
American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression - kushti
http://www.cato.org/american-big-brother
======
cubano
Mencken once said that many Americans, due to their Puritan roots, live in
"The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

This surveillance and its informants, such as are discussed in this article,
seem to me to be the embodiment of this fear.

Many people, for whatever reasons I will never be able to fathom, seem to get
some sort of thrill on snitching on the activities of others whom I guess they
feel are enjoying themselves too much.

Maybe its envy...maybe its some authoritarian streak... I don't know, but it
sure exists and many of my old friends have been bitten by its ugly bite.

~~~
the_crispr
The business about the puritans is a cute intellectual toy based on trivia and
truly ancient history.

There is no relationship between a centuries-old minority subculture, and the
bestial, militarized nuclear power that projects power into orbit, throughout
the skies and across oceans today.

There's enough porn on the internet (mostly originating from the United State)
to prove that with an accidental twiddle of your fingers into any search
engine.

~~~
InclinedPlane
You misunderstand puritanism, it has many tentacles that have stretched to
many corners of american culture. It still has a strong presence in our
standards of media "decency" where abominable violence is fine but naked
bodies, eroticism, or rough language is clamped down on to an extreme degree.
It also has lots of little weird echoes and side-effects. Consider, for
example, the way that overly happy, "bubblegum" pop music is denigrated,
especially by those who think that valuing "sophisticated" and "mature" music
(whether it's classical, prog rock, speed metal, or what-have-you) is
important. Or look at the legal prohibitions against drug use and sex work. Or
look at the modern trend, especially online, of ironic detachment.

There's very much an undercurrent of looking at pure, unfiltered exuberance,
enthusiasm, and enjoyment through a skeptical, dour, or peevish lens. The fact
that people enjoy looking at porn in private doesn't change that.

~~~
irixusr
I would argue that watching porn -in secret- is a symptom of Puritanism.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Well, pretending you don't, and especially being critical of others when their
private habits are revealed, sure.

------
yuhong
I think part of the problem in the US is the culture where eg police
departments compete for resources basically to make their own department
bigger. One of the ideas in the Ron Paul movement was that governments needs
to be smaller. Of course, in the real world it probably should not go as far
as Ron Paul suggests, but....

~~~
coldtea
The main cultural problem in the US is the acceptance, but the white majority
at least, that police behaving like they do is part of the job and acceptable.

I refer to the fact that you can be tased, shot, beat, arrested, held down by
4 policemen, beaten etc 10 times more easily than you can in Western Europe --
and people think that's OK, or what "the police is supposed to do".

Even the fact that getting out of your car when stopped by a traffic cop
(something totally OK in 99% of the world) means you can be shot in the US...

~~~
yuhong
That is not good either, but I was thinking of for example the drug war.

~~~
Zigurd
A lot of police militarization, at least before 9/11, was driven by Drug War
mythology. Now there's a badder bogie man.

------
unclebucknasty
Whenever I pause to think about surveillance and other activity of the sort
that is aimed at stifling peaceful, ideological movements and groups it gives
me a chill.

At those points it becomes clear that the predomimant interests that we are
serving are not those of "the people", as it is the people who are being
targeted. This leads to the obvious question "whose interests are we serving
and at what cost?"

~~~
themartorana
"...peaceful, ideological movements and groups..."

Just in case, I suppose.

I guess those that have power are also quite sensitive to losing it. But yeah,
Burning Man?

------
nickbauman
There's a lot of truth to the information in the posting, but remember this is
from the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, which has ties to Koch
industries. They often like to use examples of bad government for
justification to roll back government programs that help the average citizen
in favor of corporate rule, not just the bad ones that hurt everyone.

~~~
adventured
You mean the Koch brothers, the same ones in favor of: ending police
militarization, ending mass-incarceration, ending our military adventurism,
and are in favor of gay marriage? Sounds pretty great to me.

~~~
mtbcoder
I'm not sure how that addresses OP's comment, others at the opposite end of
the political spectrum also share these views.

------
dbpokorny
Sexual surveillance and repression goes back to the dawn of civilization and
the origin of language. Everybody wants to know who is having sex with who.
This is, I fear, the ultimate question of Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide
trilogy. It is difficult for a human being to resist the temptation to ask who
is having sex with who, especially after spending decades building a system
that is designed to answer exactly that question (a.k.a "artificial
intelligence" or perhaps "artificial gossip" would be a better term).

> Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the
> Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming
> does for other primates — it allows individuals to service their
> relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle:
> if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Dunbar argues that as humans
> began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually
> grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to
> be unaffordable.[51] In response to this problem, humans developed 'a cheap
> and ultra-efficient form of grooming' — vocal grooming. To keep your allies
> happy, you now needed only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds,
> servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for
> other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language —
> initially in the form of 'gossip.'[51] Dunbar’s hypothesis seems to be
> supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to
> the function of narration in general.[52]

> Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of 'vocal
> grooming' — the fact that words are so cheap — would have undermined its
> capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and
> costly manual grooming.[53] A further criticism is that the theory does
> nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming — the
> production of pleasing but meaningless sounds — to the cognitive
> complexities of syntactical speech.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_and_grooming_hypothesis)

~~~
mattlutze
_A: 42_

 _Q: How many people that have been a part of my life are having sex at this
moment?_

A bit disappointing if so, but it would at least satisfy those mice's desire
for a salacious topic to tour the galaxy's talk show circuit.

To the second part, it doesn't seem like that theory of vocal grooming would
need to be the genesis of syntactic speech.

Complex verbal communication could have come about for completely other
reasons, and, as we standardized around words and sentences and the like,
vocal grooming likewise could have grown from simple noises to these similar
more-complex mechanisms.

------
tedks
Trust a Cato article/infographic/whatever to totally ignore the red scare and
rightist motivation for virtually all political surveillance and repression.

~~~
magicGLASSman
This is a false dichotomy, you can be right or left leaning and also be
libertarian or authoritarian[0].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_compass)

~~~
zahmahkibo
1\. The political compass is oversimplified and not taken seriously by
political scientists 2\. This has nothing to do with his argument. In the US,
surveillance is largely the product of moral panics, primarily 1. The red
scare 2. The race scare 3. The drug scare, which itself is really just a
synthesis of 1 and 2; the drug war was essentially invented to attack black
and Latino communities as well as anti government "subversives." Maybe that's
not true in EVERY state that has used mass surveillance, but it is true in the
specific case of the US.

