Perhaps the most provocative morsel in Reg Whitaker's academic treatise on Big Brother's post-Orwellian face lift is his title: "The End of Privacy: How Total Surveillance is Becoming a Reality."
Unfortunately, like a scholar's version of Cosmopolitan magazine, Whitaker promises stories that don't quite live up to their billing on the cover.
Not that Whitaker, a professor of political science at Canada's York University, is a bore or pedant. His learned and convincingly paranoid prognostication into the near future is mostly well-written, only occasionally falling into the impenetrable prose of academia.
The problem is that unless one has been cryogenically frozen since Dwight Eisenhower was president, Whitaker's impassioned jeremiad comes a little late. Who needs to own a home computer, or even understand the meaning of a computer "search engine," to know -- and fear -- that any person with a laptop can easily learn private information about you? Who hasn't gotten the willies imagining the personal tales whirring away forever inside the Internal Revenue Service's mainframe computers?
Such intrusions into our privacy are common knowledge to anybody whose name has been sold from one mailing list to another or who has tried to rent a car with cash instead of a credit card.
Yet Whitaker makes it sound as if he's the discoverer of this scary aspect of the information superhighway. It is a road, he says, which is leading a kind of electronic salesman to your door, one who knows where you signed your last credit card slip, what you bought on the Internet and details from your insurance application. This cyber-glad-hander won't stop until you let him into your house so he can analyze your life and tailor a pitch or political platform for you.
"The End of Privacy," Whitaker writes, is a volume "that looks at surveillance as a mechanism of power." Readers get a quick history of spying, ranging from the Old Testament reference to "the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, send men to spy on Canaan," to the former CIA counsel who describes espionage as the "world's second oldest profession and just as honorable as the first."
But the old cloak and dagger have largely been retired, Whitaker contends. In the wake of the Cold War, he says, we're now embroiled in a global "battle to possess the information edge," and in this new "information economy" the scariest, all-knowing spies under our beds aren't the KGB or CIA. Now the omniscient data collectors with the power to destroy our lives, health, security, and credit ratings bear such benign-sounding names as Blue Cross Blue Shield, American Express, America Online and the Home Shopping Network.
Now, combining Orwell and Warhol, we're all being tracked on some stranger's list, but for a lot longer than 15 minutes. Virtually all corporations swap, sell and broker personal information to sift out likely political contributors, bad insurance or medical risks and felons on parole.
Though his description is overlong, Whitaker makes clear that our grade-school teachers weren't kidding when they warned us of that "permanent record" that would follow us forever if we misbehaved.
Occasionally the density of his prose camouflages the fact that he simply outlines these topics. And as the book goes on, he often loses his gift for definition, resorting to cliches of the ivory tower. Soon he's rounding up the usual campus icons.
"Marx incisively analyzed the relationship between economic and political power" Whitaker writes, but it is "the work of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault [that] . . . emphasized surveillance and the strategic use of information as tools of social control." True enough, but Foucault also described virtually anything short of a Sara Lee coffee cake as a tool of social control.
Prophets of doom need not provide solutions, and, as Whitaker notes, "I do not offer any blueprints for political opposition."
But maybe the revolution has started already. Whitaker tells of a teenage computer hacker named Makaveli who, in 1998, with the United States on the verge of attacking Iraq, led the Pentagon to believe that its computer data base had been violated by U.S. enemies.
He was caught and questioned on why he did it. "It's power, dude," he said. "You know, power."