As the fallout from the NSA’s phone record, email and Prism
surveillance programs continues unabated, booksellers have witnessed a newfound
interest in that most famous of government-run-amok novels, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four. A needed reminder as to how prescient he
was. As Noam Chomsky pointed out in an
interview in The Guardian, we should
not really be surprised by the revelations.
Despite the admonition of FDR more than seventy years ago, we still
succumb to fear with regularity.
The so-called
Patriot Act, launched hand-in-glove with the “Global War on Terror” paved the
way for governmental clandestine spying campaigns against its own citizens as
well as citizens of the world.
Of course,
this is not the first time the government has acted against its citizens. As Chomsky noted, the principal enemy of any
government is it own people—the Palmer raids, Sedition Acts, McCarthyism. For a detailed exposition of the nefarious us
of governmental power read Chris Finan’s From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act. Not confined to those “non-democratic”
countries that our government routinely chastises--Libya;
Syria; Egypt; North Korea;
Burma; the Congo, et al, the NSA scandal highlights the
desire of all governments for control.
As Lord Acton so correctly put it—power corrupts and absolute power
corrupts absolutely.
What
separates the present era from those that preceded it is the technological
capabilities of governments (and corporations) to “collect and mine” data. This is done with impunity, but seems to
evoke only limited concern. The
President wants us to trust the government; Congress wants us to trust that it
can control the situation; the Supreme Court has yet to weigh in on the
specifics of the NSA scandal, but seems none too concerned with the Patriot
Act. But the reality is that there has
been a rapid rise in the government’s snooping activities as well as its almost
paranoid concern with secrecy—hence the present administration’s relentless pursuit
of “whistleblowers,” who leak embarrassing information it wants to remain
hidden. I am reminded of the movie
Sneakers—the subtext was “too many secrets.”
Sadly,
apparently the younger the generation, the less the concern for privacy. Chomsky calls the present youth culture the
“exhibitionist culture.” This cultural
phenomenon—not the sole realm of the young—cultivates publicity.
As independent
booksellers, what can we do to combat the invasive actions of our
government? My partner and I refuse to
keep records of what books our customers purchase. Section 215 of the Patriot Act, a Draconian
interpretation of which led to the current NSA scandals, allows the government
to confiscate records from book shops and libraries. If we are handed a secret warrant (approved by the shadowy FISA
Court—a highly suspect and overrated check on governmental abuse as clearly
demonstrated by Glenn Greenwald who broke the NSA story for The Guardian), we are obligated to hand
over our store’s records. We are not
allowed to contact an attorney; nor are we allowed to notify people that this
action has occurred. If we did, we would
be subject to prosecution.
We
therefore do not keep this information.
As a business model, we have been told that we are handicapping
ourselves, losing a valuable marketing tool.
So be it.
To us, our
customers are not data. We value their
privacy as much as we value our own.
Happy Independents’ Day.
Shawn Wathen
