Bruce Sterling On Total Information Awareness

securitas writes "Declan McCullagh interviews Bruce Sterling about Total Information Awareness (renamed Terrorist Information Awareness and raising concerns) or 'Poindexter's nutty scheme' as Sterling thinks of it. He predicts TIA will destabilize the government and lead to internal KGB-style coups. Whether you agree with him or not it makes for thought-provoking reading."

Comments

Re:relieving

[kcbrown]

Look, as much as I think the Bush administration is a threat to civil liberties and is terrible in all sorts of other ways, to compare them generally to Nazis is an insult to all the sacrifices billions of people made in the war that destroyed German fascism. We may not have a perfect (or even good) government, but to suggest it's a goverment that will make genocide a household word or start a war that will leave upwards of 50 million people dead is a bit of a stretch, don't you think?

In 1933, or even 1937 (4 years after the Nazis gained power, which is roughly the same amount of time that the Bush administration has been in office), few people thought that Germany would start a war that would engulf the world, and nobody thought that it would be the nation to make genocide a household word. So I wouldn't be comforted by the fact that the same is true of the U.S. at the moment, if I were you.

The U.S. has already invaded and conquered its first country under the Bush administration, and it's unclear at this point how long it will be before it does so again. But I, for one, have little reason to believe that Iraq will be the only one that undergoes a "regime change" at the hands of the Bush administration before all is said and done. I don't think we'll see World War III, but that's only because the situation is different: in WW2, Germany was a militarily powerful nation but it wasn't the most powerful by any means -- and it still came reasonably close to winning. Today, the U.S. is the most militarily powerful nation on the planet and everyone knows it. I don't think WW3 will happen because I don't think anyone is stupid enough to go up against the U.S. that way.

Even so, the slide towards fascism in the U.S. is very apparent to me, and the biggest thing I haven't figured out is how Bush will remain in power beyond his allowed two terms. I'm quite certain that he will try, I just don't yet have an idea of what he's likely to do to make it happen. But I have a strong suspicion that it will involve something like declaring a national state of emergency.