Warrantless surveillance — what’s the rush?

Ever wonder why El Pendejo has been so terribly anxious to get his warrantless wiretapping complete with legal immunity for anyone merely cooperating with a government investigation? Never made much sense to me. Think about the revelation that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has a thousand employees of whom six are fluent Arabic speakers. (It will shortly be increased to ten.) Or consider that crucial telephone conversations intercepted before 9-11 were still several days away from being translated on the morning of the 11th.

It’s been suggested that Bush doesn’t want to depart this life without at least a building named after him somewhere. (After all he’s done for us, it doesn’t seem like much to ask.) But how about a nice 24×7 100% audit of planet-wide phone-calls with a classified budget and a scary and allusive code-name like Omnivore or Nemesis or Götterdämmerung?

This makes a certain amount of sense—but domestic surveillance could disappear suddenly because of a sufficiently courageous and far-reaching court decision, or could gradually find itself in bad odor with the people, unlike the Lincoln Memorial (say). And advances in fault-tolerance, interprocess communication and distributed virtual memory aren’t really Bush’s style anyway.

What follows is guesswork.

Suppose that, besides the audio, the computer system records the fact of the call—what number it was made from, what number was called, whether a message was left or there was an actual conversation, the date and duration. The real data of interest would be the tiny ASCII file just described. (The audio portion might come in handy as cover though. Suppose it was reviewed if time permitted by voice-recognition programs looking for suspect terminology, and the computers flagged conversations that needed further study—this would be far enough from conventional wiretapping to give Cheney some wiggle-room, so he could say “truthfully” that we weren’t dealing with an illegal domestic surveillance system and threat number one to our way of life? After all, no one actually heard the conversation, right? So no one’s privacy has been invaded, q.e.d.)

Now the chances of them finding anything in the audio data are pretty small, especially after Al-Qaeda figures out that you have to use codewords if you’re going to plot on the net. There are solid mathematical grounds for believing that, whatever the motivations for a surveillance system on this scale may be, preventing terrorism isn’t one of them. So why conduct permanent, 100% surveillance on the world’s entire population of telephone- and internet-users? Not a part of the Bush legacy, useless audio output, not for preventing terrorism, hmm….

For calls within the US, for household A and household B:

• the more time A and B spend talking, the more likely A and B are to have similar politics; be similar in age; have similar tastes, attitudes etc.
• the more time A and B spend talking , the more likely they are to influence each other’s decision of who to vote for, who to volunteer for, whose campaign to contribute how much money to, (unless, of course, they’re already in total agreement…)
• households (and people) who are on the phone a lot tend to be younger and healthier, have small children, and (important) be more gregarious.
• it’s possible to tell Republican households from Democratic ones with some assurance.

Households that call each other form easily discernable networks of like-minded individuals. And these networks make up a priceless, up-to-the-minute high-resolution map and profile of any area: a congressional district for instance, where an election is being held or is imminent; a state being redistricted; or any similar situation.

Demographic trends can be spotted, white flight, for example, gentrification, urban decay or an influx of immigrants.

The accuracy and fine granularity of your data give you many advantages over the candidate or party without it. To name only a few of these:

• campaign contributions and cash-on-hand immediately doubles in value because you can use it so much more effectively
• pork under your control can be directed so as to provide the maximum electoral benefit
• live speeches and appearances can be more accurately tailored to the audience (topics, banter, claimed connection to the area, food, music.)
• real supporters can be mobilized quickly and easily for demonstrations and other actions
• can be used to spy on or hinder the opposition

The Republican party is a minority, white people’s party, firmly on the side of the corporations and the people that own them. How then have they held all three branches of government in their grip for nearly eight years? I think that as they stood by and watched the besotted performance by the wretched George Bush, they must have seen the day of reckoning looming near. November 2008 would have been a good guess even without Republican sex scandals to provide a helpful tailwind.

Another four years and they can complete the task of robbing us blind. But ordinary cheating won’t be enough this time. Using this data, they stand very little chance of being noticed, much less found out and prosecuted—Republican pundits will explain it as some backlash on the part of some hitherto unknown “silent majority” and Democrats will just wander off, shaking their heads in disbelief.

Your comments are welcome.