..global political domination. Or to hide their affairs with attractive members of either sex, dreadful schemes with the tobacco industry or some financial skulduggery. These ‘terminated with extreme prejudice’ people may not have stood before any tribunal to have their crimes weighed in the balance of Justice, but extinguished they are with the single bullet of the virtuous whilst the machine guns of the evil failed to hit anybody.
It is a world with no apparent collateral damage, where only the endless numbers of the ethnically stereotyped met grisly and colourful ends. Often their own in slow motion.
Of course, this now appears to have been based largely on fact and we, to our startled surmise, find ourselves parading around the world jack naked for all to see. Our every transaction, email and twitter recorded and analysed, parsed and stored perhaps for eternity. No matter that you are a law abiding senior citizen and a small fish in no need of frying, you are still caught up in the world of international surveillance. Smile, for you are on camera operating in all the visible and invisible spectra. It is somehow troubling to know that every search I make when writing these minor tracts of human doubt is no doubt captured in some large database in Maryland or the ACT.
The Murdoch Press must have thought that because of its relationship to the great and powerful that it too could participate in the world of information pick-pocketing though that of course was the result of a few bad apples and not corporate policy. I really believe that. I really do and say it twelve times a day.
In Australia we smile complacently and say that, of course, if you have done nothing wrong you have nothing to fear. Maybe, probably, we don’t. Perhaps.
If you were sitting in Pakistan or any number of countries not officially at war with anyone and a stated valued ally of the United States, you could be sitting having dinner with your family unaware that on the other side of the world a man might be sitting in front of a screen piloting an high- explosive tipped drone thousands of kilometres from him but uncomfortably close to you. You may, or may not be a terrorist, but we should assume that the children aren’t. No matter, on “totally verified reliable information from trusted sources” you and your family may be spread across the landscape. It’s called it ‘extra-judicial killing’ and it is not a nice thing and particularly unpleasant if you were wrongly identified as an eveil-doer. As does sometimes happen.
As a thought experiment, imagine that Pakistan, Luxembourg or Mozambique equipped themselves with drones and decided that there were Americans, Argentinians or Bermudans whom they classified as terrorists. And targeted the odd ‘high-value’ with their own devices. That wouldn’t be regarded as sporting I’m sure and might cause general international disapproval. You couldn’t have everybody doing it.
Now we are better informed of all these shenanigans because of the mass leaking of government ‘secrets’ by individuals such as Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, individuals regarded as either traitors or heroes. Brave, foolish or foolhardy anyway. I think that have confirmed what we always suspected for otherwise why would all those spy movies looked so authentic?
I suffer from the barely amusing thought that, in fact, all the various spy agencies get their operating manuals from watching movies, and are now acting out how they are portrayed in the cinema. The cinema then increases the threshold and the agencies, in thrall to the collective hallucination of the media, lower their threshold of moral and ethical acceptability.
To my knowledge the prime outcome of these revelations has been a number of highly embarrassed governments who have been caught red-handed spying on, not only their own citizens, but other governments …..and even apparently ineffectual the United Nations. And in many cases without a legal leg to stand on. To our surprise we find that the United States got access to all our data as part of the US Australia Free Trade Agreement - it must have been in the part we never got to see. But what should one expect from an agreement that has been of little financial benefit to Australia, but of inestimable value to the United States?
Now you might think that, having been caught with the proverbial trousers down, the sensible thing would be to apologise and ensure that errant agencies that were operating outside the law were told to behave in an orderly manner. Strangely this seems not to be happening.
I fear that what we are going to see is further obfuscation, denial, fear, uncertainty, the creation of doubt and an attack on the media for their dreadful complicity in raising the issue. The level of secrecy within government will be raised and we won’t have the slightest clue what’s going on. The “Commercial in Confidence’ exclusions that State Governments use to hide behind will seem mere child’s play in the ever Braver New World. Expect journalists to be detained at airports and computers to be trashed.
Oh that seems to be happening. I await the knock at the door.