You are never alone..

..global
political domination. Or to hide their affairs with attractive members of either
sex, dreadful schemes with the tobacco industry or some financial skulduggery.
These ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’ people may not have stood
before any tribunal to have their crimes weighed in the balance of Justice,
but extinguished they are with the single bullet of the virtuous whilst the
machine guns of the evil failed to hit anybody.
It is a world with no apparent collateral damage, where only the endless numbers
of the ethnically stereotyped met grisly and colourful ends. Often their own
in slow motion.
Of course, this now appears to have been based largely on fact and we, to our
startled surmise, find ourselves parading around the world jack naked for all
to see. Our every transaction, email and twitter recorded and analysed, parsed
and stored perhaps for eternity. No matter that you are a law abiding senior
citizen and a small fish in no need of frying, you are still caught up in the
world of international surveillance. Smile, for you are on camera operating
in all the visible and invisible spectra. It is somehow troubling to know that
every search I make when writing these minor tracts of human doubt is no doubt
captured in some large database in Maryland or the ACT.
The Murdoch Press must have thought that because of its relationship to the
great and powerful that it too could participate in the world of information
pick-pocketing though that of course was the result of a few bad apples and
not corporate policy. I really believe that. I really do and say it twelve times
a day.
In Australia we smile complacently and say that, of course, if you have done
nothing wrong you have nothing to fear. Maybe, probably, we don’t. Perhaps.
If you were sitting in Pakistan or any number of countries not officially at
war with anyone and a stated valued ally of the United States, you could be
sitting having dinner with your family unaware that on the other side of the
world a man might be sitting in front of a screen piloting an high- explosive
tipped drone thousands of kilometres from him but uncomfortably close to you.
You may, or may not be a terrorist, but we should assume that the children aren’t.
No matter, on “totally verified reliable information from trusted sources”
you and your family may be spread across the landscape. It’s called it
‘extra-judicial killing’ and it is not a nice thing and particularly
unpleasant if you were wrongly identified as an eveil-doer. As does sometimes
happen.
As a thought experiment, imagine that Pakistan, Luxembourg or Mozambique equipped
themselves with drones and decided that there were Americans, Argentinians or
Bermudans whom they classified as terrorists. And targeted the odd ‘high-value’
with their own devices. That wouldn’t be regarded as sporting I’m
sure and might cause general international disapproval. You couldn’t have
everybody doing it.
Now we are better informed of all these shenanigans because of the mass leaking
of government ‘secrets’ by individuals such as Bradley Manning and
Edward Snowden, individuals regarded as either traitors or heroes. Brave, foolish
or foolhardy anyway. I think that have confirmed what we always suspected for
otherwise why would all those spy movies looked so authentic?
I suffer from the barely amusing thought that, in fact, all the various spy
agencies get their operating manuals from watching movies, and are now acting
out how they are portrayed in the cinema. The cinema then increases the threshold
and the agencies, in thrall to the collective hallucination of the media, lower
their threshold of moral and ethical acceptability.
To my knowledge the prime outcome of these revelations has been a number of
highly embarrassed governments who have been caught red-handed spying on, not
only their own citizens, but other governments …..and even apparently
ineffectual the United Nations. And in many cases without a legal leg to stand
on. To our surprise we find that the United States got access to all our data
as part of the US Australia Free Trade Agreement – it must have been in the
part we never got to see. But what should one expect from an agreement that
has been of little financial benefit to Australia, but of inestimable value
to the United States?
Now you might think that, having been caught with the proverbial trousers down,
the sensible thing would be to apologise and ensure that errant agencies that
were operating outside the law were told to behave in an orderly manner. Strangely
this seems not to be happening.
I fear that what we are going to see is further obfuscation, denial, fear, uncertainty,
the creation of doubt and an attack on the media for their dreadful complicity
in raising the issue. The level of secrecy within government will be raised
and we won’t have the slightest clue what’s going on. The “Commercial
in Confidence’ exclusions that State Governments use to hide behind will
seem mere child’s play in the ever Braver New World. Expect journalists
to be detained at airports and computers to be trashed.
Oh that seems to be happening. I await the knock at the door.