Help Me to Help You to Help You
by David M. Brown
Act now to cordon off your life and your stuff
from those who would monitor and invade it at will.
I don't think you should deprive me of the right to drive and fish
if I'm late with my rent. Or really any bill.
You may be entitled to a judgment against me, and, if it turns out I'm
stealing from you, even to my imprisonment. But what if I have not been convicted of any theft? Cut off
my service, evict me, sue me – but don't try to stop me from driving and fishing. Sure,
non-bill-paying can be a form of theft. But if you are justified in stopping me from driving or fishing
or entering a public men's room, I should either be in jail or on probation. Crimes are punishable when
crimes have been established. Which requires, at a minimum, a day in court.
All this by way of registering dissent from a passage in an otherwise
fine article, "Welfare Reform: the Biggest Accomplishment of the Revolution" by Ron Haskins, a policy
analyst with the Brookings Institution. Haskins participated in a 2004 Cato forum on whither the
Republican Revolution. Where did it succeed, where did it fail? What to do now?
An informative, soon-to-be-published book grew out of the forum. The
authors offer many lessons on the prospects and pitfalls of political change. But...oik, that passage
from Haskins:
"The 1996 reforms to the [welfare] program were the most important
since 1975. New means of locating income, new methods of collecting money, new information-processing
requirements, and new databases were established. Perhaps the most significant provision for
increasing collections was the requirement that employers report identifying information on every
person hired.... Another major reform required every state to develop procedures for locating and
extracting money from accounts held in financial institutions by parents who owed child support.
The provision that caused the most angry telephone calls and letters to members of Congress
required states to have laws that permitted states to terminate the driving, hunting, and fishing
licenses of fathers who owed overdue child support. Raiding a man's bank account is one thing,
but interfering with his ability to hunt or fish was radical!"
Instead of my railing against the implications here, let me refer you to Jarret Wollstein's ISIL article on
the Patriot Act and its
sundry new trusses and scaffolding for bolstering our enveloping surveillance regime – a regime
in which all innocent persons are to be treated as criminal suspects as a matter of routine.
The scariest provision paves the way for a national ID card, an
internal passport. This card, if implemented – when implemented –
will enmesh everybody who moves. As Wollstein notes, once it is fully in place "the government will be
able to track – and at will block – any of your physical movements or any of your financial
movements." The magical Social Security Number means that your SSN-tagged info in the employment
database can be linked to similarly tagged info in all other databases. Once these are all in turn
linked to the card, anything in your tracked track record can be used against you at any checkpoint.
And heaven help the John Smiths of the world if somebody named John Smith signs up with Al Qaeda.
Unreasonable searches? Warrants? The Constitution? Lotsa luck with
that line at the airport.
The long-term solution is cultural-political. All this stuff has to be
reversed, dropped, scrubbed, if it ever can be; angry letters and phone calls type thing. But you can't
wait for the politicians and citizenry to wake up before protecting yourself from such humpty-dumpty
invasiveness. You should act now to cordon off your life and your stuff to whatever extent you can from
those who would monitor and invade it at will. You may not feel an urgent need to do so right this
minute. Problem is, when you do feel the need, you may not have a minute.
And some of the steps are not that hard. Stop giving out your Social
Security Number all the time. Stop giving out your home address all the time. Stop publishing these
things on your personal checks for cripes sakes. Stop leaving the door to your life wide open and
waving in every crook and bureaucrat who might relish a leisurely tour.
I know what you're saying. "Sure, Brown, but what is the one book you
would recommend to help me get my act together given what a slouch I've admittedly been vis-à-vis
protecting my privacy?"
Thought you could stump me, eh? No, that's easy:
J.J. Luna's How to Be Invisible.
And my second pick, a book written from an overtly libertarian
perspective:
Claire Wolfe's The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook.
Now go and sin no more.
Copyright 2005 by David M. Brown. Brown is a freelance
writer and editor. To view previous installments of this column,
click here.
International Society for Individual Liberty > Book Beat: "Help Me to Help You to Help You"
