Crossroads:
Richard Thieme on a world of secrecy.
One question raised by the way we in the upper Midwest, snug in our insular cocoon, respond to news these days is, does it matter to Is it “local?” And what does “local” mean? The Journal Sentinel recently moved “local” news to the front of the first section and national and international news to the back in its print edition, in part because readers are more interested in local news and in part because news that streams on the Internet is already old by the next morning.
All news is local in a universe in which everything is connected to everything else.
me? Physicists have been telling us that for a long time, but current events make it clear in a palpable way.
Some time ago, I spent a weekend in Washington D.C., at an Intelligence Ethics Conference sponsored by the International Intelligence Ethics Association. The presentations focused on the pressing issues showing up in the trenches of intelligence work after 9/11.
A young cadet at the conference said, “I dread the day when I have to make a decision where lives are at stake but I don’t have all the information I need.”
Intelligence professionals make those decisions all the time. They do it mired in mud and murk, not in a well-lighted conference room where things seem clearer than they are. The air of the Earth, these days, is the fog of war.
I was an organizer of the conference and arranged for authors on ethics and intelligence to host discussions. One of the most impressive was Philip Seib, who taught journalism at Marquette University. He spoke about secrecy and leaks with thoughtfulness, insight and balance.
We agreed not to quote anyone from the conference. Everything we said was “not for attribution.” But I can say that discussions raised chilling questions about torture, Richard Thieme (thiemeworks.com) is a Milwaukee-based author and professional speaker. He has spoken for the National Security Agency, the Secret Service, and the FBI as well as speaking in 2014 for Def Con for the 19th time.
surveillance and secrecy, and constitutional guarantees that all administrations — Bush, Obama, pick one — now sidestep.
And this was one of the most chilling statements of all:
“Everything has been put into place for a police state.”
I have to honor our commitments and not reveal the speaker. But I will say that he knew whereof he spoke. He knows what has happened since 9/11 and the “gloves came off.” He knows what we have done. He knows how, one by one, technologies of surveillance and intrusion that extend inside and outside our borders are being used. He knows that all news is local and global, all the time. He knows that distinctions of “foreign” and “domestic” have vanished.
And knowing all that, he made that statement quietly, saying the words anxiously, with deep understanding of what they meant. This was no knee-jerk reaction from left or right; it was an observation based on incontrovertible facts. And this was well before Edward Snowden leaked the details of the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program.
Yet when I mentioned this to a person at the gym where we were both running on treadmills, noisily going nowhere, she said, “Boy, aren’t you glad we live up here where nothing like that is likely to happen?”
Is that a “local view?” Or the fear-based statement of someone who lives in denial because the alternative is unacceptable. “I don’t want to know that!” is a frequent response to my speeches on security and intelligence. But whether we want to know it or not, it’s not that it’s likely to happen — it’s that it has already happened. That’s what matters, that everything has been put into place — now, already, everywhere.
Let’s face it, our culture uses denial as a defense against reality, because knowing makes us feel helpless and afraid, because the reality of what has been done and cannot easily be undone makes for cognitive dissonance that stokes our anxieties.
So what do we talk about instead? Will Brett be on the field or in the atrium? Who’s at Summerfest this year? How much will the new arena cost?
Let me repeat what that knowledgeable person said: “Everything has been put into place for a police state.” Here, there, everywhere. He wasn’t kidding. That’s what I wanted to shout above the noise of the gym. The issue is local and global — the far-reaching apparatus of secrecy and surveillance, procedures already in place, how modern technologies work, what “metadata” really means, how someone like J. Edgar Hoover who broke the law routinely, infiltrating groups, conducting illegal wiretaps, blackmailing politicians, undermining freedom of speech, ignoring constitutional guarantees . . . what someone like Hoover would do with all this loud dark machinery that governs us . . . that’s an important issue that matters here and now.
Living inside illusions of security does not make us safe. Living “up here” does not put us out of reach of what we have done to ourselves. The machinery of a police state, the practices that enable it, the ability to exploit fear to justify its actions, the potential of terror by state as well as nonstate actors . . . these are local issues.
We share the fate of the world and are in it and on it and of it. Now that Snowden, for better or worse, has alerted the world to what some of us knew years ago, not much has changed. We try to get our hands around a meaningful response and it melts and drips through our fingers. “We need this for security” is a trump card no one can beat.
I asked a professional who deals with all this if she thought we would ever get back the control we had of our private lives.
“Oh Richard,” she said, as if I should know the answer to that question, “of course not. The technologies are embedded in every system. We’ll never get them out.”
I don’t want to know that, either. But I do know it, and I know that I know it, and learning to live in this kind of world requires knowing what’s real before we can meaningfully act. Reality, as Philip K. Dick said, is that which, when we refuse to believe in it, does not go away.
Even here. And especially now.