At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science this weekend I had a serendipitous meeting with an expert on geographic information systems. I came away with more information that confirmed my growing conviction that Bush, the magician, is distracting us with the shiny object called FISA while even more ominous violations of civil rights are just off the horizon.
Most terrifying, they seem destined to disproportionately enslave those who can least fight them--women, the young, and the poor.
Our conversation began with a recent experience we'd had with driving navigation systems. It's now possible to entrust your total safety to a satellite. But do you trust the satellite?
I mentioned a new phenomenon that was getting little press attention--"geo bullying." Boyfriends were forcing girls to keep their gps-enabled phones on all the time (despite school rules) to track where they are. While this seemed, at first, a natural extension of those "always on" earring phones, it really goes much farther. The idea that a person must be tracked all the time is the newest form of slavery.
A quick read indicates that this kind of electronic servitude is happening all over the world.
School officials in Sutter, California, order students to hang RFID tags around their necks; parents object and the principal backs down.Already, school children in Osaka, Japan, are required to wear similar tags tucked in their belongings.The government of Mexico tracks court officials with radio frequency identification (RFID) tags implanted in their shoulders.Finland changes national laws to allow cell phone tracking of children.A woman in Kenosha, Wisconsin, discovers her estranged husband has hidden a GPS tracker in her car...None of this debate will happen until citizens become alarmed enough to educate themselves and demand answers, and it's not clear they will resist.
GPS uses an array of 24 military satellites to enable tracking devices. There are a collection of lawsuits wending their way through the courts, challenging the legality of tracking children, wives, employees and even murder suspects.
Commenters have been slow to challenge the issue.
While employers are seeing the benefits — and dollar signs — of tracking their employees, employees may not realize how much they are being tracked. If you have a company car or a company cell phone, your employer would be able to track if you are using these items during non-working hours. A boss could also jump to a wrong conclusion if monitoring an employee during their lunch hour. This could potentially create uneasy employees, and lack of trust for both parties.
Because this technology is far more accessible to the "haves" and far more likely to enslave the "have nots," it's not ringing alarm bells. From the same source above, an expert recalls:
At church one recent morning, a fellow member described to me how his friend, the owner of a construction firm, uses GPS-based cell phones to track "his 20 Mexicans."
Think about it: a guy who considers Mexican workers "his" (and still has the chutzpah to go to church) is completely comfortable tracking them. Wonder if he hums "Amazing Grace" as he does so?
Like the data mining that Bush instituted as soon as he became president, the tracking of those we supervise or seek to dominate is increasing in many insidious ways. Where's our sense of privacy? In a country where the government feels it owns the wombs of women and the emails of kids, perhaps that's a moot question.
Women, unskilled workers, migrants, children, anyone who has a supervisor, or who lives in a country that feels justified in invading your privace...beware.
Before you turn on Madame Garmin or Tom Tom, before you leave your phone on so you won't "miss anything," think twice.