Czar GWB, NSA, and Hollywood

While I have stayed away from making comments about the new American Czar GWB's latest moves into the new imperium cum 1984, a chance bit of TV reinforced the seriousness of his maneuvers. It is easy to get lost in the legal babble and the point-counter point of our political culture. It is easy to loose track of what this is really all about - a comprehensive government oversight of every aspect of our lives. Ten years ago, we actually wrote letters and spoke to people face-to-face. Today, for many Americans, the web is the environment in which all communications moves. Now even the telephone is being Skyped away to the land of internet protocols.

So, back to this chance bit of TV:

Sunday night we watched "Enemy of the State", a 1998 thriller starring Will Smith, Gene Hackman and Jon Voight. This pre-9/11 movie stars the NSA with all of its surveillance tools fully deployed to track down and kill Will Smith. Though this is a very enjoyable thriller, the most frightening part of watching the movie is knowing that Czar GWB could actually literally be looking and listening just as the NSA devil-incarnate Thomas Reynolds (Jon Voight) does.

Now if you are still not persuaded that the government can really track us with its spy machinery take a look a this photo of my house in Cambridge:


Those little white forms on the deck are vinyl chairs and tables, just to add some scale.

Or, here is a tennis game at Hoyt Field a few hundred yards from my house:



If we can access these images through Google from publicly available sources, it is very easy to imagine that the NSA can see faces from space and certainly listen in on any and all conversations and emails. This Czar GWB stuff is serious.

For those who enjoy coincidences, during the movie, it is revealed that the chief bad guy, Thomas Reynolds (played by Jon Voight), was born on "9/11/1941".