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Privacy is Toast,
But No Humble Pie From Obama
Thursday, September 24, 2009
By Beverly Eakman
New American Magazine
Like the Almighty, technology works (or “morphs”) in mysterious ways. Three news stories have emerged in recent days that are indirectly related:
On September 16, Washington Times reporter Audrey Hudson reported, in an exclusive, that the White House is "collecting and storing comments and videos placed on its social-networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube without notifying or asking the consent of the site users." Hudson cites “the National Legal and Policy Center, a government ethics watchdog, which said archiving the sites would have a ‘chilling effect’ on Web site users who might wish to leave comments critical of the administration.” She also cited “Ken Boehm, a lawyer and chairman of the center, [who]…disputed that the presidential records law applies, because the comments are posted onto a third-party Web page and [are] not official correspondence with the president.”
The same day, Washington Times’ reporter Ben Conery (among other sources) reported that the President was seeking, of all things, extensions to three provisions of the Patriot Act, which he had formerly decried. The President wants to keep roving wiretaps (which allows authorities to monitor an individual instead of just a phone number), the business-records seizure clause, and continue monitoring “suspected ‘lone wolf’ terrorists.” But the term “loner” has become abhorrent, as mental health advocates have expanded it to include mavericks, independent thinkers, and people who simply prefer to work alone and get more accomplished. So, will this last provision be used to target folks who “think outside the box” and hold unique viewpoints?
On top of that, Washington Post staff writer Walter Pincus reported that the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, wants to step up counterintelligence and cyber-security among the intelligence communities (that’s a whopping 16 separate agencies) under a new, four-year plan, to “keep abreast of technical innovations and developments in information technology.”
According to the Pincus report, the DNI Director’s intent is increased “collaborative counterintelligence efforts across government agencies to ‘identify, deceive, exploit, disrupt and protect against…threats’ [including] penetrating enemy intelligence agencies [and] employing ‘counterintelligence across the cyber domain to protect critical infrastructure.’” Blair accuses foreign governments “and others” of “stealing, changing or destroying information,” potentially undermining “national confidence in the information systems.”
But just who are these “others” Mr. Blair places in the crosshairs, and why is our government not addressing the danger inherent in predictive technology as it applies to holding Americans hostage for “crimes” not yet committed?
Clearly, all three stories fly in the face of Mr. Obama’s campaign rhetoric about government transparency, concern for privacy, and worries about Bush-era “alarmism” over security — informational and otherwise.
There are two interpretations one could give to the Administration’s turnabout: (1) The President has seen and read intelligence information he was not privy to as a Senator and is suddenly scared to death that something really horrible could come down on his watch, obliterating his (and his liberal colleagues’) reelection prospects; or (2) The President is anxious to move ahead with the imposition of a surveillance society and sees the threat of terrorism as the most expedient route to public acceptance.
Either way, patriotic constitutionalists (the real Conservatives) have been remiss in their efforts to hold elected officials’ feet to the fire over increasing threats to American citizens from computerized cross-matching, tracking, and identification technologies, which is the common thread running through all three stories. The danger to citizens has been a mouse-click away for nearly two decades, and now “the chickens have come home to roost.”
Since the 1990s, attorneys and pundits have issued warnings detailing the ease with which personal information can be accessed, compared, referenced, analyzed, and utilized by agents of government, special interests (like the mental health industry), police, hackers, journalists and cranks. Large-scale psychological profiling actually began with marketing, not on the psychiatrist’s couch, as a means of selling a product to specific socio-demographic groups. The methods soon were picked up by interested parties, especially those with a political agenda, as a means of “selling” ideas, policies, candidates and legislation to specific population blocs.
Obviously, success depended upon the ability to collect information from people in the first place. If the faction “selling” an idea or policy doesn’t know how the target “audience” thinks, chances are slim that any commercial package can be constructed so as to electrify a cautious constituency.
Webster’s New World Communication and Media Dictionary, a staple of marketing agencies, started the ball rolling in the 1980s with a definition of psychographic profiling: “the study of social class based upon the demographics … income, race, color, religion, and personality traits,” adding that these data points “can be measured to predict behavior.”
Virtually nobody picked up on the word “predict,” which should have sent up red flags. Yet, prediction capability is the Holy Grail of opinion molding.
Being able to forecast who will “buy” what — be it a product, a service, a genre of music, or a political candidate — is key to bringing people onboard. Schools, magazines, pollsters, even the government Census (wait till you see the 2012 version!): Suddenly, Americans were inundated with surveys — marketing research by phone, multiple choice and true-false questionnaires in magazines and online polls. Just mail ’em in, hand ’em to your teacher, punch “1” for “yes” or “2” for “no” into your phone, click this or that box, call a toll-free number to “vote” your opinion — it’s all confidential. Why, you don’t even have to give your name.
Then software designers realized they could get your name regardless of the format of your responses. That was the turning point, and the Internet was no exception.
Washington Post staff writer Ariana Eunjung Cha reported that shoppers who return merchandise, for example, were discovering their names and purchase items recorded in a data bank even when they paid in cash. One frequent, mega-buck customer at a clothing chain bought some items she belatedly realized were similar to some she already had, so she returned them. Her receipts were intact, as were the clothes and tags. But a salesperson “handed her a slip of paper that said ‘RETURN DECLINED’ and told her to call the toll-free number for more information. The woman phoned and was informed her account showed ‘excessive returns’.”
Well, duh!
Even if you pay cash, every return requires a name and address that goes where? Into a computer — which is linked to what? A store and a cash register! And most computer databases are linked.
According to the 2004 article, many stores were “rolling out electronic systems that weigh the number of returns and exchanges a person has made, the dollar value of the items, and the dates of transactions to decide whether a consumer should be granted another.” Initially, stores were after people who wore the clothes or otherwise used their purchases, and then returned them.
But technology “morphs.” Soon, a whole lot more is possible than originally intended.
Cha continues: “As more personal information is collected into databases, computers have been handed increasing power to make decisions about our everyday lives. [T]he proliferation of …‘electronic blacklists’ has alarmed consumer and privacy advocacy groups who say many databases have incomplete, incorrect or misleading information.”
Unfortunately, nobody was alarmed enough in 2004.
What government has done since 9/11, essentially, is to use these technologies to create a psychological environment — not so much of fear, but of suspicion and irrationality. Educators, intelligence services and the mental health industry have jumped on the bandwagon, provoking distrust, which has the side-effect of inhibiting logical discussion by disrupting people’s train of thought.
How can people be made to lose their train of thought on a routine basis?
Two ways: diversion and over-stimulation. Read the headlines at the grocery check-out. Study the opening promo on any TV newscast. Go to the cinema and watch the previews. Zip! Boom! Bang! Crash! One is hit with so many graphic images and/or earsplitting sounds (or sound bites) in the space of seconds that to concentrate on any one of them to the exclusion of others becomes a near-impossibility. Even TV football broadcasts are rife with reruns, not merely of the last play, but of plays from three or more different football games, almost simultaneously, followed by a rip-roaring beer or car commercial with out-of-this-world special effects.
The young may in time adapt, despite deliberately chaotic classrooms. Many already are able to continue their text-message in the middle of this cacophony; but most adults cannot do it. The frenetic nature of daily commutes alone, coupled with entertainment and newscasts leaves most people either exhausted, nearly catatonic or in “overdrive” — none which is conducive to maintaining a stream of thought.
So, while the threat of a devastating terrorist attack no doubt is real, it also serves, in the present environment, as the perfect digression for an “extreme makeover” of America — something dictatorial-minded “progressives” have dreamed about for 50 years.
The fact is, most so-called progressives, liberals, and even fiscal conservatives believe people should be regimented and controlled for their own good and that of society. They love humanity in the abstract, but they hate people in the particular; and they certainly don’t trust “the masses.” The Constitution and Bill of Rights, they believe, are filled with nice-sounding phrases, but many notions about personal liberty have been taken off the table, now deemed dangerous in the long term. That is how people like Barack Obama can talk up individual rights in the campaign, then turn around and work to faze them out after the election.
So we shouldn’t be surprised when a 10-year-old homeschooled girl in New Hampshire is ordered into a government-run public school for having "sincerely held" Christian religious beliefs. We shouldn’t be shocked when another 10-year-old in New York is fined for setting up an “unlicensed” lemonade stand. We shouldn’t wonder how a microchip implant can be successfully marketed under names like “the Babysitter,” “the Constant Companion,” and “the Invisible Bodyguard” — allowing not only identification of the subject, but individualized tracking via global positioning system (GPS) technology.
Forty years ago, virtually no one would have accepted any of these affronts.
Frank Luntz, the famous pollster, propagandist, and marketing agent inadvertently explained the new thinking in a segment for Frontline, “The Persuaders,” that also aired in November 2004:
It's all emotion. But there's nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are on vacation, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are happy, we are not [rational]. In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we're actually unhappy….
The mental health industry had already come to the same conclusion.
Chaotic, psychologized classrooms acclimate kids to irrationality early on. William Spady, creator of “outcome-based education” in the 1980s, once said that unless learning appeals to the emotions, it isn’t being done right.
But you will notice that homeschooled kids can carry on a conversation with adults much better than government-schooled children, who mainly just grunt when spoken to. There’s a reason; they can’t articulate a train of thought.
Now, you’d think that, given all the bells and whistles of enhanced technologies like web-trolling, data-collection, cross-matching and cyber-snooping, our nation’s leaders would spend their time going after Internet stalkers, pornographers, spammers, phony credit card dealers, illegitimate drug “companies” and all the other public nuisances that cause you, the taxpayer, to spend hundreds of dollars annually on junk-and-spam filters, caller IDs, shredders and other intercept/obstruction devices. But, no. Instead, it targets the First Amendment. Our gee-whiz technologies are being used, in effect, to intimidate and marginalize people, jeopardizing their careers, on the basis of some politically unacceptable “gotcha” — which, of course, can be reversed in a New York minute.
As the 9/11 crossroads approached, the public was actually beginning to look askance at government intrusion into their personal lives. What President Ronald Reagan said in his presidential campaign resonated with the public. Any pollster could tell in the mid-80s that it wouldn’t be long before the public balked at schemes that smacked of mass surveillance and mandatory “counseling.”
But the ongoing threat of terrorism after 9/11 provided a wedge for proponents of Big Government. They quickly moved to enhance and augment technologies already in the works — like “traffic” cameras, which even local bureaucrats now admit are “surveillance tools.” Without 9/11, such tools might have been nixed by angry taxpayers. But after the attacks, there remained that kernel of doubt, that nagging “what if”: Suppose the link to a terrorist with a dirty nuke is your next-door neighbor! Or the fellow sitting next to you in church!
And increasingly, it seemed that way. Individuals began flying out of control at an alarming rate — just as new, prescribed psychiatric cocktails hit the market. Few stopped to wonder whether the drugs were the cause or the effect, as most hadn’t been around long enough to establish a track record. But with every new rampage, mental health gurus would allege the incident “proved” the perpetrator was “sick” and therefore needed the medication. And thus ended the debate.
Except it wasn’t logical, not if one reviewed crime over the past 50 years. But few weighed in on the issue, much less held their own in a discussion.
Today, government launches “trial balloons” to gauge the level of animosity toward intrusive maneuvers. They count on folks not being able to concentrate long enough to unearth a third-party grant or contract (as in the current flap surrounding Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), for which no one, including Congress, seems to be able to nail down the source of funding, foreign or domestic.) What experts have found is that after the initial surprise or shock wears off, people become acclimated (information and sensory overload, remember?), and give up.
For example, folks were shocked five years ago to learn that merchandise was being tracked to retail destinations and even to end-purchasers, when it was reported that Wal-Mart had started putting wireless radio tracking chips in underwear. This was followed by news that RFID (radio frequency identification) technology was being copied by lots of retailers (Target, Albertson’s, Sam’s Clubs, Ford Motor Company) as well as by various “business interests” for more obscure purposes (e.g., Intermec Technologies; Symbol Technologies; System Concepts); and even by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
But after the initial (and predictable) bursts of ire, people got on with their lives.
So here we are in 2009, conceding that our privacy is now illusory, that one’s personal opinions and private information are no longer sacred (or even confidential), and that one’s very thoughts are likely the result of a surreptitious marketing campaign. Yet, people miss the larger picture contained in the news stories cited at the beginning of this article. A case can be built against us on the basis of perceived intolerance, insecurity, inflexibility or any number of things, effectively blacklisting us from jobs, news coverage and even from homeschooling our kids. Microchips are now must-have items for subway cards, credit cards and building “key cards”; we allow our whereabouts to be tracked on a continuous basis.
How did we get ourselves into this mess? Suspicion was the bait; “mental illness” served as the enabling agent; and laxity toward true criminals brought us full-circle, back to suspicion. That’s how.
Yet, like the proverbial ostrich, we say a police state cannot happen here.
Beverly Eakman is an Educator, 9 years: 1968-1974, 1979-1981. Specialties: English and Literature.
Science Editor, Technical Writer and Editor-in-Chief of official newspaper, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1974-1979. Technical piece, "David, the Bubble Baby," picked up by popular press and turned into a movie starring John Travolta.
Chief speech writer, National Council for Better Education, 1984-1986; for the late Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Commission on the Bicentennial of the US Constitution, 1986-1987; for the Voice of America Director, 1987-1989; and for U.S. Department of Justice, Gerald R. Regier, 1991-1993.
Website: BeverlyE.com
NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. For further information please refer to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
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