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In some ways, at my age, I simply can't imagine (or perhaps I mean believe) the world that we now inhabit. Or rather I can't believe that, once upon a time, as a kid, I could leave my house to go meet my best friend and we could essentially disappear. My parents would have no idea where we were and no way of finding us. Of course, back then, in the 1950s, a million years before the iPhone appeared, that was simply the way life was. It didn't seem strange to any of us, including my parents. And in the morning, when I planned to meet my friend on the Madison Avenue bus as we both headed for school, I had to wait at the bus stop until I saw him waving out the window. There was no other way for me to know which bus to board.
Well, forget all of that. Now that just about every kid (more or less) has a cell phone, every parent (also with a cell phone) can know where she or he is at more or less any moment of the day (or night) or be in contact with her or him more or less anytime. After all, it's now estimated that 98% of all Americans own mobile phones, while most kids have their first mobile phone by the time they're 11 1/2 years old and almost every last one of them by age 15. Think of it as a kind of strange everyday miracle of surveillance -- or rather imagine that, in our world, all of us have become both the surveillers and the surveilled upon. And mind you, that's the harmless part of it all. For if every parent can know where every kid is, then just imagine, in our distinctly computerized, all-too-well-surveilled world, what "our" government and its various agencies can now know about us.
In fact, you don't even have to imagine it. Just check out TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon's latest piece if you want to know how eerily surveilled (if that's even the phrase for it anymore) we all now are in the age of Donald Trump. Tom
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Sometime in the late 1980s, I was talking with a friend on my landline (the only kind of telephone we had then). We were discussing logistics for an upcoming demonstration against the Reagan administration's support for the Contras fighting the elected government of Nicaragua. We agreed that, when our call was done, I'd call another friend, "Mary," to update her on the plans. I hung up.
But before I could make the call, my phone rang.
"Hi, this is Mary," my friend said.
"Mary! I was just about to call you."
"But you did call me," she said.
"No, I didn't. My phone just rang, and you were on the other end."
It was pretty creepy, but that was how surveillance worked in the days of wired telephone systems. Whoever was listening in, most likely someone from the local San Francisco Police Department, had inadvertently caused both lines to ring, while preparing to catch my coming conversation with Mary. Assuming they'd followed the law, arranging such surveillance would have involved a number of legal and technical steps, including securing a wiretapping warrant. They'd have had to create a physical connection between their phones and ours, most likely by plugging into the phone company's central office.
Government surveillance has come a long way since then, both technically and in terms of what's legally possible in Donald Trump's United States and under the John Roberts Supreme Court.
All the President's Tech
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