juxtaposition: Stone Junction Intro/today

[pynchonoid]

"The Pentagon is constructing a computer system that
could create a vast electronic dragnet, searching for
personal information as part of the hunt for
terrorists around the globe — including the United
States. [...]  it will provide intelligence analysts
and law enforcement officials with instant access to
information from Internet mail and calling records to
credit card and banking transactions and travel
documents, without a search warrant. [...]  Admiral
Poindexter, the former national security adviser in
the Reagan administration, has argued that the
government needs broad new powers to process, store
and mine billions of minute details of electronic life
in the United States. Admiral Poindexter, who has
described the plan in public documents and speeches
but declined to be interviewed, has said that the
government needs to "break down the stovepipes" that
separate commercial and government databases, allowing
teams of intelligence agency analysts to hunt for
hidden patterns of activity with powerful computers.
[...] "This could be the perfect storm for civil
liberties in America," said Marc Rotenberg, director
of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in
Washington "The vehicle is the Homeland Security Act,
the technology is Darpa and the agency is the F.B.I.
The outcome is a system of national surveillance of
the American public."
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/09/politics/09COMP.html">
New York Times, 9 November 2002


"The other day in the street I heard a policeman in a
police car, requesting over his loudspeaker that a
civilian car blocking his way move aside and let him
past, all the while addressing the drive of the car
personally, by name. I was amazed at this, though
people I tried to share it with only shrugged,
assuming that of course the driver's name (along with
height, weight and date of birth) had been obtained
from the Motor Vehicle Department via satellite, as
soon as the offending car's license number had been
tapped into the terminal -- so what?Stone Junction was
first published in 1989, toward the end of an era
still innocent, in its way, of the cyberworld just
ahead about to exponentially explode upon it. To be
sure, there were already plenty of computers around
then, but they were not quite so connected together as
they were shortly to become. Data available these days
to anybody were accessible then only to the
Authorized, who didn't always know what they had or
what to do with it. There was still room to wiggle --
the Web was primitive country, inhabited only by a few
rugged pioneers, half loco and wise to the smallest
details of their terrain. Honor prevailed, laws were
unwritten, outlaws, as yet undefinable, were few. The
question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or,
preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed
promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait
down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk
were imagining then -- a question we are still asking.
Where can you jump in the rig and head for any more --
who's out there to grant us asylum? If we stay put,
what is left to us that is not in some way tainted,
coopted, and colonized, by the forces of Control,
usually digital in nature?"
<http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html>
Introduction to Jim Dodge's Stone Junction
Thomas Pynchon, 1997








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