Think of me (and this article) as a canary in a coal mine. I only hope you’ll actually notice — and then do something about it.

In the world of our Founders, freedom was a precious commodity.  In retrospect, this is actually odd.

Our Founders, after all, lived in a largely unpopulated world.  Around the time the United States came into being, the population of New York was 25,000.  Philadelphia was huge at 40,000.  Today, small towns like Hanford, California have more than those numbers.  Where I maintain my criminal defense law office in Fresno, California, we have approximately half a million people.  In 1775, the combined populations of New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Charleston and Newport (all port cities) did not equal 100,000.

So you’d think freedom would be an easy thing to come by.  If things got too bad somewhere, I’d expect you could pick up with a few of your good friends and go look for somewhere else to start a town.  Of course, you might have to contend with “the locals,” by which I mean any Native Americans who may not wish to share space with you.

And yet our Founders became more and more irritated with what, today, would be really minor intrusions into their lives.  General warrants allowed the government to pop into a house at any time to search for such things as “contraband” — products you might have forgotten to pay taxes on when you imported them — and most people didn’t care much for that.  Thus, they passed a Constitution forbidding general warrants.

Today, if an officer wants to come into your house, there are certain requirements that must be met first:

1. He must make sure you’re from a group (e.g., gang members, poor people, non-whites) whose complaints will receive little sympathy from others for illegal governmental intrusions into your home.
2. He must be willing to “testi-lie” that you gave consent for him to enter your home, or that you became hostile and attacked him, forcing him to drag you into the house and subdue you, or some other such poppycock. (“Poppycock,” I think, is our Founders polite way of saying “b.s.”)

Notwithstanding the above, the majority of us really do enjoy a form of freedom from unlawful police intrusions.  Even me, if I would quit complaining about illegal intrusions into my privacy.

The problem is that I believe so long as I’m not killing someone, beating someone, stealing from someone, or breaking some other basic and important law, I should not even have to submit to minimal intrusions.  The nation I was born into mostly believed that, too.  It used to be that until someone committed a crime, the police pretty much ignored them.

My, how times have changed.

Maybe today’s police officers are more often pulled from the ranks of ADHD-afflicted persons (though I’m glad they missed me on that one!), because when things are slow, or they’re bored, or if they just decide they don’t like something about you, you’re going to find your freedom impacted.  It might be temporary, but you will be impacted.

And when that isn’t enough, they’re going to have new ways of getting at you, because our Leaders — who have none of the positive attributes of our Founders — are busily making sure that we are all tracked, all the time.  Every aspect of our lives will be available for inspection.

At the moment, the idea is to collect information about everything you do on the Internet, from whatever device you might use to do it and from any place at which you might do it.  And the logs must be kept for at least two years for the police to review when they feel the need.  Anyone who remembers the FBI’s Carnivore should be concerned about where this could lead.  As technology improves — particularly for predictions based on data-mining — we move farther and farther away from the freedom our Founders enjoyed.

As I said, freedom is like oxygen.  But like miners ignoring the canaries in the mineshaft, by the time enough people realize what’s wrong, it will be too late.

Next up?  RFIDs for everyone!

Wait. A. Minute.
How can we have real liberty if we lack safety?
How is a man free to “pursue happiness” — another key phrase to our country’s Founders, if his house may be burned or his family killed?

Safety is a necessary condition to liberty. Not a sufficient condition, of course, but necessary. And we cannot have safety without our criminal code, which means “tough on crime” and docket management. Granted, there must always be a balance between safety and liberty, but they are not always at odds. Without safety, there can be no liberty. Without safety, any liberty we might have is an empty notion of what might have been.

There are a number of issues one might take with this.  For that reason, I decided to blog my response, rather than leave what would only be an overlong comment.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this.  Mark Bennett makes a good start in his own responsive comment. As Mark impliedly notes, there is no metaphysical or logical connection between being free and being safe. Sometimes, as Mark states, we deliberately move beyond a place of safety in pursuit of freedom.

What is not so clearly stated is that no absolute level of safety can ever be achieved.  Even in the most “locked down” of cultures, someone may burn your house, or kill you and your family.  You could even assign a police officer to every home — don’t worry, we’re getting there — and still not be completely safe.  Assuming the officer could protect you from your son, daughter, mother, or father, who’s to protect you from the officer?

The more that the rules or laws of a particular country attempt to lock things down “in the interest of safety,” the less freedom exists.  And, frankly, the pursuit of “safety” in the United States has reached the level of insanity.  Petty officials such as the Presiding Judge of the Fresno County Superior Court routinely ignore the constitutional requirements of the Fourth Amendment because it’s apparently reasonable to expect that anyone entering the courthouse might be armed and dangerous.  We’ve forgotten that the Constitution required probable cause particularized to the individual being searched, not a belief that it was reasonable to think some person entering a courthouse might have a weapon.

It was against the very idea of indiscriminate searches on baseless suspicion — fishing expeditions, you might call them — that our Founders rebelled.  It was this very sort of attempt at making sure all the rules are followed by everyone all the time — and overbroad rules like the “search all persons entering the courthouse” rules we’re increasingly running into now — through the application of arbitrary and indiscriminate searches that our Founders revolted.  Yes, revolted.  As in, “they started a revolution and overthrew the government.”

In spite of a Constitution which requires particularized reasons to subject a citizen to a search, we are routinely subjected to searches while moving from one area to another.  Try to fly without being searched.  Try to enter any government building without being searched.

The government gets away with this for two reasons.

First, on the whole, we are sheep.  We’re not actually citizens, we’re submitizens.  When some new procedure or directive comes down from “on high” requiring us to empty our pockets, strip off our clothing, or otherwise submit to interference in our personal lives from the government, the majority of us don’t even ask why.  We just do it.  Those of us who don’t, suffer the full wrath of the government because the majority of us are submitizens.  Why should the government fear acting as if there were no Constitution, when it knows the submitizens will let them get away with it?

Second, if someone actually does resist and takes the issue to court, the court (which, incidentally, is still the government) simply redefines the term “search.”  Somehow, someway, going through people’s things and making them empty their pockets is not a search.

This is okay, “Y” tells us.  Y?  Because we must have safety before we can have freedom.

But since we can never be safe, I guess what “Y” means is that we can never be free.

I have found in talking to others that one reason people say things like this is that they believe that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, then the government won’t bother itself with invading your privacy. They believe that the invasions of privacy which do occur will be a) because someone deserved it, or b) incidental to some compelling governmental purpose and narrowly-tailored to meet that purpose. In the latter instance, they believe that if the government makes a mistake, it will quickly reverse itself before making too severe an intrusion, once it realizes that it has made a mistake and that the “accidentally-targeted” individual is no threat. In other words, governmental intrusions will not be very burdensome upon them, will not cause them major issues and, once the government recognizes that they — the people who “have nothing to hide” — aren’t doing anything they shouldn’t do, they will move on. No harm, no foul.

They fail to take into account both the mind-set of law-and-security-enforcement types and the power of computers.

Why You Are Not As Safe As You Think

Key to the beliefs these “nothing to hide” people hold are that the government doesn’t have time to waste on those who aren’t up to no good. There are, after all, millions of citizens in the United States. To pry into the lives of all these people in a significantly intrusive manner is seen as impossible.

In the world of computer security, this is what we call “security by obscurity” and it’s not a very safe way to live. For one thing, you never know that you’re safe. Just because you’re one in a million doesn’t mean that someone doesn’t see you. In the real world, in the so-called “beltway sniper” case a couple of years ago, the fact that Dean Harold Meyers was one of hundreds of thousands of people who used the Sunoco gas station in Manassas, Virginia did not prevent his death. Being one of millions may make you harder to see, but it doesn’t make you invisible.

A related technique is “security by obfuscation.” The idea there is that security is obtained when you make it difficult for people to understand what you’re doing. In computer programming, for example, names of procedures or places where information is stored might be changed from “userID” to “x14e0a” everywhere it occurs in the program code — when compiled, the computer program will still function exactly the same. But if someone tries to “decompile” the program, so that they can see what the original code looked like, it will be very confusing to read, making it hard to understand what the program is about or how it works without an incredible amount of work on the part of the person trying to use that information.

In the real world, people with nothing to hide aren’t using obfuscation to cover their tracks; in one sense, they have no “tracks” to cover. But people who do have something to hide will use techniques such as this. Consequently, governmental authorities whose job it is to protect citizens will have difficulty in determining who has nothing to hide and who does. Their jobs will require them to be suspicious of everyone. That you, yourself, are innocent of any crimes will not help you if one of them decides that your innocent behaviors are merely attempts at security by obfuscation. It will only force them to dig deeper into your life if you end up in their sights. And so, ironically, the mere existence of techniques such as security by obfuscation makes people who have nothing to hide less secure!

Both these ideas depend upon the difficulty they create for the person or persons to “accidentally” violate a citizen’s constitutional rights. The first move makes it difficult because the chance of someone with nothing to hide being picked out of a crowd of millions of other citizens — or even tens of thousands if a small geographical area (like, say, ports of entry to the United States) limits the search area — is significantly reduced. The second makes it difficult because theoretically the government still only wants to imprison people who actually commit crimes. (I say “theoretically,” because in the old days, the government only went after people who were commiting or had committed crimes. Increasingly, though, our government is targeting people who might commit crimes, i.e., who are, in the view of government, a “danger to our way of life,” and so the net widens.)

Besides the fact that neither of these techniques actually protects you — they just make you one target out of many — computers make both these forms of “protection” even less protective.

Just the other day, I got a message from Microsoft telling me their Hotmail service is going to increase storage capabilities from something like 10 megabytes to 250 megabytes. People who were getting 10 megabytes of free storage are now getting 250 megabytes of free storage. If this is what you can get free, then what can a government that spends millions on computer storage afford to keep?

And that’s not the only way computers make constitutional violations more likely. Consider this: I get a lot of email. And I mean a lot. We’re talking upwards of several hundred messages per day spread across about five or six different accounts. But I don’t really have to read very much mail. Why? Because computer programs sort my mail for me. When I go to read my mail, there are folders that have mail from certain relatives, mail from particular individuals, mail from groups I regularly read (e.g., listservs, for those who know) and folders for junk mail. Some mail never even gets into any of my mailboxes, but is dropped automagically because it contains particular kinds of advertisements I’ll never want to see. This makes the process of reading my email, in spite of its volume, pretty easy. How does this happen? Filters.

And the best part of filtering is that it sorts things for me into categories that make it much easier for me to decide what I want to pay attention to, without requiring me to get rid of stuff I might not yet have the time for. I can save that stuff indefinitely until I either get more time, or better filters, for analyzing the saved information.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to realize that you combine these two factors — huge amounts of storage and the use of filters — and it goes a long way towards overcoming the “protection” created by obscurity and obfuscation.

The Ultimate Freedom of Information Act

Maybe you still don’t care. Maybe you’re thinking that the government can keep information on every minute of your day. It’s no skin off your nose. After all, as you’ve already said, you have nothing to hide. You aren’t committing any crimes. The government will never have any reason to use any information it collects against you. And to hell with Ben Franklin’s warning, you’ll gladly risk the potential inconveniences I described above for the feeling of being safe, however false it may be.

Okay. There are at least three points that go against that way of thinking, though.

1. You don’t know what the government considers a crime.
2. The government sometimes hires corporations to collect the information.
3. The government sometimes hires corporations to analyze the data for them.

You may think you know what constitutes a crime. Chances are you’re wrong about that. Suppose you take pictures of a hotel because you’re interested in corporate architecture. Is that a crime? Are you willing to sacrifice your property forever and perhaps a few days, weeks, months of your life as you endure routine questioning and scrutiny, some of it while in custody, until (hopefully) your innocence is proven, because you had nothing to hide? And what if the government, refusing to believe your protestations of innocence, decides you’re a threat, but they just can’t prove it? So what happens when they discover that you “accidentally” broke some other law you didn’t know existed? Furthermore, what avoids catching the government’s attention today might become a point of interest in the future; remember that data once collected, can be stored indefinitely.

But let’s suppose that you’re right and you know that nothing you do is a crime and you’ll never be accidentally arrested by people who worry otherwise. So you have no problem with the idea that the government might use cameras to track your every movement.

Sometimes, however, the information is collected by private companies, working in conjunction with the Central Intelligence Agency or other governmental entities. How do those corporations use that information?

Suppose, instead of just tracking your movements with cameras, the government begins to collect and store DNA from every citizen? Many states already collect fingerprints from those who apply for drivers’ licenses. Banks and other corporations collect them from many people who write checks. What happens when those corporations that help the government collect, store, or analyze DNA samples start providing — legally or in back-door deals — that information to insurance companies?

And — believe me or not, time will be its own witness — this is the best case scenario. The United States government is planning to start issuing passports with insecure imbedded computer chips containing private information about the passport holder. As Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU Technology and Liberty program notes,

This is like putting an invisible bull’s-eye on Americans that can be seen only by the terrorists. Matthew L. Wald, U.S. will soon add computer chips to passports (November 27, 2004) The New York Times via The International Herald Tribune.

Suppose the State Department decides to imbed your DNA profile on this chip, as well? Recently, in Columbia, an eight-months-pregnant woman was drugged, abducted and the kidnapper performed a C-section to remove the baby. What next? Scan American tourists for DNA information on their passports to find the right one to kidnap for his or her kidneys?

All this is bad enough. Want something scarier? Imagine all the technology available today in a regime modeled on the German government of 1939.

Right now, Americans are frogs stewing silently in a pot. Contrary to the title of this article, it doesn’t have to be that way. But this is one place where being one-of-millions as opposed to, say, seven-of-nine, really hurts us. We, the people, theoretically still run America. But unless we speak out en masse, that’s just theoretical. So let’s find our legs, folks — jump out of the pot and all over your congressional representatives. The only way to be truly secure is to stop the daily incremental abrogation of our liberties.

Articles Used In This Blog Entry

• Photographer arrested for taking pictures of Vice-President’s hotel (December 5, 2002) 2600 News.
• Associated Press, Florida town to use blanket of surveillance cameras (April 27, 2004) USA Today.
• Declan McCullagh, Security officials to spy on chat rooms (November 24, 2004) C|net News.
• Dan Kennedy and Harvey Silvergate, How the Terrorist Crisis Threatens our Personal Liberties (October 2, 2001) Boston Phoenix via Alternet.
• Matthew L. Wald, U.S. will soon add computer chips to passports (November 27, 2004) The New York Times via The International Herald Tribune.
• Columbia police report abduction by C-section (November 24, 2004) CNN.com
• Bruce Perens, Why Security-Through-Obscurity Won’t Work (July 20, 1998) Slashdot
• Simon Robinson, Principles of Obfuscation, (December 9, 2002) Simon Robinson’s Website.
• Beltway Sniper attacks, Wikipedia.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that we have the system of crime and punishment that we have because for hundreds of years, it’s been determined that once someone has been punished for a crime, they should be re-incorporated into society. Yet, today, it is increasingly the case that once you’ve committed a crime, however minor, you’re marked for life — even if it was a youthful indiscretion.

And the more corporations take over, the less rights ordinary humans will have. Already, corporations that own shopping centers know more about you than any government agency would be allowed to know under the Constitution. Even the USA PATRIOT Act has more safeguards (almost none) than those that cover corporations.

And corporations — which themselves have most of the constitutional rights and protections of ordinary human beings, but almost none of the responsibilities of ordinary human beings — are not (officially, anyway) “the government.” This means they don’t have to pay attention to the fact that we, the people, have certain unalienable rights.

In fact, in a corporate world, we do not have certain unalienable rights. You want a job? Your rights are now “alienable.” You want to enter a certain amusement park? Your rights could now be “alienable.” How long before it becomes: “You want to eat? Your rights are now alienable.”

Cashing checks, using credit cards, identity theft and, of course, the big Boogie Man (terrorists on every street corner and constant yellow alerts) — all these things drive us to willingly, unquestioningly, give up our rights. And once we’ve done so, precedent is set. It’s much easier to keep your rights than to get them back once you’ve given them up.

But as Benjamin Franklin said,

Those who would sacrifice their essential liberty to gain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Believe me, there are much worse dangers in the world than terrorists.

In the Dark Ages, the real dangers to ordinary human beings were called “feudal overlords” and regular people, like me and you, were called “serfs.” They virtually (sometimes literally) owned the people they allowed to live in “their” land. Most people lived on land they never could own and worked it, farmed it, only to turn over most of what they owned to the overlords.

In the 21st Century, the descendants of the feudal overlords are more powerful than in the Dark Ages. And they can track their serfs — that’s me and you — much better. Today, we call them “multinational corporations.”

And unless we refuse to become serfs, by refusing to accept the easy path they promise us in return for that trifling thing called “liberty” or “freedom,” we will, like the serfs of old “owe [our] soul[s] to the company store.”

Thanks to Wal-Mart, we’ll soon never lose another dress…or the person who wears it.

This month’s CSO: The Resource for Security Executives notes that

During the next year, hundreds of companies will be forced to deploy technology for automatically tracking the movement of consumer goods using radio waves. Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology has been mandated by both the U.S. Department of Defense and — perhaps more important — Wal-Mart. — Garfinkel, “What’s Your Frequency?” (May 2004) CSO: The Resource for Security Executives, p. 55. [Emphasis added.]

RFID uses low-powered transmitters so small they can be sewn right into the fabric of clothing. These devices are capable of sitting, quiescent, until you walk within 1 inch to 100 feet of a reader. The most common use is to track assets or manage inventory. RFID tags can also contain additional information — they’re used, for example, to tag sheep with information about blood lines, date of birth and shot records.

And now Wal-Mart has insisted that manufacturers put these tags into every item they manufacture.

The data store on a 13.56-MHz tag is large enough to contain routing information for the shipping container and a detailed inventory of the products inside. — Brewin, “Radio Frequency Identification,” ComputerWorld (online).

Or information on the name, address and other identifying information of consumers who purchase items laced with RDIF? Wal-Mart, who once sued an elderly woman for her Social Security payments to recover some of their costs after they ran over her with a fork-lift (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. v. Keel (2002) 817 So.2d 1; 2002 La. LEXIS 969), would surely never stoop so low, would they? They couldn’t do that, could they?

While most RDIF tags currently in use are “write once, read many” devices — meaning the information is imprinted at the time of manufacture and is not modifiable afterwards — there are RDIF tags that can be imprinted with fresh information. With the proper devices at each purchasing terminal (e.g., “cash register”) it would be possible to imprint tags hidden in your clothing with information about who you are, where you live and anything else available to the checker. Perhaps if you pay for the item with cash, it would be easier to avoid this, but if you pay by credit card or use a store discount “club” card the checker has your personal information in hand. And suppose you mostly buy using cash and without a “club” card, but one time, you didn’t? It shouldn’t be too difficult to read the clothes you’re wearing which you purchased with a credit or “club” card, while you stand in front of the cashier waiting to pay cash for your new clothes, and transfer information from the clothes you’re wearing to the new clothing. And then…

Indelible tags sewn into clothing or embedded in the soles of shoes would make it possible to track consumers as they enter or leave stores. Readers on store shelves could alert whenever a consumer picks up expensive merchandise — perhaps automatically snapping a picture [or reading their identity from their clothes] if someone gets too many razors at once. Tags on books or magazines would identify what a person is reading by scanning his briefcase or backpack. Tags on banknotes would enable a mugger to figure out who is carrying large amounts of cash. — Garfinkel, supra, at p. 56.

Think this sounds paranoid?

It’s tempting to dismiss these scenarios as ravings from unsophisticated technophobes. Don’t. The glaring mis-uses of RFID technology previously mentioned were first brought up not by privacy activists, but by the RFID industry itself. — Garfinkel, supra, at p. 56.

Some 6 million Americans are already familiar with RFID technology, although they may not realize it. Cars equipped with RFID transponders allow consumers to pull into a gas station, fill up and never so much as remove a credit card from their wallet. And guess what?

[T]ransit authorities in several cities use E-ZPass tags as a way to measure traffic flow. In other words, people are reading the RFID in your car without your knowledge. — Newitz, “Wearing a Wire” (May 6, 2003) Alternet.org. [Emphasis added.]

Remember the scene in Back to the Future II where Marty McFly (played by Michael J. Fox) is walking down the street and the commercials adapt to his presence? This is one of the more innocuous realities made possible by RFID; but it also demonstrates how easy it is to recognize that you are you as you pass by. Surely the government would never monitor ordinary, non-criminal citizens!

Oh? Cities from Honolulu to Miami are currently using cameras to watch citizens 24 hours a day. In Honolulu,

The cameras are mounted on utility poles, and a camera operator watching a video monitor at a police substation can zoom in and out, rotate a camera 360 degrees and even look straight down[.] — Gonser, “Security cameras under repair” (March 5, 2004) Honolulu Advertiser.

And The Miami Herald reports that,

One of the nation’s richest towns has decided to digitally record the license plate of every car that meanders through its small stretch of mansions on the Palm Beach County coast and to run an automatic background check on each driver. — Bierman, “Just passing through? In this town, the cameras will know” (April 24, 2004) The Miami Herald. [Emphasis added.]

Combine that with RFID technology now being built into nearly every new automobile (16 million vehicles have this feature today) and you get a lot more than instant background checks on every driver — RFID technology could be used to disable the automobile by changing the RFID code in the ignition system. And for those who have no problems with the government keeping tabs on all people within our geographic reach twenty-four-by-seven, don’t forget that the same technology would be within the reach of criminals. Imagine being out in the middle of a deserted area in the middle of the night when someone disables your car’s ignition system.

These applications are only the tip of the iceberg. Do you think periodic drug testing is intrusive? Employers in the private sector — who are not bound by constitutional restrictions the way some governments (theoretically) are — have utilized RFID for such functions as monitoring the number of calories consumed by their employees versus the amount of exercise the employee has gotten.

Privacy activists, such as the Electronic Frontier Federation, which has a section on RFID have noted this massive potential for invasion of privacy. And I’m pointing out the potential for government monitoring of citizens’ activities. Peace Fresno won’t have to worry about the sheriff’s department infiltrating their group when they can easily be tracked by the clothes they wear and the cars they drive. Fashion Fair’s guards could be alerted to their presence the minute they step on the property by RFID tags hidden in the shoes they bought from manufacturers who bowed to Wal-Mart’s demands.

Garfinkel notes that California has legislation pending which would require businesses selling consumer goods to kill item-level RFID tags at check-out — similar to what happens now when security devices are removed from clothing at the purchase point. But as Garfinkel’s article points out,

The problem with the “all tags must die” approach, says Henry Holtzman, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, is that tags on stolen property won’t be killed. That means that having an item on your body containing a live tag might be taken as circumstantial evidence that you are a shoplifter. It’s not hard to imagine police walking the sidewalks in some neighborhoods with high-powered RFID readers, searching for anybody giving off the right signals. And it’s not hard to imagine anti-RFID activists going into stores and killing every tag they can find with covert tools. — Garfinkel, supra, at p. 58.

Nor is it difficult to imagine the police using RFID readers simply to identify and run background checks on everyone passing a particular ad hoc security checkpoint. It’s the next-best-thing to Minority Report.

RFID technology is here to stay. In reality, it’s been available for decades. But never has it been as cheap, ubiquitous and potentially threatening as it is today, in an era where the USA PATRIOT Act and other legislation that strips restrictions from governmental spying on citizens is increasingly viewed as normal and beneficial by a government that views each of its citizens as potential miscreants or, worse, enemies. Unless citizens are aware of the issues outlined in this article, they cannot act responsibly to deal with it.

So what do you do? The threat to privacy is very real, but is accentuated by the absence of government regulations limiting the use of RFID technology. What needs to happen is for concerned citizens to write their congressional representatives and express their concerns. Don’t sit back and wait until it’s too late. Stores like Wal-Mart, who consider you not so much as customers as cash cows, are ready and waiting to say, “Tag, you’re it!”

“It’s not a great deal. Individuals would be throwing away the protections of their communications for a few dollars,” Hoofnagle said. “We don’t see this as any different than letting a company listen in on your phone conversations and letting the Postal Service open your mail.”

Uh, okay. But I don’t let companies listen in on my phone conversations and I don’t let the Postal Service open my mail.

For those who don’t worry about this sort of thing…the day is coming when science will be able to scan your head as you enter a public arena. By observing activity in various parts of your brain, science can already determine things like propensity for violence, lack of impulse control, etc. Whole body x-rays (according to something I saw recently about medical advances) can be done and present images on computer screens in less than 30 seconds. All that’s needed is to combine these abilities to start scanning people. And why not? We’re already submitting to credit checks just for the privilege of paying to get on an airplane.

Hmmm…if they replace cameras at stoplights with these devices, could they ticket you before you run the red light?

The days of the pre-crime division are approaching quickly. The reactions of most citizens to it remind me very much of the story about the frog in the water which is slowly increases in temperature. The frog that would quickly try to avoid the boiling pot sits silently in the slow cooker until he’s dinner.

UPDATE September 30, 2004: There used to be a link from the words “moves to a whole new level” to a CNN story about a town in Florida. You know how most cities have cameras at intersections these days to photograph red light runners? Well the city in the CNN story had tied their cameras to a computer system and every single car that passed the camera was subjected to a background check. If the car triggered any alarms, the nearest police unit was notified, so they could go after the car. Talk about Big Brother!

He mentioned that he had a “contact” at the hospital who had seen some lab reports on the little girl, and was concerned that “proper precautions were not being taken.” Being infinitely smarter than the doctors and nurses who were treating the girl, the two of them apparently (so my acquaintance says) reported it to the Fresno Bee.

According to the Bee, the child does not have SARS. Based on what the story says, it would appear that the doctor didn’t really think SARS was the likely diagnosis anyway. (Chest x-rays—part of the diagnostic procedures that a HIPPA violator, even with access to lab results, may not see—were done and apparently this and other information lead the physician to believe it was not SARS.)

Personally, I feel much safer these days—well, except as to my privacy—knowing that I live in a country filled with people who not only support government deprecation of civil rights, but won’t let even the few remaining privacy-oriented laws stop them from reporting my personal health to the newspaper if they don’t like the way my doctor is handling things and it gives them a chance to feel important.