Wire Tapping Is One Step Too Far

“A specter is haunting our world, the specter of crypto-anarchy.” So begins a document known as the Crypto-Anarchists Manifesto, one of the many Internet publications that deal with the importance of freedom of information.

Centuries from now, it’s not going to be money or political power that controls everything, it’s going to be all the ones and zeros, all the little bits of data in computers. Whoever regulates the information has control over events. Some people, including the Crypto-Anarchists and myself, believe the best future is one in which there is no control whatsoever of information. The government cannot afford to keep secrets from its people.

Now then, you can understand my surprise one morning when I picked up the paper and read about the FBI wanting to upgrade its policy of tapping phones. It would appear that quite a few more people are going to be able to hear a third person breathing on the line if the FBI is given the capacity to tap up to one in every hundred homes in what it labels as “high-crime” areas.

Of course, the FBI has defended itself with a few main arguments. 1) They’re only after the capacity to do it. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will. 2) The technology is mostly benign. It’s only used to monitor “dangerous” situations. 3) Each individual wiretap still couldn’t be placed without a warrant.

I have a few responses to these.

Power is a dangerous thing. Make someone aware that they can do something, chances are they will. If you tell a child not to put his hand on a hot stove, you know he’s going to in the next five minutes. Trouble here is we’re not just talking about a burned pinky, we’re talking about the way we communicate. Before this new policy, the old ratio of wiretapped phones was one in 174,000. It means that the FBI might, instead of narrowing its gaze on a few people, widen it out over the general populace.

This technology is anything but safe! This is possibly an even more dangerous development than the atomic bomb. True, bombs can destroy the planet, but this kind of regulation could lead to measures that will chain and bind humanity’s ability to communicate.

The second part of the FBI’s defense is that they only want to use it to monitor for “dangerous” situations. Has anyone else here read “1984”? The power to monitor and regulate information of any kind must be closely watched. Power can be abused, and this is a power that no one should have.

As far as getting a warrant goes, who is to say just what the qualifications will be for getting one now? If the FBI wants the ability to monitor, that means they aren’t just going to put taps into “dangerous” or supposedly dangerous houses, they’re going to put them anywhere they feel like it. Without, of course, notifying the people being bugged.

Hopefully, I’m just frothing at the mouth here, and there isn’t any danger. The policy will fail, or the FBI really will put this technology to a safe use. Hopefully.

In truth, I am in fear of what the future may bring us. xxxx