John Chuckman
EXPANSION OF A COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY LEE CAMP IN CONSORTIUM NEWS
“While Pandemic Destroys So Many Lives, The Surveillance State Celebrates”
If they’re able to track [coronavirus rules] “violators” who follow within a flying spit particle of someone else, then it stands to reason they could choose to track pretty much any other type of behavior
I'm sorry, people can satirize and rant and criticize all they want, but the surveillance state is here to stay.
Americans already permitted layer after layer to be built around them - the FBI, the Patriot Act, the NSA's intrusion into everything, the American high-tech and Internet service industries becoming auxiliaries in information harvesting for the Dark State.
As capabilities with technology increase, we will only see a deeper burrowing into the fabric of society.
There is no other direction this can go, because there is no one with real power in America – such as the leaders of both political parties and the plutocrats they serve, to say nothing of the pervasive, resource-consuming military-security apparatus - who wants it any other way.
Technology is wonderful, but it changes things, changes them forever. And it does that just as surely in the service of darkness as in the service of light.
And from the point of view of those with power, voices like Edward Snowden’s are naïve and even dangerous. They represent a form of instability or anarchy.
Indeed, the very definition of what is light or dark depends on your point of view, and the point of view of those with power is entirely different from that of those who have no power.
I’m pretty sure that all real meaning of “privacy” and of many traditional “rights” in a society such as America are on their way to becoming as obsolete as butter churns.
Just consider, digital currencies are going to replace traditional bank notes. Every transaction anyone ever makes then will be recorded.
And it cannot be long before we have AI that can transcribe what you are thinking. You will be able to hide nothing.
