Fed Government has Spent $50 million on Surveillance of its Citizens
Rep. Dick Armey thinks we should know and be outraged that our
government has spent so much money on watching us and developing the technology to pick out our identities from a crowd of people.
After September 11th I was very worried that my individual freedoms would erode. To some extent they have. I can no longer ride my bicycle across the Golden Gate Bridge in the same way that I used to (they closed off one side during the week) and I have to go through the humiliation of my bags being rummaged through at airports, plus I have to show my ID about six times a day when I travel. Like most Americans I accept this as part of the solution, but infringement on personal rights is a sticky issue.
Recently at work I ran into a similar situation. For years I have had card access to a computer server room. Our IT department was run by a couple of guys who were buddies of mine. Suddenly about four months ago they were both laid off and their roles were taken over by an outsourced company. I felt sorry for my friends but did not think the change would effect me personally. Yesterday I discovered that my rights to access the server room had been cut off. I wasn't even notified, I just tried to get in and couldn't. Now I must struggle to get that right back and petition this outsourced company to let me back in. Why did this happen? Because the power to do such a thing had shifted to an uncaring source whose primary goal is to cover thier ass against hackers both internal and external. I submit that the same has occured with our government. This is no longer a government with it's citizens objectives in the forefront of thier minds, rather an oligarchy of the power-focused which seek to limit our freedoms in the name of protecting us.
George Orwell's words seem to echo my point:
Part of the reason for this [inefficiency at ruling] was that in the past no government had the power to keep its citizens under constant surveillance. The invention of print, however, made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and the film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but complete uniformity of opinion on all subjects, now existed for the first time. --George Orwell,
1984
