It’s amazing how difficult it can be to find a copy of The New York Times some weekends, or how quickly a sunny day can turn cold and overcast. Any illusion that autumn might be intent on passing us by is now gone. But I braved the cold and managed to procure a copy, the last on the rack in the fourth place I tried, and I wanted to share this from Jeffrey Rosen’s article in the Magazine section. He makes a valid argument against the coming security state:
There is, in the end, a powerfully American reason to resist the establishment of a national surveillance network: the cameras are not consistent with the values of an open society. They are technologies of classification and exclusion. They are ways of putting people in their place, of deciding who gets in and who stays out, of limiting people’s movement and restricting their opportunities….And if we meekly accede in the construction of vast feel-good architectures of surveillance that have far-reaching social costs and few discernible social benefits, we may find, in calmer times, that they are impossible to dismantle….The promise of America is a promise that we can escape from the Old World, a world where people know their place. When we say we are fighting for an open society, we don’t mean a transparent society — one where neighbors can peer into each other’s windows using the joysticks on their laptops. We mean a society open to the possibility that people can redefine and reinvent themselves every day; a society in which people can travel from place to place without showing their papers and being encumbered by their past; a society that respects privacy and constantly reshuffles social hierarchy.
In our newfound rush to sacrifice civil liberties for heightened safety, we should at least ask ourselves if such a trade is possible. “Although the cameras in Britain were initially justified as a way of combating terrorism,” writes Rosen, “they soon came to serve a very different function. The cameras are designed not to produce arrests but to make people feel that they are being watched at all times. Instead of keeping terrorists off planes, biometric surveillance is being used to keep punks out of shopping malls. The people behind the live video screens are zooming in on unconventional behavior in public that in fact has nothing to do with terrorism. And rather than thwarting serious crime, the cameras are being used to enforce social conformity in ways that Americans may prefer to avoid.”
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do the crossword puzzle.