Gene Hackman in “The Conversation”
When, in a post last week, I found parallels between the National Security Agency’s extensive data mining attempts and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I neglected to mention (as this New Yorker essay does) that one has to be careful with books that have themselves become symbols. When this happens, they become like clichés, losing their power to illuminate because mention of them throws us into already well-grooved tracks of thought. Author Ian Crouch points out that we also diminish the book itself in the process :
While it’s tempting to hold the present moment up beside Orwell’s 1984, the book is more than a political totem, and overlooking its profound expressions of emotion robs it of most of its real power. Some novels have both the good and bad fortune of being given over to wider history, inspiring idiomatic phrases that instantly communicate a commonly understood idea. Through this transformation, books become blunt and unsubtle, losing something of their art. We might call it the Catch-22 of Catch-22, or, in this case, of Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Crouch goes on to point out how different our world is from the one portrayed in Orwell’s dystopia:
[A]ll but the most outré of political thinkers would have to grant that we are far from the crushing, violent, single-party totalitarian regime of Orwell’s imagination. In one of the more chilling passages in the novel, the evil Party hack O’Brien explains, “We are not interested in those stupid crimes that you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.” The N.S.A., on the other hand, is primarily interested in overt acts, of terrorism and its threats, and presumably—or at least hopefully—less so in the thoughts themselves. The war on terror has been compared to Orwell’s critique of “the special mental atmosphere” created by perpetual war, but recently Obama made gestures toward bringing it to an end. That is not to say, of course, that we should not be troubled by the government’s means, nor is it clear that the ends will remain as generally benevolent as they seem today. But Orwell’s central image of unrestrained political power, a “boot stamping on a human face—forever,” is not the reality of our age.
I think this is a very fair point and I am not terribly worried at the moment. But as I noted in my post, I fear some future time (and it will come) when hysterical fear sweeps the country, prompting those in power to abuse the material they have collected.
And then there is the problem of mistakes, as Gail Collins of The New York Times reminds us in a recent column. I cite her story in part because it is a genuine concern but also because it reminds me of a passage from Jules Feiffer’s 1968 black comedy Little Murders. The incident concerns a fingerprint database:
In 2004, after terrorists bombed commuter trains in Madrid, Spanish officials found a suspicious fingerprint on a plastic bag at the scene. The F.B.I. ran it through its files and decided, erroneously, that it matched Mayfield’s. Further investigation revealed that Mayfield had married an Egyptian immigrant and converted to Islam — information the authorities apparently found far more compelling than the fact that he had never been to Spain.
Peculiar things then began to happen in the Mayfield house. His wife, Mona, returned home to find unlocked doors mysteriously bolted. Their daughter, Sharia, then 12, noticed that someone had been fooling around with her computer. “I had a desktop monitor, and it looked like some of the screws had been taken out and not put back in all the way,” she said in a phone interview. “And the hard drive was sticking out.”
Although Mayfield is ultimately arrested and jailed for two weeks, the story has a happy ending. As Collins sardonically puts it, “The Spanish investigators were dubious from the beginning that the fingerprints at the bombing site were Mayfield’s; they had been hoping, perhaps, for a person who had set foot in Europe within the last decade.” They rechecked their files, found the actual culprit, and Mayfield was freed and paid $2 million in damages.
But what most caught my attention about the story, besides the reminder that surveillance agencies can’t always be trusted, is how careless those who searched Mayfield’s house had been. That’s what reminded me of a monologue in Feiffer’s play. Here’s Alfred remembering back to his college days:
During Korea—I was in school then—the government couldn’t decide whether I was a security risk or not—I wore a beard—so they put a mail check on me. Every day the mail would come later and later. And it would be bent. Corners torn. Never sealed correctly. Like they didn’t give a damn whether I knew they were reading my mail or not.
Alfred is older when he tells the story and has become so fatalistic that he lets people do whatever they want to him, including allowing thugs to beat him up until they become tired. (Have we become similarly fatalistic about surveillance?) In his younger days, however, he believes in resisting and starts enclosing notes for the investigator in envelopes he mails to himself. Here’s one of them:
Dear Sir: I’ve been thinking too much of my own problems, too little of yours. Yours cannot be a happy task—reading another man’s mail. It’s dull, unimaginative. A job—and let’s not mince words—for a hack. Yet, I wonder—can this be the way you see yourself? Do you see yourself as a hack? Do you see yourself as the office slob? Have you ever wondered why they stuck you with this particular job, instead of others have have less seniority? Or was it, do you think that your supervisor looked around the office to see who he’d stick for the job, saw you and said, No one will miss him for a month!”
Eventually a man shows up saying he’s from the telephone company, even though no complaint has been made:
Shaky hands. Bloodshot eyes. A small quaver in the voice. And as he dismembered my phone he said, “Look. What nobody understands is that everybody has his job to do. I got my job. In this case it’s repairing telephones. I like it or I don’t like it, but it’s my job. If I had another job—say, for example, with the FBI or someplace, putting in a wiretap, for example, or reading a guy’s mail—like it or don’t like it, it would be my job! Has anyone got the right to destroy a man for doing his job?
Alfred writes one more letter, informing the investigator that he has “valuable information, Photostats, recordings, names and dates, about the conspiracy against him.” He gets the following response:
The letter showed up a week after I mailed it, in a crumpled, grease-stained, and Scotch-taped envelope. The letter itself was torn in half and then clumsily glued together again. In the margin, on the bottom, in large, shaky letters was written the word: “Please!” I wasn’t bothered again. It was after this that I began to wonder: If they’re that unformidable, why bother to fight back?
But he’s wrong. We need to fight back. Maybe not by making glib references to Nineteen Eighty-Four. But we must hold real debates about the tradeoffs between security and personal privacy, complete with transparency and accountability.
We have a constitutional law professor as president to lead our discussion.
