The Seattle Times
October 26, 2003, Sunday Fourth Edition
We've become a society of suspects

Jerry Large; Seattle Times staff columnist

Halloween is coming up, and we are decorating our house with really scary stuff: bats, spiders, the head of Frankenstein's monster. To spare the faint of heart, we will not display ballots with hanging chads. Western society is a long way from the time when a celebration of the macabre might have been a way to deal with our fear of mysterious dangers that lurked in the darkness of night. Night isn't all that dark anymore, and we have explanations for phenomena that might once have fueled belief in werewolves, vampires and the like. But there is still scary stuff out there, even in daylight, and sometimes we still judge risks in irrational ways.

At last weekend's Northwest Bookfest, I moderated a discussion with two authors whose most recent books deal with fear and security. Neither of them mentioned ghosts or goblins.Bruce Schneier wrote "Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly about Security in an Uncertain World."His field is security, and he runs a security company he founded. This is his seventh book about the topic, and it's intended to help people figure out whether a given set of security measures actually do what they were intended to do.

This book starts with the 9-11 terrorist attacks. "We are told that we are in graver danger than ever, and that we must change our lives in drastic and inconvenient ways in order to be secure. We are told that we must sacrifice privacy and anonymity and accept restrictions on our actions. We are told that the police need new far-reaching investigative powers, that domestic spying capabilities need to be instituted, that our militaries must be brought to bear on countries that support terrorism, and that we must spy on each other. The security 'doctors' are telling us to trust them, that all these changes are for our own good."

Security is always a trade-off, he writes, a matter of what you get for what you give up. He doesn't think most of the changes made in the wake of 9-11 will result in good security. At the beginning of the book, he acknowledges that 3,000 people died in the attacks. Later in the book he includes a common list of the top causes of death in the United States. In 1999, for example, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, heart disease killed 725,192 Americans. Cancer killed 549,838; diabetes killed 68,399; flu and pneumonia, 63,730; automobile accidents, 41,700, and so on. Life, he says, is full of risks, but people often worry most about risks that are rare, but more dramatic the stuff that makes a big splash in the news. People smoke and overeat, sit in front of the television instead of exercising, drive too fast and otherwise put themselves at risk. Attacks are rare compared with many of the dangers we blow off.

While Schneier has written a detailed text for analyzing all kinds of risk and countermeasures, the other author, Christian Parenti, targets one particular risk that he believes we ignore because many of us don't consider it a danger. Government and businesses often use surveillance as a way to protect against risks, but Parenti thinks surveillance itself is a threat to individual rights and democracy.His concern goes beyond lost personal privacy, to the erosion of resistance to government or corporate control of our lives. We get used to handing over information, to being numbers, to complying without question. That, he says, is the danger. Parenti's book, "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror," chronicles the history of surveillance to support his point. Our loss of privacy didn't start with the Internet.

The first people in America required to carry identifying papers were Africans, slave and free. The point was control.He follows the development of ever more sophisticated forms of tracking people, Native Americans, Chinese immigrants.Control systems that first targeted groups outside the mainstream have spread and become ubiquitous, taken for granted. Sometimes people have concerns, but the concerns are easy enough to get around. For instance, few people want a national identification number. Parentiwrites that efforts to enact one always fall short because the idea is politically unpalatable. But corporations found a way to make it happen, by simply demanding that people give up their supposedly secret Social Security number. If you want to get a loan, you have to give up the number.

Only a small portion of the population consists of criminals or terrorists, but all of us become suspects, monitored and cataloged.We are the goblins. I have felt frustrated and sometimes even insulted by that, but Parenti thinks we should be frightened by it.It makes sense to give a bit of information to the credit-card company and a different bit of information to the doctor and something else to Uncle Sam, but businesses and governments share information. Databases grow and are cross-referenced. People you've never met punch a button and have your life in front of them. I have to admit it that is truly spooky.