Prisoners of PRISM

A majority of Americans – 56% -- say the National Security Agency’s (NSA) program tracking the telephone records of millions of Americans is an acceptable way for the government to investigate terrorism.  (Source: Pew Research Center poll dated June 17, 2013.)

To my mind, the above finding reveals a level of ignorance, amnesia, and naiveté that a democracy cannot long withstand.  The Pentagon has told the Congress that they anticipate 15 to 20 years of continuous warfare. That alone is more than a viable democracy can maintain. Now we discover that all Americans may expect to see their personal behavior monitored by the National Security Agency (NSA).

This immense and growing database will be housed in an equally immense facility being built in Utah. The data mining activities to be applied to it can be expected to be very sophisticated. If, as it is said, they can identify individuals from it as well as the relationships with other individuals, one can expect every branch of government and every corporation with its Congressional henchpersons to be mining for its own purposes. It may be said that access to the database will be strictly controlled, but over the life time of such a data resource, justifications and pressures may be expected to prevail.

Consider, as an example, the Federal Bureau of Intelligence (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover used the resources of the FBI as he chose without any real Congressional oversight.  In fact, some legislators were fearful of him for what he might reveal about them. He persecuted Martin Luther King Jr., bugging his home, his office and the various hotels he stayed in. The latter activity turned up the fact that MLK was having affairs with women not his wife. The FBI employee even suggested that King might prefer to commit suicide rather than have these liaisons revealed. This 56% majority should ask themselves what might happen if another Hoover got hold of this database.

Again, Senator Joseph McCarthy wielded the power of his office to hound people and destroy careers and livelihoods by innuendo and fabrication.  McCarthy had no qualms about modifying a photo to show that two people were together at a certain time and place when they were not. Could another such powerful senator, riding the wave of popular hysteria or a congressional committee such as HUAC, do the same with PRISM? All it would take would be to show that a person or group placed phone calls to others who had placed call to yet others some of whom were known terrorists.  Guilt by association would do the rest.

We know other countries have fallen prey to the domination of secrecy. East Germany under Soviet control had its Stasi, many members of which were ordinary citizens reporting on the behavior of other ordinary citizens. Angela Merkel expressed to President Obama Germany’s concern about PRISM, especially the Boundless Information program within it that focused heavily on German citizens, by comparing PRISM to the infamous Stasi. As a result of their experience with the Stasi, Germany has one of the strictest privacy laws in the world. That we have secretly and massively violated it does not sit well with one of the United States’ most important allies. The level of fear in such a society is very high, which may have been the primary function of the Stasi.

This database is being developed and controlled under contract by a major corporation—Booz Allen Hamilton. This means that access to information from the database is in the hands of the private sector, where money rules supreme. One should not think for a moment that Booz Allen Hamilton is above all temptations.

With these few observations of the risk in which our democracy has been placed by the Obama Administration in mind, let us consider the context in which this database will exist.

The Pentagon has told the Congress that it expects our wars to continue for another 15 to 20 years. Reflect on what has happened to our democracy in the decade of war we have just gone through. At the end of another 15 to 20 years of war, we will have a garrison state under the military control of the Homeland Security Department. By then the citizen will have become a subject living in an environment of suspicion, control, and fear. Whatever it becomes, it will kill our democracy and democratic freedoms. It is up to citizens of today to stop this horrendous project before it accomplishes exactly what Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda have in mind. There is an implicit conflict in any democracy between freedom and security. To preserve a democratic state its citizens must, by the very conditions this bifurcation creates, take some degree of risk to preserve their democracy. This is a lesson the American citizenry have yet to grasp and has led them to be easily manipulated by fear, as G.W. Bush knew when he created colored levels of imminent Al-Qaeda terrorist attack. Our citizenry needs to grow up, calm down, and carefully develop a democracy-protecting strategy for our country. Obviously our military and our current administration cannot do it.

Admittedly, this is a big order for an American populace that seems to have forgotten the risks and efforts of the nation’s founders to create our democracy and the civic courage of those who undertook its preservation in precarious times. As the fights for a just economy and civil rights called upon the citizenry of those times, so the current destruction of our Constitutional liberties call upon us to marshal a vigorous opposition capable of stopping the erosion of our democracy. They did it in their time, we must in our time.

All futures lie in time and circumstance. Let us look at both and do our part in creating a viable and promising future for this nation and this world.

Bob Newhard  

On Humanity Overcoming its Technology

“For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.” So says Noam Chomsky in an essay titled “Humanity Imperiled
The Path to Disaster.”

Finally, the human species and its survival are becoming the focus of at least some human attention. This concern should be the bedrock of all efforts to create a better world. Every effort in that direction should be able to show its significance for human species preservation and enhancement.

With this in mind it is useful to see how it plays out in the views of those who think about it as a profession. Oxford University is the home of the multidisciplinary Future of Humanity Institute. The Institute has a major commitment to the evaluation of various threats to the survival of the human species.

The BBC report on the work of the Institute explores the thinking of its members in a document  that can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22002530k. Everything from pandemics to war as a cause of human species extinction is evaluated in terms of what our species has survived up to this point in the context of an evolution that has seen far more species go extinct than survive. In the end, they come up with the human species’ greatest threat to its survival. This threat resides in our brain and increasing technological accomplishments. Currently biological engineering, artificial intelligence and machine self-replicative production rank high in their species lethality. What is of primary concern with these threats is the inability of humans to control them; their broad potential for unintended consequences. When a life form is modified or created using genetic engineering have all the potential effects, physical, mental and social been taken into account? Put another way; the gap between discovery and implementation is getting wider as the potential of the technology is increasing, some would say exponentially. For example, in today’s news we are told that Uruguayan scientists have transferred a gene that produces fluorescence in jellyfish to sheep that now glow in the dark. One researcher gave as a reason for doing this, beyond diabetes and hemophilia, that their success may attract outside corporate research and production to their small country. In other words, we have modified a long-established life form in order to attract investment. As to the need for greater control over technology and its development need one say more?

To me, one of the most threatening cases of unintended consequences was the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein proposed it because he was concerned that the Germans were developing it. It was used, it was said, to save American lives that would be lost in an invasion of Japan. The fact that Japan had indicated its willingness to concede defeat in discussions with the Russians if they could retain the Emperor in power was known. However, that was not enough to save the lives of Japanese civilians, including children, because the real objective was to demonstrate our new technology to the Russians. On the occasion of the bomb’s first test explosion Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan project that developed the bomb, made clear the terrible consequences that would flow from this technology. Today some of the smallest countries on the planet have deployed this technology. All this to impress the Russians. It simply stimulated rapid development of the technology of mass human annihilation in yet another country.

But the beat goes on. We have allowed corporations to drive the process of technology development and deployment with little concern, other than for profit. Does Monsanto know or care whether its genetically modified corn may greatly reduce corn diversity and thereby the grain’s resistance to some newly mutated corn disease? Has the importance of biodiversity been adequately brought to bear on a technology driven by relatively short term profit? We are allowing the worst institutions, as far as accountability is concerned, to decide these matters. That a halt must be called to this process is more than evident, it is imperative. Can it be made a cause célèbre, in a world of hype, where fact loses out regularly to fiction?

As I have noted previously, in the human bifurcation of body and brain, the brain, unfortunately so often driven by the appetites of the body, is taking humanity into the territory of unimaginable consequences. Clearly, we must take technological development out of the hands of profit-driven corporations. Our concern is not to find or create the next market; it is to create a viable future for the human species.

Bob Newhard