Lockdowns threaten our democracy and give our government authoritarian control.
Article first appeared in Truthout.org:
What is needed in the aftermath of this tragedy is a critical and thoughtful analysis about what the significance of locking down an entire city meant not simply for the present or the future of urban living, but for democracy itself. Locking down Boston was generally left unquestioned by the mainstream media, though a number of progressive and left intellectuals raised serious questions about the use and implications of the tactic, particularly the abridging civil liberties, squelching dissent, and legitimating the spectacle of the war machine. For example, Michael Schwalbe argues that he was troubled by what lockdown foreshadows with its connotation of authoritarian control, its expanding use, and its ongoing normalization in American society. He writes:
When I hear that authorities have locked down a school, a workplace, a transit system, a cell phone network, or a city, the subtext seems unmistakable: We are now in control. Listen carefully and do as you are told. What I hear is the warden saying that communication will flow in one direction only, and that silence and obedience are the only options.
Lockdown as a policy and mode of control misrepresents the notion of security by reducing it to personal safety and thereby mobilizing fears that demand trading civil liberties for increased militarized security. The lockdown that took place in Boston serves as a reminder of how narrow the notion of security has become in that it is almost entirely associated with personal safety but never with the insecurities that derive from poverty, a lack of social provisions, and the incarceration binge. Most importantly, it now serves as a metaphor for how we address problems facing a range of institutions including immigration detention centers, schools, hospitals, public housing and prisons. Lockdown is the new common sense of militarized society, the zone of unchecked surveillance, policing, and state brutality.
In a society where critical analysis and explanation of violent attacks of this nature are dismissed as terrorist sympathizing, there is a stultifying logic that assumes that contextualizing an event is tantamount to justifying it. This crippling impediment to public dialogue may be why the militarized response to the Boston Marathon bombings, infused with the fantasy of the Homeland as a battlefield and the necessity of the paramilitarized surveillance state, was for the most part given a pass in mainstream media. Of course, there is more at stake here than misplaced priorities and the dark cloud of historical amnesia and anti-intellectualism, there is also the drift of American society into a form of soft authoritarianism in which boots on the ground and the securitization of everyday life now serve either as a source of pride, entertainment, or for many disposable groups, a source of fear.
The top five causes of death in the US are (in order) heart disease, cancer, respiratory diseases (like pneumonia), stroke and accidents. The infectious and non-communicable diseases on this list alone account for about 1.5 million deaths in 2010, meaning a 2% reduction would save thirty thousand people per year, almost ten times the number that would die from terrorism in this scenario. Knowing this, would you be willing to take the deal now?
Any attempt to suggest that the overly militarized response to the bombings was less about protecting people than legitimating the ever expanding reach of military operations to solve domestic problems was either met with disdain or silence in the dominant media. Even more telling was the politically offensive reaction to such critics and the intensity of a right-wing diatribe that used the Boston Marathon bombing as an excuse to further the expansion of the punishing state with its apparatuses of militarization, surveillance, secrecy, and its embrace of lawless states of exception. Equally repulsive was how the Boston bombing produced an ample amount of nativist paranoia about immigrants and the quest for an "enemy combatant" behind every door.
Another register of bad faith was evident in the comments of right-wing pundits, broadcasting elites, and squeamish liberals who amped up the frenzied media spectacle surrounding the marathon bombing. Many of them suggested, without apology, that the country should be grateful for an increase in invasive searches, the suspension of constitutional rights, the embrace of total surveillance, and the ongoing normalization of the security state and Islamophobia One frightening offshoot of the Boston Marathon bombing was the authoritarian tirade unleashed among a range of government officials that indicated how close dissent is to being treated as a crime and how under siege public space is by the forces of manufactured terrorism. For example, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) used the attacks in an effort to undo immigration reform, no longer concealing his disdain for immigrants, especially Muslims and Mexicans. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) argued that President Obama should not only deny Tsarnaev his constitutional rights by refusing to read him his Miranda Rights, but also hold him as "an enemy combatant for intelligence gathering purposes." As one commentator pointed out, "This is pretty breathtaking. Graham is suggesting that an American citizen, captured on American soil, should be deprived of basic constitutional rights."
Representative Peter King (R-N.Y.) reasserted his long standing racism by repeatedly arguing that the greatest threat of terrorism faced by the U.S. "is coming from the Muslim community" and that it might be time for state and federal authorities to spy on all Muslims. According to King, "Police have to be in the community, they have to build up as many sources as they can, and they have to realize that the threat is coming from the Muslim community and increase surveillance there," adding "we can't be bound by political correctness." King seems to think that dismissing the rhetoric of political correctness provides a rationale for translating into policy his Islamophobia and the national hallucination it feeds. Of course, King and others are simply channeling the racism of the cartoonish Ann Coulter, who actually suggested that all "unauthorized immigrants in the United States might be terrorists." This nativist paranoia is not new and has a long and disgraceful legacy in American history.
What is most remarkable is not the growth in the number of soldiers in the United States but rather their social stature... Military personnel in uniform are given priority boarding on commercial airlines, and it is not uncommon for strangers to stop and thank them for their service. In the United States, rising esteem for the military in uniform corresponds to the growing militarization of the society as a whole. All of this despite repeated revelations of the illegality and immorality of the military's own incarceration systems, from Guantanamo to Abu Ghraib, whose systematic practices border on if not actually constitute torture.
At the same time, military values no longer operate within the exclusive realm and marginalized space of the armed forces or those governing structures dedicated to defense. On the contrary, the ideas, values and profits emerging from the war sector flood civilian society to create what Charles Derber and Yale Magrass call a militarized society, which, as they put it, develops a culture and institutions which program civilians for violence at home as well as abroad. War celebrates the heroism of soldiers who use the same style weapons and ammunition used by the mass shooters at Newtown, Los Angeles or Columbine. A warrior society values its armed forces as heroic protectors of freedom, sending a message that the use of guns [and the organized production of violence are] morally essential.
Military values in America have become one of the few sources of civic pride. In part, this explains the public's silence in the face of not only the eradication and suppression of civil liberties, public values and democratic institutions by the expanding financial elite and military-industrial-complex but also the transformations of a number of institutions into militarized spheres more concerned about imposing a punitive authority rather than creating the conditions for the production of an engaged and critical citizenry. Lockdown politics signals the rise of an anti-politics, the rise of a new authoritarianism - an era of liminal drift in which democracy does not merely get thinned out but begins to collapse into dangerous forms of militarization that are increasingly normalized. Since when are SWAT teams viewed as the highest expression of national honor?
http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/16175-lockdown-usa-lessons-from-the-boston-marathon-manhunt
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/04/29/boston-lockdown-fear-uncertainty-and-bias/
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/30/nati-a30.html
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/130456/the-real-threat-to-america
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/did-authorities-lockdown-boston-give-us-taste-police-state-culture-come
More government surveillance is not the answer:
The Mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg led the way last week, saying that, despite privacy concerns, “our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.” NYPD chief Ray Kelly echoed Bloomberg, saying, "I think the privacy issue has really been taken off the table," in reference to surveillance after the bombings in Boston.
Bloomberg said terrorists “want to take away our freedoms,” yet his solution seems to be the government should take our freedoms away first. This is folly, and the very reduction of privacy and freedom is what could give victory to terrorism.
In an excellent and poignant column immediately after the bombing, security expert Bruce Schneier wrote in The Atlantic about the reaction we all should have: “When we react from fear, when we change our laws and policies to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed, even if their attacks fail.” He continued: “there's one thing we can do to render terrorism ineffective: Refuse to be terrorized.”
To Schneier’s point, the risk of terrorism is on the decline and has been since the 1970s, according to the Global Terrorism Database. And a report by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) showed the risk of Americans being killed in terrorism attacks that occur worldwide is exceedingly low. Of the 13,288 people killed by terrorist attacks in 2011, 17 were private U.S. citizens—.001 percent. In fact, you are far more likely to be struck by lightning than be killed by a terrorist.
These calls for less privacy also tend to ignore the fact that we’ve already given away a tremendous amount of our privacy since 9/11, despite the relatively low risk of terrorism in comparison to all sorts of other crime and causes of death, and have little additional safety to show for it. The PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendments Act, the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, National Security Letters, or others were all implemented with the promise that giving up liberty would increase our safety. The NYPD now has a “Domain Awareness System,” which “allows officers to tap into live video camera feeds, 911 calls, mapped crime statistics, and license plate readers” all at once—with little oversight. And those are just a few of the programs we know about.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/after-tragedy-boston-more-government-surveillance-not-answer
The Department of Homeland Security is actively seeking wireless IP Mesh transceivers that would allow law enforcement to secretly send video and digital data within mobile networks that would be virtually undetectable.
The solicitation described the necessity for products that could integrate “video encoding schemes, audio technologies such as land mobile radios, GPS and other locating technologies.”
We have been slowly acclimated to accept being video surveilled on public buses for quite some time now, with the recordings being viewed in real time by dispatch and monitoring for violent acts. Now several cities are enabling sophisticated audio surveillance technology on public transit buses. The beta-testing cities are:
• San Francisco, California
• Hartford, Connecticut
• Eugene, Oregon
• Columbus, Ohio
This obvious intrusion into the privacy of passengers is justified by law enforcement in conjunction with the DHS for “the purpose of this project is to replace the existing video surveillance systems in San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s (SFMTA) fleet of revenue vehicles with a reliable and technologically advanced system to increase passenger safety and improve reliability and maintainability of the system.”
The software and equipment being installed in these can distinguish between “clear conversations background noise of other voices, wind, traffic, windshields wipers and engines.”
Those cities are receiving federal grants to the tune of several millions of taxpayers’ dollars to be spent on Big Brother surveillance systems. In effect, those who live under this tyranny are also literally paying for it.
http://www.occupycorporatism.com/electric-shock-handcuffs-biometric-glasses-and-audio-surveillance-on-public-transportation/
Police want access to private surveillance cameras:
The Miami Herald reports that lawmakers are considering changes in regulations which would allow police access to cameras used to monitor traffic. This campaign to expand law enforcement’s surveillance power is likely to run into stiff opposition, as Americans have proven suspicious of allowing the government powers which would infringe on privacy.
“Look, we don’t want an occupied state. We want to be able to walk the good balance between freedom and security,” Los Angeles Police Deputy Chief Michael Downing, who heads the Department’s Counter-Terrorism and Special Operations Bureau, told the Herald.
“If this helps prevent, deter, but also detect and create clues to who did (a crime), I guess the question is can the American public tolerate that type of security,” Downing said.
Experts note that whether Americans like it or not, urban surveillance will likely increase in the next few years.
“One of the lessons coming out of Boston is it’s not just going to be cameras operated by the city, but it’s going to be cameras that are in businesses, cameras that citizens use,” Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, told the Herald. “You’ll see the use of cameras will skyrocket.”
Law enforcement agencies have recently been pushing for greater integration of surveillance systems. An integrated network would make it easier for law enforcement to cameras business use for their own purposes, instead of asking business owners for the recordings.
Charles Ramsey, the police commissioner for Philadelphia, invited business owners with cameras in public spaces to register them with the police department. In Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is working to expand the city’s network of 22,000 cameras, and officials in the city of Houston want to add to their network of 450 cameras through public and private partnerships. The city currently has cameras that watch over the water and rail systems, freeways, and public spaces.
“If they have a camera that films an area we’re interested in, then why put up a separate camera?” Dennis Storemski, director of Houston mayor’s Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security told the Herald. “And we allow them to use ours too.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, which already has some 10,000 cameras, said the city would keep on adding cameras -- perhaps outdoing his predecessor, who dreamed of a camera on every corner. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg took a similar tack: "You wait -- in five years, the technology is getting better, there will be cameras every place."
http://www.pressherald.com/news/Police-politicians-push-surveillance-post-Boston-.html?pagenum=1
The public seems fine with that. A recent New York Times/CBS News poll found that 78 percent of Americans welcome video monitoring.
They will fall victim to the law of diminishing returns. If you put out a couple of mousetraps, you may catch some mice. If you put out dozens, you may not catch many more. The second 10,000 cameras won't add nearly as much crime-fighting value as the first 10,000 -- or possibly even the first 1,000.
Supporters may ask: What's the harm? One drawback is that taxpayers are not composed of cash. Buying a camera costs money; so does maintaining it and monitoring the images it generates. A dollar spent on surveillance video is a dollar that can't be spent on foot patrols, police training, DNA tests or streetlights.
Another is that cameras contribute greatly to the steady erosion of personal privacy. Americans are generally oblivious to this phenomenon because they are oblivious to the multitude of unblinking eyes watching them in the course of a day. If each of us had a little alarm that went off every time we came into camera range, we might be less agreeable to the monitoring.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/05/06/surveillance-cameras-are-not-all-that