CSotD: Raiders of the Lost Lemont
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Today's Candorville revives the fear of the previous generation: What if Big Brother can watch, but wouldn't bother?
At the turn of the century, there was a sitcom called "Dharma and Greg," about an uptight guy from an uptight family married to the free-spirited daughter of flower children. In one of the two or three episodes I watched, the family discovers that Dharma's ex-radical father, who has long spoken of how the FBI has targeted him, is of no interest to the feds at all, and so they try to shield him from the awful truth by creating a phony file for him to steal.
Most of the show dealt in vapid TIME Magazine stereotypes, but that one kind of struck home, because I knew a lot of people who felt they were being spied on back in the day, and a few who clearly were.
One of the results of the Watergate scandal was a greater scrutiny of such matters, from which escaped the facts of COINTELPRO, the dirty-tricks campaign Hoover waged against dissidents of the era. It wasn't much news to anyone on the left, but it helped dismiss the responses of "You're paranoid" and "They wouldn't do that."
We weren't paranoid, and, not only would they do it, but they did.
After the facts emerged, there came a point at which the feds announced that (A) you had a right to see your file and (B) they intended to destroy the ones that proved to be inconsequential.
This brought up an interesting dilemma for most people who had demonstrated for civil rights or marched against the war or played guitar or worn a paisley shirt or what-have-you, because, if you didn't have a file, asking to see it sure felt like a good way to get one started or to get an existing file upgraded from "inconsequential."
I always figured that the only reason I would have a file would be if they started separate files for everyone who appeared in someone else's file. If that were the case, my "file" would hold a single piece of paper listing two or three times my name was on a list of names in a file about somebody far more interesting.
There were people who we knew for certain were under FBI surveillance, and most of them were such small fish that it made you wonder what they planned to do with all this information they were collecting. Especially since people we thought they probably ought to move on never seemed to have anyone move on them.
And then, when I saw the final scene of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," where the recovered ark is being more completely lost than it was to begin with, I said, "Oh, there's all that information they were collecting: fourteenth pallette in the third row from the right."
This is how underwear bombers get on airplanes while five-year-old kids are being pulled out of line because their names are on the no-fly list: Keeping track of everybody is, in practice, pretty much like keeping track of nobody at all.
Now, I only have a stupid phone, so, as I understand it, Big Brother doesn't know where I am unless I make a phone call while I'm there. Let me save him some trouble: Livingroom, bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, dog park, grocery store.
But for those, like Lemont, who have Smart Phones, the issue becomes more fraught, because the damn thing apparently sends out a constant stream of information, even when it's idle. Should you be concerned that someone is logging all your activities?
I'd say, yes, if you're worried about wasteful government spending.
Or if you really feel that some crook is going to the trouble of going on-line to monitor your Smart Phone information stream rather than just randomly wandering through your neighborhood to see whose car is gone and whose lights are out.
In which case you should switch on your phone, mail it to another state and then wait in your darkened livingroom with a baseball bat.
That'll learn'em!
(You knew this one was coming.)
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