juxtaposition: Safire/Pynchon re civil liberties

[pynchonoid]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/14/opinion/14SAFI.html>

"If the Homeland Security Act is not amended before
passage, here is what will happen to you:

Every purchase you make with a credit card, every
magazine subscription you buy and medical prescription
you fill, every Web site you visit and e-mail you send
or receive, every academic grade you receive, every
bank deposit you make, every trip you book and every
event you attend — all these transactions and
communications will go into what the Defense
Department describes as "a virtual, centralized grand
database." 

To this computerized dossier on your private life from
commercial sources, add every piece of information
that government has about you — passport application,
driver's license and bridge toll records, judicial and
divorce records, complaints from nosy neighbors to the
F.B.I., your lifetime paper trail plus the latest
hidden camera surveillance — and you have the
supersnoop's dream: a "Total Information Awareness"
about every U.S. citizen.

This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario. It is
what will happen to your personal freedom in the next
few weeks if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented
power he seeks. [...] "


<http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html>
"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?"
Thomas Pynchon
Introduction to Jim Dodge's Stone Junction, 1997






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