Wanted….. As it turns out, (thanks to The Guardian), the NSA and the US Government have been mining our online data and phone calls to ‘protect’ us from whatever they decide at the moment is a threat. It also turns out that, about half of Americans surveyed think it is a fair trade off – privacy for national security. The other half don’t agree. It’s a tough question, and an even tougher concept – pre-emptively locating and arresting terrorist before they can carry out the deeds that they are planning. I have seen this movie before: Minority Report with Tom Cruise. It’s based on a Philip K. Dick novel of the same name. The protagonist, John Anderton (Cruise), is a Captain in the Pre-Crime division. It doesn’t countenance using the web as the vehicle to find out who is going to commit a crime and arresting them before it has happened, but it’s pretty close to reality, as it turns out (like so much Philip K. Dick). The core of the controversy over things like PRISM seems to be whether this notion of spying on the population for their own good is “American” or “Constitutional”. The problem, of course, is that the Founding Fathers could never have imagined something as all pervasive as the Internet. The closest they had was Ben Franklin’s post office and Franklin’s newspaper. (Think of Franklin as the Steve Jobs of the 18th Century). But what if there had been an Internet and Social Media in 1775? And what if The British (the legal government at the time) had had both an NSA and Prism. How different our history would have been. First, the British would have nabbed trouble-makers like Sam Adams and Thomas Jefferson early on. While their personal correspondences are replete with their dissatisfaction with British rule, the British, being British, didn’t read other ‘gentlemen’s mail’. This attitude held out until Secretary of State Henry Stimson, after which it was considered ridiculous. Letters exchanged between Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and the rest of them would have had them all shipped off to Guantanamo before the first box of tea could have been tossed into Boston Harbor. Paul Revere, tweeting ‘The British Are Coming #revolution” would have had him arrested before he could get into town. National Security would have been restored. The proper government would have been able to locate the radicals and the revolutionaries and disappear them for good. Peace would have been restored. And we would all be singing God Save the Queen. Well… Maybe that would not have been so bad (says my English wife).
Copyright Michael Rosenblum 2013
