Falling as rain falls
on a mountain
storm, shower, mizzle
words cataract through ravines
stream across hills
pour into the wide embrace of rivers
as wild woodcarvers gouge, plane, polish the land
till, with a child’s delight,
dissolving in the indefinable, illimitable sea.
It is, I think, inevitable:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI is embarking on a $1 billion project to build the world's largest computer database of biometrics to give the government more ways to identify people at home and abroad, the Washington Post reported on Friday.
The FBI has already started compiling digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm patterns in its systems, the paper said.
In January, the agency -- which focuses on violations of federal law, espionage by foreigners and terrorist activities -- expects to award a 10-year contract to expand the amount and kinds of biometric information it receives, it said.
At an employer's request, the FBI will also retain the fingerprints of employees who have undergone criminal background checks, the paper said.
If successful, the system, called Next Generation Identification, will collect the biometric information in one place for identification and forensic purposes, the Post said.
Those who have the capability and the budget will be driven to compile ever increasing information about ever more people. It gives a feeling of comfort to the powerful, a chimera of safety, the feeling that if enough is known about enough people then harmful actions can not only be punished but even prevented.
A combination of ever-increasing processing power and the capacity to know biometric and also genetic information about people means that (other things being equal) the trend will be to recording every individual in an accessible form. Who would ever have the power or, having the power, the will to stand up and say 'Stop now, we don't need to know.'?
It won't be enough to shout 'privacy' or 'liberty' as though these slogans will stop this trend, nor 'transparency' or 'safeguards' as though these will legitimate the amassing of data. It will be important to know who has access to what information and how it may be used. (In fact it may will be in the interests of the security services to let people know just how much they know, so long as they are vague about the limits, in order to deter malevolent action. But it will be impossible to state the limits of how it will be used - once collected the data will be maipulable in ways currently unconsidered.)
We are, I believe, on the threashold of a vast change in social and political relationships embodied in the capacity to digitise people (in effect) of which Facebook is to future databases as an abacus to the computer.
How will we live with the assumption that everything is known and nothing forgotten? Will we be ruled by shame - or will shame be a thing of the past as everyone is shown to do shameful things? Will we find ways of public forgetting to enable us to grow - or will teenage excess, misjudgement, rebellion always be held against a person? Will forgiveness become a new public virtue? Or will the sophistication of data lead to crude divisions of people into, say, those who are a threat and those who are tolerable - white and black hats again?
It will not all be bad - the possibility of individualised medicine may well be one advance, the impossibility of racism another - and it may (despite the present structures creating these systems) tend towards egalitarianism. But such extensive change is unlikely to happen without social turmoil and pain.
Balanced on sea-edge.
Between.
Land ground fine between
duration and oblivion;
unstable, edge-less.
Sea sand turning underneath;
an old new tide
erases my mark.
Less often observed is that the practice of waterboarding has roots in the Spanish Inquisition and parallels the persecution of Anabaptists during the Protestant Reformation and the Roman Catholic Counter Reformation. Why did practices similar to waterboarding develop as a way to torture heretics—whether the heretics were Anabaptists or, in the Inquisition, Protestants of any stripe as well as Jews and witches and others?Schweiker sees the use of water for torture by Christian persecutors as a kind of anti-baptism:
Torture has many forms, but torture by water as it arose in the Roman Catholic and Protestant reformations seemingly drew some of its power and inspiration from theological convictions about repentance and salvation. It was, we must now surely say, a horrific inversion of the best spirit of Christian faith and symbolism.Christianity uses powerful symbols, its discourse addresses the great issues of life and death, morality and sin, and it also proclaims the possibility of transformatory redemption – that all things may be made new.
Once they spoke
of their own volition conjured
Falah, with dual Israeli and Canadian citizenship, was held by the Shin Bet allegedly for spying until released after 23 days following a campaign by fellow geographers and other academics.
He felt he was being questioned more about his academic career - and that it was held as an accusation against him - than about any putative spying.
Most of all, the article concludes, Mr. Falah is haunted by the sense that his imprisonment was meant to send a message.
"I feel it was like a punishment," he says, meant to scare him and other Palestinian scholars into self-censorship.
And that's the way of police states, the purpose of interrogation and torture: not solely the punishment of the individual but the breaking of civil society and the crushing of any independence of thought and autonomy of action. If the Palestinians are to be cowed then any who attain prominence of any sort - within or outside the Palestinian territories - become legitimate targets.
And across the world the police seem to go to the same school. Keep interrogation and torture hidden and secret so that no-one can see what is happening, but make sure it's an open secret so that it can terrify the rest of the society. There is nothing so powerfully destructive as a dirty secret that everyone knows.
In the end the use of force is unsustainable - but in the mean time too many are broken and suffer from it.
