There’s this Surveillance Society Clock from the ACLU. Modeled after the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to show how close we were to nuclear Armageddon, this clock purports to show how close we are to a Surveillance Society is which all of our privacy is finally stripped away and Big Brother truly is watching you.
According to the ACLU, several factors are at play in determining how close we are to midnight, the moment when our Cinderella freedoms turn into the pumpkin of totalitarianism. They are:
- Powerful new technologies
- Weakening privacy laws
- The “War on Terror”
- Courts that are letting privacy rights slip away
- A president who thinks he can ignore laws against warrantless spying on citizens
- Big corporations willing to become extensions of the surveillance state
I don’t know. The time seems so arbitrary to me. In general, I would agree that these items can have a negative effect on my privacy, but no where does the ACLU elaborate as to how each affects the clock. Why is it set at six minutes to midnight? Why not three minutes, or two? I just discovered this thing so I don’t know if it will change as noteworthy events, such as extension of the PATRIOT Act, happen. At this point, I just see it as an overly dramatic marketing tool to get people to think about the problem of lost privacy.
Which is NOT a bad thing, in my opinion, but put it all into perspective. Yes, the Constitution has been mangled under Bush, but he’s not the only president to play fast and loose with the thing. It’s been going on since at least FDR, who considered the Bill of Rights outdated in the face of the Great Depression.
And if you think it’s bad here, with fucked up TSA no fly lists, that CAPPS II boondoggle, and the domestic spying cockup, just look over the pond, where liberty-minded Brits are fighting the “Database State”.