Technology and tomorrow: a challenge to liberty.

It's tempting to wonder if Thomas Jefferson, writing from France to James Madison in support of a Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution, ever imagined the possibility of spy satellites. With the Industrial Revolution still in its infancy he would only have the past as his compass when thinking of the days ahead. In fact, the fledgling democracy he endorsed was itself lifted in part from the ancient Greeks. It reasonable to assume, then, that when Jefferson later sparred with Alexander Hamilton about their new country's future, neither visionary foresaw cameras the size of pinheads or rifle microphones that could detect the conversation of resident redcoats in a building across the street.

Jefferson would have had little to inspire the thought that one day the kilns of human ingenuity would produce devices that directly threaten individual privacy--and test the viability of our most cherished freedoms.

Over two centuries after it was proposed by the first U.S. Congress, is the Bill of Rights destined for the scrapheap? Will liberty survive the age of spy-cams and Patriot Acts, or was George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four just a couple of decades shy of hitting the mark?

According to ancient tradition it was the titan Prometheus who, having stolen fire from the gods and given it to humans, inaugurated technological civilization. That pilfered flame which cooked our earliest meals now burns in our atomic reactors.

It also runs in every electronic circuit we use.

As if in defiance of medieval--era opposition to science and technology, modern American society embraces it. Gadgetry of all kinds--often debuting in the markets of Japan's Akihabara--is devoured by American consumers. In the early months of 2004 more people bought camera phones than camcorders, proving the desire for unified, multi-use, compact technologies. The subway commuter can now be chatting with friends, sending e-mail, surfing the Internet, watching an MPEG video, or recording fellow travelers--all with a single device that fits in the hand.

It wasn't so long ago that this sort of gadgetry was reserved for James Bond's Q-branch, compelling 007 to quip, "Quite ingenious!" Now the toys of Ian Fleming's secret agent are the reality of everyday citizens.

And predictably these toys are making legal ripples. In March 2004 a Los Angeles-area man was indicted for allegedly installing a spying device on a computer to record his employer's every keystroke. The $50 device, called a Key Katcher, attaches like a tiny barnacle between the keyboard and hard drive. It then records several months' worth of keystrokes and can later be "debriefed" by downloading its stolen secrets. Naturally, the Key Katcher appeals to suspicious spouses eager to catch cheating mates and to wary parents who want to monitor their children's electronic stomping grounds. In the Los Angeles case, forty-six-year-old Larry Lee Ropp claims he was acting as a whistleblower by attempting to prove that his company was conducting illicit business practices. Ropp now faces a penalty of up to five years for "illegally intercepting electronic communications."

While cases like this are destined for legal gladiatorial games, the question that Jefferson might have asked is: "If this kind of spyware can be purchased for merely five bills with Alex's face on it, what other sorts of prying-eye technology are available? And what's coming?"

The answer may disturb you.

The Only Thing to Fear ...

A long-standing practice of biologists is to tag animals with tracking devices so their locations and behaviors can be monitored. In a few short years this technology will be coming to a human near you.

In recent months U.S. manufacturers announced plans to utilize Radio Frequency Identification tags, or RFIDs, in a staggering array of products. Making use of the same technology that allows cars to sail through EZ Pass tolls, RFIDs will be appearing on clothing, sneakers, razors, books, boots, and just about everything else that a tiny tracking device can be stitched onto or into. Why? The initial incentive is a highly practical one: "tagged" products can be readily tracked through the distribution gauntlet from factory to store shelf. Concealed like many extant antitheft devices, they will do nothing unless touched by a "reader signal," which makes the RFID "reply" with its own unique signal--an electronic dialogue invisible to the person wearing it.

There are other uses for this remarkable invention. The shoppers of 2010 will be able to pass through store checkout lines without needing to pause for any grumpy cashier demanding a price check. The shopper of 2015 will have even better options: imagine being able to walk into a store and have your clothes "tell" the salespeople your entire purchasing history and preferences. As more and more businesses merge into megacorporations, future consumers will find themselves at the heart of an elaborate web work in which their entire financial histories can be traded wherever they go.

This isn't science fiction. Since 1997 Mobil has been spectacularly successful with its Speedpass program while convenience-store juggernaut Wal-Mart has informed its largest suppliers that products must be equipped with RFID tags by January 2005. Obviously, this has raised the hackles of such groups as the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the World Privacy Forum. It's one thing to install an anti-theft tag on a Liz Claiborne sweater; such devices are removed before you exit the store. It's quite another when your apparel can theoretically announce your location wherever you go.

Then there are the cameras that will study your every move. In Greek mythology, the hundred-eyed god Argus was the world's greatest watchdog; today Argus has become a reality in the form of thousands of surveillance cameras in such key cities worldwide as London, England; Sydney, Australia; and most recently Washington, D.C. After the terrorism of September 11,2001, the U.S. capital was quick to embrace the cameras, which now keep watchful eyes trained on federal buildings, mass-transit stations, and shopping areas. According to a statement by D.C. Chief of Police Charles Ramsey, America's capital "must and will expand its use of surveillance cameras, much like London, which uses 150,000 cameras to monitor its population."

The use of technology by police to enforce the law is quite different from using technology to monitor a population. Arresting lawbreakers isn't the same as tracking every citizen in a given prefecture. Setting up radar speed traps for lead-footed drivers doesn't mean that surveillance should be used on everyone who drives, walks, shops, and has conversations they think are private.

One of the problems with those who shrug off the threat of omnipresent surveillance is they still think these cameras require a rent-a-cop in a security booth whose attention alternates between the grid of TV screens and Gameboys. The alarming truth is that computer recognition technology is improving at such an exponential rate that soon individuals will be identified, logged, and catalogued automatically--without requiring an army of officers scribbling names on a legal pad. Gait-recognition programs sound like something straight out of Monty Python (and in fact the only way to foil them may well be to adopt a particularly silly walk) but they exist, capable of studying the unique nuances in each person's style of step. Facial-recognition programs also have a startling and ever-increasing accuracy record, measuring the distances between eyes, nose, and mouth to come up with a person's ID-sort of like taking fingerprints from afar.

These technologies aren't perfect. Currently if you want to hide from a face-reader you need only don a pair of sunglasses. But given that computer power effectively doubles every few months, don't expect your Ray-Bans to conceal your identity for long. The chilling reality is that, in a society of a million Orwellian eyes, governments can easily slip behind the curtain and establish a police state unlike anything ever seen in history.

Grave New World

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated" reads the Fourth Amendment.

Unfortunately, today the U.S. government has many times run roughshod over these twenty-four words. Ever since the terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon three years ago, extended powers of surveillance have been granted to the government--and with great rapidity-that the Bill of Rights has taken a back seat to home land security concerns. The numerous provisions of the Patriot Act permit monitoring and interception of e-mail, warrantless searches, increased surveillance, and the ability to conduct phone and Internet taps with little judicial scrutiny. They also allow the government to brazenly investigate a citizen's reading habits by snooping into library and bookstore records. On July 8 an effort to curb this part of the Patriot Act barely failed by a vote of 210-210 in the House of Representatives when the White House threatened a veto. A majority was needed to prevail.

The Fourth Amendment rights of the people are on the chopping block. Another provision of the Patriot Act invests the president with the power to label any American citizen an "enemy combatant," in effect dispensing with the Fourteenth Amendment's declaration that "no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law." And this is to say nothing about the use of DNA databanks, which are currently unregulated. When will police officers be permitted to demand DNA samples--perhaps by cotton swabbing the mouths of "suspected deviants" in a way reminiscent of 1997's film Gattaca?

Is the omnipresent use of cameras a violation of the Fourth Amendment? Many attractive women feel the eyes of men sweeping over their bodies as they walk. But if such an inspection is done by a computer, much more might be surmised. Her vital statistics, financial records, political leanings, press clippings, and all "known associates" could be tallied and scrutinized for whatever an administration deems "deviant or unpatriotic behavior" Wouldn't this qualify as an unreasonable search?

Naturally, this sort of instamatic dossier is only possible if a centralized database of all American citizens becomes available. But these databases are actually under development.

James Dempsey, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, addresses this very issue in July 2003 in testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Commercial and Administrative Law. In his paper, "Defense of Privacy Act and Privacy in the Hands of the Government," he writes: "Agencies are developing new 'data mining' technologies that would seek evidence of possible terrorist preparations by scanning billions of everyday transactions, potentially including a vast array of information about American's personal lives." While admitting that modern terrorist threats require expanded powers for homeland security, Dempsey suggests caution instead of the hasty fork over of freedoms that politicians did in the fear addled weeks immediately following September 11, 2001. "Government implementations of this uniquely intrusive technology should not go forward without explicit congressional authorization based on a finding of effectiveness, guidance for implementation, and oversight," Dempsey adds.

Consider the development of a data collection system originally known as Total Information Awareness (TIA) from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The system's name was eventually changed to Terrorist Information Awareness, keeping the acronym and purpose unchanged. All available information on a citizen is entered into a centralized database, allowing an agency to make queries on anything and, at the dick of a mouse, be provided with a list of anyone who matches the input criteria. Using TIA, a government agency could find all citizens who traveled to Saudi Arabia in the last two years and then cross-reference this list with all citizens enrolled at flight schools. It could also be used to construct a list of all those who attended peace rallies, bought BMWs, went to the library twice a week, and dated women of Japanese descent. The digital age's information highway, coupled with increased surveillance systems, makes all information--or as DARPA puts it, total information--available for unlimited snooping.

And it isn't just big government tentacles making use of today's fluid availability of information. Commercial database entities smelling profit are pitching themselves to law enforcement agencies--a few clicks on a wireless handheld device and an officer can access near limitless vistas of private information. And consider entities like LocatePLUS Holdings Corp., a Beverly, Massachusetts, company that proudly announces it maintains databases on 98 percent of the U.S. adult population. Certainly this can be a boon to police. Who, however, is monitoring how this data wellspring is tapped? What watchdog group keeps a wary eye on the compilers of secret lists--not to mention secret courts?

It's not as if there are no historical precedents for agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation conducting surveillance on ordinary civilians who--as in the Vietnam-era--wish merely to exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech, freedom of the press, and peaceable assembly.

That the terrorist threat necessitates an increase in the government's power to protect its citizens is entirely understandable. Unfortunately, bills like the Patriot Act have already been used in cases that have nothing to do with terrorism. Last year the Patriot Act was used against a strip club in Las Vegas, compelling Senator Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada) to quip, "The law was Intended for activities related to terrorism and not to naked women?

What Does This Mean for the Future?

In a not-too-distant year an ordinary American--whom we'll call Eric Blair--gets up each day to go to work. Cameras mounted on every traffic light monitor his route. Computers at his workplace door register his arrival and departure. Each time he visits a store, dines out, or attends a movie, cameras controlled by such programs as TIA watch and record him and every purchase he makes.

Blair isn't even a blip in America's surveillance system so long as he sticks to his expected route--sort of like Jim Carey's creepy predicament in the film The Truman Show. But one day Blair deviates from his schedule. He calls in sick to work but cameras show him tooling around the city in his car. Perhaps he goes to the library to check out a "politically questionable publication." Perhaps he drives to a girlfriend's house for some "illicit premarital intimacy." Maybe he just wants to find a private place where he can hike--a behavior that suggests "socially deviant tendencies."

This all sounds absurd but the point is that, when everyone can be tracked, anything is possible. The policies and philosophies of a given administration, no matter how seemingly preposterous, can be imposed when the infrastructure for universal surveillance exists. Even puritanical "blue laws" for which few people are arrested today could be enforced, as thermal imaging cameras directed at Blair's girlfriend's house are capable of piercing the walls and registering body temperatures suggestive of "illicit intimacy."

Blair's world may have had its roots in 2001 when a terrorist attack in the United States triggered off new homeland security policies. But the surveillance systems originally designed to "look for terrorist behavior" were expanded to "look for deviant behavior." Blair's world is one loosely based on a kind of feudal system of monitoring whereby towns watch their own citizens, states watch their towns, regions watch their states, and regional stations get their directives from the top of this pyramid.

"Such technology must be used only if effective," writes Dempsey in his address to the House committees. "It must be subject to checks and balances; it must be implemented with a focus on actual suspects, guided by the particularized suspicion principle of the Fourth Amendment; and it must be subject to executive, legislative, and judicial controls. At this time, these checks and balances do not exist."

The Eyes of Echelon

For years conspiracy buffs have reported the existence of a shadowy government entity known as Echelon, supposedly led by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) in conjunction with its counterpart agencies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Echelon reportedly attempts to capture all global communication to and from the United States. This information is then screened by filtering software, or "sniffers," for words and phrases suggestive of subversive content. Since e-mail passes through a limited number of hubs, they're not difficult to screen as they shuttle through.

The possible existence of Echelon has led a worldwide community of computer users to celebrate "Jam Echelon Day". Every October 21 for the past six years people have attempted to jam Echelon's alleged spying eyes by sending out a mass flood of messages containing "red flag" words. And although there are conspiracy buffs convinced that aliens in black helicopters are making crop circles, Echelon really isn't that farfetched; the technology is available today. In fact, some of the very hackers who criticize NSA surveillance have themselves hacked into national hubs and installed their own sniffer programs. Once all this information is compiled in one database, Big Brother could be anyone from a federal agency to the teenager next door. Identity theft will explode into a thriving black market industry.

"A despot always has his good moments" wrote Voltaire in addressing the issue of tyranny. "But an assembly of despots? Never. If a tyrant does me an injustice, I can disarm him through his mistress, his confessor, or his page ... but a company of tyrants is inaccessible to all seductions." In a world of invisible and warrantless searches, omnipresent cameras, and tracking devices, American life may well be thrust under the microscope of a legion of would-be tyrants as inaccessible to "seductions" as they are to public accountability.

Despots throughout history have sought overriding control of their flock and have often achieved these ends even with primitive technology at their disposal. From the ancient courts of Chinas first empire to twentieth century Nazi and communist regimes, the construction of a police state was made possible by rampant use of spies and informants. But even then, the independent spirit managed to secure occasional moments of privacy, whether in the security of their bedroom reading forbidden literature or in creating secret meeting places where revolutionaries (like Jefferson) plotted to win their freedom back.

Modern technology threatens to abolish privacy entirely, often in the name of "protection from enemies." After all, fear of Irish Republican Army-sponsored terrorism compelled Britain to adopt widespread surveillance in London--just as Washington, D.C., scrambled to install a multitude of cameras despite questions over the effectiveness of these measures and the implications to the freedom of law-abiding citizens. It was the infringement on liberty, in fact, that compelled Jefferson to proclaim that, whenever a form of government becomes destructive to liberty it is the "right of the people to alter or abolish it"

Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley recently determined that the total stockpile of global information doubled between 2000 and 2002. Comprehending the full implications of this estimate is daunting, and foreseeing the future trend of technology may be as difficult today as it was for Jefferson. Certainly the young twenty-first century will become the most gadget-obsessed, electronically addicted era in history, and there's little doubt that most of these technologies will be fun. We've come a long way from the hunter-gatherer groups which learned to tame fire. Technology has been the reason why because it often makes life more convenient. It turns ordinary human beings into wizards who can harness information from the air the way a medieval alchemist was supposed to be able to turn lead into gold. The Homo sapiens species is largely connected through an elaborate webwork of communication; even a person hiking in the Congo can patch into the global network via sat-com phones or global positioning systems. The great diaspora in which humanity was scattered throughout the globe is being stitched into one collective mosaic.

Does this mean that privacy must vanish as we all cram close together? It's an absolutist's argument to ask: "Is technology good or evil?" Obviously the truth lies not in the science itself but in the applications of that science. Utilizing surveillance cameras in a bank to catch a robber might be termed an acceptable use of electronic eyes while having cameras viewing every neighborhood seems threatening.

In the fourth century BCE Plato wrote, "Seeing that everything which has a beginning also has an end, even a constitution such as yours will not last forever, but will in time be dissolved." The chilling prophecy of these words seems especially relevant today as we confront not only legal infringements on constitutionally guaranteed rights but technologies that may do away with these rights altogether. The only solution that suggests itself is to monitor the would-be monitors. If the United States is to remain the bastion of liberty, personal freedom cannot be subject to some giant counting system as every move and thought are monitored. The same cozy web we've created could transform itself into a prison with one large, all-seeing spider at the center.

In such a society a future Jefferson might just be inspired to draft a future declaration. After all, there'll be a lot more at stake than highly taxed tea.

Brian Trent is a professional journalist, essayist, and novelist who lives in Waterbury, Connecticut.