IP: The Societal Costs of Surveillance

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

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From: "the terminal of Geoff Goodfellow" <geoff () iconia com>
Date: Wed, 31 Jul 2002 14:57:48 +0200
To: "Dave E-mail Pamphleteer Farber" <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: The Societal Costs of Surveillance

July 26, 2002
The Societal Costs of Surveillance
By MICHELE KAYAL, Honoluly

Helena Blazkova had come to kick me out.

It was 1992, and I had been renting her apartment in Prague for about a
year. I had gone to the former Eastern Bloc shortly after graduate
school on a United States government fellowship, and I felt it my duty
to show by example how the free world worked. I thought I had been a
model tenant. I kept the place neat, I paid my rent faithfully, I even
made sure to put out fresh flowers when I knew she was coming over.

But that was the problem: I didn't always know she was coming over. She
used to come in when I wasn't home, on tips from the neighbors.

When Helena -- my age and, I thought, my friend -- came that night to
tell me to leave, she laid down a litany of charges: You shower too
often. You talk on the phone late at night. You leave your pajamas out
and the bed unmade. You've had men here. You have a cat.

Oddly, that was the charge that stunned me most. I had minded a friend's
cat for a weekend once. How could she possibly know all this, I
wondered. The neighbors had told her, I learned. They had called her to
say I had a cat.

It had never occurred to me the elderly lady next door was spying. Nor
did I think anything of the woman who seemed always to be on the landing
when I came and went, which must seem incredibly nave. After all,
everyone knew the Communists snitched on one another, right? But I never
thought they'd spy on me. There was nothing interesting about my life. I
had nothing to hide and I wasn't doing anything wrong. But I was
different: single, a woman, a foreigner. And that was enough to get me
watched.

So the recent brainstorm by the Justice Department to enlist couriers,
meter readers, cable installers and telephone repairmen to snoop on
people's private lives for anything "suspicious" dredged a cold and
until now forgotten feeling from the pit of my stomach. Many have
objected that such a program would violate civil liberties and basic
American principles. But stoking people's fear to set neighbor upon
neighbor, service worker upon client, those who belong against those who
don't, does something more: it erodes the soul of the watcher and the
watched, replacing healthy national pride with mute suspicion, breeding
insular individuals more concerned with self-preservation than with
society at large. Ultimately it creates a climate that is inherently
antithetical to security.

In my new apartment I kept to myself. This still didn't stop the
neighbors from leaving me nasty, anonymous notes about how much heat I
used, or why I showered every day. I, the watched, became like the
watchers: scared, angry, on guard, protective of my mundane personal
business, eager to shield myself from false accusations and willing to
shirk civic interaction to do it.

I suddenly understood the commuters on the Prague metro who covered the
books they read with plain brown paper -- not to protect the expensive
books, I was told, but to hide what they were reading from others. They
had taken their minds and their thoughts underground.

How could such a culture possibly create a more secure society?

I left Prague understanding for the first time what it really meant to
be an American, what the core of the privilege was: that the liberty and
respect for individuals that I took for granted was something other
nations had to work hard to achieve.

The spy encounters were crushing in a country and among a people I came
to love deeply. Still, even in Prague in 1991, I knew the police would
not show up at my house on a tip that I took too many showers or talked
on the phone too late at night.

But today in America, I wonder what can get a person into trouble. What
if the exterminator, whose monthly visits keep my house pest free,
suddenly registers my last name as unusual? I'm a transplant to Hawaii
and not a member of its common ethnic groups. What if the person who
fixed my window screens tells someone about the Islamic-style plaque in
my kitchen, the one with the 99 names of God written in Arabic script, a
beautiful reminder of a short tourist trip to Pakistan before all this
started? What if the man who delivered some furniture the other day
reports the phone call he heard me take from my father, the one in which
I commiserated with him about the stock market and said nasty things
about people in power? What will happen when the snooping begins?

Perhaps we should ask the Czechs.

======

Michele Kayal, who lived in Prague from 1991 to 1995, is a former news
editor of The Prague Post.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/26/opinion/26KAYA.html>

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
geoff.goodfellow () iconia com * Prague - CZ * telephone +420 603 706 558
"success is getting what you want & happiness is wanting what you get"
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/01/biztech/articles/17drop.html
http://www.tapsns.com/members-bio/geoff-goodfellow.shtml
 


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