Big Brothers of Multiculturalism

Most kids, at least when I was growing up, had fun fantasizing they were being followed, that the man in the funny hat walking behind them, or the overly friendly grocery store clerk, or the housewife out for a stroll with her “baby”, were all really on assignment from the KGB or FBI or any number of other spy agencies, and were keeping track of their every movement (as they were so obviously DANGEROUS to the smooth functioning of the cosmos, or so they wanted to believe).  Psychologists call this the “child grandiosity syndrome”, the feeling the child has that he is the all-important center of the universe.  It was just as fun giving the agents the slip, too, darting around a corner, behind a shelf or a bush and watching the agent pass by, oblivious that he had been “outsmarted” by mere kids.  Nowadays, it’s not so much fun anymore, especially when one realizes he really had been followed, and not once, but for months or even years:

Consider this short excerpt:  “STAPO je istu pratio stalno od ponovnog dolaska u Bec, poslije izdrzane kazne u SFRJ, ali nije mogao da dodje do kakovih podataka koji bi ukazivali na njenu politicku …djelatnost.  Nas broj: 57 37.   23.11.1971. Rukovodilac V Sektora, Josip Blazic”, only one of many contained about me in the dossier held by former Yugoslavia’s secret police.  The first time I read it, my face became hot and flushed as I recalled some of my other “acts”, decidedly non- political, that they must have witnessed.  The time I got into an argument with a waiter named Tony at a restaurant behind the Votiv Church and was escorted roughly out, never to return.  They must have been snickering at my indignation, these omnipresent agents.  Who does she think she is?  Creating a ruckus, disturbing the other guests?  Another time at the Prater amusement park, had they been there, too, when I had….oh the indignity of it all!  It was bad enough that I remembered, but to think that others remembered, too, that they had written down all the gory details in a secret report so that others could visualize it as well….that they had then talked about it with still more people, perhaps their wives or colleagues, chuckled again about the “American girl”, her scandalous behavior, her embarrassment, excessiveness…this was unbearable.  Who did she think she was, anyway?  On the other hand, many of the other dossier allegations, observations, statements, conclusions were total fabrications, less believable than if they had written that I’d suddenly grown a long, hairy tail and sprouted horns, and intended quite obviously to gain praise from one’s boss, or perhaps a raise in position or salary.  So how effective, after all, was the notorious spy agency, if its actions were predicated upon some agent’s literary flights of fancy? 

Consider then what is happening today, in the world of super technology, and not just to ostensible “security threats”, but to citizens who have never expressed a single political thought, or performed the smallest action in opposition to the “system.”  A recent two year study by Washington Post investigative journalists, “Top Secret”, revealed mind-boggling details about the ineffectiveness of the current U.S. intelligence bureaucracy in the post 9-11 era.   Every day, for example, the National Security Agency alone intercepts and stores nearly two billion separate e-mails, phone calls, and other communications.  Analysts who are tasked to analyze documents and conversations received by both foreign and domestic spying publish 50,000 intelligence reports each year, few of which are ever read.  Additionally, there are approximately 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies presently working on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States, and a huge number of individuals, 854,000 (nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C). with top-secret security clearances.  (By the way, have they located Bin Laden?) According to the report, in Washington and the surrounding area, “33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy about 17 million square feet of space.”  That’s a lot of spying, but it’s a lot of bureaucracy as well.  Even U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, seems to agree that this is overkill:  “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent extremism”, he stated in a recent interview, “we did as we so often do in this country…the attitude was, if it’s worth doing, it’s probably worth overdoing.”   That might be why the late Senator Ted Kennedy, as well as a six year old girl, appeared on the incredibly bloated U.S.  “no fly list”, , one which ostensibly contains potential dangerous threats (some say as many as 40,000) to aviation security.  If there is evidence they are threats, why not arrest them?  If there is no evidence, why not set a trap for them, and, if they fall into it, then you can arrest them?

Google, the mammoth Internet search engine, has been recruited as well.  According to recent media reports, the company has jointly invested with the CIA in an internet project, Recorded Future, that "continually scans thousands of news publications, blogs, niche sources, trade publications, government web sites, financial databases and more….sifts through millions of posts and conversations taking place on blogs, YouTube, Twitter and Amazon to "assemble actual real-time dossiers on people….it is being integrated with Google Earth…which will allow real time tracking of the locations of persons or groups as part of the overall intelligence dossier.“  The German Handelsblatt recently pointed out that "Google knows more about you and me than the KGB, Stasi or Gestapo ever dreamed of. “  Which is why Germans are up in arms about the Google Street View service being introduced there, which would eventually display the family house of every German, as well as the car parked in the driveway, the state of one’s yard, bushes, and flowers, and even the design of one’s curtains, to the entire world. 

Is there a message, some useful knowledge, that can be gleaned from the knowledge that in today’s world, Big Brother has been cloned in the thousands, perhaps millions?  Perhaps that it is all doomed to failure, it and all other systems of thought that depend upon the identification of one, single, indisputable “enemy”.  Why?  Because the ones who are doing the identifying, which must be based on a mutually shared set of political, social, philosophical and religious life perspectives in order to succeed, are a bunch of multi-cultural Big Brothers named Ahmed, Mishuko, Federico, John, Fyodor, and Wolfgang.  Comprendo?  Verstehen Sie? Woops, I mean, do you get it now?