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Big Brother is watching you 24/7
The roots of America's surveillance culture are deep - and ominous
By Brian Gilmore
As soon as possible, reread George Orwell's "1984." Then break your cellphone into small pieces, put the pieces in a paper bag, and burn it.

Some of us might take such actions after reading Christian Parenti's thought-provoking book, "The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America - From Slave Passes to the War on Terror."...

...Cellphones are just one example of how all of us are easily traced everyday through the convenience of modern technology. Credit cards, Internet accounts, gym memberships, library cards, health-insurance records, and workplace identification badges are some of the other routine technological conveniences that daily record our every move.

By closely examining chattel slavery in America, Parenti illustrates how this pattern began centuries ago. Using such measures as patrols and passes, America desperately tried to keep track of its many African slaves.

The creation of full-time police departments, starting in New York City in 1845, marked a further broadening of America's surveillance system. These police departments used finger-printing and photography to track criminals and, Parenti says, in the process laid the groundwork for our current system of mass observation.

The individual chapters of "The Soft Cage" focus on particular topics that could be books themselves. One of the best, "The Camera Land: Security Aesthetics and Public Space," discusses the proliferation of cameras that seem to watch all public spaces. Parenti notes that such an arrangement has a "corrosive effect upon democracy."

He also analyzes surveillance at work in the social-welfare system, and through the economy in which the proliferation of "digital cash" (debit and credit cards) has "caused an unplanned, unexamined extension of state power and social discipline."...