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Canwest News Service
In 1984, the year in which George Orwell set his great dystopian post- war novel of the same name, there was a rush to point out that the landmark date had arrived and, Cold War notwithstanding, Big Brother was almost nowhere to be seen outside the Communist bloc.
Even there his grip was loosening. The Soviet Union was in the process of dismantling itself. Reform movements swept through Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. The first signs of economic reform emerged in China under Deng Xiaoping.
North Korea continued to stew in its self-imposed isolation and paranoia but seemed an anomaly; relations were even beginning to thaw between the United States and its former enemy, Vietnam.
Orwell's vision of a repressive state in which citizens were subject to constant surveillance and a steady diet of propaganda intended to amplify perceived threats to the homeland from faceless but fanatical foreign enemies who were engaged in perpetual war was cast as amusing but far-fetched.
But 25 years later, once-self-confident democracies that see themselves threatened from within and without now drift toward the security state envisioned for Orwell's novel. Leaders justify foreign wars with warnings of imminent attack from weapons of mass destruction that can't be found. They soberly warn that civil liberties must be sacrificed to deal with a never- ending war against vague and amorphous enemies.
The rise of security, it seems, is driven by its psychological doppelganger, the rise of insecurity. We're afraid of crime, though crime rates are dropping. We're afraid of "them," although "they" are actually "us." Mainstream majorities behave as though they were victimized minorities. Tiny visible minorities are perceived as threats to order and the status quo.
Democracies still value civil liberties and don't wish to abandon these "hard-fought for" rights, the head of Britain's famous intelligence service MI5 said openly in 2005, in the aftermath of terrorist bombs from Islamic extremists in London, a city long inured to bombings by the Irish Republican Army.
"But the world has changed and there needs to be a debate on whether some erosion of what we all value may be necessary to improve the chances of our citizens not being blown apart as they go about their daily lives," warned Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller in a speech reported by the BBC.
Media is 'embedded'
Part of that change has been in social perceptions of terrorist threats and the legitimacy and effectiveness of military responses, all modulated through a mass media that is increasingly part of the institutional landscape.
Journalists who once had relatively unfettered access to the battlefield are now "embedded," their objectivity subtly co-opted by a military skilfully mastering the arts of spin, image management and public relations.
Meanwhile, citizen surveillance both public and private — parking lots, washrooms, railway platforms, restaurants, gas stations, drug stores, streetscapes, banks — becomes so pervasive with the presence of cameras sufficiently routine as to submerge into the unnoticed background.
Furthermore, there's a blurring of public interest and private, for-profit motives. From wars in the Middle East and Africa to the heartlands of democracies, everywhere there seems to be a corresponding rise in the privatization of security, from the use of corporate mercenaries and private police forces to the contracting out of surveillance and surveillance counter- measures.
Last June, for example, Canada awarded a $75-million contract to Provincial Airlines Ltd., a subsidiary of Provincial Aerospace Ltd. of St. John's, Newfoundland. The company will provide aerial surveillance of inland coastal and offshore waters and monitor domestic and foreign vessel activities.
Orwell increasingly looks more prophetic than mistaken, not least in his perception of frightened masses embracing the sacrifice of their liberties for the promise, however illusory, of security.
True, the present reality is not entirely the grim fiction conjured by the novelist after watching Nazis and Stalinists, but the congruencies should be troubling.
In Nineteen Eighty-four, doomed protagonist Winston Smith is under constant watch by Big Brother. In the contemporary security state, individuals can be — and frequently are — under constant scrutiny, tracked by the electronic spoor we all leave in the information economy.
Even private individuals can buy their own bugs, spy cams, night vision equipment, encryption and deciphering devices. Surveillance technology is now a global growth industry.
The market for alarm systems, services and installations is expected to approach $20 billion by 2011, according to one recent market analysis.
At airport check-ins, body scans render travellers naked to video surveillance. Electronic intelligence establishments monitor billions of e- mails, financial transactions, telephone conversations and even who is borrowing or buying which books at libraries and bookstores.
If Winston Smith, the invented character, found himself enmeshed in the security apparatus, "disappeared" by the security forces and then cruelly tortured psychologically, what are we to make of contemporary policies — euphemistically dubbed "extreme renditions"– by which innocent individuals like Canadian Maher Arar can also be kidnapped, "disappeared" and tortured?
Arar was snatched by American security forces as an alleged threat to the state, whisked off to a secret location and subjected to cruel psychological tortures only to be completely exonerated of all accusations by a commission of inquiry.
And what do we make of documented reports from human rights groups that China operates "black prisons" of which there's no official acknowledgement and into which people vanish?
In a chapter titled "The Rise of the Security State," in his book American Politics and Society, David H. McKay traces the American rise of being a security state to its origins in 1917 when the United States mobilized for the First World War.
1917 a turning point
The U.S. decision to enter the European conflict on the side of Britain, France and Russia coincided with the collapse and overthrow of the Russian government by Bolshevik revolutionaries in October 1917. U.S. federal and state governments swiftly enacted anti-anarchist and anti-communist legislation and introduced curbs on speech that had previously been constitutionally protected but was now deemed to interfere with military operations.
During the Second World War and the Cold War that followed, McKay notes, there was renewed impetus to curb the activities of fascists and communists. One bill would have forced all communists to register with the federal Department of Justice which would then be empowered to prosecute and deport them. It was vetoed by President Harry Truman.
However, what propelled the U.S. toward a 21st-century security state, one that Americans of 80 years earlier would barely recognize, was the attack by an obscure fundamentalist Islamic terrorist organization upon the World Trade Center in New York.
The attack, launched on Sept. 11, 2001, using airliners hijacked with primitive box-cutters but carrying full loads of jet fuel that made them into gigantic flying bombs, was a stroke of both tactical and strategic genius. It destroyed without warning and in the unblinking gaze of global media, a mighty symbol of America's economic power in the very heart of its biggest city in broad daylight while security forces watched helplessly. Even the military command at the Pentagon was struck in a side attack.
The indelible events later tagged 9/11 occurred, McKay wrote, at a time when public perceptions of any conceivable threat to the country were at a historic low. The Cold War had ended, there were rapprochements with China and Russia, there was promise of a "peace dividend" from a stand-down by nuclear forces and many looked forward to a "Pax Americana."
Instead, a powerful blow was delivered to the financial heartland of a world power which during the modern era had experienced no attack against its home soil. The response was swift, ruthless and draconian, and reflected a heightened sense of insecurity. Instead of a peace dividend, Americans got the Department of Homeland Security, a bureaucratic behemoth with 208,000 employees and a budget that at $50 billion a year would be the envy of several score small nations.
It pursued its self-described mandate– "Protect Our Nation from Dangerous People" — by tightening borders with its most trusted ally, increasing patrol and surveillance manpower, developing new biometric tracking technology and expanding the role of the Secret Service.
The ethics of the state were redefined to permit a greater range of coercive techniques in the interrogation of prisoners who might be seized and held without warrant. New security rules spawned a new lexicon of Orwellian euphemisms, some of which had been used by Nazi state security agencies.
Torture became "special methods of questioning" and "refined coercive interrogation technique." Secret prisons with torture facilities became "black sites."
The U.S. is not the only modern state to embrace the new security model. The United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Sweden and Germany have all embarked upon new security initiatives.
Canada expands security
Canada is engaged in a sweeping expansion of its surveillance laws to permit surreptitious listening to cellphone and Internet communications and seeks to force service providers to add enabling surveillance hardware and software to networks.
The United Kingdom, where Orwell foresaw the sleepless eye of Big Brother, now has one surveillance camera for every 14 citizens. A 2006 report for that country's information commissioner minced no words.
"We live in a surveillance society," it said. "It is pointless to talk about surveillance society in the future tense. In all rich countries of the world everyday life is suffused with surveillance encounters, not merely from dawn to dusk but 24/7 . . . the majority are now just part of the fabric of daily life. Unremarkable."
But surveillance practices that become so pervasive we cease to recognize them are accompanied by profound risks, the British report said. It pointed to the historic abuse of census data — normally shielded — to interned Japanese citizens who had committed no offences during the Second World War. More recently, racial profiling has emerged as a way of identifying potential terrorists and enemies of the state.
"We do not have to imagine some wicked tyrant getting access keys to social security or medical databases to see the problem," said the report. "The corruptions of power include leaders who appeal to some supposed greater good [victory in war] to justify unusual or extraordinary tactics."
Canada's own privacy commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, in an interview with the Ottawa Citizen early this year, expressed similar concerns. "Certainly we're living in a surveillance society," she said. "There's the surveillance of street cameras as we walk to work, the loyalty cards as we buy our coffee. We may be tracked in and out of our office. Exceptionally, employers can do surveillance on their employees. Your kids may be under surveillance cameras at many day cares. In hospitals, there's increasing use of surveillance of patients. So we are in a surveillance society.
"The issue is not, are we in it or not. It's how well do we control it and how well do we make sure there are very, very stringent rules about who gets what information for what purposes."
Put another way, the public insecurity which grants democracies permission to transform themselves into security states by diminishing long-cherished civil rights involves redefining our collectively agreed conceptions of liberty and freedom.
The risk, as Orwell so astutely warned in his 1948 novel, is that democracies themselves might, in their pursuit of security, become what they most abhor and slide into that twilight zone of illusions and slogans where "War is Peace; Freedom is Slavery; Ignorance is Strength."
shume@islandnet.com
