The Birth of The American Political Prison
Several day ago, the news broke that U.S. President George W. Bush has authorized the state security apparatus to spy on American citizens without due process of law. In that time, I have struggled to decide how to address such a serious issue. The only thing that saddens me more than Bush's fundamentally misguided decision to spy on The People, is The Peoples' unwavering resolve not to care about it, let alone do anything about it.
Fortunately, even the mass media has publicized this issue, and writers around the nation are making the arguments that need to be made against domestic surveillance. That is pretty easy to do, since those arguments are perfectly obvious to anyone who understands the most basic principles upon which the United States of America was founded (i.e., support for personal liberty, and opposition to government tyranny).
So I've decided to use this opportunity to explain how a virtual prison like the American Debtors Prison orginates, because what President Bush has effectively done by authorizing domestic spying is to inadvertently authorize the creation of The American Political Prison.
First and foremost, the American Debtors Prison is a virtual prison, in which the "chains" that bind are actually the electronic transfer of personal information about debtors from one place to another. For example, if a debtor defaults for any reason and begins to be terrorized by collection agents, they could previously move to another location ("skip"), re-establish their ability to earn an income without interference from collections terrorists, and return to a position of financial stability that would allow them to repay their defaulted debts. The electronic transfer of personal information in the American Debtors Prison makes "skipping" all but impossible today, because the instant a debtor establishes residence in another location, collection agencies know about it. And collectors will immediately begin to interfere with the debtor's ability to earn an income just as before, by terrorizing them at home and at their new job, illegally revealing their defaulted debts to new co-workers in a misguided attempt to coerce payment, etc. There is no escape from the American Debtors Prison by non-miraculous means, because the electronic transfer of personal information allows anyone to track any other person, anywhere, at any time. The American Debtors Prison has utterly annihilated the concept of personal privacy, in the most profound sense imagineable.
But what is domestic spying, if not a fundamental invasion of privacy in a nation that prides itself on constitutional guarantees of personal liberty? The U.S. government does not have warehouses full of people listening to phone calls live, reading emails as they are sent, or otherwise introducing a human interpretation into the vast amount of personal information they gather. Just like the credit bureaus, which claim to be able to determine unique human beings' characters by creating a standardized scoring system based on nothing but data of dubious authenticity and credibility that is stored in computers, the U.S. governement analyzes the bulk of its data using computers to "listen" for certain words in your telephone calls, using computers to scan emails for certain words and codes, etc. It is all done by computers--the very same kind of computers that give us the "blue screen of death" at the most crucial times in our own daily use of computing technology.
In other words, the U.S. government's ability to discern anything meaningful about a typical subject's intent is no different than credit bureaus' ability to discern anything meaningful about a typical debtor's intent. The government can't discern anything meaningful at all about peoples' intent by merely intercepting their communications and using computer programs to analyze discrete examples of their language and behavior out of context. Especially in the United States, where The People are supposedly enjoy freedom of speech, analyzing that free speech with computer programs cannot possibly lead to accurate assessments of real peoples' character and intent. (Human analysis cannot succeed in that regard either, for that matter). For example, do YOU know anybody who says one thing, and does something completely different? Or more to the point, do you know anybody who doesn't?
Here's an example from the American Debtors Prison: A debtor's credit report generates a score that classifies him as "high risk", which naturally implies that the computer program which generated that score was somehow able to discern details of his character. However, when a human being investigates the matter, she may discover that something entirely different is really going on. Perhaps the debtor fell "off the radar" because he is working 80 hours a week doing odd-jobs for the enormous amount of cash necessary to hire an attorney who can negotiate with his creditors, precisely because he intends to repay his debts. After all, the American Debtors Prison itself prevents debtors from obtaining gainful employment through normal channels, so it only makes sense that many debtors prisoners would be forced to go "off the radar" if they are to survive at all. Conscious attempts to elude tracking by predatory lenders and terrorist collection agents does not necessarily mean that everyone who "skips" is trying to run away from their debts. It can just as easily mean they are diligently trying to repay their debts by the only means creditors have left available to them (which literally requires them to "run away" from collection agents, since collections terrorism represents a major, if not an insurmountable obstacle to earning an income with which to repay debts).
No computer program can discern an individual's true intent by merely cataloguing and classifying a tiny subset of the nearly infinite variety of possible human responses to extraordinary stimuli like collections terrorism. But the credit bureaus claim they can identify a true "deadbeat" by simply scoring whatever inaccurate, contradictory, incomplete information exists in their databases. And so does the U.S. government claim that it can identify a true "terrorist", using essentially the same criteria.
In other words, domestic spying is about as reliable at identifying terrorists as credit reports are at identifying "deadbeats". Which is to say, it is not reliable at all.
Yet all of that information the U.S. government gathers about its citizens in its futile attempts to identify terrorists does go somewhere. It goes into various files and databases, where it may be lost, stolen, or shared with other government agencies. This massive dissemination of personal information, taken completely out of context, and rarely if ever interpreted by intelligent human beings, is analogous to the credit bureaus' endless quest to gather, store and distribute personal information about consumers. The end result is a glut of so much dubious information that there is no conceivable way to analyze it at all and arrive at accurate conclusions. So the agencies who gather, share, and analyze so much data have no choice but to resort to heuristics (analytical shortcuts) instead.
In this way, a teenager who borrows a library book about the Manhattan Project for a book report can be flagged by some government computer program as a "potential" terrorist. And that is the status this citizen will possess in top-secret government databases until an intelligent human being finally investigates the matter and "clears" him. If no intelligent human ever researches this, that citizen will carry the label of "potential terrorist threat" for the remainder of his or her life, without even being aware of the fact--until it suddenly becomes a weapon to be used against him (perhaps when he runs for President of the United States 30 years later--because he is a good citizen and a patriotic American). This is precisely what happens to debtors prisoners when they suddenly realize what financial institutions and credit bureaus have been doing to them all along, quietly, behind the scenes, without their knowledge, until it was too late.
President Bush's decision to spy on American citizens is not only an attack against everything the United States of America stands for, it is an example of exactly what we should be fighting against in the so-called War on Terror. There is probably nothing Osama Bin Laden would love more than to make American citizens distrust each other to the point where democracy, freedom, liberty, constitutional rights, rational thought, and simple human decency grind to a halt in the United States, causing us to destroy ourselves with no effort at all on his part. President Bush is making Bin Laden's dream come true.
Likewise, if it were possible, the credit bureaus would store every detail of your personal life, right down to a play-by-play of every action you take, every moment of every day. Why? Because they have carefully cultivated a mythology in our society that they, and they alone, are able to discern a citizen's true character and intent--as long as the credit bureaus have enough personal information to feed into their computer programs and generate a score. The simple-minded theory they proffer is this: the more information you plug into the computer, the more accurate the result will be. It is a fundamentally misguided, if not downright stupid theory.
But here is a secret: even the credit bureaus are aware that this analysis is bullhit! However, they continue the ruse because it is the perception that the credit scoring system works that creates "added value" to their services, not the reality of whether or not that system actually works (and the reality is, it doesn't work well at all).
The credit bureaus would joyfully sacrifice YOUR personal privacy down to the minute details of every movement you make, every moment of the day--if it were possible to do so--because that is what maintains the illusion that they have a useful product to sell at all. Even though doing so would create such a degree of false accusations, distrust, faulty assessments of individual character, corruption and other unintended consequences, that the fabric of society itself would be put at risk. But the credit bureaus don't care about that; non-human corporations have no national loyalty. They are only in it for the money. This kind of capitalist fundamentalism is a concept that Osama Bin Laden could easily relate to, and it can be articulated simply:
"Even if every other person on the planet suffers, and the entire world is destroyed, it's worth it as long as I get what I want."
Likewise, President Bush is merely maintaining a grand illusion with his domestic spying program, with no foresight at all, no comprehension of the unintended consequences that must inevitably result. Nothing good can come from gathering, storing and distributing information about the one subset of human beings on earth (American citizens) who are least likely to want to cause the United States harm. Yet, all the personal information gathered WILL end up in documents and databases, and it WILL be analyzed by computer programs, and it WILL cause a lot of citizens a lot of problems. If not today, then perhaps a year, or a decade from now. The information gathered never goes away--is only gets shuffled around, obfuscated, corrupted, and placed even more out of context than it was when it was originally gathered.
Make no mistake about it--the similarity between domestic spying and modern debtors imprisonment are profound. And since the American Debtors Prison is a virtual prison that is built on personal information gathered and analyzed out of context, it is not unreasonable to expect that the U.S. government's gathering and analysis of personal information out of context can only lead to a similar type of virtual prison--the American Political Prison.
The Third Reich kept a lot of files on its own citizens too--probably more so than the intelligence it gathered on foreign enemies. Those files were stored on paper (and to an extent, on primitive computer punchcards supplied by IBM). Today's files on American citizens are stored in a complex network of modern computer databases, linked together in a manner that remains Top Secret. This represents a crucial distinction between domestic spying in Nazi Germany decades ago, and in the United States today. Even so, there is no good reason here to challenge the aphorism that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The problem is that too many people are trying to learn from the wrong history lesson.
Like the Holocaust, the American Debtors Prison is a bona-fide human atrocity that posterity will liken to human slavery in terms of it's barbarism and injustice. So what else can we really expect to come from President Bush's decision to essentially create the infrastructure for a virtual American Political Prison which, for all intents and purposes, is identical to the infrastructure of the American Debtors Prison? After all, the Nazis thought they were doing the right thing for their country, too. The Law of Unintended Consequences means that those who commit atrocities might very well believe they are actually doing good work. To my knowledge, neither Hitler, nor Osama Bin Laden, nor President Bush, nor the credit bureaus, nor Satan himself, has ever confessed to doing evil.
No, if we are to truly comprehend the implications of domestic spying in the United States we must not look to emotional political rhetoric about Nazi Germany for answers. The stakes are simply too high for that kind of intellectual negligence. We must look instead for the most fundamentally similar example from history, and learn from it. But neither Nazi Germany nor Al Quaeda represent good analogies for domestic spying in the U.S., because neither are based on a network computerized information systems that store and analyze personal data about human beings out of context. Only the American Debtors Prison provides a clear example of what must inevitably result from President Bush's decision to spy on the very citizens who elected him to office. All we need to do is recognize the enormous amount of human suffering that the credit bureaus have caused among the very consumers that brought the credit bureaus to power, and the future consequences of domestic spying become clear.
All the best,
Paul
Fortunately, even the mass media has publicized this issue, and writers around the nation are making the arguments that need to be made against domestic surveillance. That is pretty easy to do, since those arguments are perfectly obvious to anyone who understands the most basic principles upon which the United States of America was founded (i.e., support for personal liberty, and opposition to government tyranny).
So I've decided to use this opportunity to explain how a virtual prison like the American Debtors Prison orginates, because what President Bush has effectively done by authorizing domestic spying is to inadvertently authorize the creation of The American Political Prison.
First and foremost, the American Debtors Prison is a virtual prison, in which the "chains" that bind are actually the electronic transfer of personal information about debtors from one place to another. For example, if a debtor defaults for any reason and begins to be terrorized by collection agents, they could previously move to another location ("skip"), re-establish their ability to earn an income without interference from collections terrorists, and return to a position of financial stability that would allow them to repay their defaulted debts. The electronic transfer of personal information in the American Debtors Prison makes "skipping" all but impossible today, because the instant a debtor establishes residence in another location, collection agencies know about it. And collectors will immediately begin to interfere with the debtor's ability to earn an income just as before, by terrorizing them at home and at their new job, illegally revealing their defaulted debts to new co-workers in a misguided attempt to coerce payment, etc. There is no escape from the American Debtors Prison by non-miraculous means, because the electronic transfer of personal information allows anyone to track any other person, anywhere, at any time. The American Debtors Prison has utterly annihilated the concept of personal privacy, in the most profound sense imagineable.
But what is domestic spying, if not a fundamental invasion of privacy in a nation that prides itself on constitutional guarantees of personal liberty? The U.S. government does not have warehouses full of people listening to phone calls live, reading emails as they are sent, or otherwise introducing a human interpretation into the vast amount of personal information they gather. Just like the credit bureaus, which claim to be able to determine unique human beings' characters by creating a standardized scoring system based on nothing but data of dubious authenticity and credibility that is stored in computers, the U.S. governement analyzes the bulk of its data using computers to "listen" for certain words in your telephone calls, using computers to scan emails for certain words and codes, etc. It is all done by computers--the very same kind of computers that give us the "blue screen of death" at the most crucial times in our own daily use of computing technology.
In other words, the U.S. government's ability to discern anything meaningful about a typical subject's intent is no different than credit bureaus' ability to discern anything meaningful about a typical debtor's intent. The government can't discern anything meaningful at all about peoples' intent by merely intercepting their communications and using computer programs to analyze discrete examples of their language and behavior out of context. Especially in the United States, where The People are supposedly enjoy freedom of speech, analyzing that free speech with computer programs cannot possibly lead to accurate assessments of real peoples' character and intent. (Human analysis cannot succeed in that regard either, for that matter). For example, do YOU know anybody who says one thing, and does something completely different? Or more to the point, do you know anybody who doesn't?
Here's an example from the American Debtors Prison: A debtor's credit report generates a score that classifies him as "high risk", which naturally implies that the computer program which generated that score was somehow able to discern details of his character. However, when a human being investigates the matter, she may discover that something entirely different is really going on. Perhaps the debtor fell "off the radar" because he is working 80 hours a week doing odd-jobs for the enormous amount of cash necessary to hire an attorney who can negotiate with his creditors, precisely because he intends to repay his debts. After all, the American Debtors Prison itself prevents debtors from obtaining gainful employment through normal channels, so it only makes sense that many debtors prisoners would be forced to go "off the radar" if they are to survive at all. Conscious attempts to elude tracking by predatory lenders and terrorist collection agents does not necessarily mean that everyone who "skips" is trying to run away from their debts. It can just as easily mean they are diligently trying to repay their debts by the only means creditors have left available to them (which literally requires them to "run away" from collection agents, since collections terrorism represents a major, if not an insurmountable obstacle to earning an income with which to repay debts).
No computer program can discern an individual's true intent by merely cataloguing and classifying a tiny subset of the nearly infinite variety of possible human responses to extraordinary stimuli like collections terrorism. But the credit bureaus claim they can identify a true "deadbeat" by simply scoring whatever inaccurate, contradictory, incomplete information exists in their databases. And so does the U.S. government claim that it can identify a true "terrorist", using essentially the same criteria.
In other words, domestic spying is about as reliable at identifying terrorists as credit reports are at identifying "deadbeats". Which is to say, it is not reliable at all.
Yet all of that information the U.S. government gathers about its citizens in its futile attempts to identify terrorists does go somewhere. It goes into various files and databases, where it may be lost, stolen, or shared with other government agencies. This massive dissemination of personal information, taken completely out of context, and rarely if ever interpreted by intelligent human beings, is analogous to the credit bureaus' endless quest to gather, store and distribute personal information about consumers. The end result is a glut of so much dubious information that there is no conceivable way to analyze it at all and arrive at accurate conclusions. So the agencies who gather, share, and analyze so much data have no choice but to resort to heuristics (analytical shortcuts) instead.
In this way, a teenager who borrows a library book about the Manhattan Project for a book report can be flagged by some government computer program as a "potential" terrorist. And that is the status this citizen will possess in top-secret government databases until an intelligent human being finally investigates the matter and "clears" him. If no intelligent human ever researches this, that citizen will carry the label of "potential terrorist threat" for the remainder of his or her life, without even being aware of the fact--until it suddenly becomes a weapon to be used against him (perhaps when he runs for President of the United States 30 years later--because he is a good citizen and a patriotic American). This is precisely what happens to debtors prisoners when they suddenly realize what financial institutions and credit bureaus have been doing to them all along, quietly, behind the scenes, without their knowledge, until it was too late.
President Bush's decision to spy on American citizens is not only an attack against everything the United States of America stands for, it is an example of exactly what we should be fighting against in the so-called War on Terror. There is probably nothing Osama Bin Laden would love more than to make American citizens distrust each other to the point where democracy, freedom, liberty, constitutional rights, rational thought, and simple human decency grind to a halt in the United States, causing us to destroy ourselves with no effort at all on his part. President Bush is making Bin Laden's dream come true.
Likewise, if it were possible, the credit bureaus would store every detail of your personal life, right down to a play-by-play of every action you take, every moment of every day. Why? Because they have carefully cultivated a mythology in our society that they, and they alone, are able to discern a citizen's true character and intent--as long as the credit bureaus have enough personal information to feed into their computer programs and generate a score. The simple-minded theory they proffer is this: the more information you plug into the computer, the more accurate the result will be. It is a fundamentally misguided, if not downright stupid theory.
But here is a secret: even the credit bureaus are aware that this analysis is bullhit! However, they continue the ruse because it is the perception that the credit scoring system works that creates "added value" to their services, not the reality of whether or not that system actually works (and the reality is, it doesn't work well at all).
The credit bureaus would joyfully sacrifice YOUR personal privacy down to the minute details of every movement you make, every moment of the day--if it were possible to do so--because that is what maintains the illusion that they have a useful product to sell at all. Even though doing so would create such a degree of false accusations, distrust, faulty assessments of individual character, corruption and other unintended consequences, that the fabric of society itself would be put at risk. But the credit bureaus don't care about that; non-human corporations have no national loyalty. They are only in it for the money. This kind of capitalist fundamentalism is a concept that Osama Bin Laden could easily relate to, and it can be articulated simply:
"Even if every other person on the planet suffers, and the entire world is destroyed, it's worth it as long as I get what I want."
Likewise, President Bush is merely maintaining a grand illusion with his domestic spying program, with no foresight at all, no comprehension of the unintended consequences that must inevitably result. Nothing good can come from gathering, storing and distributing information about the one subset of human beings on earth (American citizens) who are least likely to want to cause the United States harm. Yet, all the personal information gathered WILL end up in documents and databases, and it WILL be analyzed by computer programs, and it WILL cause a lot of citizens a lot of problems. If not today, then perhaps a year, or a decade from now. The information gathered never goes away--is only gets shuffled around, obfuscated, corrupted, and placed even more out of context than it was when it was originally gathered.
Make no mistake about it--the similarity between domestic spying and modern debtors imprisonment are profound. And since the American Debtors Prison is a virtual prison that is built on personal information gathered and analyzed out of context, it is not unreasonable to expect that the U.S. government's gathering and analysis of personal information out of context can only lead to a similar type of virtual prison--the American Political Prison.
The Third Reich kept a lot of files on its own citizens too--probably more so than the intelligence it gathered on foreign enemies. Those files were stored on paper (and to an extent, on primitive computer punchcards supplied by IBM). Today's files on American citizens are stored in a complex network of modern computer databases, linked together in a manner that remains Top Secret. This represents a crucial distinction between domestic spying in Nazi Germany decades ago, and in the United States today. Even so, there is no good reason here to challenge the aphorism that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. The problem is that too many people are trying to learn from the wrong history lesson.
Like the Holocaust, the American Debtors Prison is a bona-fide human atrocity that posterity will liken to human slavery in terms of it's barbarism and injustice. So what else can we really expect to come from President Bush's decision to essentially create the infrastructure for a virtual American Political Prison which, for all intents and purposes, is identical to the infrastructure of the American Debtors Prison? After all, the Nazis thought they were doing the right thing for their country, too. The Law of Unintended Consequences means that those who commit atrocities might very well believe they are actually doing good work. To my knowledge, neither Hitler, nor Osama Bin Laden, nor President Bush, nor the credit bureaus, nor Satan himself, has ever confessed to doing evil.
No, if we are to truly comprehend the implications of domestic spying in the United States we must not look to emotional political rhetoric about Nazi Germany for answers. The stakes are simply too high for that kind of intellectual negligence. We must look instead for the most fundamentally similar example from history, and learn from it. But neither Nazi Germany nor Al Quaeda represent good analogies for domestic spying in the U.S., because neither are based on a network computerized information systems that store and analyze personal data about human beings out of context. Only the American Debtors Prison provides a clear example of what must inevitably result from President Bush's decision to spy on the very citizens who elected him to office. All we need to do is recognize the enormous amount of human suffering that the credit bureaus have caused among the very consumers that brought the credit bureaus to power, and the future consequences of domestic spying become clear.
All the best,
Paul
posted by Paul at 9:18 PM
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