FC: The societal costs of total surveillance, from NYT

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

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

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.

[...]




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