Monday 10 June 2013

roy g. biv or the dark side of the moon

It's not as if out of the blue, the US intelligence agencies now can see us as God and the Angels or Santa Claus—not quite or that the congress of private individuals, businesses and the negotiations of statesmanship was heretofore above snooping and observation, but still to be confronted with the brute and raw data, the scope and depth, is chilling. Already, America has demanded the flight-manifests of passengers world-wide and has become a clearing-house of financial transactions, bullying those reluctant to play along into submission. The herding instinct, strength in numbers kept us safe individually. Underscoring the tribunal of fellow-sieve Bradley Manning, a contractor with the nebulous National Security Agency could no longer face the sinister realities, of course assumed but danced around and it turns out veiled with a spindly cover of lies and false-modesty.
Thank goodness that there are individuals with the strength of convictions to speak out and force the erosion of privacy—long beat up but rarely addressed in earnest, since these quantified revelations, billions, trillions of data elements per month profiling citizens all around the world, drag-net style, like cases of industrial espionage, political baiting and spy-rings tend to create an overall confessional mood. Perhaps the owning up will be more than the fessing up that all intelligence agencies spy on one another but might inspire some more whistle-blowing. How could the German Chancellor greet the American President next time, from a background where the private-sphere is enshrined and protected and discussed and debated and shake hands with an equal who has basically appointed himself as her parole-officer, knowing more intimate details (at least anything with an electronic finger-print) than the Stasis without a blush of anger and feeling violated on behalf of the people she represents—not that Germany was more or less of a target than any other nation, the USA included.

What does such a discovery mean for the efforts of other countries and organizations fighting for increased protections for privacy and the right to be forgot? Since this information is unlikely to ever be purged, even if the zealous grab is relaxed and promises of safe-keeping are extended, do sovereign attitudes and latitudes become even more irrelevant, regardless of whether the data is transited through the States or not? And as for safe-keeping, despite a lot of people with consciences, there are unending and grand-standing scandals not to be out done of violations of public trust, from targeting certain affiliations to be put through the wringers to legions of baggage checkers who steal from passengers' luggage and just general self-important people with a quantum of authority to abuse. This outrage against the world, I think, won't settle quietly, in spite and because.