Dick’s Warnings Unheeded: Surveillance and the Penopticon
One of the basic tenets of freedom calls for privacy. It is impossible to be truly free if someone is watching your every move. Why? Because even if that tracking has benevolent intentions, one can never fully shake the feeling that those watching are also judging. Besides which, if they are not judging, then what’s the point in watching?
The Australian government decided to challenge this idea in some new legislation, as DogReader points out:
One of the fundamental tenets of a democracy is the ability to have ‘checks and balances’ to safeguard the civil rights of the individual citizen. This basic precept is being challenged by the proposed legislation in Australia:
“Security agencies would be able to secretly track people via their mobile phones and monitor their internet browsing for up to three months without obtaining a warrant under new laws due to go before the Senate this week.”
How far is this removed from Philip K. Dick’s dismal predictions of future totalitarian governments? This legislation only permits surveillance for up to three months, but what if this is the first step to something far more sinister? What happens in a world where the government keeps track of every place you have been and where they have personality profiles on each and every citizen?–wait, they already do this.
The question is, how much of our freedom are we willing to give up in order to keep the rest? This the fundamental question that lies at the heart of every government, and ultimately the question on which America was originally founded. They are already trying to take away our firearms; will we let them take away our privacy as well?
Leave a Reply