Things To Come: Surveillance State

Be Not Enticed To Tyranny:

Elizabeth Melton 

A surveillance state is being erected around the American public at an alarming rate. In many urban and suburban settings, anyone traveling on public streets or sidewalks will have his image captured by the ubiquitous surveillance cameras. A leisurely stroll around the neighborhood, as well as any conversation along the way, might be recorded if the city uses surveillance-enabled street lights. Even our own front yards might not be safe from the prying eyes of the state if a neighbor has a “smart” doorbell that shares data with law enforcement.

Rural areas are not exempt from this intrusion. Automatic License Plate Reader cameras (ALPRs, often contracted under the brand name FLOCK), are being placed on rural highways and on county lines in an increasing number of areas. Audio and video surveillance now cover remote corners of the Amazon Basin. Satellite technology could ensure that, one day, no square foot of the planet is unobserved.

The power of the modern surveillance state is without historical precedent. 

The argument that “there is no expectation of privacy in public” no longer adequately addresses the huge quantities of data that surveillance apparatus captures, stores, and analyzes.

While civil rights and other niche groups are sounding the alarm about the dangers of Big Brother, critics are surprisingly underrepresented among popular news 

So why does the average citizen not have greater concern over these intrusions upon their civil liberties, in some cases even championing it? One answer to that question might be that these systems are a Trojan Horse. While they are dressed up as a gift that will protect society from all that they fear, it is the gift itself that poses the greatest threat.

The use of fear to gain power is a tale as old as time, but our unprecedented access to information has not made us any less vulnerable to it. Each decade of the lives of the modern citizen has brought about its own moral panic with the accompanying “solution.” From the Satanic Panic to the War on Drugs, fear has driven consistent relinquishment of our individual rights over time.

The justification for the modern surveillance state began on Sept. 11, 2001. The fear inspired by those terrible events was the foundation for the unconstitutional provisions of The PATRIOT Act, the advent of real-time crime centers, and the birth of the TSA. Public fear of terrorism enabled the government to impose security measures that would never have been tolerated in the absence of a crisis.

With greater public acceptance of an increasingly Orwellian environment, expanding surveillance from the airport into the streets required only amplifying stories of gang warfare, a problem portrayed as solvable only with the rampant use of cameras.

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