They Can Follow You Everywhere
GOOGLE AND UNCLE SAM CONTINUE THEIR RELENTLESS ASSAULT ON PERSONAL PRIVACY.
by Nat Hentoff
I’ve previously mentioned my gratitude to Google for its swift and verifiable answers to my research questions. But the Silicon Valley leviathan is increasingly a menace to what’s left of our privacy.
Now being developed is Google Glass, a controversial glasses-like device that “allows users to access the Internet, take photos and film short snippets,” reported David Streitfeld in a New York Times story. “Glass is promoted by Google as ‘seamless and empowering.’ It will have the ability to capture any chance encounter…and broadcast it to millions in seconds.”
Feel a little clammy?
So does HUSTLER contributor Robert Scheer. In a TruthDig.com post titled “Google’s Spy masters Are Now Worried About Your Secrets” he wrote: “Every time there is a so-called terrorist attack on American soil, pressure to ramp up the reach of our increasingly omnipresent surveillance state spikes, sweeping ever-larger numbers of people and more intimate information concerning their lives into national databases.”
Where’s the indignation among the citizenry? Fear of terrorists has conditioned us to ditch the Fourth Amendment.
Scheer continued: “These technological invasions of our privacy serve to undermine the bold assertion of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that the protection of personal, private space is essential to the freedom of the individual.”
Did you wave goodbye?
Quoted by Scheer are lofty Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, who coauthored the Wall Street Journal article “The Dark Side of the Digital Revolution.” Ever heard of biometric information? In their words, it “can be used to identify individuals through their unique physical and biological attributes…. With cloud computing, it takes just seconds to compare millions of faces…. By indexing our biometric signatures, some governments will try to track our every move and word, both physically and digitally.”
Meanwhile, corporations like Google can collect data on what we buy and increase profits by selling it to third parties.
Schmidt defended Google’s data-sharing in 2009 when, as its CEO, he told CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo, “If you have something you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”
I don’t expect Google Glass to be mentioned much, if at all, in upcoming national, state and local elections. Maybe Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, a Democrat who remains loyal to the bedraggled Constitution, or Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky will remind us that the American Revolution began simmering in part because the colonists were enraged by British customs agents raiding their offices and homes without warrants, just as the FBI does now habitually.
Along with privacy, this ceaselessly voracious technology is taking from us our most effective weapon against an ever more enveloping police state: free speech. Tucked into David Streitfeld’s peek at Google Glass was a keen observation by Bradley Shear, an expert on social media at George Washington University: “Google Glass will test the right to privacy versus the First Amendment.”
Google Glass and potentially more effective destroyers of individual privacy continue to surpass our wildest imaginations. How many of us could have even conceived of a high-speed, übercomprehensive search engine, much less Google Glass, 20 years ago? And how many protesting journalists, Constitution-defending politicians and outraged citizens will be able to withstand the scrutiny of their private lives by the likes of Google and Barack Obama and the tech-savvy villains following in their footsteps?
I insist that this country’s best chance to again become a self-governing Constitutional republic is if more and more teachers are willing to stand up to tyranny and the invasion of privacy. They will enable new generations of voters to fully understand what it is to be a free American in charge of their government.
The true America has survived the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and later the Civil War, including Lincoln’s violation of his northern opponents’ civil liberties; the first Red Scare and J. Edgar Hoover; the mass imprisonment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War; anti-Communist zealot Joe McCarthy’s 1950s witch-hunt; and it is surviving terrorism.
But will America survive what Google Glass portends it will become?
