Security State: All Deposit, What Return?

War economy gave birth to the security state and the promotion of endless fears. Terrorism without borders is the latest on the war front, very possibly aided and abetted by international cyber-crime.

Billions of US dollars have been spent annually to put our soldiers in harm’s way and weapons in the hands of foreign armies, both allies and their enemies. To some extent, United States foreign policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize the Middle East. Our involvement there has been more about oil and money than the advertized promotion of democracy, much less human rights. By contrast, our involvement in Africa has been next to nil, never mind that human rights are being trampled all over the place and genocide is on the march. There isn’t, apparently, enough money in caring about what happens in Africa. This American disinterest in the plight of African nations has been a boon for China, which has all but moved in to mine the minerals and themselves, bringing their own workers, to the impoverishment of each local populace where they make an agreement with the local despot.

On the home front, billions of US dollars are spent annually to incarcerate people and to militarize our domestic law enforcement agencies. To some extent, United States domestic policy has done more to destabilize than to stabilize our inner cities. The law has seen fit to uphold many of the most egregious cases of police brutality. In large part, allowing civilians the opportunity to stockpile small arsenals has promoted the notion that police have the right to shoot at “suspects” in the kill zone, and ask questions only when the bodies are on the slab. Frequently, what looks like a brandished weapon is no weapon at all; sometimes it actually is a weapon, at others there is absolutely no weapon. The militarized police are claiming, and taking pride while doing so, that they are being “frightened” into what is later called “effectiveness,” and the courts are upholding that position in many, too many cases. While the police are “looking out for their own,” are they also looking out for the rest of us? Shall we bring race relations into this discussion?

Police and Fire unions are among the biggest supporters of local government officials’ election campaigns, followed closely by big development companies. Police and Fire contracts, with heath and pension benefits, take a huge chunk out of any municipal government’s general fund. Some contracts allow officers to become vested in their pension within between five to ten years of service. Some officers “retire” after they are vested. Some of these officers apply for lucrative contracts in other municipalities. Double-dippers, sometimes even triple-dippers abound in a pay and pension system that is not regulated and is completely unsustainable. You have only to look at the rising number of municipal bankruptcies to know that this is true.

Taxpayers contribute most of the money that supports the security state, but are we more secure? My thought is that we wouldn’t need to have “Security Officers” posted outside our grocery stores, if we were really secure. Too many of these jobs are just for show. How can it not be so? Most of the security officers I have seen lately weigh in at over three-hundred pounds, and are attentive mostly to their electronic media. Would such a person be able to apprehend a fleeing wrong-doer? You can’t just be dressed for the part; you actually have to be able to deliver something that recruiters, these dates, call “proven effectiveness.” The world of privatized enforcement seems to include anything in a spectrum defined at one end by the small, well-armed private army (working sometimes outside the law) to the $13/hour actor from central casting, at the other.

There have been too many high profile cases, of late, where people had been arrested, tried and convicted of crimes they did not commit. Better late than never to be exonerated, I suppose, but these costly mistakes would never have been uncovered if it had not been for the growing database of forensic DNA. Meanwhile, innocent lives have been broken and wasted, and some have died before the truth could be uncovered.

The average person’s notion of how police do their work comes from the television. From what is shown on TV, most people would think that every law enforcement agency works methodically from an extremely strict set of protocols. TV police protocols say that you cannot arrest someone and hold them in custody without strong probable cause including evidence. In my town (in real life), two people were arrested for committing a string of arsons. The two do not know one another, and one was at work at the time the fires he is accused of were set; one has jobs and family and ties to the community, the other is a transient. The evidence the police have to bind these two people over has yet to be disclosed in the courtroom, but Columbo would never arrest two people just because someone said they saw the person or because a surveillance tape showed a figure that might just look like the person someone said they saw near one of the fires, if there weren’t so much shadow. There might well be a number of people on the street, if there is a fire in the neighborhood, observing. I do not know how this particular situation will play out; only time will tell. But I find it disquieting that the police do not need evidence and probable cause to bind a person over for trial. The person can be arrested, and the police then conduct their investigation while the one arrested is taken off the street, and isolated from contact with family. I would put a question forward: Does it serve justice and does it prove “effective” to set bail nearly twice as high for the transient as for the workingman? There will be no person raising bail for the transient, so what is the purpose and what does it achieve? Meanwhile, to some extent, the men have been tried in the press: the Mayor of the town has promised to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law. The Mayor is up for reelection. The Mayor’s platform is, of course, “proven effectiveness.”

Where did I get the information for this blog entry? I read the newspaper everyday. I hope you do, too.  Much of what we see is a theater, a masquerade meant to imply order, which may not exist, at all. All of the issues and stories I touch on here are related; they do not occur in one-off or in isolation. We need to ask the hard questions about the money we pay for “security.” We need to have better determinations about deadly force. We need to get guns off the streets, period. We need to vote for people who might really do something about all this, rather than shoo in the incumbent rubber-stampers, whose campaigns are paid for by security unions and big business interests. Only today, the new head of the FBI, James Comey, said in interview that cybercrime is the biggest terrorist threat to our security. An argument could be made that it is the biggest threat to world order, but no one wants to go that far. Those claims will only come when economies topple, and then it will be too late.

There is a lot of investment being made in armed security. There is not nearly the same investment being made in people and justice. Major infrastructure changes needed to insure greater electronic security are “too expensive” for big business; it is cheaper for big business to send out new credit cards and pay off insurance claims than to invest in better, more secure systems. What investments are made benefit big business and all the trappings that support big business, including “security guards.” This investment maintains a crippling status quo of economic divide, but what are the returns?

Things will not change until big business gets hurt, and hurt badly. In the event, politics will not be able to save big business, and neither will security guards. For all that we may want to change the balance power, we do not want to see what happens when the hackers bring down the firewalls.

Pins, Passwords and UserIDs; all the numbers of our lives

“Pictures hanging in a hallway

And the fragment of this song

Half remembered names and faces

But to whom do they belong

When you knew that it was over

Were you suddenly aware

That the autumn leaves were turning

To the color of her hair

Like a circle in a spiral

Like a wheel within a wheel

Never ending or beginning,

On an ever spinning wheel

As the images unwind

Like the circles that you find

In the windmills of your mind”

English lyrics from the song “Windmills of Your Mind”

Marilyn and Alan Bergman

(music composed by Michel Legrand)

I had an interesting encounter with Customer Service this morning. We had been early registrants for toll transponders, when such service came to our area. A year ago, we discovered that the transponder we had was no longer operating; we would go through the transponder toll lane, and no telltale beep would issue forth to signify that our toll had been registered. The system had photo identifications of our cars, however, and so we were never in violation, as the photo would be compared to our account information and verified.

Somewhere along the line, about a year ago, this was no longer good enough, and we were contacted by letter, and asked to call in to unsnarl what had previously not been snarly, but now for some reason was.

We called in, and the customer service person told us we needed to get not one, but two transponders. We could no longer share one between both autos. And they asked us to send them back the one we had that was no longer working. We did so.

Now, a year later, we have two transponders, but were sent a notice of “evasion of toll”. Guess what, one of the “newer” transponders no longer seems to be working. My husband checks out our on-line account (this was one of the “changes” or “upgrades” to transponder “service” over the years, so that customers can do all the work and the transponder people don’t have to hire as many customer service representatives). When we initiated our online account, years ago, all you needed was a customer identification code and password.

Today, when I called the transponder customer service line, negotiating the knarly phone system, (including the ubiquitous “please listen carefully, as our menu options have changed,” message that has appeared on most customer service phone systems in the last ten years, never to be changed again, but always to repeat that it has been changed, even if that change was made years ago, and not yesterday...), and was asked for a four-digit pin number.

Well, we don’t have a four-digit pin number. We never had one for this account; all we ever needed was a password and user identification code. So, I waited, while the automated voice yammered at me “the code you entered [even though I had not entered one] is not valid. Please enter your…” (sigh)

Finally, the machine gave up on me, as I waited on the line, and kicked me over to a live representative.

I gave her the account number, in response to her first question. Then she asked me for a pin number. I said, “we don’t have one.”

“You should have a pin number, and I cannot help you if you cannot give it to me.”

“Can’t we verify by address and phone number?”

“What is your address?” I supplied the address.

“And what email address would the account be under?” I gave my husband’s current email address.

“That is not correct.” Oops. My husband had changed his email address within the last six months, but had not updated it in the, oh, gee, several HUNDRED accounts we have all over the internet.

I supplied his previous email address.

“That is not correct.” GAH! We had opened this account so long ago that the email address used was one that was for an email service no longer available, owing to merging and submerging and overmerging of undermergable corporations by übermergable ones. “I am afraid I cannot help you.”

“Look,” I said, “I am just trying to tell you that of the three transponders listed, we only have two. One of them was no longer working, and we were told to mail it back, which we did.”

“Where did you send the transponder?”

“This was about a year ago. I know that they gave us an address over the phone, and we sent it there. Obviously, things have changed quite a lot since then, for you and for us. I no longer have a record of that information.”

“If you cannot verify your account, I cannot help you.”

“I can give you the numbers of the transponders we do have, surely that is something that will verify our account. You should be able to see this information.”

The rep listened patiently as I recited what records I did have to proffer, in the form of transponder identification numbers. I heard typing in the background.

“Yes, these are listed on your account.”

“Thank you, yes. And the other one that is listed we no longer have, as we sent it back.”

“Since you cannot verify your pin number or your email address, I will have to send you a letter in the mail about how to properly update your account.”

“I see…”

That phone call took about 25 minutes, and when it was over, I was really no closer toward my goal that when I started.

I might understand all of this multiple code business, if security were really at stake with regard to “the product.” This is not a stock transaction or a bank transaction, and while we use a credit card to pay for our toll transactions, surely our address should be enough to verify we have an account. It works for other accounts.

This kind of security is rather misplaced in our scheme of priorities. The fact that we must have unique codes (passwords, user identifications, pin numbers, etc.) for every single internet account (which often is a secondary account associated with an original service begun before the internet was available to the public) is nothing less crazy-making. We have a huge spreadsheet to tell us what all our codes are. Seems a little ridiculous, given that most of these accounts are not dealing with trade secrets, government secrets or anything except a very occasional monetary transaction that, yes, should be secure, but is often transacted through a secure webpage that you are transferred to on the website.

In fact, this is just how we were able to change our credit card information on the transponder site, without the need for a pin number!!!!

Meanwhile, customers pay the price for the inefficiency of the agency that does not remove old information when it is supplied or send a message informing the need for new, additional means of identification, like a pin number.

While we are chasing after the “circles in spirals” and the “wheels in wheels” of petty business bureaucracies, what more important life experiences are we missing?

Is this the aspect of technology that was supposed to make life easier and less work-intensive?

Is this the windmill of your mind, or mine?

Perhaps we are all now face-to-face with the dilemmas of “Don Quixote.”

Civil Discourse 101

Discourse is a form of communication, more commonly referred to as discussion or debate. These days, we seem to be really bad at it. Instead of exchanging ideas, we seem to be talking past each other.

Yelling. We hear a lot of it—as if loudness is required, in order to get the point across. The folks that are yelling seem really intent on being heard, but when their turn to listen comes along, the faculty of hearing seems missing. So, many exchanges are not exchanges at all, but shouting matches where the one with the highest decibel level wins. Yelling at and past one another, but neither side being heard.

Lost, in the yelling and escalating anger, are the issues, not to mention possible solutions.

Fifty years ago (nine months before I was born) on this date in 1961, John F. Kennedy gave his inauguration speech, of which I excerpt the following passages:

So let us begin anew -- remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is always subject to proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us. Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals…

Let both sides unite to heed, in all corners of the earth, the command of Isaiah -- to "undo the heavy burdens, and [to] let the oppressed go free."¹



And, if a beachhead of cooperation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a new endeavor -- not a new balance of power, but a new world of law -- where the strong are just, and the weak secure, and the peace preserved.



All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days; nor in the life of this Administration; nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

Those words are as timely and fresh, today, as they were when they were first spoken. There is a lot more in that speech that makes it seem dated; the Cold War and balance of power in the world is clearly at issue. But if we focus on the bits that I have printed here, we should see that we have a lot of work to do; we have not passed "Go" with very much of Kennedy's list of goals.

A lot has happened in fifty years, but not the realization of that bright and shining dream. And in that time we have belabored much the issues that divide us, without ever realizing the great promise of justice, security and peace.

I ask you to remember the promise, and to renew it in your heart.

I ask us all to begin anew, to relearn civility, to renew our commitment to the dream, renew our efforts in civil dialogue, that we may finally, and as a united front, discover the path of action that will make the dream a reality.


//


Kennedy, John F. Inaugural Speech, 1961. http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres56.html