Here’s Radley Balko making sense again:
A liberal blogger wrote to me in an email this week that libertarians who call the TSA pat-downs a violation of their civil liberties do a disservice to actual violations of civil liberties. It’s not difficult to envision the day where anyone wishing to take mass transportation in this country will have to first submit to a government checkpoint, show ID, and answer questions about any excess cash, prescription medication, or any other items in his possession the government deems suspicious. If and when that happens, freedom of movement will essentially be dead. But it won’t happen overnight. It’ll happen incrementally. And each increment will, when taken in isolation, appear to some to be perfectly reasonable.
Let’s add a layer of science-fiction to this. Imagine how inconvenient it all will be. As gasoline gets more expensive, and mass transit becomes a more common form of travel for more and more Americans, people will start to become increasingly frustrated by the delays. Indeed, the delays will be far more troublesome to most Americans than the invasion of privacy. Long lines will do more to infuriate the American public than the loss of liberty.
In any case, imagine now that using biometrics – say retina scans – or ID chips implanted in our wrists, we could seriously speed up those lines. You have naked scanners that detect metal and scan for the implant/retina/whatever at every entrance to any public transport. No need to show ID, no need to talk to anyone. Where you are, who you are, where you’re going – all these will be in the database, safe and sound.
Now imagine a bomb goes off in a mall. Or at a theater. Pretty soon you have scanners of some variety at these venues as well. Maybe not naked-scanners, but ID scanners – something to track who is in attendance. This would also be handy for large public gatherings – rallies, protests, etc. It would be ten times easier to keep track of people on government terrorist lists.
First, the architecture of totalitarianism is weaved into society to preserve our security; it is bound tighter in order to accommodate our convenience. And, as Balko notes, it will happen incrementally, reasonably even.
Totalitarianism doesn’t have to happen over night. You plant it like a seed and wait for it to grow. Its architects might not even realize what they’re doing. Politicians have serious incentives to keep us safe and to not inconvenience us at the same time. It happens accidentally, incidentally, but once the architecture is in place, the chance it will be abused grows exponentially, and our ability to turn it back decreases in kind.
