02 February 2013

Letter from Lhasa, number 300.
The Surveillance-Industrial Complex


Letter from Lhasa, number 300. The Surveillance-Industrial Complex
by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

ACLU, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex. How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society, ACLU, 9 August 2004.
(ACLU 9 August 2004).
American Civil Liberties Union


This text, a kind of libertarian manifest, underlines the proliferation and diffusion of personal information, both from public authorities and from private entities, and its misuses both from government and from companies.

The information ‘society’ makes available an everyday progressively greater quantity, and ready-to-be-used, of electronic information about people. This information is collected and used from public authorities. In addition, public authorities, also with the excuse of security and terrorism, actively operate for the extension of their informants’ and spying, or pseudo-spying, networks.

Insecurity and terrorist psychoses are created and diffused precisely for the proliferation and expansion of State terrorism apparatuses, and for getting subordinated subjects, ready to become informants and self-informants, stalkers and assassins.

For specialized private companies, it is also a good business to be involved in this records’ collection, as well as in the other activities. While it is a burden, for many companies, to be obliged to act as a support for public ‘security’ apparatuses, and to be involved in their discriminations, abuses, persecutions etc, alias in State terrorism.

All this variously collected information is in some way processed and is misused in a variety of ways. Once one is even casually inserted in some list of suspects, and so flagged, or even simply included in a list not necessarily of suspects (but equally considered a suspect for the same simple fact of being in a list), it is nearly impossible to be removed from this self-proliferating flagging mechanism. What means that the flagging process in largely out of control with nobody in charge for eventual revisions. Its function is only to justify all the economic, bureaucratic and a-social business of the information collection and processing.

What this ACLU’s text does not underline is that the information collection networks are easily used as State/government-organized stalking, persecution, torture, assassination etc networks, alias for State terrorism. So, finally, public powers create a para-totalitarian reality where people can be easily persecuted with the same justifications of the information collection and spying.     

State terrorism apparatuses more are mass and para-totalitarian ones, more the formal powers depend on informants, militians, followers or however one may call them. There is information collected from whatever kind of records. In addition, there is human produced information, or disinformation, so not particularly reliable.

It is in the nature of the informant, usually an infamous and ignorant louse, to provide the ‘information’ it thinks be appreciated from its bosses. On the other side, police officers, soldiers and bureaucrats in charge of this kind of activities are not cultivated people could discriminate and evaluate information and disinformation.  

Also ordinary ‘objective’ records can be falsified. However, even more easily, human-provided information, or supposed information, can be absolutely arbitrary and false. Not only. As secret informants and formal authorities can provide whatever slander and present it as sure information, also targets or common people can diffuse on line information or disinformation against informants and their puppet masters. This information or disinformation becomes a record and as a record it can later become information diffused from power sources. Once diffused and proliferated, no one can remove it.

Power can falsely accuse, so abuse, whatever subject of whatever imaginary crime or danger. If a lot of people diffuses information, with precise names, addresses etc against louses and puppet-masters of State terrorism, also this information may become part of the classification system used and misused from power against its subjects.

Specific hacking of databases for casually flagging masses of subjects could contribute to make unusable this already unreliable and persecutory flagging produced from public formal authorities. It is also possible that the exponential proliferation of personal information and of flagging, and the inevitable unreliability of flagging software, will finally make unusable all this information accumulated about everybody.

Although there constantly be new frontiers of power intrusion into and against individuals, as the elaboration of new software presented as better than the previous one, and the further diffusion and usage of devices for watching human bodies and minds suppressing, or trying suppressing, whatever privacy.

At the same time, the State/government-organized and -managed persecution apparatuses, as well as the assassination apparatuses, respond to an immanent, illogical and anti-economical ‘logic’ of bureaucratic proliferation:  
 * More persecutions and assassinations è more funds and power alias further expansions of the same persecution and assassination apparatuses which, by again more persecutions and assassinations, try to get again more funds and power.
* More persecutions and assassinations è more funds and power EQUAL More funds and power è more persecutions and assassinations
* More insecurity and ‘terrorism’ è more funds and power & more persecutions and assassinations
* Indispensable State/government creation of insecurity and terrorism (actually no private individual and entity could create any mafia and any terrorist gang without State/government promotion, support and cover) for getting more funds and power AND State/government secret decrees for more persecutions and assassinations
* Competition among the various Secret Police corps [persecution, assassination etc machines] for getting more funds, so the need to show that there is more need of persecutions and assassinations, and that a specific Secret Police apparatus is a better Persecution & Assassination machine than the other ones.
* Each client State of the USA and of the UK (the two main world empires) needs to show its owner[s] that it is a better persecution and assassination machine than the other client States/governments.

The real problem is not anyway that the new technologies had made possible the mass classifications of populations and that whatever new technology make that more detailed and intrusive. The point is the misuse of those information, disinformation and flagging, which are used for persecuting people, for State terrorism, instead of for protecting individuals and populations.

The point is not the police use of information. It is its utilization for State terrorism against its same and other subjects.

From this point of view, this ACLU’s text may contain a serious element of mystification and de facto support for State terrorism. Does it make any sense the defence of a supposed privacy while no privacy really exists? Or is it only a backward and vain battle?  

Make everything public!
No privacy!
No information State/government monopoly!
No State secret!
Stop State terrorism, whatever kind of State terrorism, as well as State terrorism founded on made-up ‘information’!


ACLU, The Surveillance-Industrial Complex. How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society, ACLU, 9 August 2004.