Microsoft announced its new X-Box this week, and it is the stuff of which science fiction used to be made. It is interactive to the extent that it no longer requires controllers of any kind, but rather it can recognize your face and your gestures, hear and understand your speech, and interact with any other device capable of receiving messages or instructions from it. And not to be outdone, Google has announced that it is developing a pair of glasses with a small screen imbedded in them that will allow you to direct searches about the things you see and will give you access to the internet for whatever purpose you wish to use it for. Google has also gone almost all the way toward developing a self-operating automobile that will allow the driver to sit idle while the hardware and software imbedded in the car's guidance system makes all the judgments necessary to deliver the occupants to their destination, even if they're asleep at the wheel, so to speak. I know that in my own life, the local water authority has ceased to send me the cards by which I used to read the meter quarterly and now estimates my bill based on past usage, and not very well either, because I am unwilling to allow them to install a digital automated transmitter that will send my water usage information--and I fear much, much more information--to their central billing department...or wherever. Perhaps all this is progress, but I refuse to allow the digital transmitter to be attached to the meter in my house because I don't want information flowing from my home without my family having the capacity to control it...or even to know what information is really flowing from the house. I may be just paranoid, but with drone aircraft having the capacity to kill people from miles up in the sky without them even knowing that they are targets...with the justice department seizing the phone records of members of the press from third party phone companies, and with cases going to The Supreme Court on the subject of GPS plants by law enforcement without warrants...I don't think I am unjustified in being resistant to...what shall we call them...digital intrusions. And while the capacity to invade our privacy continues to grow, corporate America is asking us to volunteer to give more of that capacity to it...a kind of power that government still has to get a court order to exercise...as if I would voluntarily trust Microsoft where The Constitution says I don't have to trust the government, which leads me to congress.
As the Republicans convene their congressional kangaroo courts aimed at pillorying upper level civil servants as if they are aware of every pencil stroke that occurs in their agencies, all in a quest to aggrandize themselves and distract the American people, what is important is going unnoticed by them. The assault on our privacy in every respect, from cameras monitoring our movements by foot on the street to monitors on police cars that constantly scan traffic and record license plates in such a fashion as to allow the police to locate anyone who drove near one of their cruisers at any given time, is intense. But our legislators blithely ignore it all while they fixate on the possibility that the same government that is watching us relentlessly will launch an attempt to confiscate all of the 300 million or so guns located in 55 million households with the million or so personnel available to them...a feat of impossible scope, and thus no threat to us at all. They are concerned that each of those million federal military and law enforcement personnel can go to fifty-five houses and force even the posse comitatus extremists who are armed to the teeth to surrender their weapons, but they are undaunted by the fact that we are being watched every minute of every day and private industry is now augmenting the digital network that may well be the instrument that ultimately leads to a full and final end to privacy for all of us. They are fixated on a few people who were trying to prevent tax-exempt, private status for donors to ineligible political organizations by focusing on the organizations' names--and I don't see why focusing on an organization with the phrase "Tea Party" in its name is proscribed any more than it should be to focus on one that includes any other party name, Republican or Democratic for example--but they do nothing to prohibit companies and individuals from putting software on our computers and cell phones without our knowledge that gives them access to our private digital information, our locations and our habits and thus enables all kinds of things, including theft on a sometimes massive scale. On Wednesday, you could have seen Chariman Darrell Issa of the House Oversight Committee that is endlessly investigating this purported IRS scandal explaining that problem away on C-Span as he only incidentally, he would have us believe, made the distinction between an organization having the Tea Party in its name on the one hand, and actually being political because of affiliation with the Tea Party. His point was that "Tea Party" is a philosophical label, like conservative, not a designation of political activity, much less a political party...a tough point to make given the prideful pandering of congressmen to their local Tea Party organizations and their willingness to vote as a block to effect cognate political change on virtually every occasion. Note that I said political change, not social change, the latter being the route to tax-exemption and the former being strictly excluded from that privilege by inclusion of the word "exclusively" in the operative statute under which 501 (c)(4) status was created. Republicans writhe, twist and turn to make political hay, but when it comes to the things that really count, they can't move in a straight line because money talks, not their constituents. Imagine congress doing something that Microsoft really didn't like. Corporations have had their way in this country for three decades, and they have gradually invaded our body politic like ticks, but the focus in Washington, even among Democrats who are afraid to ask questions for fear of voter back-lash, is on a few low level bureaucrats who tried to make sense out of a vague provision of the law and chose an easy way instead of a good one.
This all reminds me of a poll statistic that crops up all the time. The pollsters ask, do you think the country is headed in the right direction, but they never ask in what sense you think so...either way. Well, here's a news flash for the pollsters. That isn't a question that demonstrates a political inclination toward either party. When people say that we're not headed in the right direction, they're not saying that Republicans or Democrats are wrong. They are saying that all of them are. In that regard, someone had better wake up argue for a change of course very soon, or it will be too late for all of us.
Your friend,
Mike
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