer and fewer people, the Keepers of the Real, those who Know. We are asked to trust them with this power, but if I recall the words of Lyndon Johnson correctly, trust is when you have them by the cojones and at the moment, it isn’t our hands doing the squeezing.
Meanwhile policies are proposed that make Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus look like child’s play.
Thomas Jefferson advocated free public libraries because he thought the availability of information was essential for a democracy. Contrast that vision with Total Information Awareness, the government plan to cross-correlate data related to travel, credit, the library books we read, everything, but to share that data only among the Keepers of the Real. Meanwhile, the free flow of scientific and technical information – like the flow of foreign scientists and technicians in the flesh – is increasingly throttled.
It’s a real dilemma, isn’t it? In a free society terrorists can use any aspect of the infrastructure as a weapon. Cars can be stopped on roads and bridges, airplanes turned into missiles, subways turned into tombs. The only defense, we are told, is to monitor everything and look for suspicious activity.
But where will it go next? I have said before and will say again that the practices of information security foretell how a society will implement security at all levels. Why? Because information and communication technologies shape the structures of society. Distributed networks give rise to distributed networks. What is necessary in the networked world becomes necessary in the physical world too.
In the realm of computer security, for example, it was recognized that efforts to secure network perimeters often fail because 80% of unlawful intrusions originate with insiders. The logical next step was surveillance of insiders through keystroke logging and anomaly detection so deviations from sanctioned behaviors could be flagged.
In the physical world, too, with its leaky national borders, insiders and outsiders have become impossible to distinguish, so perimeter defense doesn’t work. The logical next step – ubiquitous surveillance and anomaly detection – is exactly what we’re getting.
Cameras are everywhere. If a camera detects a person walking erratically through a parking lot, the person is flagged because they might be stealing a car. That methodology applied to travel, financial transactions, and the other movements that constitute social and economic life in a digital world means that any deviation from the norm, a norm determined by the Keepers, will set off alarms. As the knowledge that we are watched is internalized, we will watch ourselves, doing the job for them.
In addition, the end of a meaningful distinction between insider and outsider has caused the fusion of foreign intelligence and domestic police operations. What we used to call necessary safeguards are deemed irrelevant and a single panoptic eye looks inside, outside, all around.
Ironic, isn’t it? Advocates of the New Economy called for silos to come down, information to flow freely, organizations to restructure, and so they did. But rather than flatten onto a single horizontal plane, hierarchy has been reinvented on a larger scale. The horizontal structures are just bigger branches on taller trees. And at the tree tops are digital images of leaders, stabilizers for their perpetually frightened followers, the inverse of roots.
The geometry of the twenty first century is apparent. There is no outside, there is only an “inside” and the tower from which the Keepers can keep watch. Enemies will be defined as anyone who opposes their power, whether real terrorists, serious journalists, political opponents, or just plain citizens who want to know what’s going on. Secrecy in the name of security will protect not only essential secrets but incompetence and malfeasance as well. Just as a recent proposal from the Department of Justice says that behaviors such as hanging out with terrorists should be interpreted as an implicit request for the revocation of American citizenship, those who deviate from “domestic norms” may also find themselves exiled.
Let’s remember “Echelon” and make a prediction.
Echelon is the name popularly given to the enterprise of intercepting worldwide communications by English-speaking countries. Because American law prevented Americans from spying on other Americans, we relied on our partners to do it for us. As a CIA veteran told me, forgiveness is easier to get than permission. Intercepts were shared in the name of the greater good.
Let’s port that lesson from information security to the physical world.
Assassination was recently decreed by the President to be an acceptable option. Other nations such as Israel are also on record saying they will kill their enemies wherever they can find them.
A recent strike at senior Al Qaeda in Yemen killed an American citizen. The action was tolerable “there,” even if assassinating Americans in America is still off limits. But porous borders make “here” and “there” meaningless, so it’s only a matter of time until American citizens are assassinated “here” too. It will be justified in the name of security and necessity, and just as the identity of the source of some Echelon intercepts was unknown, we will not always know which finger pulls the trigger.
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers was filmed first during the McCarthy era. A thinly disguised allegory, it showed that danger came when we fell asleep.
Nothing is inevitable, Marshall McLuhan said, so long as we are willing to contemplate what is happening. Awareness is the precondition of action, and if there is any moral imperative in our time, it begins with staying awake.
The willingness to stay awake and mobilize our best selves for the battle ahead is the real challenge facing this generation. The President was right. Freedom doesn’t come cheap, and the ones likely to learn that first are the real journalists, real hackers and the real insomniacs.
