http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/commo...5E12272,00.html
July 19, 2005
HAMLET is in the middle of texting his soliloquy to Ophelia (2B or not 2B?) when his father's ghost appears on the parapet. With a deft movement of his Nokia, he manages to photograph the apparition, immediately forwarding the image to his mother, the adulterous queen.
Meanwhile, in Verona, Juliet is murmuring into her mobile, telling Romeo she'll only pretend to be dead, thus ruining Shakespeare's plot. Thereby establishing a sad precedent: a majority of literary, dramatic and operatic plots being rendered redundant by mobile phone technology. "Run for your life Red Riding Hood, that's not really grandma!"
Some Los Angeles Police Department thugs are about to put the boot into a prone African-American when they remember they're a Monty to be spotted by someone collecting footage for Funniest Police Brutality Home Videos on cable television. Smile! You're on candid camera pretty much all the time and everywhere; in your taxi, the Sydney Harbour tunnel, at the ATM.
Technology changes everything. The censorship of porn or anything else ended with the internet. Pandora's box is not just open, it's kindling. And George Orwell's all-seeing eye for Big Brother is equally available to the pollies, the police and the pervert.
Thanks to sat-nav, you can find your way to Brunswick or Brisbane, but the same satellites can find you. Check Google's new eye in the sky: the on-demand maps that can show the world or the tiles on your roof. Welcome to tomorrow. Soon you'll be subjected to facial recognition technology when you try to enter a country or board a plane.
Your DNA will lead to your arrest more surely than your fingerprints. Your state of health? An open book to insurers and potential employers. Every credit card purchase identifies your location while feeding into a database that knows your interests and predicts your appetites. Your taste in books, movies and pornography is digitised. You are watched, overheard, licensed, tabulated and cross-referenced. Your identity, address and attitudes bought and sold by marketers. The big secret is that you have no secrets.
In this context the Prime Minister has had a change of heart about the identity card. Twenty years ago, John Howard opposed it. Then it smacked of socialism, of the granny and police states. Now, with the spectre of Osama bin Laden providing a blank cheque to the sort of big government Australian conservatives and US Republicans claimed to abhor, we'll be lucky to escape having bar codes tattooed on our foreheads.
Like many other civil rights abandoned since 9/11, we've given up the right to privacy. But we'd already sold our souls for a mess of pottage with the credit card. Add the mobile phone and our whereabouts are tracked as if we are wearing electronic ankle-bracelets. We're like ear-tagged, micro-chipped cattle or US parolees. We beep with every footstep.
Yet we're expected to believe that the ID system would be a weapon against terrorism. In a world where bright kids can hack into any mainframe, how long before the code of the card is cracked and counterfeited? No matter how clever the technology, smart people will outsmart smart cards. No matter how high the surveillance level, security services will stuff up.
September 11 is just one of a host of examples of gross intelligence failure. Home-grown attacks in the US prove -- and the Oklahoma bombing reminds us that Muslim extremists don't hold the copyright on terror -- that the FBI and CIA and all their technologies count for very little. Consider the billions spent on the surveillance of Iraq. That came up with weapons of mass destruction that weren't there and links between Baghdad and bin Laden that didn't exist: the mistakes used to justify a war.
On balance, I'm opposed to Howard's revival of the so-called Australia Card. I'm suspicious of his Government's motives and I've profound doubts about the competence of his Government's intelligence agencies. Or indeed, any of its agencies.
The stuff-ups and brutalities of the Department of Immigration and Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs, largely on the watch of Phil Ruddock (now our Attorney bloody General) should give us pause. As should the Howard Government's shameful acquiescence to George W. Bush's prison camps and military tribunals, and the rough justice they've offered Australian citizens.
2B or not 2B? If that's the question, many of us don't trust Howard or what he'd do with the data his bureaucrats would collect. In any case, we've sold too much of our privacy already. Now we must be very careful, lest we're lulled into a false sense of insecurity.