And set a watcher upon her, great and strong Argos, who with four eyes looks every way. And the goddess stirred in him unwearying strength: sleep never fell upon his eyes; but he kept sure watch always.
—Hesiod, The Aegimius
The Greeks were the first to document the frightening idea of “mass surveillance” that plagues us today.
For the Greeks, “the watcher” was represented by Argus Panoptes — a giant monster with one hundred eyes. His name meant “all-seeing,” and he was employed by Zeus’ wife Hera with the task of guarding Io — one of Zeus’ many lovers.
*Image Courtesy of Hellenica World
As legend goes, Panoptes’ eyes never slept at the same time. No matter the time of day, his myriad of eyes would be watching — there was no escape from the monster’s gaze. He eventually had to be slain for Io to be spared his oppressive surveillance.
In the late 18th century, the English transformed this mythical beast into an actual brick-and-mortar building called the “Panopticon.”
This circular prison was designed so that all the prisoners could be watched by a solitary watchman who sat perched in the middle of the circle, able to scan the imprisoned at any given moment. While it would be impossible to actually monitor all prisoners at once, the prisoners themselves never knew where the guard was looking at any given time, so it forced them into obedient behavior.
The man who designed it, Jeremy Bentham, claimed it served as “a mill for grinding rogues honest.”
The mere threat that they were being watched was enough to enslave their behavior. Yet these tales seem almost quaint in an age where everything we do is being monitored — our emails, our phone calls, and now even our movements. Today, the United States is one big Panopticon, and we’re all prisoners living in it.
Now, it is up to us to slay the giant of police state surveillance.
Last week, the unwashed masses actually won a crucial battle against the beast. But the war is still raging…
Here in Maryland, we’ve been subjected to a particularly sneaky form of the Panopticon: license plate readers.
Every day — unbeknownst to most drivers — the Maryland police use highway cameras and their own cruiser cameras to scan thousands upon thousands of law-abiding drivers and mark their time and location. This bank of drivers’ locations is then sent to other state and federal law-enforcers to do what they will. The info is stored at data centers, in some case for as long as they please.
These methods are not being used for appropriate means like identifying stolen cars or tracking down fugitives on the run. In fact, a Montgomery County Police Department document states that the information gathered can be used for any “official law enforcement purposes.” A bit vague, don’t you think?
From the ACLU:
New documents reveal, many departments are keeping innocent people’s location information stored for years or even indefinitely, regardless of whether there is any suspicion of a crime. In Maryland, for every one million plates read, only 47 were potentially associated with serious crimes.
“The spread of these scanners is creating what are, in effect, government location tracking systems recording the movements of many millions of innocent Americans in huge databases,” said ACLU Staff Attorney Catherine Crump.
A tiny fraction of the license plate scans are flagged as “hits.” For example, in Maryland, MCAC recorded 29 million reads from January through May of 2012, but only 0.2 percent of those license plates, or about 1 in 500, were hits. That is, only 0.2 percent of reads were associated with any crime, wrongdoing, minor registration problem, or even suspicion of a problem. Of the 0.2 percent that were hits, 97 percent were for a suspended or revoked registration or a violation of Maryland’s Vehicle Emissions Inspection Program. In other words, for every million plates read and stored in Maryland, only 47 (0.005 percent) were potentially associated with a stolen car or a person wanted for a serious crime.
So essentially, the state is spying on your every move to bust people for minor infractions that serve no purpose for public safety. Unless, of course, you count someone’s lapsed emission test as a threat to our safety… which I certainly do not.
Does an overdue emissions test give the government the right to track your visits to the doctor’s office, your church, or a political protest?
If you have nothing to hide, you have no reason to worry… right?
Unfortunately, this method of surveillance is not unique to Maryland.
The federal government clearly envied Maryland’s license plate scanners, so much so that the Department of Homeland Security was actively trying to set up its own scanning system for the entire country.
If it had its way, the DHS would have given a private company a contract to set up a national license plate recognition database which would have pulled together all of the license plate readers into a national bank. The federal government would have a record of everywhere you went.
Let’s say, for example, you drove to a political rally this year…
There would be a DHS record of the event that could be pulled up years from now to implicate you in whatever “crime” the state wanted to pin on you.
It’s essentially a government rap sheet. But historically, rap sheets are only for criminals, not for the democratically minded electorate that wants to make its voice heard.
There is a chilling effect here: If you know you are being tracked and monitored, you are not going to engage in activities the state may find objectionable. It’s right out of Psychology 101…
Fred Cate, a law professor at Indiana University, told Ars Technica:
“A classic example of expanding data collection and centralization, concerning people who have done nothing to warrant suspicion, without a clearly defined purpose or the legally required privacy impact analysis. Build it first and worry about privacy and purpose later’—it is the same disease that has infected the NSA and so much of our government. This type of dragnet search is the modern equivalent of the general search that [the Constitution’s] framers were so anxious to guard against.”
Thankfully, the program was just shut down due to overwhelming opposition from civil liberties groups.
Score one for the outsiders…
Just like prisoners in the Panopticon, the knowledge you’re constantly being watched will have grave psychological effects. It will create a population ruled by fear and paranoia. The government cannot defend that these spying actions are in the public’s best interest.
The consequences are dire not only for an abstract concept of freedom but also for the very tangible effect on our metal health. Recent studies have shown that constant surveillance causes high levels of stress and anxiety in the population.
In essence, it is driving us insane.
However, one unintended consequence of government surveillance is that it breeds distrust of the government itself. A series of studies have uncovered that when people discover their leader is “watching” them, their trust in that leader takes a nosedive.
This is a vicious cycle that produces more paranoia and distrust, which in turn creates more citizens for the government to “appropriately” spy on.
But victories of the people, like the recent killing of the national license plate identification system, give me hope that we outsiders are rising up in number.
In essence, we’re creating an Army of Outsiders…
And we’ll need as many soldiers as we can obtain in our battle to slay the modern Argus Panoptes and destroy the open-air Panopticon in which we are living.
We only hope we’re doing our part by giving you the ammo you need to join the fight.
