Total Information Awareness (TIA) and DNA Data Collection

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/health/dna-privacy-golden-state-killer-genealogy.html

This new use of DNA is being marketed to the public. It's part of the anti-privacy normalisation campaign. Led by swindlers like Mark Zuckerberg we're told that authenticity demands transparency. These are the values of the new generation.

Leaving the validity of such an ethos aside, the values of transparency don't seem to apply to CEO's or people holding powerful positions within government or the larger social bureaucracy. The mandarins and certainly the praetorians are exempt. The new transparency is meant for the plebeians and now this story about DNA sounds a warning.

The New York Times (along with the Bezos owned Washington Post) is the newspaper of record, the mouthpiece not of the Left, but of the Establishment. The linked article is the pretense of debate. There is a warning and yet there's also something of a trick. This story only hints at it. You can be assured this is only the beginning. Similar stories will be popping up over the next year or two.

The solution will be in the form of triangulation, acceptance of the new but with accompanying 'safeguards' to protect the public, in other words, a false compromise. And time after time the safeguards fail but this time the costs and consequences are of a different order.

Look, the state used this technology to catch a serial killer. Who could possibly be against that? Who would want to take away these tools from law enforcement, just for the sake of privacy? Certainly we would all be willing to forego our own selfish concerns about privacy in order to stop monsters like this.... right? Similar arguments have been recently made for the large-scale installment of urban cameras linked to the Cloud in places like Newark NJ. The public is encouraged to watch and of course call in anything suspicious. Schools in the suburbs of Buffalo, are deploying facial recognition software in their already pervasive video surveillance network. It's all in the name of stopping crime and protecting the children... right?

Apart from being a classic case of the false dilemma, history and experience tell us that once the precedent is established it will never remain static. That is the very nature of both society and law. They necessarily contain an inherent dynamism. The ball is always moving and yet once certain lines are crossed, new fields are opened and walls which once limited power and protected aspects of humanity are removed. Society itself is dashed and not easily rebuilt. Every war produces this effect as does every social crisis. At present we're marching toward both.

We already know that if it were up to law enforcement they'd swab us for DNA every time we got a traffic stop or a parking ticket. There are many within both law enforcement and the disease control community that would (if allowed) establish genetic and digital profiles on all of us and track everything we do.

We can be thankful that thus far such people have been stopped and limited in their capacities to attain such unlimited powers. Are these people quite literally evil? Do they wake up and think malicious thoughts? I'm certain they don't view themselves as sinister, evil and enemies of mankind. But they most certainly are. They are part of the tech-wave's greatest danger... dehumanisation. We have a significant number of megalomaniacal people, like the tech industry's celebrity pioneers and people within government that seek godlike powers. This coupled with the inherent dehumanising effects of modern technology is leading us into a very dangerous, indeed a rather dystopian place. It is even at the door.

This tendency by the people wielding power coupled with literally hyper-algorithmic leaps in technology should have everyone not just concerned but severely alarmed. As a Christian my actions are limited to speaking out and warning, and then suffering as a result. If I wasn't a Christian bound to the call of a pilgrim witness/martyr, my reaction would be quite different. If my hope rested in this world alone then you can be sure I'd fight for it and the ends would justify the means. Yet I cannot abandon my calling to become an activist and yet at the same time for practical temporal reasons, I would not be sorry to see a more robust active resistance (or even non-resistant opposition) to this trajectory.*

And yet the activist sector is largely inactive. Few if any are genuinely questioning the system as such. They want it to cater to them, they're not prepared to challenge it existentially.

Some people confuse the hippies with the 1960's Left. There are some overlaps but they're not exactly the same thing. The true hippies were involved in drugs and rock-and-roll spiritualism. They weren't all that engaged. Tuned out is more like it. The New Left of the 1960's eventually adopted some of the fashion sensibilities of the hippies... as did large segments of the nation... but they never really embraced the lifestyle. They flirted with the fads but they were people devoted to political change and in many cases, the wresting of power away from the longstanding Establishment. This was the base of the anti-war movement, not so much the 'hippies'.

There was for a time in this country a principled Left-wing opposition to the Establishment. Despite all the claims and rhetoric coming from the Right, that movement doesn't really exist anymore. Even figures like Bernie Sanders who are considered 'Far Left' are actually advocates of the Wall Street-Pentagon i.e. Imperial system. They may support largesse and patronage. They may support identity politics and call for reform. But they are not genuinely challenging the system. They're 'Leftism' is really more a form of Centrism. When someone like Bernie Sanders supports John Brennan and says he 'did a good job' then you know his Leftism is largely phony and he's solidly pro-Establishment. Even outlets like Democracy Now! and other 'Far Left' figures like the Canadian Naomi Klein are little more than Centre-Left in their orientation.

As Christians we cannot endorse their political programme but neither would Bible believing Christians wish to endorse the Right-wing and/or Establishment narratives regarding America's mythologised history, nationalism and war. Both sides are wrong. The Right will often possess a veneer of Christian values although they were (and are) so convoluted with equally anti-Christian values that I find it baffling that so many Christians remain confused and still buy into the Right's propaganda.

Likewise the 1960's era Left was often explicitly anti-Christian and yet for all that they often provided a helpful (and often moral) critique of the Establishment. While we would never fully embrace even their criticisms, the wickedness and hypocrisy of the Established order that was (and is) the US imperial system was exposed by them. And even though their critique is often flawed, it's still profitable to consider. The recent ACLU report on immigrant prison facilities comes to mind. A scathing report it exposes the absolute evil that is being covered-up by the mainstream media. The Democratic Party has done virtually nothing to oppose the Obama policy which has continued and been amplified under Trump. Sadly, many Christians celebrate the policy even while they remain ignorant of the sadistic evil taking place in the system. Sadly, while I'm sure every professing Christian would formally decry such horrific abuses, I'm afraid many would still largely support it. They're more likely to have compassion for their pets than for the children being tortured and raped in American facilities. Reckoned criminals, many of these migrants are really refugees of American imperialism and its multi-generational campaign to subjugate and exploit Latin America.

And yet whatever 'good' came out of the 1960's Left ended with the 1980's as the activists of the Boomer generation largely sold out and went mainstream. By the mid-to-late 1970's the movement had burned out and most of them moved on. They undoubtedly wanted to remain socially conscious and even while they retained some of the rhetoric they became entrenched in the corporate and academic worlds. Even several television shows in the 1980's picked up on this reality.

Culture went through a process of triangulation and the Establishment (it seemed) found a compromise with its own values and the vision of the radical and revolutionary impulse of the 1960's activists. For many of the 1960's youth, this triangulation or compromise seemed a good move. 

I'm not sure how many of them were conscious of this but their actions and later rhetoric indicate that many settled down and found a modus vivendi with 'the system', the very apparatus they once opposed. They felt that they had made some important gains and time and perhaps maturity had showed them that revolution was not the way.... but reform. Some still believe they 'changed the world' for the better. And yet the more honest observers will acknowledge that apart from a few 'gains', the Right largely won the battles of the 1960's. The world did change but in many ways it was the Leftists themselves who did the most changing. They won the sexual revolution to be sure but Wall Street reaped the profits from it, cashing in on the dismantling of the family. And in terms of existentially changing the American system, the Left utterly failed. Many seem content with the facade of a compassionate empire and others became energised by the new 'humanitarian' emphasis that came to the fore in the wake of the Cold War, even though it became little more than a pretense for a new series of wars.

In other words, they sold out.

And thus apart from a relatively small number, many today will not march against war or protest what is happening in society. For a brief moment in 2003, some thought the movement would revive but just as quickly it collapsed and has not returned. When Nixon illegally invaded Cambodia in 1970, they took to the streets and the college campuses erupted, leading to students being shot. Today, when the public learns that America is waging secret wars and has placed troops in Yemen, Syria and throughout Africa.... few care or are even paying attention.

The fascist and totalitarian trajectory of the state is not something that 'moves' the New (now old) Left anymore. Neither they nor their progeny are willing to sacrifice their safety, take risks and face the loss of respect and security in order to oppose the wicked system and its murderous policies. Truly they have become middle class, and fully embraced what was at the core of their parent's value system. Their parent's generation (the Greatest were told) quickly sloughed off the ideals of old agrarian America and its 'salt of the earth' values. It may seem counterintuitive but the WWII generation was progressive. They left the farm and weren't looking back and they embraced a new set of values while retaining a veneer of the old. It didn't work and their children challenged it. Some did this openly and politically but most ended up doing so over the course of their adulthood. Many never marched in a protest and yet ended up rejecting the values of their parents... and especially their grandparents. The Right has mythologised the values of the pre-1960's and yet clearly society has changed. I think some of the blame actually rests with the so-called 'Greatest' generation but undoubtedly their children broke ranks.

The 1960's Left made peace with the Establishment in the 1980's and today their expressions of 'dissent' appear in the form of identity politics, if that. They represent no serious challenge to Wall Street, the military-industrial-intelligence complex and certainly not the empire.

Martin Luther King for all his faults understood that identity politics was a dead end. Wall Street and the Pentagon were at the heart of America's rot and to fix one you had to fix all.

This lesson has been revitalised in recent years and more people are beginning to grasp it. The Establishment is not going to let a serious challenge develop. Even now the tools are being sold to the public that will ensure such a challenge will no longer be possible. All too often triangulation, a form of Hegelian dialectic is the method of choice, the means of moving the ball down the field.

Total Information Awareness (TIA) was the abandoned Orwellian project put forward by Deep State operatives during the George W. Bush administration. They weighed the public response and then quickly 'ended' the programme. And yet it didn't end. They simply fragmented it, changed names and went right ahead with it. It never died.

Now fifteen years later we're transitioning from War on Terror 2.0 to Cold War II. The Total Information Awareness (TIA) moniker will not be recycled and yet the project's aspirations and goals are once more being openly promoted and implemented. For the American public fifteen years is like a century. Memories fail and the times have changed. They're trying it again, but piecemeal this time.

Without delving into the details I will for the sake of this brief piece assert the goals of the Reagan era Deep State were basically fascistic and it's their vision that has lived on and even now has sunk deep roots in the American system. They don't control everything but their power is growing and there's no viable opposition at this time.

It's hard to imagine a situation in which this trajectory could be reversed. All possible scenarios point to some kind of catastrophic social collapse or war.

*Activism implies violence pure and simple. I realise many will take issue with such a statement, perhaps even umbrage but I guarantee that if they do, it's because the principle hasn't been properly thought out.

Activists are calling upon the power of the state, through legislation and the courts to effect change. Court dictates are enforced by men with badges and guns. Relying on the courts is to resort to a form of what is at first bureaucratic power but then translates into threat and ultimately violence.

Other activists seek confrontation and resort to 'propaganda of the deed' types of action. As a Christian I would be more favourable toward the famous 'Tank Man' of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and less so toward the folks who fought the Anti-globalist Battle of Seattle in 1999. While I share some of the views of the anti-globalist community I don't believe as a Christian I should be fighting a street battle with the police. Our only course is non-violent opposition but the number of Biblically minded Christians is so few that a social movement (even if desired) is not possible. We will always be a tiny minority. Our goals are not political but even if they were, we will never have the numbers to truly affect society. And of course we will always be opposed by the False Church which seeks to supplant Biblical claims and undermine any genuine expression of Christ's Kingdom.

While I have no wish for society to fall into chaos I nevertheless believe opposition to the state is sometimes healthy even if motivated by less than holy reasons. On a human level I understand such actions and were I not a Christian I would certainly join them and probably go much further and yet those doors are closed to us.

Politics is about power and always carries within it the implicit threat of violence. It's about force and coercion. This is true of those who wield it and wish to hold it as well as those who seek to bring about great change. The reformist mentality is probably the most mild and sober expression of political change and yet at this point does anyone really believe 'reform' is possible in the Western system?