A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (7 page)

The Electronic Concentration Camp

The farther we advance into the electronic concentration camp, the more the police, as well as the prisons, will be considered responsible for the identification and re-education (that is, "rehabilitation") of "social misfits"–a.k.a. dissidents, rabble-rousers, nonconformists, and extremists. By "police," I am referring to the entire spectrum of law enforcement and surveillance personnel from local police and state troopers to federal agents (the FBI and intelligence police that work locally through "fusion centers"), as well as the military and agents employed by private corporations who work in tandem with government-funded police.

Line of Riot Police

In order to ferret out individuals who might potentially upset the status quo, police and other government agencies will have to focus more of their resources on preventive detention, which means viewing everyone as potential "suspects" and using surveillance technology to monitor their activities. This has already come to pass.

The end result, as author Hannah Arendt recognized, is that more and more innocent citizens will need to be taken into "protective custody" and "handled as a 'protective police measure that is, a measure that deprives people of the ability to act."
⁶⁰
In today's world, such "protective custody" is technologically induced. Arendt, who survived a Nazi concentration camp and wrote the definitive work on totalitarianism, saw early on that the largest group of inmates in concentration camps were "people who had done nothing whatsoever that, either in their own consciousness or the consciousness of their tormentors, had any rational connection with their arrest."
⁶¹
In fact, the "ultimate goal ... is to have the whole camp population composed of this category of innocent people."
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Moreover, the police primarily exist to protect and keep safe the "good" (or compliant) citizens who reside in the electronic concentration camp alongside the less savory elements. The point, however, is that
all
citizens are inhabitants of the electronic concentration camp. In such a society, where the citizens believe the zookeeper to be friendly and looking out for their best interests, there is really no need for overt, generalized tyranny of the masses.

Yet even in such a system, periodic and/or sporadic crackdowns and arbitrary arrests are necessary to ferret out the misfits (even the nonviolent ones), the majority of whom will be innocent. "The arbitrary arrest which chooses among innocent people destroys the validity of free consent," writes Arendt, "just as torture–as distinguished from death-destroys the possibility of opposition."
⁶³
This is now being played out in the streets of some of the larger American cities where stop-and-frisk searches and racial profiling are common occurrences.

Logically, then, if a police state is to operate at optimum level, each and every citizen, even the completely innocent, must be kept track of– geographically, biologically, and economically–from cradle to grave. The police must know orbe capable of finding out precisely what every citizen is up to at every moment. The resulting loss of privacy and blurring of any distinction between private and public life and thoughts are common denominators in societies that shift toward state authoritarianism. "The only person who is still a private individual in Germany," boasted Robert Ley, a member of the Nazi hierarchy, after several years of Nazi rule, "is somebody who is asleep."
⁶⁴

Indeed, the government is already preparing electronic dossiers on virtually every citizen. Take, for example, the National Security Agency (NSA). A clearinghouse and a depository for vast quantities of data, the NSA makes it possible for the government to keep track of what Americans say and do, from the trivial to the damning, whether it is private or public. Anything and everything you've ever said or done, especially electronically–such as phone calls, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Google searches, emails, bookstore and grocery purchases, bank statements, and commuter toll records–can now be tracked, collected, catalogued, analyzed, and placed in an electronic file by the NSAs super computers and teams of government agents. In this way, as former intelligence agent Jim Bamford writes, the NSA "has transformed itself into the largest, most covert, and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever created. In the process–and for the first time since Watergate and the other scandals of the Nixon administration–the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the United States and its citizens."
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Human Goldfish

We have to face facts. Mandated by advancing technology, a pervasive surveillance is here to stay. Undoubtedly, we have become human goldfish. Not knowing who is looking in, we have created an electronic concentration camp from which escape is less likely with each passing day short of living in a cave.

The pressing issues we now face also raise other important philosophical and spiritual questions. What totalitarian ideologies aim at "is not the transformation of the outside world or the revolutionizing transmutation of society," writes Hannah Arendt, "but the transformation of human nature itself".
⁶⁶
Thus, the questions we wrestle with are profound ones. Will the citizenry be able to limit the government's use of these invasive technologies, or will we be caught in an electronic nightmare from which there is no escape? Can human nature really be altered in such a way that people will forget the longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, and love (longings that often consumed those of past generations)? Can we forget that we are human? Can humanity be obliterated?

CHAPTER 4

Fiction Has Become Reality

"The Internet is watching us now. If they want to. They can see what sites you visit. In the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us. The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing is, we'll lose our right to privacy. An ad will appear in the air around us, talking directly to us."
⁶⁸

–film director STEVEN SPIELBERG

A
rt–whether in the form of movies, novels, or paintings–has an uncanny way of predicting the future. As the renowned media analyst Marshall McLuhan once recognized, art acts as an early warning system to enable us to cope with inevitable technological change.
⁶⁹
"Inherent in the artist's creative inspiration is the process of subliminally sniffing out environmental change," observed McLuhan in a 1969 interview. "It's always been the artist who perceives the alterations in man caused by a new medium, who recognizes that the future is the present, and uses his work to prepare the ground for it."
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The emerging police/surveillance state that is currently being erected around us has been hinted at and prophesied in novels and movies for years, starting with George Orwell's increasingly relevant novel
1984
. However, it may be that filmmakers, the dominant visual artists of our time, have given and continue to give us the best representation of what we now face as a society. To this end, I shall use some of the best sci-fi films in recent decades as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the emerging police state.

Perhaps the most disturbing fact about these futuristic films is that the future is now. Fiction has become fact. Virtually everything predicted in the following films has come to pass or is about to become reality. The question, of course, is whether we will accept a totally dehumanized existence or work to retain some semblance of our humanity. Will we actively resist the police state or passively cling to our technological devices and smile as Big Brother and Big Sister dictate the terms of our existence?

Future Films

Fahrenheit 451
(1966), adapted from Ray Bradbury's novel and directed by Francois Truffaut, depicts a futuristic society in which books are banned and firemen are called on to burn contraband books–451 Fahrenheit being the temperature at which books burn. Montag is a fireman who develops a conscience and begins to question the book burning. This film is an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where virtually everyone now precensors speech and even thoughts. Here, a brainwashed people addicted to television and drugs do little to resist governmental oppressors.

The plot of Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece
2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968), as based on an Arthur C. Clarke short story, revolves around a space voyage to Jupiter. The astronauts soon learn, however, that the fully automated spaceship is orchestrated by a computer system-known as HAL 9000–which has become an autonomous thinking being that will even murder to retain control. The idea is that at some point technology in the form of artificial intelligence will become autonomous, and that human beings will become mere appendages of technology. We are already seeing this come to pass with the massive intelligence systems tasked by the government with amassing information on average citizens and monitoring their communications and activities.

George Lucas' directorial debut
THX1138
(1970), presents a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by a police state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names, but instead are known only by letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by robotic police equipped with "pain prods"–electro-shock batons, or in modern terms, tasers.

Director Stanley Kubrick presents a future ruled by sadistic punk gangs and a chaotic government that sporadically cracks down on its citizens in A
Clockwork Orange
(1971). This film may accurately portray the future of Western society that grinds to a halt as oil supplies diminish, environmental crises increase, chaos rules, and the only thing left is brute force exercised by the police and other governmental agencies.

Soylent Green
(1973) takes us to the year 2022, when the inhabitants of an overpopulated New York City depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation. A policeman investigating a murder discovers the grisly truth about what soylent green is really made of. The theme is chaos in a world ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is greed and profit.

Taking a Philip K. Dick novel as his guide, director Ridley Scott introduces us to a twenty-first century Los Angeles in
Blade Runner
(1982), where a world-weary cop tracks down a handful of renegade "replicants" (synthetically produced human slaves). Life is dominated by megacor-porations, and people sleepwalk along rain-drenched streets. This is a world where human life is cheap, and where anyone can be exterminated at will by the police (or blade runners). This film questions what it means to be human in an inhuman world.