Friday, August 24, 2007

The climate that sustains mankind may disappear, but government will know where you are, by gimleteye

According to Miami Today, the “Miami Police Department will install a series of closed-circuit cameras in downtown Miami… ‘The primary benefit is it’s meant as an anti-terrorism initiative,’ said the Miami chief of police, John Timoney.”

Miami, of course, is not alone in installing video cameras to track the movement of citizens under one rubric or another that all boil down to using technology to enforce conformity with the law.

The New York Times reports (August 9th, 2007) “At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets … in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.”

Well, you might say that the United States is not China, despite symbiotic economic relations.

The initiative has been promoted by a Chinese tycoon, Lin Jiang Huai, (August 12, 2007 ‘In China, a High-Tech Plan to Track People’), who “said the success of American technology during the invasion of Iraq inspired him… Bush helped me get my vision.”

Thanks, for that.

Miami experienced its own version, in November 2003 when the city hosted the Free Trade Area of the Americas Summit.

Nearly three years later, long enough for media attention of the controversy to recede, a City of Miami blue ribbon panel released its official conclusions. The second of fourteen findings noted that “although not quantifiable, repeated television images of violent protestors (at other locations where international economic conferences were held) no doubt contributed to an apprehension that similar chaos and violence would befall the City of Miami during the FTAA.”

In the war against terror, apprehension counts a lot.

Citizens in Miami were met by militarized police in full riot gear, including electric shields, tanks, automatic and semi-automatic weapons, tear gas, rubber bullets and gun-fired bean bags. An observer noted, “similar means have been used, of course, in response to global justice movement actions in the past… What makes Miami different, more frightening, is that all of these tactics were (now being) used in the absence of direct action by demonstrators.”

In other words, in Miami, American citizens exercising their constitutional right to freedom of expression were terrorized by police made "apprehensive" by television images.

Democracy turns out to be a fungible commodity, depending not on the law but on who is valuing it.

What the official narrative does not include is the fact that securing Miami as the permanent site for the FTAA secretariat was strongly valued by then-Governor Jeb Bush.

A Miami base for the FTAA would have been a maximal political statement, a career capstone, a mission accomplished that would have served him well whether he retired from office back to Coral Gables, or, decided to advance to national office—a realistic hope in 2003.

Apprehension serves many masters.

In China, the Times reports that coastal authorities will require citizens to carry identification cards encoded with a computer chip that contains information relating to security issues, as well as the capacity to be tracked by GIS devices.

It’s only a few strokes on the keyboard to add information onto the chip, in addition to “religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status, reproductive history”, that you may have participated in a protest against your government, or written a letter to the editor, or posted a blog.

It would be bad enough, and hostile enough to American democracy, if we only had government behavior to worry about.

But when the power of profit is added to the combustible mixture of sycophancy, careerism, and the revolving door between public office and private industry, the balance shifts even further.

Contrast the willingness of government to be "apprehensive" and monitor the movement of people, but not of pollution.

Take drinking water quality, for example.

It is relatively easy for scientists to use dye markers to trace the flow of groundwater through aquifers. Really bad stuff, stuff that can kill you or change your hormonal system, attaches to water and travels through pipes right into your faucet.

Government is supposed to protect you from the worst of it, but regulators have only scratched the surface of measures that could adequately assure industrially processed water is safe to drink.

In Miami-Dade County, where 2 million residents get drinking water from an aquifer on the surface, you would think that establishing the connection between what happens above ground to water quality and how it affects water only a few feet below the surface would be as urgent a priority as monitoring the movement of undesirable people on streets.

Of course, it is not. The US government, with buy-in by state and local environmental bureaucrats, treats this kind of research like a state secret.

The reason is simple enough.

In the United States today, science can significantly adversely affect the zoning and permitting process, through which the profitability of a certain land parcel is apprehended.

Federal laws protect aquifers under the direct influence of surface water. Scientific monitoring that establishes the location and movement of pollution is antithetical to a government organized to do the business of development.

This is exactly the case near the drinking water wells supplying Miami, where powerful contributors associated with the political campaigns of former Governor Jeb Bush and President Bush are engaged in commercial activities that, in one case, involve the introduction of a cancer causing substance, benzene, into the drinking water aquifer.

This information wasn’t voluntarily disclosed to the public even though federal law also compels government to notify people when cancer-causing substances in drinking water supplies are moving toward their health and safety.

The toxic pollution was only revealed through a lawsuit by Sierra Club, its Miami group, and other environmental organizations. When a federal judge recently ruled that rock mining had to stop in a vast area abutting the Everglades, west of Miami, the miners--whose blasting is the likely source of benzene--ignored the judge until an appeals court denied industry's request for a stay.

So excuse me if news that “live video from the Florida Department of Transportation cameras will feed into (local) police headquarters” makes me apprehensive.

The official investigation report from the shameful 2003 episode in Miami notes blandly, “When orders to disperse were issued, law enforcement officers did not provide clearly defined dispersal routes which, in turn, lead to confusion and, in some cases, arrests and incarceration.” Some individuals who dispersed as ordered by advancing police officers were subsequently arrested by another agency for failure to disperse.

When democracy become a fungible commodity, the rights of individuals do get lost--whether by accident or on purpose, the baseline for measurement tends to become the prerogative of government, whether in China or the United States.

As to what happened to the political party that professed to protect the right of citizens against those tendencies hostile to freedom, it is all to be judged according to what you value.

No doubt, there are plenty of corporations willing to bet that such confusion over values could be cleared up simply if Americans would carry ID cards with readable and trackable chips--worn on your wrist, your ankle, or under your collar like a dog.

4 comments:

Mambi_Watch said...

Great post Gimleteye.

I rjust read the Miami Today article about the street cameras. I laughed when I read Chief Timoney's reason having those cameras as an "anti-terrorism" initiative.

He gave the same excuse to the IRP for his departments actions at the FTAA protests. He said:

"Make no mistake about; the FTAA in Miami offered a huge opportunity, a symbolic opportunity for everything terrorists want: high symbolism and a high body count."

Pure BS, in my opinion.

As you suggest, behind initiatives for street cameras, riot police in downtown or overlooking environmental concerns, there are other interest: business interests.

I think people should ask themselves if these interest should have priority over health standards, civil liberties, and rights to protest.

A real democratic society, I believe, would not tolerate such beliefs, or the BS of Chief John Timoney.

Anonymous said...

They probably have to say it is "antiterrorist" in order to get the feds to cover the cost.
You wouldn't believe the crap we are paying for in that manner.

Anonymous said...

Maybe they should install them at car dealers.

Anonymous said...

It is getting out of control. You are watched at work, you are watched at stores and you are watched on the streets. Even living alone doesn't assure you to have privacy, as they track all your internet, phone, power and gosh knows what else in your home.