It's time for another Church Committee.
And probably the break-up of the CIA and FBI. The agencies have become little more than extortion rackets, gathering their bits and bytes of information not for the greater good of the country but to exert pressure and control on the people who pay their salaries and on the people's elected representatives.
Extortion, blackmail and coercion are what they do.They knew all about the Biden family corruption and used that information, not to warn the country but to feather their own nests and expand their power base. And that's just one example among dozens. It's a nasty business. As Senate [then]-Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Washington insider since 1980, said in January 2017:
“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”
From The MIT Press Reader,
"We must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
In the 1960s, Congress turned the tables and began to address the threat that the state and its use of computerized technologies posed to the privacy of its citizens. Much of this was in response to President Johnson’s proposal for a “National Data Center” in 1965 to consolidate federal databases as part of the Great Society project. Congress became alarmed and held numerous hearings in the House and Senate between 1966 and 1967 to discuss the many potential invasions of privacy represented by government control of individual data. The idea of a state repository of citizen data created quite an uproar, as explored in the text that follows, and the “National Data Center” did not come to pass.
A decade later, in 1975, the Church Committee, chaired by Senator Frank Church, convened to investigate widespread intelligence abuses by federal agencies, including the CIA, FBI, NSA, and IRS. Prompted by whistleblower Christopher Pyle’s exposé of the Army’s domestic surveillance, the committee revealed extensive government spying on American citizens, often based on political beliefs with no link to violence or foreign threats. In a chilling interview on Meet the Press that summer, Church amplified his warnings, pointing to “a future in which technological advances could be turned around on the American people and used to facilitate a system of government surveillance.” If the U.S. continued down this path, he cautioned, “No American would have any privacy left,” emphasizing that “we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”
Cultural fears about the state’s ability to track its citizens have circulated at least since the 1930s when the New Deal ushered in Social Security and a panic ensued over being assigned an identification number that would follow one all the way to the grave. These fears continued through the 1950s with the Red Scare, loyalty oaths, and the anti-Communist crusades of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. However, Congress did not devote much attention to the privacy of individual citizens until the 1960s, when concerns reached new heights, thanks in part to technological advances.
Portable recording technologies and computing began to sound alarms, as their capabilities elicited new threats to privacy rights. Such worries were amplified by the Supreme Court, as Chief Justice Earl Warren stated in a 1963 opinion regarding recording devices and entrapment: “The fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual.” In addition, a wave of writing by scholars and journalists at this time, focused on technology, privacy, and personal autonomy, helped inform public debate. In many ways this work anticipated current anxieties about the price of life under Big Tech.
Vance Packard’s “The Naked Society” (1964), Alan F. Westin’s “Privacy and Freedom” (1967), and Arthur Miller’s “The Assault on Privacy” (1971) were among the most influential in this genre. Miller understood then that the time would soon come when “our primary source of knowledge will be electronic information nodes or communications centers located in our homes, schools, and offices that are connected to international, national, regional, and local computer-based data networks.” Westin evoked many present-day issues in his wide-ranging, foundational book, paying great attention to “data surveillance” and how new technologies were affecting norms of privacy in order to recuperate this “cornerstone of the American system of liberty.” He viewed privacy and freedom as inextricably linked, defining privacy as “the claim of individuals … to determine for themselves when, how, and to what extent information about them is communicated to others.” “Privacy and Freedom” is still useful today for thinking about the malleable parameters of privacy, and its power in defining an individual’s relationship to the state.
This was the context in which President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed a federally controlled data center called the National Data Bank in 1965 as part of the Great Society project. The data center was imagined as a tool for efficiency and organization that would consolidate federal databases at the dawn of computerized record-keeping. However, concerns about technology and privacy were becoming widespread enough that a congressional Special Subcommittee on the Invasion of Privacy was established in the House of Representatives. Four separate hearings were held in the House and Senate between 1966 and 1967 to discuss the threats to privacy posed by the computer and the government control of data. They were dominated by overwhelming expressions of concern about the sanctity of individual privacy and civil liberties. The government’s power combined with the yet-unknown capabilities of digital technology were positioned as the main potential threat. The determination that the public needed to be protected from the centralized state collection of data above all else, without sufficient attention to the dangers lurking elsewhere, was a defining moment for cloud policy that has only grown more consequential over the decades that followed.
The chair of the Subcommittee on the Invasion of Privacy running the House hearings, Representative Cornelius “Neil” Gallagher (D-NJ), introduced the investigation of the National Data Center in July 1966 by saying, “The possible future storage and regrouping of such personal information … strikes at the core of our Judeo-Christian concept of ‘forgive and forget,’ because the computer neither forgives nor forgets.” Representative Frank Horton (R-NY) warned that “the magnitude of the problem we now confront is akin to the changes wrought in our national life with the dawning of the nuclear age.… It is not enough to say ‘It can’t happen here’; our grandfathers said that about television.” One of the original network architects of the Internet, Paul Baran, alluded to threats posed by the future cloud in his expert-witness testimony, noting that “a multiplicity of large, remote-access computer systems, if interconnected, can pose the danger of loss of the individual’s right to privacy — as we know it today.” Author Vance Packard called attention to the “suffocating sense of surveillance” engendered by a centralized government database, noting the “hazard of permitting so much power to rest in the hands of the people in a position to push computer buttons, … [because] we all to some extent fall under the control of the machine’s managers.”....
....MUCH MORE
"What If Stalin Had Computers?"
