Fall of the house
During the making of Poltergeist, the special effects lead Kathy Kennedy said, "The line reads 'The house implodes ...' and it cost us a quarter of a million dollars to make the #$@%!\& thing implode!" Just 20 years earlier, that amount was the budget of the entire film in which the House of Usher eventually falls and consumes itself. (In that film, all we see is a dwindling light fading to black.)
The budget for our all-too-real fear-induced "feature" seems destined to skyrocket indefinitely. Recently, documents came to light revealing that the FBI planned to purchase phone and e-mail transaction databases across the U.S. for US$5.3 million. As The Register nicely points out, this works out to the private records of every American being sold -- to the agency that the U.S. Department of Justice accused in 2002 of repeatedly breaking the law (download PDF) and secretly accessing information about US citizens (again) -- for about 18 cents per citizen.
No wonder, then, that trust in government has been dwindling since the Eisenhower administration (whence comes, ironically, the phrase "military-industrial complex," the original problematic alignment of government and private interests against the common man). Despite a slight bump after 9/11, the Brookings Institution reported that just 40 percent of Americans "trusted the federal government to do what is right just about always or most of the time." And the government has earned that mistrust. As far back as one looks, people with privileged access to information abuse it.
But the incursions continue, the laws change, and the courts allow the erosions. The latest twists are that we're not even supposed to know about them. In a recent denial of a lawsuit about disclosure of phone records, U.S. Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said, "The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities."
Real horror, however, comes from complacency and acceptance. As people get used to small technical encroachments on personal rights, they rely on existing laws to keep those powers in check. But with each small legal step to renew or strengthen those supposed crime-fighting technologies, the bar is set lower. I just can't figure out if we're getting a series of pointless quarter-million-dollar special effects or the low-budget horror of civil liberties dwindling in the darkness. Maybe both.
Jon Espenschied has been at play in the security industry for enough years to become cynical, blase, paranoid, jaded, vicious and cynical again. He manages information governance reform for a refugee aid organization and continues to have his advice ignored by CEOs, auditors and sysadmins alike.