First, Your Shoes; Next, Your DNA: Elliot Cohen on How Surveillance Is Erasing Freedom and Autonomy, Step by Incremental Step
Alissa Bohling
t r u t h o u t
Interview
Elliot Cohen's reputation for prescient reporting precedes his new book, "Mass Surveillance and State Control: The Total Information Awareness Project." In 2007, years before today's comparatively widespread coverage of the Comcast-NBC merger and other threats to net neutrality, Cohen won the first place Project Censored award for his story about the free speech implications of the 2005 Supreme Court decision cementing the Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) position that telecommunications laws could not be applied to cable modem services.
This time, Cohen zeros in on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Total Information Awareness project, a comprehensive surveillance program begun under the Bush administration that continues under Obama and that Cohen characterizes as an "Orwellian nightmare." In the book, Cohen tackles a topic ripe for speculation and paranoia with an approach that is both urgent and measured, tempering the terrifying results of his research with two simple questions – how bad could it get, and what can we do about it?
Alissa Bohling: People are exposed to a lot of apocalyptic narratives these days. What would you say to readers who might think a book like this is alarmist?
Elliot Cohen: It's certainly sounding an alarm, but the urgency of sounding the alarm is warranted; it's evidence based. There are a lot of reasons for thinking that this needs to be taken seriously. There are two kinds of alarms. One is just panicking and not really having any evidence and not knowing what to do. The book, on the other hand, has a rational approach. Basically what I'm saying is that there's evidence for thinking that we're moving in a direction of a controlled society, a controlled culture. It isn't that we're one hundred percent there, but there are dangerous trends, and if we don't do anything to offset them, then we really will be in some serious trouble. If the book is perceived as being overreactive, it's better - as I say in the book - to go in that direction than to simply put one's head in the ground and act as though there's really no problem.