The Tyranny of Liberty

Gerd was a postman in Berlin in the early eighties with a small gambling problem. The discovery of this led to his recruitment into the Stasi, or at least its unpaid snooping wing. His job was to steam open any letters coming from the West and to read the contents. His conscience, in so much as a habitual gambler can have one, was soothed by the thought that he was exposing illegal activity, such as discussions about escape attempts or propaganda.

Pretty soon however, he found that his handlers were more interested in gossip than they were in crime. They wanted to know if the letters suggested a secret lover, a drug addiction or even a mild fetish. Anything that could be used to embarrass the recipient and thus give the Stasi another recruitment opportunity. Gerd realised quite quickly that his own recruitment had come about after he wrote to a cousin in the West looking for a loan to pay off some gambling debts.

All of this seems spooky and unnecessarily over the top. But is there any difference between this and the activities of the American spy agencies? Electronic messaging (E-Mails and text messages) have replaced handwritten letters as the means by which the general public communicate. The Americans don’t need a giant kettle to steam open the contents of these missals. The co-operation of Telecom companies and the likes of Google and Apple do all the work for them.

Gerd could only get through a couple of hundred letters a week. A computer program can scan millions of emails in a second. The purpose is the same however. If reading peoples letters or emails uncover a criminal activity than that is a bonus. Criminals are generally too smart to communicate through these channels as anyone who has watched “The Wire” can testify. The real purpose is to find a hook to somebodies embarrassment. Infidelity and homosexuality are probably the most common means to this end. The spy agencies realise that the best way to get at terrorists is through a vast network of informants living in the communities in which the terrorists live. And the best way to recruit this network is to threaten to expose that which they will do anything to keep secret.

So we live in a society where our government are intent on finding out as many secrets about us as they can, so as to potentially use this against us in the future. If people believe that you have nothing to worry about if you’re not doing anything illegal, then they should ask the former citizens of East Germany. What better way to keep an eye on a suspected Islamic terrorist for example than to find out something embarrassing about the person who sits next to him at work or the lady who cleans his house and to recruit them as unpaid spies?

This may seem like Orwellian conspiracy theory but it’s been used in every society since biblical times. Judas after all was paid to spy on his mates when they were out having supper and a few beers. Why people think that we live in benevolent times now and that “those sort of things couldn’t happen” is beyond me, particularly when technology affords our current masters the opportunity to do things that previous tyrants would have only dreamed about.

So when Edward Snowden disclosed that every email and text message in the world was being recorded on a giant database in the US, I wasn’t surprised. I’d always assumed they did this sort of thing anyway. I was actually surprised that it took so long to become public. I’ve always kept my name out of this blog but assumed that anyone with a modicum of technology skills could figure out my Google account or IP address. So the mention of “Islamic terrorist” and “conspiracy” in the same posting has probably triggered off an automatic search and the robotic descendent of Gerd is currently trawling through my Gmail. He’ll be sorely disappointed as it mainly consists of marketing spam from websites I have been foolish enough to put an email address into.

I did find it funny though that the recent news coverage of secret spying systems has centred on people passing through airports. Snowden was holed up in the transit area of Moscow airport for weeks. Dante would have mentioned airport transit areas in his circles of hell, had they existed at the time. The journalist who broke Snowden’s story (Glenn Greenwald) was also caught up in airport shenanigans when his partner was intercepted in Heathrow and detained for nine hours. It’s taken me nine hours to navigate the tunnels beneath Heathrow in the past, so I think he should count himself lucky that he had a chair for most of this time.

Airports have also spooked me, particularly since 9/11. If you want to see the full reach of the tentacles of state snooping, then visit your local terminal. I’ve had my iris photographed, my body scanned to the amusement of the queue behind me who got to see an outline of my Michelin man shape on the adjacent screen and my body patted down more intimately than an Amsterdam hooker.

As a result, I’ve always felt uncomfortable passing though airports, even though I’ve never so much as smuggled an apple into New Zealand (a capital offense it must be pointed out). But I still get nervous every time I pass through immigration or security. Which is probably why I always get stopped by the random explosives check just after security scanning.

George Orwell said “I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt”. That might explain why the powers that be are intent on finding as much ‘dirt’ about us as possible and to maintain us in a world of fear and anxiety. If it is, then I think it is too high a price to pay. Gerd lived to see the wall come down. Will we ever experience the same release from tyranny?