Telescreens 2026

     Yes, this one is about these devices:

     Flock has 120,000 cameras in 49 states that capture 20 billion license plates a month—along with dents, bumper stickers and other identifying features. The company says it is giving police a powerful tool to catch criminals. But the same bipartisan public anger that has risen up from towns and cities to stall data centers is now aimed at Flock’s spreading camera network.
     Republican members of Congress have introduced bills to restrict the technology. Jordan appeared on Tucker Carlson’s podcast last month where the host compared Flock to the ever-present surveillance of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four.” President Trump has weighed in too, saying last week that Flock’s cameras were “under review.” Flock opponents held rallies in 44 states, while a number of towns—including two in Massachusetts in the past few days alone—said they would stop using the cameras.
     As with data centers, the debate over Flock has spilled into this year’s elections, from Florida to Rhode Island to San Francisco.

     If you have a personal interest in not being watched, this website shows you where the cameras are:

     The usual objection to the proliferation of Flock cameras is that the information they collect is prone to abuse. That’s true. But imagine that somehow, those abuses could be curbed to an adequate degree – perhaps even prevented altogether. Would there still be a Fourth Amendment objection to the omnipresence of surveillance devices? When you leave home and go about in public, do you retain a right to privacy?

     It’s a dubious claim. You’re in public, after all. Constitutional scholars are divided on the matter. Still, many Americans object to being watched, by Flock camera or any other technology. The literate ones point back to 1984 and its ubiquitous telescreens. That was a nightmarish vision, to be sure. But just now I have something else in mind.

     Military science-fiction writer David Drake penned a series of short stories about Jed Lacey: a future detective in a world where surveillance was very nearly total. Lacey makes use of it to pursue his quarries. But privacy could still be had… for a price. Lacey occasionally pays such a price, as do some of his targets.

     The point, of course, is that scarce commodities will always command a price. We casually say “as free as the air we breathe,” because today, here on Earth, breathable air is all around us. But if that air were to become scarce, it would command a price. Possibly a very high price, as without it, there cannot be life.

     Should surveillance devices such as Flock cameras proliferate to the extent of London in the United Kingdom, his comings and goings would no longer be something an American could regard as “my own business.” Each of us would be aware of being watched. It would change the nature of all commerce and social interaction. It would also present a problem for those who seek to use the information.

     Huge volumes of image data are very hard to search. Individual skeins of such data that pertain to particular persons or a protracted series of events, no matter how desirable, would be difficult to isolate. Unprecedented search technologies would be required for the task, to say nothing of the need for many new petabytes of storage.

     What’s that? Did you say something about data centers? Oh, sorry, my mistake. Must be that my hearing is going at last.

     Why are people protesting against data centers?

     AI Overview

     People protest against data centers because the massive facilities required to power the artificial intelligence boom consume immense amounts of electricity and water, drive up local utility bills, create constant industrial noise, and generate very few permanent local jobs relative to their massive footprint.

     Perhaps some protestors against the rash of huge data centers are motivated by the considerations Google Gemini cites above. But perhaps others are thinking about the uses to which such massive repositories of digitized data could be put. Especially given the rapid advances in artificial intelligence programs capable of ultra-sophisticated searches, associations, and inferences.

     I don’t like the trend. But I’m an old man, and unlikely to see it in its full flowering. On the other hand, you, Gentle Reader…

     Garrod lowered his face into cupped hands. There are no satellites, he thought. No torpedoes carrying Retardite eyes down out of orbit. They don’t need them. Not when they’re dusting the whole world with slow glass!
     A preternatural calm seemed to descend over his brain as he considered the mechanics of the proposition. The resolution of Retardite’s crystalline structure was so fine that a usable image could be obtained from a particle a few microns in diameter. Yet each speck would be invisible to the naked eye under normal conditions. They were using it in hundreds of tons—Retardite dust of mixed delays, swirling down over the entire continent from crop-sprayer aircraft. Such aircraft generally used electrically charged ejector nozzles, giving the particles an electromagnetic potential which caused it to be attracted on to the crops rather than drift straight on to the ground. Only in this case, the slow glass micro-eyes were being released from high up so that they would cling to everything—trees, buildings, telegraph poles, flowers, mountain slopes, birds, flying insects. It would be in people’s clothing, in their food, in the water they drank.
     From now on, came the silent scream inside his head, anybody, any agency, with the right equipment can find out anything about ANYBODY! This planet is one huge, unblinking eye watching everything that moves on its surface. We’re all encased in glass, asphyxiating, like bugs dropped into an entomologist’s killing bottle.
     The seconds crept, and he was conscious only of the sound of blood pulsing in his veins. And I…And I did it!

     [Bob Shaw, Other Days, Other Eyes]

     Do have a nice day, now!

Going Your Own Way

     Yes, yes, yes: My “output” is declining. But then, so am I, and not slowly. Please bear with me. These days it takes a lot more effort for me to produce something worth my Gentle Readers’ time and attention.

     Nevertheless, if you’ll keep reading, I’ll keep trying.

* * *

     Just this morning, I encountered this on X:

When training for a mission in space, people are judged on their psychological ability to work as a team. They can hardly afford someone who is not part of the team and wants to do it their way only. That could spell disaster for a mission in space. Yet here we are on spaceship…

— SpiritsofIdaho (@SpiritsofIdaho) April 22, 2026

     The “spaceship Earth” motif isn’t new, of course. The conception of Earth as a vessel rather than a static environment goes back several decades. While it can be used tendentiously, as it is above, there’s also some value in it for directing one’s attention.

     One of Earth’s features that spaceships lack is room. The land area of Terra is about 50 million square miles. Every one of those square miles enjoys a breathable atmosphere. While some of those square miles are less hospitable than others, there are at least 25 million square miles of land surface that are habitable, or can be made so with time and effort.

     If we approximate Earth’s current population as 8 billion souls, the average human density of our world is no greater than 320 persons per square mile. 320 persons per square mile does sound ominous. It becomes less so when we figure human density per acre.

     There are 640 acres in a square mile. Thus, that 320 persons per square mile figure equates to two acres of land per person.

     Have you ever had to mow a two-acre plot? I have – and with a push-mower, at that. You don’t want that experience; trust me on that.

     Humans prefer to cluster at far greater densities than one every two acres. Consider Manhattan: an island of 22 square miles with a population of about 2.2 million persons. That’s 100,000 persons per square mile, If we figure Manhattan’s human density per acre instead of per mile, we get approximately 160 persons per acre. Roomy? No, yet the great majority of Manhattan residents live there by choice.

     The most densely populated major nation, India, has approximately 1.4 billion residents on approximately 1.2 million square miles of land. That’s still only about 1200 persons per square mile: less than two persons per acre. The great majority of Indians live in population centers much denser than that.

     Consider SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule, which usually carries a four-person complement. I don’t have exact figures, but I’d be shocked to learn that there’s 100 square feet of floor space in that capsule. I doubt the crew holds any cha-cha contests in there. That 100 square feet figure would give the Crew Dragon, as it’s normally manned, a human density of 1600 persons per acre. In all probability, it’s higher than that.

     Therefore the Crew Dragon, when manned, is at least ten times as dense as Manhattan Island. The astronauts are all there by choice. There’s no “astronaut draft,” at least for the moment.

     In nearly every case of social, economic, or political importance, we choose to cluster with others.

* * *

     There will probably never be a “vessel” as roomy as “spaceship Earth.” Yet people do complain about crowding. Rush-hour traffic congestion, retail stores during major holidays, even the construction of new housing in relatively sparse districts draw muttered forebodings about “running out of room.” But the complainers seldom seem inclined to move to more spacious environments. The reasons are many, but nestled among them is this one: We like one another’s company, as long as we can take it or leave it at our personal whim.

     Granted, some of us prefer to be alone. There are also some people no one wants to be around. Still, they’re not the products of intolerable crowding. As long as each of us has a place of our own to which he can retreat at need, undesired and undesirable company isn’t an “issue” that demands a “solution.”

     The need to cooperate with others – colloquially speaking, to get along – arises from the need to be with others. When there is no such need, the imperative of cooperation vanishes. This has two implications above others.

     First, the preservation of privacy depends on the preservation of private property as Americans understand it. For the principal feature of private property is that its owner has the legal and moral right to exclude others. That has always been the basis every kind of property, real or movable.

     Second, individual mobility must be preserved at all costs. He who can “get away” has the power to seek refuge from others, at least for a time. That idea is of course violently opposed by the promoters of “15 minute cities” and similar chimeras. For individual mobility means that you can get away from them. No would-be dictator, determined to decree every last aspect of others’ existence, can abide that.

     Watch for the doom-shouters of “overpopulation.” Their arguments don’t matter. Their enemy is privacy itself. They are uniformly hostile to private property and to the ability to “get away” at will via individual mobility. Only when privacy has been effectively eliminated can they rule us absolutely, with no escape possible.

     Orwell knew it:

     The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
     […]
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH      He took a twenty-five cent piece out of his pocket. There, too, in tiny clear lettering, the same slogans were inscribed, and on the other face of the coin the head of Big Brother. Even from the coin the eyes pursued you. On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet — everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed — no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

     Be vigilant.

Creating Your Own Problems

     Good morning, Gentle Reader. Happy Vernal Equinox (traditional). Wherever you are in this blessed land, I hope you’ll enjoy beautiful spring weather today, because I won’t. Here on the World’s Largest Piece of Terminal Moraine, it’s predicted to be overcast and damp all day. Bummer.

     I’ve come reluctantly to the conclusion that, with the notable exception of the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch, people are pretty BLEEP!ing stupid. They’re nearly always the source of their own miseries. They overspend and then complain about being broke. They cloister themselves and then complain about having no friends or social life. They try to drive North-South on East-West roads, get smacked up, and then complain about “careless drivers” and high insurance premiums.

     The enveloping diagnosis for this malady is “It’s Someone Else’s Fault” syndrome. Given its prevalence, I have no doubt that you’ve observed it in someone you know. There’ve been days when I’ve imagined it everywhere.

     That may be because it really is everywhere.

* * *

     A brief vignette: Many years ago I had a coworker whom I shall henceforward refer to as “old Ray,” because that’s how he was known around the office. “Old Ray” couldn’t be bothered about things the rest of us regarded as the basic requirements of courtesy, such as tossing trash in a trash can rather than on the floor. He was a well-respected senior engineer, but so heedless of his surroundings that he created chaos for the rest of us.

     In particular, “old Ray” regularly failed to check whether the coffeemaker had ended its cycle before grabbing the carafe and filling his mug. He created many messes in this fashion. I, being a snotty little shit, upbraided him for it one day when his proclivity had left a large puddle of coffee on the floor of our office. He took umbrage, and a shouting match ensued. Management intervened before blows could be struck.

     I was taken aside and admonished for the incident. I’d “created the problem,” you see. “Everyone” knew that we had to make allowances for “old Ray.” I asked whether management was aware of the effect on the rest of us, and was answered with a “what can you do” shrug. I went back to my own labors shaking my head.

     It got me a reputation as a boat rocker. “Be careful around Fran,” the office gospel ran, “He says things.” Never mind that I was also the one who “does things,” such as solving others’ intractable problems and cleaning up after “old Ray;” that was deemed immaterial.

     I realized then that the rest of us were fated to clean up after “old Ray” until his retirement date should arrive. Management policy had deemed the status quo preferable to an uproar. Given that consensus, I, who’d evoked an uproar, was “the problem.” We’d been doomed to trash tossed aside in hallways and regular puddles on the floor.

     No, I didn’t stay there very long.

* * *

     Why am I exercised about this particular subject, you ask? Because few have grasped a simple fact of life in society:

Politics is not the source of solutions,
But of burdens, dissatisfactions, and disharmony.

     A private problem can be mitigated or solved by private means. A politicized problem becomes everyone’s problem. It draws the State into the matter and compels everyone to “take a side.” Such an expansion of the scope of the problem creates several things:

• Resentment among the unwillingly involved;
• Hard feelings between those who disagree about the matter;
• An opportunity for the State to expand its powers, which it will surely exploit.

     As if further irony were required, it also lessens the feeling of responsibility among those who did the politicizing. Now that it’s “everyone’s problem,” they can sit back while “everybody” – meaning the State, of course – does whatever will be done about it, good, bad, or indifferent.

     It’s madness, but it’s everywhere. “The personal is political!” shout the rabble-rousers of the Left. That means the end of privacy – the end of private action in response to private problems. It means that we must wait upon the State for the remediation of what displeases us. Finally, it means those who disapprove of you, whatever the reason, can bludgeon you into complying with their preferences. Assuming they can assemble a local preponderance of force, that is.

     I’m not going to thrash this into the magma layer. I just needed a moment to vent about… well, about “things as they are,” including ordinary people’s lack of resistance to the politicization of what should be private matters handled privately. We keep getting sucked into it, when a moment’s consideration should make it plain that politicizing an “issue” nearly always makes it worse.

     For the love of God, stop politicizing petty shit! Stop trying to compel others to conform to your preferences! Accept human variation as long as it does you no harm. If you find it intolerable, either wall it off, or move away from it and build a wall around yourself.

     See also this old tirade. And do have a nice day.

Your Dwindling Privacy

     Books have been written about it. Commentators have ranted about it. Vast arguments between supposed “policy wonks” have addressed it. But very few people are paying attention.

     I suppose we’re too busy diddling one another on social media. Hah! Yet another Orwellian phrase: the “social media” conduce to sociability and social health in no way discernible by Man. Indeed, they’re a front in the ongoing war on your privacy.

     But you, being a Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch, know better, right? You’ve watched the newsreels. You’ve seen the interviews with the field commanders and the wounded just back from the front. You’re too intelligent and too well informed to take part in a war against your own interests.

     Then again, you might be a conscript.

---

     I’ve said on several occasions that privacy, properly understood, isn’t an enforceable right in and of itself. Whatever degree of privacy Smith can secure for himself derives from his legitimately owned property and his rights over it. Hearken to this older essay:

     What is privacy? An informal definition would be the privilege of "keeping yourself to yourself": that is, restricting others' access to you, to your property, and to information about those things to only those whom you approved. But access to you and your property is covered by another, better grounded right: the right of a legitimate owner to the control and disposition of his property. It's the informational component of the privacy claim that causes the problems.

     If there's something about you that you don't want known, and you have a "right" to control the dissemination of that information, how do you exercise your "right" once someone has learned the critical fact? Murder? Lobotomy? Hypnosis? A voodoo curse? If you elect to have an interaction with some other person, and he refuses to agree to keep silent about it, how would you enforce your "right" to privacy and still have the interaction?

     As your Curmudgeon has previously written, rights are those claims that can be simultaneously asserted without generating clashes that can only be resolved by a recourse to force (the "test of arms"). As we can see, privacy claims don't satisfy that criterion.

     Nevertheless, most Americans value their privacy and would like better protections for it. At least, that’s what we say. But our behavior is at odds with such statements:

1. An increasing percentage of our purchases are made through the Internet;
2. Nearly all purchases that cost $100 or more are made with a credit instrument;
3. Our interactions with one another are conducted ever more through “social media;”
4. “Smart” devices that monitor our choices and behavior are proliferating at great speed;
5. The number and size of our governments – we have over 88,000 of them – continue to increase.

     With the exception of item #5, no one can be blamed for the incremental losses of privacy enumerated above. No one, that is, but ourselves.

     Nearly every transaction that involves two or more of us results in the release of information about us into the public domain: information that can no longer be kept private. And a host of organizations and institutions are sucking it up repackaging it, and selling it as we speak.

     Welcome to the Age of the Fishbowl. It’s a seemingly benign habitat that lures you in with promises of efficiency and convenience. However, once you’ve entered, you can never escape.

---

     I first set my fingers to the keys this morning with this article in mind:

     ‘No Cash’ signs are popping up everywhere in Sweden as payments go digital. More than 4,000 Swedes have had microchips implanted in their hands to pay for things.

     Sweden is the most cashless society.

     Last year, the amount of cash in circulation in Sweden dropped to the lowest level since 1990 and is more than 40 percent below its 2007 peak. The declines in 2016 and 2017 were the biggest on record, Financial Post reported.

     Sweden’s worried and they are not sure what to do.

     Cash matters because a transaction conducted in cash conduces to greater privacy than one conducted through a credit instrument or the Internet. In the former case, only a buyer and a seller are involved; in theory at least, information about the transaction can be confined to those two persons. When a credit card or the Internet is involved, the information passes through an unknown number of hands and is stored in an unknown number of places – and neither the buyer nor the seller can compel any of those parties to observe any degree of constraint about how the information is used.

     Yet a number of “economists” – yes, those are “sneer quotes” – are arguing that cash ought to be completely eliminated. Why? Their reasons vary, but not one of them will hold water for five minutes. That’s largely because they don’t grasp what makes cash important.

     Cash is a broader concept than money or currency. Anything a seller will accept on prima facie grounds in exchange for what he sells constitutes a form of cash.

     Note that checks, promissory notes, credit, and digital transactions don’t qualify. These are not prima facie instruments; their “value,” such as it is, arises from the guarantees made by intermediating organizations and institutions. Commodities – e.g., gold, silver, copper, buckskins, whiskey, tobacco, seed corn – offered in trade are a kind of cash. Federal Reserve Notes, as little as I think of them, are a kind of cash. A promise to provide service at some future time is a kind of cash. These things don’t depend for their negotiability on the guarantees of a third party.

     Its advocates claim that Bitcoin, the best known of the “cryptocurrencies,” qualifies as cash. Considering what’s been going on with Bitcoin lately, I’m not so sure.

     Cash offers the possibility of privacy in transaction. That’s why governments are hostile to it.

---

     A swelling number of organizations and institutions want to know as much as possible about you and everything you do. The information has value to them. They trade it among themselves. That trade is often characterized as being to everyone’s advantage, including yours. But this is far from certain.

     Perhaps Amazon can serve us all better by remembering what we’ve purchased from it. Perhaps our television providers can better tailor their offerings to our tastes by learning what we’ve been watching. Perhaps various lesser firms can offer us what we want or need more efficiently by learning other details about our lives and interactions. But the price should be kept in mind: it involves the sacrifice of a considerable degree of privacy.

     Here’s an example that chilled me somewhat. Imagine that John and Mary, a married couple, live in a detached, single-family home with “smart” electrical metering technology: a device that continuously reports on electrical power consumption. Mary takes a trip, perhaps for business purposes, while John remains at home. During that interval their provider of electricity notices a sharp increase in electrical power consumption at their home, which drops back to previous levels shortly before Mary’s return.

     Shortly after Mary returns from her trip, she and John receive email solicitations from divorce lawyers.

     Fanciful? Yes, for the moment...but every increment in the stream of information we allow others to accumulate about us brings it closer to reality.

     It’s up to you to decide whether or not you care.

Re-Privatization

     “Opinions are like assholes: Everybody’s gotta have one.” – Porretto’s Principle of Personal Assertion

     I feel a change coming on. I’ve been ranting and raving and generally bellyaching about politics and government, here and at other sites, for more than twenty years. Yet I’ve accomplished nothing except to alert a few kindred spirits to the existence of a cranky old bastard who sees things approximately as they do. Those two decades of effort have wearied me in several ways. My will to continue is lower than it’s ever been.

     I think I know why my efforts, and the efforts of innumerable other thinkers and writers, have produced so little progress. And if you have the patience for just one more tirade, I’ll attempt to explain.

---

     “The personal is political.” – Leftist mantra.

     Once in a great while I get my fangs into something with broad explanatory power. It might not unify gravity with the other three fundamental forces, but it seizes my imagination, and my desire to explore it thoroughly, even so. The recent one that strikes me as being of the most value is the one I explored in this piece:

     I’ve long held the belief that any man who’s willing to assert the absolute truth of even one statement must eventually accept that every well-formed statement – i.e., a statement that either posits a fact or a causal mechanism -- is either absolutely true or absolutely false, men’s contrary opinions notwithstanding. The concept behind that assertion is, of course, that there is such a thing as absolute truth – objective reality itself – which makes my notion quasi-tautological. For all that, note how few persons are willing to contradict the anti-objectivity propagandists of our time. That latter sort is permitted to gambol about screaming that “There are no absolutes!” virtually without contradiction – not even a murmur of “Including that one?”

     This is not an utterly new and fresh observation by any means. Bishop George Berkeley and Dr. Samuel Johnson had it out over the existence of absolute truth nearly three centuries ago. As it was Johnson’s foot that recoiled, his position remains the more persuasive.

     Consider in this context the oft-repeated tale of a first-grade class that was asked how to determine the sex of a kitten:

     Years ago I supervised the Indian seminaries. On a visit to a school at Albuquerque, the principal told me of an incident that happened in a first grade class.
     During a lesson, a kitten wandered into the room and distracted the youngsters. It was brought to the front of the room so all could see it.
     One youngster asked: “Is it a boy kitty or a girl kitty?”
     The teacher, unprepared for that discussion, said, “It doesn’t matter; it’s just a kitten.”
     But the children persisted, and one little boy said, “I know how we can tell if it is a boy kitty or a girl kitty.”
     The teacher, cornered, said, “All right, you tell us how we can tell if it is a boy kitty or a girl kitty.”
     The boy answered, “We can vote on it!”

     This episode, if it’s factual, occurred several decades ago. Yet it pertains with a terrible power to the major sociopolitical problem of our time. That problem is summarized in the quote at the head of this segment.

---

     “Skinwalker is a Native American concept, the gist of which is a person who can turn themselves into an animal by wearing the skin of that animal. The tradition is most developed among the Navajo and is part of the Witchery Way, along with another branch known as the Frenzy Way that was used by a witch to influence the minds and emotions of others.
     “Why?” a girl in the front row asked.
     “Excuse me?” Pitcairn asked.
     “Why would they call it the Frenzy Way when it only influenced an emotion or two?” she clarified.
     “Have you ever seen video footage of a mob or riot?” he asked.
     She nodded.
     “Heard of the Salem Witch trials?” he asked.
     Again she nodded.
     “And you still wonder how much power there is in influencing emotions and thoughts? My dear, the entire marketing and advertising industry is dedicated to influencing emotions and thoughts, not to mention a little branch of human endeavor called politics.”

     [John Conroe, Brutal Asset]

     Politics has become the biggest sector of human involvement and maneuvering in American life. Today it affects everything. There is no area of life in which government, and therefore politics, does not intrude.

     The reason is the great skill at manipulating human emotion which those who strive for power have acquired. If you can elevate the emotions of a substantial group over some “issue,” you can politicize that issue: i.e., you can make it seem like a proper subject for governmental action. And of course, in our “democracy” – yes, those are “sneer quotes” – that implies decision-making governed by electoral processes, whether directly or indirectly.

     Do you doubt this? Consider only one example, because it underpins everything else: the cherished right to freedom of expression. No right is more clearly expressed by the Bill of Rights. Yet today that right is under sustained attack by persons who demand that an “exception” be made for “hate speech” – and who demand the sole and absolute authority to decree what constitutes “hate speech.” Could there ever be a clearer linkage of politics to emotional appeals?

     You’d think the Left’s campaign to achieve that end would be laughed aside on the grounds of Constitutional law, three hundred years of Anglo-American tradition, and simple logic. If our power to express our opinions and convictions is politicized, then nothing remains outside the political orbit. A country once nearly wholly free would become a country wholly enslaved, a rightless chattel at the mercy of the whims of the Omnipotent State. Yet that is the abyss at whose edge we stand.

---

     “Power tends to corrupt. Absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” – John Emerich Edward Dalberg, Lord Acton

     When Ben Franklin was carried from the constitutional convention in September of 1787, he was stopped in the street by a woman who said, “Mr. Franklin, what have you wrought?” Franklin said, “A republic, madam, if you can keep it.” – Lawrence Lessig

     Emotional manipulation is the means, but the politicization of everything is the end. Needless to say, the Left’s aim is to become and remain the master. Yet even if the Right were to prevail and to exterminate the Left utterly, the consequences would be just as bad.

     When we in the Right allow a subject to become political, we collaborate in our own destruction. Granted that there are some subjects which are inherently political: our military and how it’s employed, international relations, the defense of acknowledged rights by the courts. But all else is at least potentially private.

     The proper role of the American patriot in this Year of Our Lord 2018 is to preserve and re-expand the private sphere. When we depart from that role – i.e., when we engage in politics over a subject that can be made a matter for private decisions and actions – we fail of our duty.

     The Constitution of the United States was written to define and delimit the public sphere. Most of our state-level charters were made in accordance with the same ideals. Indeed, the word republic, which was once understood to be the quintessentially American term for our polity, derives from the Latin phrase rei publicae: “public matters.” If there are properly public matters, any of the Founders would have told us, there are therefore properly private matters as well – and keeping the two separate is the critical activity of men determined to remain free.

---

     “And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

     I’ve come to feel that the “Mishnory road” essays, which are grouped here, plus this older piece that addresses the commonalities and divergences between “orthodox” conservatism and ideological libertarianism, are the most salient of my contributions to American political discourse. Everything else I’ve ever written is a consequence of the thoughts expressed in those pieces.

     That recognition has me pondering whether to continue on with these interminable, often repetitive op-eds. If the appropriate logic for dealing with a specific “issue” can be found in something I’ve already written, why go on to write further about it? Why surrender implicitly to the Left’s endless temptation to treat every subject, great or small, as something to view through a political lens?

     Politics can be fascinating...much in the same way as torture, which it’s coming ever more to resemble. But one does not immerse oneself in a horrifying subject without sustaining personal harm.

     I harbor no illusions about my vulnerability...or my mortality. Advancing age presses those subjects upon one’s mind. So I hope you’ll bear with me as I make a number of adjustments to the sort of material I post here at Liberty’s Torch. While I appreciate the value my regular Gentle Readers place upon these screeds...candidly, often without understanding why...I hope you’ll appreciate the sense of urgency under which I labor.

     The most private of all things is one’s own life and what one chooses to do with it. Let’s resist the temptation to drown our lives in politics.

     “Keep thine eye fixed upon the doughnut, lest thou pass unaware through the hole.” – The Curmudgeon’s Carbohydrate Aphorism

America’s Secret Police

     You’d better be wearing your seat belt, Gentle Reader. It’s not often I get to start an essay with a title that provocative, so you can be confident that what’s coming will have a bit of an edge to it.

     Is there a phrase in the lexicon of politics and government more ominous than “secret police?” Doesn’t it give you a little chill to imagine that We The People suffer such an indignity? It’s a pretty good distance from MAD Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” comic, you know. Back when that was popular, we had a Cold War, an arms race, and mandatory hide-under-your-desk drills to keep us mindful of the Red Menace.

     But what is a secret police, anyway? Is it a police agency whose existence is concealed? Is it an agency that enforces secret laws – laws John Q. Public isn’t allowed to know about until he’s been accused of violating them? Or is it an agency whose existence is openly acknowledged, but whose operatives, operations, and methods are kept secret? Have you ever given it any thought?

     Maybe it’s time.

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     The Soviet Union of late, unlamented memory possessed a number of police agencies. Two of them, the KGB and the GRU, were often referred to as secret police, despite being well known to the USSR’s people. Most of the agents of those agencies were open about their jobs. Indeed, a post in the KGB or GRU was regarded as a sign of status in the USSR. It marked you as one not to be trifled with.

     If the KGB and GRU qualified as secret police by any standard, it could not have been that they or their operatives were kept secret. However, what those operatives were doing at any given time was kept secret...at least, until the agency was ready to pounce on a target.

     The Soviet Union’s secret police conducted their “investigations” in secret. They selected their target quietly. They operated to gather “evidence” against him quietly, and by means that were seldom disclosed. Most telling of all, they operated under the presumption that a citizen of the Soviet Union had no right to privacy – in other words, no right to have any secrets.

     That was the pattern for the secret police of all the Warsaw Pact countries, for Communist China, North Korea, and Cuba, and for every other totalitarian hellhole this sorry planet has ever endured. The secret police weren’t secret. Their methods weren’t secret either. What they were doing at any given moment was kept secret. That was necessary if they were to penetrate the secrets of their targets.

     Secret police are about your secrets, not theirs.

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     To the extent that Americans have any privacy – i.e., any capability to keep secrets – it lies in the right of private property, which the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees. In recent years, the courts have extended property-like protections to our electronic communications: telephone calls and the Internet. However, the police are unhappy about that. They argued, successfully, that those privacy protections obstruct their investigations of individuals and organizations suspected of felonious activities. So systems were erected to permit police wiretapping and electronic monitoring of such persons and organizations, subject to the approval of the courts.

     At that point we’d already hit a stunning departure from the traditional scope of police work. Yet it’s likely that you didn’t notice it.

     The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are extensions of that earlier police argument. The averred aim was, of course, to better guarantee our “national security.” Ironically, and despite the rather phantasmal aspect of “national security,” the argument has greater plausibility at the international level than it does at the domestic level. However, the fly in the ointment remained the same.

     For covert surveillance of a target to yield worthwhile evidence of wrongdoing, the target must be kept from knowing that his communications are being monitored. In other words, he must be induced to be a witness against himself without ever knowing it.

     Consider also that such monitoring almost always takes place before there’s any other evidence of an operation against the United States, its properties, or its wider interests. The monitors are looking for evidence of a crime that might not have been committed at all. That same logical flaw invalidates the argument for police wiretapping of suspicious domestic persons and organizations. A court that grants a communications surveillance warrant without first being presented credible evidence of a crime already committed or in progress has violated the rights of privacy-in-communication that an American is supposedly guaranteed.

     And the target is not allowed to know.

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     By the argument above, the FBI, CIA, and NSA constitute secret police agencies materially indistinguishable from those that terrorized the Soviet Union. They exist to penetrate Americans’ secrets, regardless of whether their targets have done anything criminal by our domestic laws, or averse to America’s “national security” according to the National Security Act or Espionage Act. Their very nature renders them largely beyond effective supervision, for the elected executives and legislators nominally tasked with supervising them are often themselves targets. It is in the nature of clandestinely gathered “intelligence” that an imaginative “analyst” can concoct an accusation of heinous conduct from the surveillance capability alone. Who could falsify the allegations of an agency permitted to work in such a fashion? Who is so completely without secrets of his own that he would dare?

     Note that our supposed guarantees of communications privacy are essentially irrelevant to the above. What matters most is the covert targeting.

     How about it, Gentle Reader? Are you at all disturbed by the notion that America’s secret police might be after your secrets? Have I got you looking over your shoulder yet, or are you certain that your comings, goings, and miscellaneous doings couldn’t possibly be of interest to our national snoops?

     Consider Harvey Silverglate’s “three felonies a day” argument before you answer.

     “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” – Lavrenti Beria, the first head of the OGPU, later to be renamed the KGB

Is It Impossible To Go On Offense?

     There are certain modern innovations of which your Curmudgeon is, to put it gently, not a fan. However, fair consideration has caused him to conclude that it’s not the innovations themselves but the ways in which they’re exploited that leave him cold.

     The one your Curmudgeon’s longtime Gentle Readers surely expect to hear about first – and with excellent reason – is the smartphone. Yes, this seemingly miraculous device, which packs the power of a mainframe of old into a package that fits a human hand, is near the top of your Curmudgeon’s Hate Parade. As he’s raved against the pernicious phenomenon of “absent presence,” in which whatever the afflicted one is doing with his smartphone takes priority over the reality around him then and there, on at least two previous occasions, he’ll forbear to assault your eyes with it this morning. Still, the smartphone deserves at least this brief mention.

     Another, which your Curmudgeon’s Gentle Readers probably do not expect to see mentioned, is the Internet itself. No, not the way it’s put all of human knowledge at one’s fingertips. Not the way it makes possible the dissemination of news and opinion near to instantaneously to the entire globe. And not the way it facilitates these periodic dissipations of bile lest the accumulation perturb your Curmudgeon’s cherished serenity. Rather, the way it’s used by vicious, small-minded persons to harass those with whom they differ from behind an anonymizing moniker.

     This article is the morning’s stimulus. The first sentence should suffice to tell you the essentials:

     Four prominent conservative women who support gun rights have been targeted with death threats, rape threats and threats to their children simply because they have championed the right to own a gun for self-defense.

     Please read the entire article. If you reach the conclusion without doubling your blood pressure, check your pulse: you may have died and not noticed.

     Because the Internet makes the concealment of one’s real name and locale so easy, barrages of vilifications and threats such as the ones Corban, Loesch, Jacques, and Washington have endured are effectively impossible to counter. While it might be possible, given a lot of time and effort and the cooperation of generally indifferent law enforcement authorities, to ferret out the identities of a few of the attackers, the price of the effort plus the number of assailants make it unlikely that anything of the sort will be done. Thus, the one effective response to such a hateful phenomenon – going on offense to hunt down the miscreants, bring them to book, and punish them severely – is denied to these women.

     And the Internet is what makes it possible.

     When person-to-person communication was limited to letters and landline telephones, a campaign such as the one the women above have suffered could be redressed by law enforcement. Letters could be traced back to their senders. Phone lines could be monitored. Law enforcement’s ability to sniff out the offenders made it next to impossible to get away with sustained harassment. The Internet has eliminated that course of action in the name of a specious “right to privacy” whose dark side is dark indeed.

     The funny thing about that “right to privacy” is how easily it’s used to destroy the lives of completely innocent persons. You’d think a “right,” which should be something all persons can enjoy simultaneously without engendering conflicts that can only be resolved by the use of force, would present a more innocent aspect. However, the conundrum can be answered simply: There is no right to privacy divorced from the rights of property.

     What “right to privacy” inheres in an individual outside his own home? Passers-by can see him, note his appearance, and watch where he goes. Those with whom he speaks can remember and record his words. Cameras that monitor the street can retain his image indefinitely. Merchants who interact with him can make records of the transactions. If he makes a purchase with a credit card, his identity is stamped onto that transaction and its details forevermore.

     Any privacy an individual can sensibly enjoy begins and ends at his threshold. When he emits a signal intended to reach the world at large, he loses any imagined “right to privacy” over the information carried by that signal. Why, then, have we fetishized the “privacy” – really, the anonymity – of the Internet attack squadrons that have made the lives of Corban, Loesch, et alii a season in hell?

     One of your Curmudgeon’s most valued colleagues has chosen to conceal his identity behind a moniker. He has good reasons: he and his family have been scurrilously attacked by persons who disagree with his views, which are conservative and patriotic. His wife is of a delicate disposition and cannot endure the stress from such things. He also fears for the safety of his children. Yet he would not have had to resort to a pseudonym were it impossible for his attackers to do so.

     Your Curmudgeon is on record as saying that he respects those who choose to stand behind their words far more than those who don’t. Plainly, attaching one’s right name to one’s emissions is integral to that choice. Yet the Internet’s privilege of anonymity in expression has made it effectively impossible for many persons to express themselves under their right names. They cannot expose their attackers and haul them up for public shame and disgrace.

     Perhaps there is no legal or technological solution, though your Curmudgeon, who was a communications specialist before he retired, finds that proposition dubious. But the cancer that has made it risky to express an opinion for public consumption has already had a poisonous effect on our public discourse. Present conditions continuing, it will only get worse.

The “Are You Paranoid Enough?” Edition

     I’ve never been a fan of what’s become known as “the Internet of Things.” Bandwidth around here is precious – too many people are online at all hours, and we have only one viable broadband provider – and I pay extra to make sure I’ll have what I need. I may be an old crank, but I’m neither old enough nor cranky enough to need light switches I can throw digitally from the smartphone I don’t own. I certainly don’t need for my appliances to be having conversations with their distant colleagues about how unappreciative I am.

     I have no idea whether mine is a majority or a minority opinion. I know that some people have embraced the Fully Wired Home with great enthusiasm. I’ve often wondered whether those folks have grasped what they’re letting themselves in for. Today we have some thoughts on just what that might be:

     The government is already spying on us through spying on us through our computers, phones, cars, buses, streetlights, at airports and on the street, via mobile scanners and drones, through our credit cards and smart meters (see this), television, doll, and in many other ways.

The CIA wants to spy on you through your dishwasher and other “smart” appliances.

     NO! Our omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent State wants to transform The Land of the Free into a Total Surveillance Society? Say it ain’t so!

     Granted, the amount of digital traffic monitoring required to conduct effective surveillance of 330 million Americans is staggering. The amount of computer power required even to search for keywords that would trigger closer attention is even more staggering. The amount of storage required to save all that traffic for later perusal by analysts, or for use as evidence? Thank you no, I’m already staggered enough. But the more I think about it, the more plausible it seems.

     The key is the motive.

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     My memory isn’t firing on all sixteen cylinders this morning so I can’t be certain of the provenance of the following, but I think it was Lavrenti Beria, the first head of the Soviet Tcheka (later to become the KGB), who said “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” Harvey Silverglate’s recent book Three Felonies a Day provides great insight into the peril the ordinary American faces in our era of law grown luxuriant beyond all justification. The prospect of a database sufficiently expansive and well organized to support Beria’s boast should send a chill down the spine of anyone sensible enough to distrust government.

     But why would a government want such a database? For intimidation purposes, of course! Imagine that the following conditions were to be satisfied:

• All electronic communications is monitored and stored by the NSA or an equivalent.
• The storage technique is sophisticated enough that an analyst can isolate one particular person’s traffic in no more than a day.
• WiFi “hotspots” have expanded to map the entire United States.
• Commercial transactions, whether by dint of convenience or through the effective elimination of cash, have become entirely digital.
• Internet-enabled devices capable of monitoring and digitizing domestic conversations have become ubiquitous; at least one such device is “awake and alert” in every household, at every instant of every day.

     Would anyone dare to criticize an entity (or one of its masters) that has access to the entirety of his stored transactions and conversations? Would anyone dare to ponder a move against it, whether political or practical?

     Don’t know about you, Bubba, but I wouldn’t.

     The question isn’t whether they who desire power above all other things would want such a system, but rather how close technology has come to making it possible.

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     “Motive, means, and opportunity” are and will remain the keys to analyzing any conceivable crime. In truth, they’re the keys to analyzing why anyone does anything, legal or otherwise. When power-seekers view their prospects for gaining, retaining, and increasing their power, the motive for adopting some particular means and maneuvering toward the opportunity will be obvious.

     Back when I was still slinging bits, communications was one of my sub-specialties. Based on what I know, and on the current state of technology as I perceive it, I would say that the practical possibility of such a total-surveillance system is not yet here. A few things are still required:

• Computer systems capable of indefinitely expanding their immediately accessible storage without impacting their capabilities;
• Artificial intelligences dedicated to storage in, searches of, and retrieval from such systems;
• The aforementioned ubiquitous digital monitoring devices;
• The elimination of cash.

     Those conditions are not yet met...but we’re getting closer. While the steady pressure to make everything Internet-enabled is worrisome, even more ominous is the increasingly visible hostility of all governments to cash. Cash is the indispensable requirement of privacy in transaction. Should it be eliminated (or reduced to a trivial relic), no one would be able to buy or sell without the State knowing everything about the transaction down to the last detail. There’s more at stake here than keeping one’s tax bite tolerable.

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     Even today, it’s likely that a Beria-like inquest would have no problem catching and burning you or me, Gentle Reader. The subconscious awareness of our vulnerability is what makes that recent reality-TV show about ordinary citizens trying to evade detection and capture by professionals in that art lodge unpleasantly in our backbrains. Could you escape the agents of the State if they were determined to get you? I know I couldn’t.

     The recent revelations about the CIA’s hacking abilities and the arsenal of tools it commands are enough to keep a lot of Americans – not all of us on the right of the political spectrum, but preponderantly so – awake at night. A total-surveillance system that employs the devices in our very homes, communicating over “hotspots” generously provided by regional broadband suppliers, is more threatening still. Given the luxuriance and ambiguity of the law today, we ought not to be assisting the State in constructing such a nightmare.

The Secrecy Syndrome

     To gauge from the Liberty’s Torch email-bag, something I wrote yesterday has struck a nerve, specifically this:

     Just as governments strive to do everything in secret, they strive with equal fervor to eliminate the privacy of their subjects.

     One correspondent pointed me to this article:

     Rather than ameliorate the situation, those in power have doubled down on the stupid. In what only can be described as a move of sheer brilliance, the Virginia Senate has already passed a bill to keep police officer’s names confidential. To my knowledge there is no state or national precedent for this, at least here in the U.S. Clearly precedents exist in such democratic strongholds such as East Germany, pre-1945 Germany, post-Czar Russia, Democratic Republic of China, Iran, and virtually every African country since the 1950’s.

     The issues are obvious. The potential for abuse becomes astronomically higher. It very nearly incentivizes lawless behavior from law enforcement....Becoming an anonymous badge removes an important impetus for morality and legal behavior. The Milgram experiment makes this point abundantly clear. Make the individual anonymous, put them in a room with an authority figure, and watch the magic happen. I have no doubt this correlates closely with the various threats and cries for the identity of Levoy Finicum’s shooter in Oregon. Like all things, it will be done in the name of safety, ‘for the children’ and wives of law enforcement and take us yet one step closer to the gaping maw of tyranny.

     Even in states without such legislation on the books, it can be extremely difficult to determine the identities of the badge holders. Indeed, as governments at all levels strain to expand their coercive powers – often by arming bureaucrats – they intensify their efforts to “protect” the identities of those who are sent out to wield “lawful authority.”

     Ponder that for a moment while I fetch more coffee.

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     The attack on citizens’ privacy has been a headline item for quite some time. The Snowden revelations about the NSA’s wide-spectrum capture of cell phone and Internet traffic were only the most dramatic of the lot. The “Stingray” cell phone interceptor disclosures have commanded quite a bit of attention, as have the FBI’s recent efforts to coerce Apple into unlocking cell phones.

     The ATF’s “Fast and Furious” operation was intended to compel gun dealers to report multiple-gun transactions, in the name of preventing “straw purchases” of firearms for illegal purposes. Look how well that worked out. Several states now require the reporting of anyone who makes a bulk purchase of ammunition, under a similar rationale.

     Being married to an accountant makes me privy to certain other invasions of our privacy. We all know that financial institutions are compelled by law and regulation to report all the details on cash transactions above $5000, but did you know that the IRS requires professional tax return preparers who file electronically to register their computers with the IRS?

     Mind you, the IRS requires this in the name of “protecting taxpayer information.” But who – or what – has been responsible for the illegal disclosure of taxpayer information? Wasn’t it the IRS itself?

     For those of us who employ gold and silver as inflation hedges, the news is equally disturbing: Coin and bullion dealers must report all transactions over certain thresholds. Your hard-asset hoard might not be as private as you’ve thought.

     Remarkable how the government can screw up royally, then lay the penalties for the screwup on wholly uninvolved private citizens, isn’t it?

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     Low intentions go hand in hand with a desire for secrecy. That’s so obvious it doesn’t require an explanation. The desire to penetrate the privacy of others kicks in when the holder of those low intentions is a government agency.

     Many are the areas of human activity where governments seek to pierce our privacy. However, their concentration will always be on those things that support the free action of private citizens:

• Weaponry;
• Communications;
• Money.

     The citizenry can resist State coercion, if it has the resources with which to educate itself, acquire arms, and organize for resistance. But to be effective, resistance must be directed at the proper targets: i.e., those that seek to shackle us. A spirit of resistance that remains merely a targetless desire not to be coerced has very little prospect for success over the long term. As the saying goes, no one ever won a war by playing defense.

     When the State succeeds in penetrating the privacy of the citizen, it forearms itself against efforts to resist it. If it can shield the identities and activities of its own agents, it is largely immunized against counterattack. Under a regime that succeeds at both those things, there is very little prospect for freedom.

     The 88,000 governments – federal, state, county, municipal, and local – in these United States have proved adept at both tasks. In aggregate, they employ many millions of persons and spend more than $6 trillion per year. The most important details of our lives are laid bare to them. Yet, except for the half-million officials we elect to those governments, we know almost nothing about those who claim to act under their authority.

     It’s appallingly clear that a secret law is an instrument of tyranny, intolerable on its face. Why isn’t it equally clear that secret law enforcers are tyrants in their own right?

     Think about it.

The War On Cash: A Further Look At The Dynamic

     At the 1987 California State Libertarian Party convention, legendary Austrian economist Murray Rothbard was asked for his opinion of the then-current discussions about making all paper currency digitally readable and writable. Dr. Rothbard immediately zeroed in on the underlying intention: the effective elimination of cash.

     Say what? But isn’t paper currency “cash?” It’s what we use in routine, day-to-day transactions, without the need for an intermediating financial institution to perform the transfer. How would it cease to be “cash” if it merely became possible to write a readable transaction trail onto it?

     Dr. Rothbard noted that one fundamental property of cash is its anonymity. A medium of exchange that carries a record with it is the reverse of anonymous: it can be made to testify to where it’s been and for what it was used. Once all currency was so equipped, the federal government could mandate that all new “cash registers” be equipped with the technology to write and read the embedded record. Then as now, the rationale was “to impede criminals,” especially drug dealers.

     Furthermore, such currency would have a built-in invalidation period. When the embedded record was full, such that no additional transactions could be recorded on it, the holder would be required to exchange it for a fresh note at an authorized facility. Thus, the government’s control of all financial transactions would be ironclad, impossible to escape.

     That was 1987, Gentle Reader. Before the civilian-accessible Internet. Mobile phones were analog only; cell phones were still being developed. The “PDA” was a pathetically limited item, no more than a digital notepad. And the writing was already on the wall.

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     Just as governments strive to do everything in secret, they strive with equal fervor to eliminate the privacy of their subjects.

     Privacy – alternately, anonymity – is what makes it possible for Smith and Jones to transact without the State knowing about it. It makes it possible for Smith to keep all knowledge of his liquid assets to himself. Cash of the traditional, impossible-to-trace sort facilitates the export of one’s wealth to a place far from the State’s reach. That’s why the federal government has imposed export controls on American currency. God help you if you’re discovered trying to leave the U.S. with a large amount of cash; you’ll be treated more roughly than any suspected terrorist.

     Today’s First World countries are heavily festooned with monitoring devices: cameras, microphones, cell-phone-tracking systems, taps on Internet backbone traffic, and so forth. Micro-seismic detectors listen to the rumble in our streets. Satellites equipped with optics of phenomenal resolution watch us from orbit. Everywhere we go, we’re identified, traced, and followed by the all-seeing eyes of the Omnipotent State. Only in our hand-to-hand dealings in the most cloistered of locales do we enjoy any privacy at all. Is it any wonder that those who worship power are so determined to deny all possibility of financial privacy to us who want only to be left alone?

     “But criminals!” You’ve heard the cry. It’s almost as constant as “For the children,” and even more specious. Consider the current foofaurauw over the cell phone the FBI has demanded that Apple unlock. Why? Because it might provide a lead to a possible third party to the mass shooting in San Bernardino a couple of months ago. The precedental power of compliance by Apple is difficult to overstate.

     We have here another case of that most vicious of legal canards, "compelling government interest." This time, it appears not to be sufficient. Too many people are aware of the range of their activities that would subsequently be monitorable...and far too many people have a compelling interest of their own in keeping a substantial part of their affairs entirely private.

     That desire for a private space in which individuals can transact without fear of prying government eyes is strong enough to reinvent cash, should the valueless cash foisted upon us by the Federal Reserve System be shorn of its anonymity.

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     The reinvention of cash will require both determination and trust. As any new cash won’t be “legal tender,” which the seller is required by law to accept “for all debts, public and private,” any new cash will be required to have some of the properties of a commodity money:

1. Valued for their intrinsic properties;
2. Easily recognizable;
3. Difficult or impossible to counterfeit;
4. Durable under use;
5. Relatively stable in quantity;
6. Divisible into very small quantities without degradation.

     The traditional money metals – gold, silver, and copper – possess all those qualities. For hand-to-hand transactions between strangers, all of them would be highly desirable at the very least. Should the transactors know and trust one another, qualities 1, 2, and 3 would remain absolutely required, while the others would be of less importance.

     It’s unlikely that a single “standard cash” would arise swiftly after the Fed’s destruction of the privacy of its notes. More likely, there would be many “local cashes,” perhaps a few “regional cashes,” for a long time afterward. There would also be a great deal of barter, unmediated by cash of any sort. Some items that would start out as common barter would be “promoted” to the status of a cash: ammunition in the most common calibers has frequently been mentioned in this connection.

     The one thing of which we can be sure is the dynamic: the desire of millions of Americans for a zone of privacy in which they can transact without notice by the State.

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     Americans’ most important protection against the State is the State’s own nature: its predictability and the stupidity of its adherents. A slice of an underappreciated novel from one of the greatest of contemporary storytellers has much point:

     Rammaden, the safecracker, had told an amusing story about two thieves who had broken into a supermarket one Friday night when they knew a snowstorm had kept the Wells Fargo truck from arriving and taking the heavy end-of-the-week receipts to the bank. The safe was a barrel box. They tried to drill out the combination dial with no success. They had tried to peel it but had been totally unable to bend back a corner and get a start. Finally they had blown it. That was a total success. They blew that barrel wide open, so wide open in fact that all the money inside had been totally destroyed. What was left had looked like the shredded money you sometimes see in those novelty pens.

     “The point is,” Rammaden had said in his dry and wheezing voice, “those two thieves didn’t beat the safe. The whole game is beating the safe. You don’t beat the safe unless you can take away what was in it in usable condition, you get my point? They overloaded it with soup. They killed the money. They were assholes and the safe beat them.”

     [Stephen King, Firestarter]

     Should our political masters “kill the money” in the currently anticipated non-explosive way, they’ll have pitted themselves and their monolithic coercive skills against the ingenuity and determination of millions of Americans determined to preserve what remains of their privacy. One lumbering Goliath will face off against millions of small, quick, inventive Davids, each with a sling of his own choosing.

     Which way would you bet, Gentle Reader?

Exponential Curves

     About twelve years ago – yes, I’ve been doing this for that long; since 1997 in fact – I wrote an essay titled “Curves” that appeared at the old Palace of Reason, about the curve of technological advance. Its peroration went like this:

     The test of any political theory is what results it produces in practice. Just-war theory holds that we must wait to be struck before striking back. Now that a modest sum will buy the expertise and components with which to fabricate devices that can kill thousands, even millions, the cost of waiting to be struck has become unacceptable.

     At that time I was mainly concerned about its implications for terrorism and the safety of Americans and our nation. My central point was that the rate of technological advancement is directly proportional to the prevailing level of technology. If we let y represent the level of technology at time t, the equation becomes:

dy/dt = C₁y

     ...where C₁ represents some arbitrary (in this case, unknown) constant. This is one of the first differential equations any calculus student learns to solve:

y = e^C₁t + C₂

     ...where C₂ is an indeterminate constant and e is the familiar exponential base:

e = limit((1 + 1/n)ⁿ)

     ...as n increases toward infinity: approximately 2.71828.

     And now that I’ve exhausted some of you and baffled the rest with (“I was told there would be no...”) mathematics, let’s talk about our situation as regards personal privacy.

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     It’s well known that the public streets of every significant city in the U.S. are heavily stippled with surveillance cameras. I don’t think we’re yet at the level of Person of Interest, but we’re approaching at an accelerating clip. Indeed, the rate of acceleration is itself increasing. Extrapolating the current trend not too unreasonably, by 2025 every district in the nation with a non-negligible population density will be so heavily equipped with surveillance devices that there will be no public space free of them.

     What follows from that, Gentle Reader? What follows from that plus license plate readers, vehicle recognition systems, government backdoors into credit-card-payment-processing systems and large cellular communications services, and the rest of the we can see you trends of the Twenty-First Century? How much meaning will the concept of privacy have at that point?

     For that matter, would the trend toward total government surveillance necessarily stop there? Might it not extend its feelers into nominally private spaces? After all, if “they” can see and hear you at any and every moment of your life, wouldn’t it cut down on crime, and quite sharply at that? Wouldn’t “they” be likely to argue that it would make offenses like insider trading and domestic abuse things of the past, and that it would therefore constitute a matter of “compelling government interest?”

     Think about it.

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     He who knows where you are at every moment can exert a great influence upon you through that mechanism alone. He who also knows, to a fairly detailed degree, what you’re doing and with whom can exert still more influence. When the “he” in question is a State without Constitutional bounds, equipped with every imaginable coercive instrument and ruled by men to whom only power matters, we arrive at the genuinely total totalitarianism Orwell imagined but which 1948 technology could not produce.

     Am I dead certain that such a future is headed toward us? No; as I said above, I’m “extrapolating the current trend not too unreasonably.” After all, how long ago did the Supreme Court rule that a government may seize private property and simply turn it over to another private party, as long as it was “for a public purpose?” Your privacy depends entirely on your property rights; once the latter are dissolved, the foundation beneath the former must collapse.

     The irony of the Left’s habitual demands for incursions upon private property should be plain at this point. But no one expects the run-of-the-mill Leftist to grasp it; his “compact and unified church” will shield him against such an intellectual excursion.

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     As technology advances, monitoring devices will become ever smaller and harder to detect. Yet they’ll be as sensitive as their predecessors, if not more so. The exponential curve of technological advance guarantees this, until we reach some limit imposed by the laws of physics. The consequences strike me as both irrefutable and dire. I cannot take the attitude that Bob Shaw’s protagonists took at the conclusion of his blockbuster novel Other Days, Other Eyes:

     In later decades, men were to come to accept the universal presence of Retardite eyes and they learned to live without subterfuge or shame as they had done in a distant past when it was known that the eyes of God could see everywhere.

     Privacy – space and time in which what we do, and with whom, and to what end, is entirely at our discretion, such that we may choose and act without fear of politically imposed consequences – is one of the main reasons we value freedom. It’s not a right apart from the property rights that make it possible, but it’s a great part of the reason we value those property rights. It is severely reduced today. It might well be gone entirely tomorrow.

     Can you imagine enjoying such a future, Gentle Reader? Enduring it without complaint or regret? If your answer is no, there’s another, much harder question you must confront: once it’s in place, can you imagine successfully rebelling against it? Overthrowing the regime that’s imposed it?

     Food for thought.

Naughty Words Part 3: “Security”

     Senator Rand Paul has drawn quite a lot of flak for his firm stance against the bulk collection of phone call metadata. Some of that flak has come from persons who really ought to know better:

     During debate over renewing the Patriot Act:

     People here in town think I'm making a huge mistake. Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.

     Takeaways: 1) It's all about Rand, 2) There can be no legitimate disagreements over the pros and cons of the Patriot Act, and 3) If you do disagree with him on this, you're probably a bloodthirsty, spiteful f*ck.

     And in a similar vein:

     Rand Paul is not just criticizing his named enemies in the Senate, then. He's criticizing the millions of GOP voters whose instincts tend to be more conventional and interventionist than his own.

     Mind you, it’s quite all right to disagree with Senator Paul on this or any other issue. But why tar him as self-absorbed, interested solely in his prospects for the presidency? It should be clear by now that he has essentially no shot at gaining the GOP nomination; all the big guns of the Republican establishment have aligned against him. Therefore, we must seek elsewhere for the reason.

     Fortunately for my aching fingers, we don’t have far to seek.

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     The following comes from Daniel Yergin’s Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State:

     In the autumn of 1945, civilian and military heads of the different services trooped up to Capitol Hill to testify before the Senate committee on the question of the unification of the military services. Whereas in an earlier round of such hearings, in spring 1944, “national security” barely came up at all; in these 1945 hearings, a year and a half later, the policy makers constantly invoked the idea as a starting point. “Our national security can only be assured on a very broad and comprehensive front,” argued the most forceful advocate of the concept, Navy Secretary James Forrestal. “I am using the word ‘security’ here consistently and continuously rather than ‘defense.’” “I like your words ‘national security,’” Senator Edwin Johnson told him.

     That was the origin of the pernicious phrase national security, which has come to dominate every discussion of military posture, of information classification and handling, of the gathering of intelligence, and of federal surveillance of the American homeland. Pick an arbitrary member of Congress, invade his bedroom at two AM, and dump a bucket of ice water on him, and he’ll come awake sputtering “National security!” But I have a question: What does it mean?

     It doesn’t appear to mean:

• Protection of Americans’ rights;
• Enforcement of America’s borders or immigration laws;
• Rational provisioning and employment of our armed forces.

     If you can define it, please help me out, because the only coherent meaning I can assign to it is:

That which can justify any violation of Constitutional constraints and any abridgement, infringement, or suspension of individuals’ rights.

     Think about it.

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     Senator Paul has called into question the use of national security as a password to extra-Constitutional power. The federal government is nowhere granted the power to do what the NSA’s metadata-collection program is doing. It’s neither necessary nor proper to the defense of the United States. Indeed, it’s openly acknowledged that the program has yielded no actionable intelligence. Its masters cannot point to even one terrorist plot that metadata-collection has foiled...and they’re open about it.

     Even leaving Constitutional considerations aside, the metadata-collection program is very difficult to defend. It has yielded nothing of consequence to anti-terrorism efforts. When combined with facilities such as EZ-Pass and cell phones’ GPS facilities, it equips the federal government with the means to determine, within about a quarter mile, exactly where any cell-phone-owning American is at any time. When combined with other data available from the Internet, it provides Washington’s busybodies with an extensive dossier on every last individual within our borders: who and where you are, what you’ve been doing with your money, and how you go about your day.

     Who and what are being secured? Whose interests are being protected in this fashion? Is it not transparently obvious that this program is of far more value to the political establishment than to any private citizen? Is it not equally obvious that it would be invaluable in ferreting out pockets of resistance to unConstitutional federal activity and squashing them before they can become numerous or well organized? And is it not mind-shatteringly obvious that this invasion of our privacy could only have been justified by the claim that it’s “essential to national security” -- ?

     Of course, obvious does mean overlooked.

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     Don’t imagine for an instant that it’s only Republicans who constantly plead “national security” to justify the invasion of Americans’ rights. The Democrats do it, too. Indeed, as Daniel Yergin points out in Shattered Peace, it was the Democrats who started it: the Truman Administration, which rationalized its actions as politically necessary to fend off the GOP. “National security” is immensely useful to all elements of the political establishment, for not only does it justify all sorts of unConstitutional federal activity; it also functions as a shield against disclosures that would topple many a political edifice and end many a political career.

     The redaction of documents released in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, which robs the Act of the greater part of its value as a watchtower against federal corruption and overreach, is justified entirely by “national security.” Try to imagine how such excisions could be justified on any other basis. I can’t.

     Just how secure are you feeling right now, Gentle Reader?

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     In a rather different context, Robert A. Heinlein wrote:

     I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or "security." There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be.
     Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest in supermarkets and exurban subdivisions and tonight is the PTA supper don’t forget dear you promised.

     The entire notion of “security” is a phantasm, a shiny bit of colored glass used to lure us away from that which is possible and attainable, and toward that which is not, has never been, and never can be. This is true at any level of organization, from individuals to nation-states. Indeed, the Earth itself is irremediably insecure, as earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, tsunamis, meteorites, near-encounters with asteroids, and the occasional solar flare should demonstrate to anyone’s satisfaction.

     There is risk in everything. There are defenses against some sorts of risks, but no defense is “secure” in any sense that holds water. Human life is an ongoing game of rock / paper / scissors. So also is the bizarre perversion of social organization we call government – but no member of the political class, high, middle, or low, has ever dared to admit it. That is, until Rand Paul, United States Senator from the state of Kentucky, dared to challenge the concept in open Senate session, at least by implication.

     No, Senator Paul will not be the GOP nominee for president, nor should he be. But it would bring a smile to this old face if a larger fraction of the Republicans on Capitol Hill were to admit what’s become so glaringly obvious since 2001:

• That we are not “secure;”
• That we cannot be made “secure,” even at the cost of all freedom;
• That only the Leviathan on the Potomac has any interest in imagining otherwise.

     Remember you read it here first.

What’s Yours...Isn’t

     I suppose it’s time to head back to the salt mine. After all, the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch might find their moods improving and their blood pressure de-escalating otherwise, right? Right?

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     I don’t read Zero Hedge nearly as often as I should:

     Imagine going to the bank to withdraw some cash.

     Having some cash on hand is always a prudent strategy, and especially today when more and more bank deposits are creeping into negative territory, meaning that you have to pay the banks for the privilege that they gamble with your money.

     You tell the teller that you’d like to withdraw $5,000 from your account. She hesitates nervously and wants to know why.

     You try to politely let her know that that’s none of the bank’s business as it’s your money.

     The teller disappears for a few minutes, leaving you waiting.

     When she returns she tells you that you can collect your money in a few days as they don’t have it on hand at the moment.

     Slightly irritated because of the inconvenience, you head home.

     But as you pull into your driveway later there’s an unexpected surprise waiting for you: two police officers would like to have a word with you about your intended withdrawal earlier…

     It might not be local cops, either. We’re talking about federal action here. So they might be Justice Department agents. Possibly even FBI types. And all you need to do to land in prison is say something to a fed that some federal prosecutor can construe as an attempt to deceive him – a federal crime under the United States Code. Ask Martha Stewart and Lewis “Scooter” Libby about their experiences in that regard.

     With the costs of everything under the Sun rising steadily as the Federal Reserve weakens the dollar, Americans are becoming frantic about finding ways to save a few bucks. One way to do so is to hold cash and inquire discreetly into whether the vendor or artisan with whom you’re transacting would offer a cash discount. Many will do so upon request. But the price of the item or service involved must be substantial: typically four or more digits to the left of the decimal point.

     Thinking of buying new windows or vinyl siding? Perhaps a new driveway or a backyard fence? What about having central air conditioning or a generator put in?

     Even if you’re not in the market for some “consumer durable,” you might be thinking of going to the precious metals to retard the deterioration of your dollars. Many Americans have done so in recent years. But such transactions are almost always conducted in cash, whether as a wire transfer or by counting out actual greenbacks. And the federal government is very interested in knowing who’s making such purchases.

     Scared yet?

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     Privacy as a reliable fact of life is gone.

     It’s been some time since the intrusions escalated from relative nuisances, such as the requirement for a permit to add a deck to the back of your home, to genuine threats to freedom such as the “suspicious activity report.” As with so many other aspects of the loss of our liberty, the key to the process was gradualism: taking thin slices of the freedom salami, spaced some time apart, so as not to alarm ordinary folks into going for their pitchforks. We’re near the terminus of the process today. If we judge by the old definition of property as the right to exclude others from access or appropriation, there’s essentially no private property left in these United States.

     Maybe that spring-assisted folding knife in your hip pocket qualifies as entirely and only yours...but don’t be seen fiddling with it when a “law enforcement officer” is nearby. They frown on such things, don’t y’know. You’d probably go home without it.

     Say, weren’t street predators – rapists, muggers, and the like – a lot rarer back when no gentleman would be seen in public without his sword? But I digress.

     As the prices of goods and services escalate, there will be more, not less, federal intrusion into what we once regarded as our routine transactions with one another. Indeed, one of the reasons the feds are not unhappy about the deterioration of the dollar is that it justifies precisely such intrusions. The War on Drugs has been immensely useful to the statists for that reason, though it’s done nothing to reduce the consumption of illegal narcotics, cocaine, Ecstasy, and the like.

     If you pay attention to the news, you’ve surely read an article or two about “policing for profit:” the use of the War on Drugs to justify arbitrary seizures, whether of “suspicious” cash or of real estate where a drug transaction might have once taken place, from wholly innocent Americans. In that particular case, local “law enforcement” has led the pack. However, the feds are right behind them in their exploitation of the highly convenient “asset forfeiture” laws.

     What’s that you say? Asset forfeiture is an important tool for fighting “drug crime?” Sorry, both the practice and the results speak otherwise. It’s more about “deficit reduction”...but not the sort of deficit of which a naive sort would be thinking.

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     For all the odium I and other commentators heap upon the Obamunists, we can’t lay this entirely upon them. It started a long time ago, under Richard Nixon. The legal theory upon which it was justified is that an inanimate object can be guilty of breaking the law, and so can be detained, indicted, and tried as if it were a living man. Think about that for a moment.

     Gives a whole new meaning to those jokes about “guns running amok,” doesn’t it? But that is indeed the legal theory behind asset forfeiture, whether the asset is a physical item such as your home or a more abstract one such as your life savings.

     Now about those IRAs and 401(k) accounts...

     Oh, never mind. All stand for the Pledge. And have a happy Saturday.