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.
