The Abyss From Which There is no Return
Democrat Congressman Frank Church sounded a warning almost 50 years ago. What he didn't anticipate was the merging of the Surveillance State and private businesses.
What a colossal mistake we made.
And when I say “we”, I include myself in with millions of conservatives over the years who trusted the private sector because we held the doctrinaire belief that competition in the free market was the great equalizer, the great sin eater that kept everything balanced and on the straight and narrow.
Maybe it was simple naivete. Maybe things have changed.
I was reading an article at John Solomon’s site “Just the News” about a report from the organization ParentsTogether titled "The Dangerous Tech Toys Report 2022" that focused on children’s toys that collect data or otherwise open doors for strangers to communicate with children without parental knowledge. Some of these were simple built-in walkie-talkie or Bluetooth devices which would allow someone outside the home to ask kids to do things, some like the Amazon Fire HD Kids Pro, designed for children ages 3–7, through which Amazon collects and stores inordinate amounts of data on all users, including children.
At this point, most people know about the popular phone app called TikTok, owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company which is alleged to provide a direct pipeline of data to the Chinese government.
I guess I can understand why a foreign government would want to collect data on people within the borders of a potential enemy, what I can’t understand is the voluntary nature in which the data is given.
But then that is the rub, isn’t it?
It is the voluntary nature by which we give our data to social media companies, to online businesses like Amazon, even to Domino’s when we want to order a pizza. We willingly trade our personal information for the convenience of delivery of a pizza or some cheap Chinese made goods.
I read an article – forgive me, I can’t remember the source – about something Democrat Congressman Frank Church, the chair of the Church Committee, said in an interview with Meet the Press on August 17, 1975. Here is what Church said about the capabilities of the Surveillance State almost 50 years ago:
“There would be no place to hide. The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny. And there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is this capability of this technology.
I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That’s the abyss from which there is no return.
That’s the abyss.”
And this is before the Internet made passive data collection a negotiable part of our daily lives. These groups don’t need to hack anything, we give the data freely. It has become so ubiquitous we don’t even think about it.
Of course, Church was talking about the abilities of the intel community at that time, mostly the CIA, to surveille any person anywhere for any reason – but now every government agency from the Capitol Police to the FBI to the US Post Office maintain their own intelligence operations.
But corporations have always been in the intelligence business. Once they paid millions upon millions a year to large consulting and data gathering companies to conduct research on their customers to help determine how to create more of them and how to market their products more effectively.
Where formerly only the federal government had direct access to such a goldmine of data, the Internet brought with it the ability to collect data in volumes and at such a low cost (as compared to what companies once paid), it was like manna from Heaven to these corporations – a cottage industry in the collection and sale of data, much of it personal, evolved into packaging data as a product for sale to the highest bidder.
As the common idiom goes, if sign up to get an online service for free, YOU are the product.
It is my opinion, whether it came from what they learned in universities infected with communist ideology or just greed, corporate leadership in many industries began to see government as a partner and protector rather than an adversary or a necessary evil. Perhaps it started with the Chrysler bail-out in 1979, I’m not sure. Maybe it happened during the mortgage bust and TARP in 2008, but somewhere along the line, big corporations came to see government as a sugar daddy when times get tough.
Of course, it was the American taxpayer, not the government, who bailed out Chrysler in 1979 and Wall Street investment banks in 2008.
It certainly seems most of the tough times since about 2000 have been created by government policies that either ignored or tacitly promoted the very conditions put in place by politicians that were favorable to these corporations – but there was always going to come a time when payback was demanded in exchange for those favorable conditions.
This melding of government and the private sector is not unheard of – it happened in Nazi Germany when major German corporations joined with the Nazi government to confiscate the assets of German Jews and use forced labor to produce goods for the Nazi war effort. Companies like Hoechst AG, part of IG Farben, arranged for human experimentation on unwilling prisoners at Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen. Zyklon-B, the gas used to kill at the concentration camps was a product of another IG Farben subsidiary.
I don’t say this to accuse American corporations of being Nazis, only to indicate that public/private associations are extremely dangerous when private companies accept doing the bidding of government as part of their mission. We would be fools to believe that Twitter was the only company colluding with the DOJ (FBI), the State Department (CIA) and the CDC/NIH/WHO to censor and silence critics.
That is the “total tyranny” and “the abyss from which there is no return” of which Frank Church spoke in 1975, and it happens when perverse incentives cause people not to consider if they should do a thing just because they can.
Excellent analysis and reporting.
All nations seem to go through predictable stages of evolution.
America has seen unprecedented growth and success. Following WW II and the common belief that American industry saved the world from fascism, we became self-satisfied, fat, lazy, and corrupt.
Observation of life proves that, as Bob Dylan wrote, "If you're not busy being born, you're busy dying".
America, once called a "shining city on a hill" has become the 4th Reich. Unless there is a surprising resurgence of patriotism and faith, we will either see the USA become the dictator of the planet or a smoking destroyed ruin.