Independence Day - From SURVEILLANCE

A year ago at this time I was writing about my hope that people in the United States would start a movement to stop drones. I think it's fair to say that the movement has been started.

Part of that movement has been a growing awareness that we need to stop the use of drones for domestic surveillance. Now, with the Snowden revelations about the extent of domestic spying, it's clear that the time has come for a major movement to stop spying in the United States:

Independence Day - From SURVEILLANCE!

During the last several weeks, I've been writing about the way that George Orwell's predictions about surveillance and totalitarian control have come true in America -- and it's clear that many people are reading this material and getting mobilized to join the movement to stop the surveillance.

There are lots of ways to become a part of the solution.

Support the work of national groups like the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC).

Connect with in your area that are working to stop surveillance - like the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights (CCDBR) here in Chicago.

Join the anti-drones movement -- there are anti-drones groups in almost every state.

Or even -- do we dare? -- find groups working to get rid of the business-as-usual politicians and elect anti-surveillance candidates in the 2014 mid-term elections!

But whatever you do, start by equipping yourself with a vision. Read 1984.

"Ownlife" - A Notion Too Dangerous for the State to Tolerate?

The movement for peace and justice and civil liberties needs organizing and it needs action. But it can't forget self-care . . . .

"In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity." (George Orwell, 1984 - p. 72)

In the movement for peace and justice and civil liberties, we spend a lot of time trying to encourage people to get organized. Maybe the first thing we should do, though, is to encourage people to get alone.

C A R E E R.

M A R R I A G E.

S C H O O L.

T R A I N I N G.

I N V E S T M E N T S.

L I F E    G O A L S.

Who has time to think?

As Orwell describes it, the best test of whether someone is teed up to be a safe, conforming member of society is the degree to which you can smell an-ever present haze of sweat:

"Parsons was Winston's fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms -- one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended. . . . An overpowering smell of sweat, a sort of unconscious testimony to the strenuousness of his life, followed him about wherever he went, and even remained behind hm after he had gone." (p. 19)

And, in case you run out of things to do, the society keeps you fed on a constant diet of "films, football, beer, and gambling." (p. 63) (Welcome to Chicago . . . . )

In my own life, I actually had to read a book to convince me to slow down.

I remember very clearly, some time back in the early '90s, walking on the bank of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia and reading Solitude: A Return to the Self by Anthony Storr, and thinking, "Stop doing things long enough to get my bearings? Learn to listen to what I, myself, think? What a concept!"

Spending time alone and in reflection doesn't guarantee unconventional thought and a turn to dissent -- much less resistance. But it creates the space that makes it possible.

That's why I think this quote from Storr's book is valuable: "[t]he capacity to be alone is a valuable resource when changes of mental attitude are required."

So -- yes -- organize; but also take the time to do some self-care.

Take a walk by the lake.

Visit a museum.

Find a quiet church.

Draw.

You'll be amazed at how rebellious it can make you.


(1984 page references are to the 2009 Plume paperback edition.)

MORE: please see also The Mind of the "World Beyond War" Activist.


Please share this post . . . .

If You're Not Looking Over Your Shoulder Yet, You're Not Paying Attention

[Part of the series: 2013 = 1984?]


 "He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary." (George Orwell, 1984 - p. 16)

I've been thinking a lot about the description in 1984 of Winston writing in his diary. I've been wondering if it's really true that in the United States today -- as in Winston's world -- the very act of free expression, itself, has become so hazardous, what you say hardly matters.

My journal
. . . where I can say anything . . . .

It can be confusing because we engage in so much public expression -- lots and lots of self-disclosure on Facebook, for instance -- that it may not seem true to say that there are limitations on free expression.

However, I realize that I actually have two tiers to my thinking and expression. There is a "public" tier that I recognize will be seen by everyone, and from the moment I turn the idea into written words, I assume everyone in the world may sooner or later have the opportunity to see them. Sure, there's a slight frisson of excitement putting something slightly risque or personal up on Facebook or on my blog; in reality I know that only a tiny number of people will see it, but there's always the possibility that everyone will see it, right?

And . . . as we know now . . . there is the certainty the the government will have it at its fingertips when it wants to use it.

Which brings me to the second tier of thinking and expression -- the part that's "not ready for prime time." This is the stuff that ordinarily I might entrust to a diary or journal. It includes ideas that I'm not even clear about as the words are flowing onto the page -- the act of putting the ideas into words is intended to help me think about them.

In the old days, people like me used to go through a thought process sort of like this: "Do I dare write about this embarrassing or unconventional thought in my journal? What if I'm run over by a bus and people are going through my things and they see this? Oh . . . but I'd be dead . . . so I guess it doesn't matter . . . . (Still . . . ?)

Now that the FBI has taken to raiding people's homes -- people who haven't been run over by a bus, I might add -- and seizing every last scrap of paper they possess, the act of keeping a diary really does seem too dangerous to contemplate. After all, the whole point of keeping a diary would be to think freely. If no risks are taken -- if there's no potential thoughtcrime -- what would be the point of writing in the diary in the first place?

I've been having trouble reconciling my apparently rich intellectual and expressive life, on the one hand, with these feelings of fear and paranoia and self-censoring on the other. Then something that Andre Gregory said in "My Dinner with Andre" struck a chord.

Metropolis

Gregory spoke of the way in which many people in New York City felt they ought to "get out of New York," but never seemed to do so. And then he described one of the participants in Findhorn who told him that he had come to believe that New York City -- and our cities in general -- had become the model of the concentration camp of the future: places where the inmates build the camp themselves and convince themselves that they are free. (He might well have added, "And they crow about how much fun they're having on their Facebook pages!")

It seems like an ironic and/or crazy notion. But clever. Yes, there's something to think about there.

Perhaps it would be amusing to write about it in my journal. If I dare.


(More thoughts on 1984 here . . . .)
(1984 page references are to the 2009 Plume paperback edition.) 


Related posts

One of the biggest areas of self-censorship in American life is criticism of the state of Israel.

(See "What good is a tweet?" (The Packing and Unpacking of Meaning and the Steven Salaita Case) )







Sometimes we hold back in the very settings -- and on the very issues -- where open discussion is most needed. ("Don't rock the boat!")

(See What Happens When People Talk With Each Other (My Graeme Reid Moment) )









Years later, in the days when I traveled frequently to China and brought home picture books for my children depicting the adventures of Monkey battling all manner of demons, I began to take seriously the importance of demons and demon-quelling as a metaphor.

(See Channeling Zhong Kui (the Demon Queller)) 

Facecrime in America

[Part of the series: 2013 = 1984?]

"He had set his features into the expression of quiet optimism which it was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen." (George Orwell, 1984 - p.4)

Rather surprisingly, Hendrik Hertzberg asserted in The New Yorker this week, apropos of the revelations about the U.S. government spying program PRISM, "In the roughly seven years the programs have been in place in roughly their present form, no citizen's freedom of speech, expression, or association has been abridged by them in any identifiable away . . . . The critics have been hard put to point to any tangible harm that has been done to any particular citizen." (The New Yorker, June 24, 2013 - p. 26)

Nothing tangible? Really? Reach up and touch your cheek, Mr. Hertzerg.

As George Orwell knew, the first victim of government assault on free expression is that remarkable organ known as the human face.

1984 is replete with references to what happens when people experience so much repression that they can't trust their own faces.

[T]here was a space of a couple of seconds during which the expression in his eyes might conceivably have betrayed him. (p. 15)

His face remained completely inscrutable. Never show dismay! Never show resentment! A single flicker of the eyes could give you away. (p. 32)

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself - anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called. (p. 55)

[I]t was only a twitch, a quiver, rapid as the clicking of a camera shutter, but obviously habitual. He remembered thinking at the time: that poor devil is done for. (p. 56)

Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct . . . ." (p. 94)

"Prescient" is a word that one can get tired of hearing applied to Orwell, but it really is startling how completely he anticipated the work of Paul Ekman, who has documented the science of how the human face conveys -- and betrays -- feeling and thought. (His work is familiar to millions of Americans as it was popularized through the Tim Roth TV series, Lie to me*.) The images on this page are examples of Ekman analysis.

There was a time when we would have scoffed at the notion that this description from 1984 could be relevant to life in America:

There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. Is so far as scientific research still continues, this is its subject matter. The scientist of today is either a mixture of psychologist and inquisitor, studying with extraordinary minuteness the meaning of facial expressions, gestures, and tones of voice, and testing the truth-producing effects of drugs, shock therapy, hypnosis, and physical torture; or he is a chemist, physicist, or biologist concerned only with such branches of his special subject as are relevant to the taking of life.

But today, the notion that we have any privacy -- and that we have the right to remain silent -- is rapidly becoming an object of nostalgia.

(How long will nostalgia be tolerated?)

(1984 page references are to the 2009 Plume paperback edition.) 

Related posts

Despite the difficulties associated with engaging in effective solidarity with dissidents in China, it is important to make the effort. A fundamental tenet of all peace and justice activism is that if we have the power to speak we can do anything, and if "they" succeed in shutting us up, it's the beginning of the end.

(See What is the US Peace and Justice Movement Doing for Dissidents in China?)

"In whom and in what should we be putting our faith?" If not in Manning -- and the Manning Principle -- then in whom, and in what?

(See The Path to Peace: Why Not the Manning Way?)







Posterboard and markers: $21.79
Leaflets: $7:50
Bullhorn: $99.99
Standing up for peace and justice when everyone around you is saying "Get a job!" and "GO F**K YOURSELF!": PRICELESS!

(See Dissent: PRICELESS!)

Fed Up With Being Spied On

[Part of the series: 2013 = 1984?]


"There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork." (George Orwell, 1984 - p.2)

Edward J. Snowden has forced us to confront what we all knew already: our government is running wild and we can't get our privacy back, short of some kind of very extreme change.

For a long time, many of us have been shrugging off the probability that our Facebook posts and other social media were being seen by the government; we joked about hearing strange sounds on the phone lines and the possibility that our meeting rooms were bugged. We remarked over the ubiquitous cameras in Chicago and other cities. We had a vague sense that the government's computer and communications system power were far beyond anything we could really understand.

But Snowden has stuck it in our face, and now -- like Winston Smith in 1984 -- we're being challenged to confront it. Do we really want a world in which our own affairs are 100% transparent to the government? Can't we push back?

And that's just the half of it. My sister, Elaine Scarry, has written about how things have gotten turned on their head in Transparent Citizens, Invisible Government: "The Patriot Act inverts the constitutional requirement that people's lives be private and the work of government officials be public; it instead crafts a set of conditions in which our inner lives become transparent and the workings of the government become opaque. Either one of these outcomes would imperil democracy; together they not only injure the country but also cut off the avenues of repair."

The problem is not that we are living our lives in public. People are entitled to be "out" without fearing that the facts of their lives will be abused.

We have a problem with our government. It sees opportunities for power in every bit and byte of our personal data, and it's time to call it what it is: wrong.

We've been fortunate to have some modern-day Paul Reveres -- Bradley Manning and now Edward J. Snowden -- to raise the alarm. Now it's up to us to rise to the call.


For more on the surveillance state: Read 1984.

(1984 page references are to the 2009 Plume paperback edition.) 

Related posts

A large number of people are marked for exclusion and deprivation -- and worse -- because they have characteristics that are susceptible to the whole apparatus of power:  they are easily recognizable as  NOT "normal" or "right" or "acceptable" . . . under the gaze of surveillance this condition is recorded and propagated . . . for perpetual recording and processing within the data centers of power . . . accompanied by intermittent acts of physical and cultural injury -- random, senseless -- to reinforce their unshakeable status. 

(See Drone Gaze, Drone Injury: The War on Communities of Color)

One issue that has a key place in the midterm elections in 2014, I believe, is surveillance.  With each passing day, I am hearing more and more people say that the surveillance issue is something that a wide spectrum of people are deeply upset about. That includes people on the right as well as people on the left -- people who don't usually talk with each other, much less work together for positive change!

(See The Surveillance Issue: The Fulcrum of the 2014 Election?)

There has been a good sign in 2013, in that many people have become outraged about government surveillance. A recent Pew poll found that Americans are now more worried about civil liberties abuses than terrorism. I believe a big question in 2014 will be whether challengers successfully address the issue of NSA surveillance in their campaigns.

(See What Will Election 2014 Boil Down To? )

Orwell Was Right

I've decided to read a book to ring in Barack Obama's second term. No, I'm not talking about The Audacity of Hope. I'm talking about 1984, by George Orwell.

In case you haven't read it lately, I strongly recommend giving 1984 a fresh read. My memory of it was of a book that was clever, but a bit shallow, and one that ultimately imparted a feeling of comfort because, after all, it was pointing a finger at the misdeeds of other societies. (Okay, okay, it's been a long time since I last read it . . . . )

NATO protests, Chicago, May 2012

What I'm finding instead is a book that is both packed with insight into the psychology of the public experience of repression, and startlingly prescient about the specific facts of our world today.

With respect to the latter of these, allow me to quote just three brief descriptions that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up:

In the distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a blue-bottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. (p. 2)

We in Chicago are the most electronically surveilled population population in the world. (Can you say "seventeen thousand cameras??) The proliferation of cameras makes the use of helicopters optional.

Of course, they're not really doing anything with all that surveillance, right?

It was always at night -- the arrests invariably happened at night. . . . there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. (p. 17)

Considering that progressive Americans are rejoicing today over the re-election of Barack Obama, despite his failure to close Guantanamo, reverse the legacy of night raids in Afghanistan, prosecute the torturers who carried out extraordinary rendition, and abandon his claim to be able to detain anyone indefinitely under the NDAA . . . this passage is chilling.

But it was the passage that seemed to describe drone strikes really made me stop short:

"Steamer" was a nickname which, for some reason, the proles applied to rocket bombs. . . . The bomb had demolished a group of houses two hundred meters up the street. . . . Thre was a little pile of plaster lying on the pavement ahead of him, and in the middle of it he could see a bright red streak. When he got up to it he saw it was a human hand severed at the wrist. (p. 74)

This description was quite startling to encounter, shortly after seeing the account of Pat Chaffee, recently returned from the Code Pink delegation to Pakistan to protest U.S. drone killings, entitled, "Body Pieces".

I feel quite sure that when I read this passage years ago, I thought, "Well, certainly, that will never happen . . . .

Never say never.

Orwell was right.


Page references are to the 2009 Plume paperback edition.
Image: @Deprogrammer9 Copyright Julie Dermansky 2012


Related posts

Re-reading George Orwell's 1984 recently made me see at least 15 ways 2013 is like the world he describes in the book . . . .

(See 2013 = 1984 ? )

As the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights prepared to convene a conference on surveillance on October 19, 2013, it was a shock to find that the majority of the Illinois congressional delegation voted AGAINST the Amash Conyers Amendment -- the measure to curtail NSA surveillance.

(See In Chicago, Illinois: YOU ARE UNDER SURVEILLANCE!) 













"What are the unseen possibilities and risks associated with drones?" We need the insights of lots of people -- including the work of thinkers who are no longer living -- that are good at imagining the future and considering previously unimagined possibilities.


(See DRONES: Build a Foundation for Our 3-D Future ) 

Drones, 1984, and Foucault's Panopticon

Are drones such a menace because of their weapons? Or because of their surveillance? Or is it even bigger? Ask Foucault . . . .

More: "Why focus on drone attacks?"

For those of us who have been focused on the boots on the ground in Afghanistan, data published by the New York Times yesterday added a whole new dimension: it published statistics on drone sorties and strikes in Afghanistan in 2009.

The article is an important counterpoint to the headline-grabbing drone strikes by the CIA in Pakistan, and is worth reading online. What you miss by looking at the online version of the story, however, is the graphs of month-by-month activity, which show several striking trends. Strikes by missiles and bombs from drones were up sharply in the first half of the year; the second half of the year, by and large, showed a slight tapering off. (This was consistent with the overall trend in attacks by aircraft and drones.) At the same time, the number of drone sorties -- that is, missions of all types, including "just surveillance" -- showed a very steady upward trend month by month throughout the year. As the article reports:

"Predators and Reapers [are] now supplying more than 400 hours of video a day to troops in Afghanistan . . . Some of the Reapers will soon carry 10 cameras instead of just one, and 30 by 2011, adding to the profusion of video."

Up until now, when I have thought about drones, I have thought about the ethics of drones as a weapon in general, including the specific problem of whether drone strikes constitute extrajudicial executions under the Geneva Conventions.

I have always also had a nagging sense that there is something wrong with the surveillance aspects of drones, as well. But I didn't become so focused on it until confronted with the numbers.

Science fiction? 15 Ways George Orwell Was Right . . .

There is perhaps no more powerful portrayal of the problem of extreme surveillance than George Orwell's novel 1984. One of my strongest memories of 1984 was the efforts that Winston had to make simply to find a place in his own apartment where he could escape the observation of Big Brother. Perhaps it was because I, like so many other people, encountered the book as a teenager, when privacy suddenly becomes simultaneously so important as well as so hard to come by, that I remember this so clearly.

While popular culture makes frequent explicit references to "Orwellian" situations that involve doublethink, Newspeak, the Thought Police, and the other ideological nightmares of 1984, I wonder if the real nightmare isn't simply the constant surveillance. I, for one, have always thought that lack of privacy is not an absolute evil, but can only be evaluated in the context of what happens as a result of loss of privacy. I'm beginning to rethink that view.

The French philospher Michel Foucault, in his groundbreaking work Discipline and Punish, reviewed the history of society's efforts to isolate and control elements that caused it problems. Ultimately, Foucault zeroed in on the efforts of Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarians to apply analysis and scientific thinking to prisons. The result was the panopticon.

Jeremy Bentham's "panopticon" (drafted by Willey Reveley)

The panopticon was a prison design that reversed the old paradigm, in which prisoners were stored away, "out of sight, out of mind," and instead arrayed them in a way in which they could be observed as efficiently as possible by the fewest number of managers.

Presidio Modelo prison, Cuba (2005),
followed the panopticon design.

Foucault understood this to be symptomatic of the much larger project of societal rule. To Foucault, prior to the physical and bodily aspects of control and manipulation, there are aspects that have to do with seeing, knowing, naming, and categorizing.

At the end of the day, is surveillance bad if no harm comes of it? Or is it even possible to separate the two? Consider this quote from the New York Times article. Speaking of Stephen P. Mueller, top air commander in Afghanistan, the article stated:

He said the strikes typically came when troops were caught in firefights or the drones came across people who appeared to be planting homemade bombs, the biggest source of allied casualties. The counterinsurgency strategy "isn't about going out and finding those," he said. "But when we do find them, we obviously do what's necessary."

Obviously.


MORE:

Foucault and Drones: "Surveiller et Punir" Indeed!

Drone Gaze, Drone Injury: The War on Communities of Color

Why U.S. Society is Caving in to the Lure of Wall-to-Wall Surveillance

When the President says, "The American people don't have a Big Brother who is snooping into their business," it probably means the American people have a Big Brother who is snooping into their business . . . .

Fed Up With Being Spied On

DRONES: Build a Foundation for Our 3-D Future

Drone Killings: Come Clean

Orwell Was Right