Personal Privacy, Government Intervention and Who Cares?

Personal privacy is dead, and contrary to the laws of nature, is actually getting deader (more dead?).  We lost a lot of our Right against entry into and search of our homes in a recent Supreme Court Decision, but it is getting worse and will get even worse still.  Interestingly, the people that you think would be screaming about this loudest are not, mostly because it is not their ox being gored.  Allow me to explain how our privacy and personal Rights are going bye-bye.

In my car, I have a "transponder" that pays tolls for me on various toll roads throughout the State of Florida.  It also, by the way, can tell you exactly when and where I went through a toll plaza.  What could be the downside to this convenience?  Well, there are a number of them, actually.

If I go through toll both 'A' at a certain time and tollbooth 'B' sometime later, the police do some math and, poof, they know how fast I was going.  I was not sure what they were going to do to prove I was the one that was driving and hadn't loaned out my car.  I was sure it would involve my photo being taken as I go thought the tollbooths, but I was wrong, the State issues the ticket, under these circumstances, to the registered owner and, unless the car is stolen and you can prove it, you are guilty.  The concession that is made is the fact that you don’t get points on your license and, presumably no license suspension down the road, after you get a few of these.  How do I know this; because they are doing the same thing now with red-light cameras.  Why are they doing this; MONEY!!

Okay, so they know I am speeding on the Turnpike.  They also know exactly where I am and when I am there.  They don’t need black helicopters or GPS tracking devices, although those exist too, but more on that another time.  Let us take this technology out just a little further.

We are all required to have Driver’s Licenses, right?  Let’s say the state slips a transponder into the D.L.  It slips in where we have the magnetic strip that allows all your personal information to be placed on a traffic citation by a police officer who pulls you over for that traffic violation.  He does not have to write much of anything, except sign his name.  He swipes the D.L. in his little card reader and, once again, poof, completed traffic citation.  Replace that with a small, and they are available, transponder that now broadcasts your personal information. 

In law enforcement, there are four basic pieces of information that will be used to search to see if you have a record or warrant: name, date of birth, sex and race.  The transponder has this information in its memory bank.  A police officer drives by, the same kind of thing that does it at the toll booth inquiries of your D.L. transponder and determines, based on the information it gets, any of the following:  your D.L. is suspended, you have a warrant for unpaid parking tickets in Washington, D.C., you have a prior DUI conviction, you have three prior speeding tickets, finally, let’s say you put the transponder license in one of those silvery shielded bags to prevent it from sending out all this information, you still get pulled over.  Why?  Because when the information does not come up on the police officer’s computer screen, he presumes you are driving without your license in your possession.  This is a traffic violation, and you get pulled over for protecting your privacy.  By the time all this technology is applied, it will probably be deemed to be illegal to shield the transponder anyway.

Now, these scenarios anticipate a moving or stationary vehicle.  Let us move the situation to a slightly more private setting, your home.  The police drive by your home.  Their computer lights up, flashes and says, “John Smith, Felony Warrant.”  Mr. Smith happens to be a your dinner guest and you have no idea he has the unmitigated gall to have committed felony at some point, but this does not prevent the local constabulary from kicking your door off the hinges and coming in to get him.  He is a wanted felon; they are not going to knock, not in the world as it is today.  They are going to kick in your door, rush in, arms at the ready, screaming, “Everybody get down!”  They will be pointing very large (at least from your perspective) guns at you and your dinner guests.  Mr. Smith is, after all, a felon.  I suspect that by this time the government will have figured out a way to define passing an NSF check as an act of terrorism.  So automatic weapons will be the rule, rather than the exception.

I have all sorts of problems with this, not the least of which is identity theft.  I have a friend whose ID got stolen in the mid 1980’s and he is still dealing with it.  How do we deal with it when it is being transmitted out into the ether?  I can drive down a street with a laptop computer now and find unsecured networks left, right and center.  You don’t have to be much of a hacker to go rummaging around computer files on the computers on these networks.  Think about what I would find out about you if I could sit out on the street in front of your house and access your computer hard drive?  If I could steal your ID off a transponder in your wallet, what could I do with that?

The people you would think would be screaming about this erosion of our privacy the longest and the loudest are those that are the libertarians (A/K/A: Conservatives, Right Wingers, Republicans) among us.  Government intervention into our lives is anathema.  The government is something from which we must, as a people, be protected.  I am a firm believer in this concept.  I want to be protected from the overreaching authority our government, however, the Conservative, Libertarian-types deal with this in a schizophrenic and hypocritical manner.  They seem to be perfectly willing to support increasing authority of the police in this country and allow the expansion of the authority of the police to intrude into our lives each and every day.  They do this on the false assumption that the only people that will be the victims of this overreaching authority are the criminals.

The Right-Wing is willing to support the taking away and diminishing of Civil Rights from criminals, the so-called bad guys.  The problem is who are the bad guys?  Eventually, the “bad guys” are whoever the government says they are.  We allow them to define who the bad guys are, and one day, be careful, because it might be you.  The argument is akin to one man's freedom fighter is another man's insurgent (remember:  Osama bin Laden was a "freedom fighter" in Afghanistan as long as he was fighting the Russians).  We have all heard the term “technicality” as it refers to a criminal defendant.  Usually, it is used in the sentence, “He got off on a technicality.”  Folks, that “technicality” is usually one of the first ten amendments to The Constitution of the United States. 

The Bill of Rights is NOT a technicality; it is one of the many things that made this country one of the greatest and most free societies on the planet. You are more than welcome to give up your Constitutional Rights, anytime you want to, but don’t you presume to offer up mine or try to take them away.  I fought too hard and too long earning them for everybody, including myself, to have them squandered in the name of some temporary feeling of security.

We have reached the point in this society where we are perfectly willing to give up the Rights of the other guy in seeming anticipation that we will never need to use or invoke them.  We have also reached the point where we have lost sight of a very important basis on which our country was founded.  While it goes back to the days of the Roman Empire and, in fact, to Deuteronomy in the Bible, we have lost sight of the fact that “it is better to allow ten guilty men go free than convict one innocent man.”  We have actually done a 180º shift.  It is better to convict one innocent man than allow ten guilty men to go free.  I would say that those that have this attitude are those that, as my friends from Texas would say, “Don’t have any skin in the game.” 

It is really easy to say okay, one innocent guy can pay so I feel safe, but it is a little different when you tell someone, “Sorry, it is your turn to take one for the team.  We need to make sure we get the ten guilty guys, so you get to be the innocent one that gets convicted of a crime he didn’t do.”  I wonder what that man would think of all those technicalities in that situation.  Let me make it even a bit more personal, the person’s skin we put in the game is that of your son or daughter.  How do you feel then?  By the way, “It couldn’t/won’t happen to me.” is about the only wrong answer.  As I have said before, it happens, when it happens.

The Conservatives are perfectly willing to trust the single most intrusive arm of the government, the police (in whatever form they manifest themselves, Local, State or Federal law enforcement).  While Conservatives do not trust any other alphabet-soup arm of the government, if you are with the FBI, P.D. or DOJ, then you are untouchable to them.  I don’t get the hypocrisy.  That which presents the most immediate and most intrusive threat to a free society, armed law enforcement, is the group that no one seems to want to control.  These are the guys that can instantly turn you from innocent citizen to criminal defendant in the proverbial New York minute.  I guess I should point out that any police officer can make the decision to arrest any person at any time for any reason, good, bad or indifferent.  Most will not without the required legal reasons, but, if you find the wrong one, at the wrong time, with the wrong attitude, you are going to learn what a favorite law enforcement phrase really means, “You can beat the rap, but you can never the ride [to jail].” You are going to jail my friend and there is not a damn thing you can do about it.  Oh, and if you resist, you are probably going by way of an emergency room.

Folks, the day of big brother has already arrived and George Orwell’s 1984 has gone viral.  I suggest we figure out how we are going to protect ourselves from those sworn to protect us and are willing to do anything THEY feel, in their sole discretion, is necessary to protect us.  We as a society have become so fearful that we now are perfectly willing to give up fundamental rights for temporary security and that is wrong on a quite a few levels, and unless we do something really soon, I assure you, we are all going to have “skin in the game.”