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Big Brother Gets a Brain
Gregus writes "The Village Voice delves into the DARPA's latest plan to track people and vehicle movement in cities, ostensibly for urban warfare, though this would be really handy watching 'suspicious' people in any city. "The goal, according to a recent Pentagon presentation to defense contractors, is to 'track everything that moves.' " The actual DARPA RFP and briefings. I just feel more safe all the time."
I pretty much guessed as much when the DMV in our state issued everyone new license plates. The primary difference was that the new kind are many times more reflective than the old ones, making them ideal for tracking via camera at lengthy distances.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
It's an astonishing book, but the basic premise is that constant war is a means of keeping resources scarce, purely in order to maintain class distinction. If the plebians get too rich and well educated, they'll start to question why they need a ruling class at all, and the ruling class would rather be comfortable in a land of poverty than revoltingly rich in a land of plenty. The whole Big Brother culture is just a consequence of that (from the need to cover up the futility of the war), not the cause.
While it's true that USKA burns up hundreds of billions of USD a year (possibly a trillion if you count the stuff that isn't counted) in moving guns, tanks and bombs around the world, the goal does seem to be global imperialism rather than domestic scarcity. Sure, plenty of people are starving, but our middle classes are fatter and happier in terms of consumer toys than even the Inner Party in 1984.
Then again, that's pretty much what Winston Smith believes until he reads the book, so what do I know? The goal might be different, but the methods seem largely the same; an eternal war that can't be won against a foe with a constantly changing face, surveillance of citizens in the name of this war, arrest and detainment without due process, parading and show trials of prisoners for propaganda value, WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH, the whole works.
But I still can't figure out what the goal is. If it's merely self preservation for the incumbent autocrats, then that's understandable but both disappointingly unimaginative and largely unncessary - 98% of US Congressional incumbents already get reelected, and hereditary ruling dynasties are now as accepted in the USA as in Airstrip One. What more do they want? What is the point of moving further towards a police state? Any ideas?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
For those not in the UK, the above comment is actually very funny. Feel free to laugh heartily and mod up, therefore conveying the image that a lot of UK people are reading this, and consequently making us feel more at home with the content!
Joking aside, being able to track vehicular activity is one thing, being able to identify the person or persons within that vehicle is an entriely different matter.
My brother is serving in Iraq now. Although the army is able to track all vehicles and pinpoint their movements, during the war they still attacked and killed people on their own side because they could not identify the people in those vehicles.
Only a minor detail but one which is pretty significant.
~~~~~~~~~ "I must create my own system, or be enslav'd by another man's." William Blake, Jerusalem.
The answer sadly is deeply embodied in a belief in controlling other people's moral behavior.
The dogma that comes hand in hand with most of the control freaks in Washington is that of ultra-conservatism, and the feeling of betrayal by the court system in terms of moral erosion.
These people are acting in a manner that is so close to that of the fundamentalist Muslim radicals they love to hate that it is simply amazing to me.
None the less, I believe their agenda and repressive actions will be short lived just as all their predecessors movements have been in this country.
One needs only to look at probation's short life, or the political legacy of Joe McCarthy to observe the fate of the current moral extremists.
Even if they get the infrastructure set up, how do they implement this in our legal system? I figure that the images they have will be grainy, black and white, and of blurry, moving cars at night. I don't see how you can hand that to a jury and say, "Well, even though you can't see anything here, our program is nearly 87% certain that this car is in fact the car of the defendant." Is 13% reasonable doubt? Is 12%? We know that .5% isn't, or cases involving DNA evidence would be thrown out. At what point does jury duty become the analysis of quantatative figures as opposed to qualitative arguments?
To some extent I feel like a logical justice system is a step forward for society. At the same time, I'd prefer a trial by my peers, were I ever faced with the choice. Some day a jury deliberation may be number crunching:
"Well, the computer on 4th and Broad Street has determined with 75 percent probability that the defendant was moving towards the scene of the crime, and the computer on 5th and Broad Street gives us a 80 percent probability that he stopped at the scene. That gives us a 95% degree of probability that he was at the scene at the time of the murder. According to the Numerical Methods Act of 2015, we have to convict him."
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We're playing compare and contrast with 1984, remember? Middle class Americans have cars, they have televisions and DVD players and computers and washing machines and (by and large) reliable electricity for them, have mortgages and detatched houses with basements and garages. Sure, they have to work to keep them, but that's still half way to Orwell's utopian alternative to war austerity. Outer Party 1984ians work 60+ hours a week, 90 if they are redacting large parts of history, for no reward, remember?
Heck, if you're on welfare in the USA, you've still got far, far more than 1984's proles. You have your own viewscreen, and it doesn't watch you (yet). You can eat more or less what you want in terms of fat, carbs and protein. You get more than 20 grams of chocolate a week, and you don't have to get your gin on the black market. Orwell's proles would be delighted to live in 2003 America.
As for education, the vast majority of the US middle class are literate and have a political education that goes (barely, but measurably) beyond simple indoctrination. Whether they retain that knowledge, or act on it, is largely a matter of choice, but they aren't denied the opportunity.
On the other hand, the US middle class are brainwashed with jingoistic flag-worshipping propaganda from an early age, and I'm not disagreeing with your premise that consumer debt is a millstone round most peoples' necks, but it's a millstone of their making. If you want to step out of the rat race and live on minimum wage or welfare, you're free to do so. Orwell's characters - proles and party both - don't have that luxury.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.