By Bob Boldt
Someone recently asked me what I thought about a statement attributed to persecuted whistleblower, Thomas Drake: “If everything is a target, there is no target.” I said I thought that what he was driving at was, the bigger the haystack the harder to find the needle. When you collect everything on everybody, the amount of data is so overwhelming that anything relevant is nearly impossible to find.
The dirty little unspoken secret is they don’t care even one wit about finding any needle. Their real goal is behavior control. Watched people behave quite differently from the way they do under an expectation of privacy. Because you don’t know if they are watching you or not, you have to assume they are. The real purpose of universal surveillance is not catching “bad guys” but controlling the population with the least amount of actual effective surveillance. If you believe what the NSA people tell you, that they are protecting you, you are believing a lie. Your government has no more interest in protecting you than it has in protecting the rest of the world from Capitalism.
Remember Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon?
The idea of the Panopticon was to enforce behavior or sense of control. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on him an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no danger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are madmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there are no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of the distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents.
–from Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison,
by Michel Foucault
 |
| Image from the 2006 German film, The Lives of Others |
By the time East Germany collapsed in 1989, the Stasi employed 91,015 employees and 173,081 informants. About one of every 63 East Germans collaborated with the Stasi.
| Copyright © 2015 by Bob Boldt |
Bob,
ReplyDeleteInteresting article.
I have an amusing experience with the East German Stasi in the past. In the early '70s I was doing research on my doctoral thesis on the customs union among German states, the Zollverein of 1834, in the Humboldt University, Berlin, located in East Berlin. The university turned out to have a large collection on contemporary pamphlets pro and contra the proposed union. It was impossible to read them all.
So I wrote doown the titles and their call numbers on a block of paper, to be able to order them by inter-library loan from a West German university library. This system was working well between East and West.
On the way back to West Berlin via the subway one had to pass a policed barrier in the station on the Alexanderplatz, wherer they searched my bags, running into many pages of my lists of booklets and the, unusual and suspicious looking - for them - call numbers.
They thought they had caught an American spy, shunted me into a back office where they wanted to grill me.
When the suspicious and hostile Stasi captain started out on his questions I answered with a loud laughter and said that nobody in the Stasi had apparently ever been in a library before, implying that they were an evidently stupid bunch.
He was stunned. Nobody had ever told him that they were stupid before.
My laughter cost me a further hour of questioning. They wanted to somhow punish me.
But it was worth it to see perplexed expression in the man's face.
Rolf Dumke
Rolf, I would love to have heard your laugh and heard the startled reaction – except for the extra hour's grilling!
DeleteYou are lucky all your laughter merited you was an extra hour of questioning. Figures of authority dread humor most of all. This is evident if you have been around a TSA agent or a policeman lately.
DeleteBob, thanks for showing how modern surveillance of whole populations embodies the 1949 vision of George Orwell's novel 1984 and Jeremy Bentham's early 19th-century idea for disciplinary institutions, the Panopticon. I had somehow missed (or failed to remember) hearing about Bentham's Panopticon.
ReplyDeleteHave you heard of the "Auto-icon"? From Wikipedia's entry on Bentham: "[Bentham's] skeleton and head were preserved and stored in a wooden cabinet called the 'Auto-icon' [photo], with the skeleton padded out with hay and dressed in Bentham's clothes. Originally kept by his disciple Thomas Southwood Smith, it was acquired by University College London in 1850. It is normally kept on public display at the end of the South Cloisters in the main building of the college; however, for the 100th and 150th anniversaries of the college, and in 2013, it was brought to the meeting of the College Council, where it was listed as 'present but not voting'."