Control By Stealth: Governmental and Corporate Snooping

IMPORTANT FACTS

OUR CITIZENS

MUST KNOW ABOUT

GOVERNMENT SURVEILLANCE

IN OUR POSTMODERN SOCIETY


There is an inverse relationship between governmental surveillance of the citizens and personal privacy and freedom. As surveillance increases, freedom and privacy inevitably decline! Yes, total security demands total surveillance! Would all our private moments -- eating a slice of breaad, drinking a cup of black coffee, reading a book, writing an essay, making sweet or passionate love to a woman, sleeping on a bed, listening to a favourite song, watching a good movie, taking a shower, SHITTING, URINATING and thinking about a current event -- be sacrificed? Who, among us citizens, would agree to such sacrifices?

Even without being a totally repressive regime (like the autocratic and authoritarian Singapore Government), the individual liberties of the citizens can be significantly compromised! Certain vested interests will use concerns over security and efficiency to advance an unacceptable level of surveillance across the whole of our society! There is an obvious trade-off between security/efficiency and the privacy/autonomy of the individual. Powerful groups in our society will always advocate security/efficiency; and defenders of personal privacy must always remain at a financial and logistical disadvantage.

We face the danger, in the 21st century, of the gradual establishment of totalitarian forms of government within democratic nations -- with the use of modern surveillance technologies (to which we, as citizens, are all subjected) by the governments of the world. Disturbing questions abound: What are the possible outcomes of the implementation of such surveillance technologies? How much surveillance is too much? When is the cure worse than the disease? How much risk and inconvenience are we prepared to accept in order to preserve our liberties and our privacy?

We must, as citizens, confront these problems openly! Everyone in our society should! We should not lose the freedoms we now so cherish! If we don't stop surveillance-creep, we will get the surveillance, and the society, we deserve! Creeping government repression -- through the use of surveillance technologies -- will lead ultimately to the establishment of a controlled society. Some argue that such a possibility is non-existent. Are they prepared to betray, recklessly, all of our society's freedom? But for what?

In the same vein, Big Business has also owned and heavily influenced, via advertising and other pathways, a supine and acquiescient mass media. It inadequately covers, and often ignores, the reporting of abuses and of the erosions of our legal freedoms and rights by the surveillance authorities during the past several decades.

I'm not interested in a sham compromise between the surveillance government and its victims or targets. I'll challenge repressive legislations which creep, stage by stage, over my liberties! (Compromises? Making minor cosmetic changes? Ostentatiously shelving part of the political programme -- but intending to introduce it in stages, by stealth, later?)

I won't be neutralized in any way! On such a basic topic as my freedom, I will not hold "balanced", "fitting", "harmonious" and "effective" views -- just to compromise with the politically-motivatesd surveillance authorities. I will, in fact, deliberately and unapologetically hold "extreme" views -- to challenge and oppose the government! I don't care about the government's "concessions": I'm not duty-bound nor obligation-tied nor responsibility-conscious enough to reciprocate positively or productively to such "friendly" or "benign" overtures!

The surveillance authorities cannot be trusted, for their motive is not only to hang on to power but also to increase such power -- as its perpetuation will enable them to exert absolute and total control, eventually, over our society and to assert their unchallengeable superiority and dominance over all who come under their rule.

But, of course, they can't defend themselves against me -- against my public and open exposure, revelations and criticisms of their surveillance methods, techniques, measures, activities. actions, attitudes, plans and technologies. They couldn't in the past -- and they still can't now (and they never can in the future) defend themselves by relying on reasoned arguments and rational explanations. There will be too many inconsistencies, illogicalities, contradictions and ambiguities in their arguments and explanations. They will thus, as expected by me, knowing them all too well from my knowledge and reading of evidences based on past events -- as proffered in records (both official and unofficial) of our short history, continue to promote a climate of fear in Singapore and to instill more loathing of the government among our citizens (by manufacturing and concocting bizarre scenarios, interpretations, narratives and documentary "records" -- involving, possibly, the invoking of conspiratorial theories and the spinning of spy stories ) in order to give and maintain a "democratic" veneer for their totalitarian practices and rulership.

This is the reality of the current situation in our political and corporate system.