June 5, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Death of Privacy – Next Step: Death of Democracy
 
By Cicero
Special to Huntington News Network
 
Removing the protection of individual’s private data is another step – a big one – to moving the nation closer to a dictatorship. Today, anyone can troll the Internet and within a blink of the eyes track down various aspects of an individual’s life from birth, schools attended to marriages, devoices, children, address, and numerous other personal data. All this plus our telephone records are now easily accessible to various government and non-government agencies. It is quite unnerving to think that we have no idea to what extent the government is exercising, or prepared to exercise surveillance of the citizens of this once real democracy.
 
The latest bad news came as the government started seeking to require Internet service providers keep data of all Internet usage for up to two years. For those of us who have been around for a while, we may remember with nostalgia the good old days prior to the presence of high-speed data search engines like Google and all kinds of data mining software when such accumulation of data would have been pointless. Today the records can be cut and diced in so many different ways that the government can easily know more about us than we do ourselves. Already, this exponential growth of the power of the “Big Brother” is surreptitiously changing our day-to-day life to the point that we now have to question what is still left with a true democracy that we once thought we knew and had. On the other hand, perhaps this question is already getting to be irrelevant.
 
Indeed, through technologies like the radio frequency identification (RFID) devices, which are now widely adopted in all major toll systems in this and other nations, it is possible that data can become available to governments for tracking of vehicle movements. As the RFID devices enter more of the consumer markets, which is indeed the case, more and more data can be used to determine many – too many – things about individual consumers. Tying these records together with credit cards sales, gasoline purchases and other daily activities we engage in is testament to saying that we can forget about such things as freedom and privacy. Scary, isn’t it? Well, the good news is to date there is still a small portion of the population carries such devices, but eventually everyone of us can, and will be tracked probably in everything we do, every day.
 
For those who think I’m being too grim here, please be reminded that within one year all new passports in the United States and some other countries will have an RFID embedded in them and eventually, all will contain biometric data about the person carrying the passport. The European Union is even making a step further in considering building such devices into the currency to guard against counterfeiting. If that becomes a reality, I suspect the U.S Treasury will likely ask to do the same for the explicit purposes of fraud prevention and tracking of fund movement.
 
It has been years since people started to embed RFID chips in their pets to keep track of the animals in case of loss. Now many individuals are placing such devices under their skins containing personal and medical data so that in case of emergency injuries the unconscious individual can be externally scanned with the data being delivered to the medical professionals for determination of the person’s prior conditions, medications and contact data. While such information can potentially save one’s life the same information if combined with other personal data could be taken advantage of by the government as a monstrous tool to build up a dictatorship.
 
As the RFID chips are becoming cheap and ubiquitous, they are now in the process of penetrating further and deeper into our daily life virtually in a cradle-to-coffin manner. A number of hospitals in the United States have already started to attach bracelets containing an RFID tag to newborn babies so that their staff will be notified if a child is being taken out of the hospital. Perhaps we are not that far from the day when an RFID device would be implanted under the baby’s skin. And from that moment on, that individual would be scanned constantly throughout his/her life with a built-in device that could remotely monitor and update 24/7 everything about him/her including the DNA, health, address, whereabouts – indeed everything. Well, that is not fun.
 
While these technologies are in themselves arguably useful when used for the rightful causes the developers envisioned at the beginning, they unfortunately also provide an opportunity of abuse by a deviant authority or an ego maniac dictator bent on keeping track of individuals for horrific purposes though often under the masquerade of righteous reasons, such as, anti-terrorism.
 
I would gravely argue that the death of individual privacy would mark the beginning of the death of democracy. If the Imperial Bush Administration would be granted the permission to store and access the data of Internet use – God forbids – then what would be the next step? Would they at some stage also seek permission to implant an RFID chip in each of us? How dare I even think of it!
 
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Editor’s Note: In the 1952 movie “Five Fingers,” James Mason played the valet of the British ambassador to neutral Turkey during World War II. He was a German spy who went by the code name “Cicero.” His intelligence information – including the date of D-Day – was excellent, but fortunately for the Allies, the Germans didn’t believe him, thinking him a double agent. The film was based on real events. The alternate title of the movie is “Operation Cicero.” The Roman political figure, orator and philosopher Cicero was a champion of the traditional institutions of the Roman Republic and the enemy of autocracy, including the politics of Julius Caesar and Pompey.