Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Their Own Self
FRED Columns
Birthing The Ogpu
Chronicles Of The Galloping Sovietization
It's going fast now. Not just the searches and growing federalization
of law enforcement, but now the military as secret police. It's getting
dark out there. I'm going to burrow into Tahiti with a brown maiden,
change my name to Oogawaga, and hope they overlook me.
In Chicago on the flight to Guadalajara I was as usual detail searched
by domestic aboriginals. They say searches are random, but they are
lying. They would be random if mediated by a random-number generator,
which they aren't. Somebody chooses who to harass. If you have a beard
and a cowboy hat, or wear a Harley shirt, they'll randomly select you
at least once per trip. I promise.
Which has nothing to do with security. They are searching people of
whose appearance they disapprove. Priss cops.
I had my scuba gear in a shoulder bag. Our highly trained security
mechanics pawed at it like monkeys who had found a fruit basket. Great.
Kink the hose near a connection and I suddenly don't have air at 130
feet. One of these frauds pulled out my dive computer. He looked as
if he wasn't sure whether to inspect it or peel it.
"What is this?" he asked.
"A coconut," I didn't say, or I would still be in jail. I did say,
"A dive computer."
He looked at it without comprehension, then asked me again what it
was. Presumably he suspected that it might have turned into something
else in the intervening two seconds. It's how dive computers are. One
minute a computer, the next minute a rainbow-colored unicorn.
Brainless thoroughness complemented thorough brainlessness. They pulled
everything out, knowing what none of it was, and stuffed it back in,
having accomplished nothing. The exercise was pointless. I had two dive
lights containing twelve C-cells. They could have been carefully sealed
Semtex. The dive computer could have been full of C4.
And the airlines wonder why people fly less.
Tell you what. I'm going to call Homeland Security in an Arabic accent
and say, "We sending suicide bomber, he haff explosive prostate. Heeheehee!"
Then I'll buy railroad stocks.
Anyway, to continue the grisly chronicles of unwanted security:
Having reached Guad, I was chowing down on really great ribs at Bruno's
when a buddy handed me a printout from the Washington Times.
First sentence: "Language tucked inside the Homeland Security bill will
allow the federal government to track the e-mail, Internet use, travel,
credit-card purchases, phone and bank records of foreigners and U.S.
citizen in its hunt for terrorists."
Bingo. I told you it would happen, but I thought it would be slower-a
gradual linking of DMV records state to state, police records becoming
electronically available, and so on. Nope. We're going for the whole
totalitarian enchilada at once. Yes indeedy. The Mommy State is going
to watch us very carefully. For our own good.
Better yet, the Defense Department is going to run the Total
Information Awareness program. (I didn't make that name up. I couldn't.
TIA in Spanish means "aunt," which fits. Aunty will keep an eye on us.)
Yep. The military is going to be another federal police force. You want
to be watched, don't you? It's so we won't be terrorists.
Says the Times "Computers and analysts are supposed to use
all this available information to determine patterns of people's behavior
to detect and identify terrorists…."
Patterns of behavior. Data mining. If you have lunch three times at
Kabob Bazaar, and charge ammunition at the shooting range where you
take your daughter plinking, and read a book on torpedo design because
you like military history-the computers will kick your name out, and
the feds will show up to ransack your life.
I'd rather have the terrorists.
Note the attempt to sneak this cybernetic Stalinism surreptitiously
into law. Legalizing unlimited surveillance of everybody is not trivial.
If a worse law has been passed, I am unaware of it. You don't try to
make massive changes in the tenor of society without mentioning it to
the society. The White House knows this.
But that is exactly the scam being worked. It is underhanded, deliberately
deceptive, far more dangerous to the country than Moslem terrorists.
It is the product of minds that have no idea of how America is supposed
to work.
If you think Aunty is going to be used only to fail to catch terrorists,
you are kidding yourself. Knowledge is power. It gets used. I'm from
Washington. I know. For example, the congressman who decides not to
run again because his political enemies have discovered his taste for
little boys. It happens.
Who of us doesn't have some skeleton moldering in the crawlway? Do
you want your wife to know about the time at the Watermelon Growers
convention when you ended up in the sack with that gal who, though married,
wasn't married to you? You probably aren't going to make waves, are
you?
Once the barrier is breached between governmental and private records,
surveillance will grow like kudzu-so that we will be safe. If the government
can have access to all existing records to protect us, it will shortly
want to create new ones to protect us. At Fort Meade in Maryland broods
the National Security Agency, which is not supposed to, and may not,
spy domestically. It has phenomenal capacity for intercepting, decrypting,
collating, storing. Just the thing for prospecting for terrorists, don't
you think? You can bet the Homeland Security people have thought.
Fear not, though. These same Homeland Security people have said that,
why no, they would never, ever, do anything wrong, and they even have
a Privacy Officer to make sure. What could be more reassuring?
Building a system to spy on Americans, the government assures us that
it won't use it to spy on Americans, and to protect us against the possibility,
the government will provide a Privacy Officer who works…for the government.
I never thought I could possibly want Clinton back. The man was a detestable,
lying, libidinous psychopath who did chunky interns, looted the White
House, and sold pardons like an escapee from Chaucer-but he begins to
look like a mere amiable clown. Bush means business.
If you are ever in Papeete, ask for Oogawaga.
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