The “Lives of Others” was an extremely powerful movie. They way they performed surveillance in what what ostensibly a more “non-technical” era was disturbing.
Bringing people in for minor interrogations, and saving the seat cover in a sealed glass jar to be used later by bloodhounds...if necessary.
The concept of storing those seat covers is readily comparable to the Tera-petabytes of data being collected for years on us.
We aren’t doing anything wrong. But all those texts, phone transcripts, emails, you name it, are being cataloged and stored just like those seat covers in those hermetically sealed jars.
Even worse, due to the ease of cross-checking with computer technology, our equivalents of those hermitically sealed seat covers can be easily accessed and looked at, then cross-checked with the hermetically sealed seat covers of people we have associated with...and the hermetically sealed seat covers of people THEY have associated with.
Known as the “Two Hop Rule”. It used to be the “Three Hop Rule”, but they had to change that because statistically, the “Three-Hop Rule” could be used to look at the hermetically sealed seat covers of nearly every single person in the country...legally given the power of computers to analyze, categorize, and cross-check.
As the Spying Scandal unfolding against the Obama Administration indicates, the capability is already there, and has already been used in conjunction with Police State Tactics. What happened to Trump, Papadopoulos and Flynn was and is a scandal. I even include Manafort in there, because even if he has shown he is a shady character, he was treated in the way he was ONLY for political reasons.
We have, in this country, definitely come to the banks of a Rubicon. There is still time not to cross it.
About that movie “The Lives of Others”: One of the most terrifying parts for me was when the Stasi were breaking into a guy’s apartment to bug it, and a neighbor looked out her keyhole to see what was going on, and Ben Kingsley’s character noticed the change in light through the keyhole and, without hesitation, marched over (as the horrified woman looking through the keyhole straightened up and backed away from the door, her eyes wide in terror at realizing she had been noticed by the State) and delivered the characteristic “Heavy Knock of The State” with the back of his fist on the door.
And I admit: I supported the PATRIOT Act.
I shouldn’t have.
I should have known better.
But in my view, we were at war. We had just had several thousand of our countrymen murdered in cold blood in a matter of hours. I have always held that in time of war, there are going to be limitations on freedom. The press won’t be able to discuss ship or troop movements, that kind of thing.
What I didn’t readily accept is that the pervasive level of surveillance and data storage they needed to carry out to accomplish their ‘goals’ was power we simply cannot give to a government, no matter how well intentioned they may be.
As we have seen with the Obama Spy Scandal, that access to data is simply impossible for humans to resist abusing. They put all kinds of rules and regulations (the violation of which are punishable by codified law) into place to protect us as citizens.
And they simply ignored them and stepped over them as if they weren’t even there, so sure they would never be found out and punished.
We cannot ever again agree to things like that, and must find a way to roll this back what is there.
I bear responsibility for tacitly approving of it, and was I ever wrong. There are many who take pleasure in crowing about how they were right, and I take no pleasure in hearing that, but that is the price I must pay.
The Lives of Others is on Netflix, so I’ll definitely watch. Txs.
I’m quite aware of Stasi tactics, since half of my wife’s family lived under that system. Erich Fritz Mielke murdered my wife’s uncle. I don’t fear the State where I live, because they’re still a bunch of bumbling boobs and everybody knows where they live.
The real Stazi would have just shot her through the keyhole ...