THE ELECTRONIC POLICE STATE

Perhaps you saw the story headlined on Drudge (2/11) about the Obama Administration asserting that Americans have "no reasonable expectation of privacy" regarding their cell phone conversations.

It’s yet another sign of the emerging Electronic Police State.

When we think of a "police state," most of us summon images of Nazi storm troopers or Stalin’s henchmen dragging people out of their houses in the middle of the night. These images are accurate enough, but they reflect the conditions of the world over a half-century ago, and they really do not very well reflect what is happening in the world today.

In other words, these images are mostly out of date. The modern police state is generally silent and transparent. It is electronic.

An electronic police state is characterized by this:

State use of electronic technologies to record, organize, search and distribute forensic evidence against its citizens.

The two crucial facts about the information gathered under an electronic police state are:  it is are gathered in the form of criminal evidence, ready for use in a trial;  and that it is gathered universally and silently, and only later organized for use in prosecutions.

In a full Electronic Police State (EPS), every surveillance camera recording, every email you send, every Internet site you surf, every post you make, every check you write, every credit card swipe, every cell phone ping… are all criminal evidence, and they are held in searchable databases, for a long, long time.

Congress has now increased the penalties for mail and wire fraud to 20 years in prison. What constitutes wire fraud? Anything the prosecutor wants. All he needs is a "victim" and the use of the "mail" – which need not have anything to do with the federal Post Office, and includes electronic transmissions ("wires") over privately-owned Internet services.

I want you to think very hard and long on this: any email you have ever sent can be grounds for felony federal wire fraud prosecution threatening you with 20 years in prison. The email, or "electronic transmission," does not itself have to be fraudulent. It can still be "wire fraud" if it is only somehow "involved" in what the government deems to be a "fraudulent scheme."

Nervous now? It is a complete illusion that anything legally stands in the way between federal prosecutors and American citizens.  The EPS gives Washington politicians and federal prosecutors the capacity to ruin anyone’s life they capriciously choose. You can be prosecuted whenever they feel like it, since the evidence is already in their database.

Many questionable surveillance technologies came into use in the United States during the Bush presidency. At the time, quite a large number of people said "I trust George Bush. I don’t think he wants to do this for the purpose of increasing his personal power, I think he wants to protect us."

It may be that these people were fully correct, but that doesn’t matter, because Mr. Bush is gone, and these technologies remain in use by his successor. And they may remain for many more successors to use.

Long-term, the EPS destroys free speech, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and other sections of the Bill of Rights. Worse, it does so in a way that is difficult for people to point out and condemn.

During normal times, when a government behaves badly, there are people who are willing to protest. But, what happens to those protestors when the government has every email they’ve sent for the past five years? Will a protestor still act, knowing that the government can (with the push of a button) call-up all the emails she sent to her friends when she was depressed? Or every web site she ever surfed? Or every phone call she ever made?

Not likely.

Because of this, the EPS negates free speech over time. The 1^st Amendment remains on the books, but using it exposes the citizen to any number of prosecutions, not to mention the embarrassment and damage caused by criminal charges being made public.

The Federal Register in the United States now contains over 76,000 pages. In addition to this, there are state laws and who-knows-how-many pages of departmental demands. We are all criminals now. We remain unbound only because of prosecutorial discretion, and because evidence is hard to gather and organize. But with an EPS, gathering and organizing evidence is automatic.

From the standpoint of a tyrant, an electronic police state is a perfect weapon: It chokes off all dissent before it can form, but leaves the state looking pristine. The enforcement mechanisms are fear and shame, and, being internal to all involved, they remain unseen, no matter how powerful their effects.

Liberty is slipping away, silently.

Over 50 years ago, before most Americans had ever heard the word "computer," Ayn Rand’s predicted where government was headed. From Atlas Shrugged, Chapter Three, aptly entitled "White Blackmail":

There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted — and you create a nation of law-breakers — and then you cash in on the guilt.

Every time any of us sends an email, we get to ponder how much easier it is for the Electronic Police State to cash in on the guilt.

However… there is a way the Internet can ruin the EPS operative mechanism.  I’ll tell you about it next week.

TTPer Paul Rosenberg – "prosberg" on the Forum, is the developer of the Cryptohippie.com virtual private network, which was the subject of Marco The Wizard’s column, Cryptohippie.