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Colton man asks why are Americans so accepting of surveillance?

Posted 9/9/14

To the Editor: Just when the nightmare of mass surveillance is becoming a distant memory in Eastern Europe, many Americans are accepting, indeed welcoming it in this country. It is a pity the foreign …

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Colton man asks why are Americans so accepting of surveillance?

Posted

To the Editor:

Just when the nightmare of mass surveillance is becoming a distant memory in Eastern Europe, many Americans are accepting, indeed welcoming it in this country.

It is a pity the foreign films that depict what it is like to live in a surveillance state are not better known here. There is The Lives of Others, set in East Germany in 1985, in which a government minister uses his powers of surveillance to force an actress to prostitute herself to him, to inform on her playwright fiancé, and ultimately to commit suicide.

In East West, a Frenchwoman finds herself a prisoner in post-WWII Soviet Russia, her passport confiscated, her life destroyed, surrounded by eavesdroppers, spies and informers all too ready to consign her to a forced-labor camp, which is where she eventually winds up.

By far the most terrifying of such films is the The Chekist, which depicts the functioning of the first Soviet security department, the Cheka (the Emergency Commission). Later incarnations of this organization were the NKVD (the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs), active during the Terror of the 1930s (a period that has been well documented by Robert Conquest in his The Great Terror) and the KGB (the Committee for State Security) of James Bond fame. The film consists mainly of a series of mass executions of putative enemies of the people.

It is naive to think that if one is not breaking the law, one has nothing to fear from constant and ubiquitous surveillance. By itself, the vast amount of data collected invites officials to see suspicious behavior and conspiracies where none exist. This is especially true if bona fide cases of criminality are few and far between. And unfortunately, not all officials possessed of limitless power of surveillance are immune to the temptation to frighten, humiliate, degrade and ultimately to destroy, as witnessed by these three films.

There was never a surveillance state in human history that did not guarantee its citizens two things: a living hell and an early grave. No person or group of persons should ever be given unlimited power over their fellows.

When, as in The Chekist, one is standing naked facing a bloodstained wall, waiting for the executioner's bullet, it is too late to say, “Maybe things are getting out of hand.”

Kevin Beary

Colton