Here’s a great little piece on the social implications of TIPS and other surveillance projects based on a personal story of life in Prague…
The Societal Costs of Surveillance
New York Times; New York, N.Y.; Jul 26, 2002; Michele Kayal;
Copyright New York Times Company Jul 26, 2002
[Author note]
Michele Kayal, who lived in Prague from 1991 to 1995, is a former news editor of The Prague Post.
Helena Blazkova had come to kick me out.
It was 1992, and I had been renting her apartment in Prague for about a year. I had gone to the former Eastern Bloc shortly after graduate school on a United States government fellowship, and I felt it my duty to show by example how the free world worked. I thought I had been a model tenant. I kept the place neat, I paid my rent faithfully, I even made sure to put out fresh flowers when I knew she was coming over.
But that was the problem: I didn’t always know she was coming over. She used to come in when I wasn’t home, on tips from the neighbors.
When Helena — my age and, I thought, my friend — came that night to tell me to leave, she laid down a litany of charges: You shower too often. You talk on the phone late at night. You leave your pajamas out and the bed unmade. You’ve had men here. You have a cat.
Oddly, that was the charge that stunned me most. I had minded a friend’s cat for a weekend once. How could she possibly know all this, I wondered. The neighbors had told her, I learned. They had called her to say I had a cat.
It had never occurred to me the elderly lady next door was spying. Nor did I think anything of the woman who seemed always to be on the landing when I came and went, which must seem incredibly naive. After all, everyone knew the Communists snitched on one another, right? But I never thought they’d spy on me. There was nothing interesting about my life. I had nothing to hide and I wasn’t doing anything wrong. But I was different: single, a woman, a foreigner. And that was enough to get me watched.
So the recent brainstorm by the Justice Department to enlist couriers, meter readers, cable installers and telephone repairmen to snoop on people’s private lives for anything “suspicious” dredged a cold and until now forgotten feeling from the pit of my stomach. Many have objected that such a program would violate civil liberties and basic American principles. But stoking people’s fear to set neighbor upon neighbor, service worker upon client, those who belong against those who don’t, does something more: it erodes the soul of the watcher and the watched, replacing healthy national pride with mute suspicion, breeding insular individuals more concerned with self-preservation than with society at large. Ultimately it creates a climate that is inherently antithetical to security.
In my new apartment I kept to myself. This still didn’t stop the neighbors from leaving me nasty, anonymous notes about how much heat I used, or why I showered every day. I, the watched, became like the watchers: scared, angry, on guard, protective of my mundane personal business, eager to shield myself from false accusations and willing to shirk civic interaction to do it.
I suddenly understood the commuters on the Prague metro who covered the books they read with plain brown paper — not to protect the expensive books, I was told, but to hide what they were reading from others. They had taken their minds and their thoughts underground.
How could such a culture possibly create a more secure society?
I left Prague understanding for the first time what it really meant to be an American, what the core of the privilege was: that the liberty and respect for individuals that I took for granted was something other nations had to work hard to achieve.
The spy encounters were crushing in a country and among a people I came to love deeply. Still, even in Prague in 1991, I knew the police would not show up at my house on a tip that I took too many showers or talked on the phone too late at night.
But today in America, I wonder what can get a person into trouble. What if the exterminator, whose monthly visits keep my house pest free, suddenly registers my last name as unusual? I’m a transplant to Hawaii and not a member of its common ethnic groups. What if the person who fixed my window screens tells someone about the Islamic-style plaque in my kitchen, the one with the 99 names of God written in Arabic script, a beautiful reminder of a short tourist trip to Pakistan before all this started? What if the man who delivered some furniture the other day reports the phone call he heard me take from my father, the one in which I commiserated with him about the stock market and said nasty things about people in power? What will happen when the snooping begins?
Perhaps we should ask the Czechs.
