Mayor Daley the Lesser has decreed it to be so in a meeting with the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board:
"Security and terrorism won’t be an issue if Chicago wins the right to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games because, by that time, there’ll be a surveillance camera on every corner, Mayor Daley said Wednesday.
"By the time 2016 [rolls around], we’ll have more cameras than Washington, D.C. … Our technology is more advanced than any other city in the world — even compared to London — dealing with our cameras and the sophistication of cameras and retro-fitting all the cameras downtown in new buildings, doing the CTA cameras," Daley said.
"By 2016, I’ll make you a bet. We’ll have [cameras on] almost every block."
Mayor Daley the Greater had a better idea than cameras on every block. He had the Chicago Police. I need only remind those of you of the correct vintage about the 1968 Democratic Convention whereby the Chicago Police were told to go out and crack some heads during anti-war demonstrations outside the Convention Center. The Chicago Police did exactly that, as well as escorting unfriendly reporters out of the hall and standing in front of TV news camera that were trying to film the riots going on. One of the escortees was Dan Rather of CBS.
Now the Son of Richard Daley, obviously cut from the same cloth on this subject, wants to see surveillance cameras on every block of the great city of Chicago. The ostensible reason is to cut down on street crime, which is a good thing.
Perpetual, unblinking surveillance however, is not a good thing. Please don’t tell me that "If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." That argument is like a Chihuahua dog: It don’t hunt. The same argument is used by the Department of Homeland Paranoia, with a slightly different wording.
The same argument was used by the Stasi in East Germany in the glory days when East Germany was owned and operated by the Soviet Union. The same argument was used in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Latvia, Lithuania and the rest of the former-Soviet bloc countries. Today, North Korea and Mainland China are the two most obvious practitioners of "If you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear" mantra.
The big loophole in the argument is defining "nothing to hide". Citizens in a reasonably free society do not always agree with everything their government does. That is a cornerstone of what we call ‘democracy’. Voters are allowed to complain, sometimes vehemently.
What pervasive surveillance seeks to do is to preclude even the potential for legal dissent. It doesn’t take a Master’s in history to know that the lawmakers, as soon as they have the ability to snoop, will snoop. As soon as they can snoop, the laws will be changed to make even the slightest deviation from the ‘norm’ an offense against the state.
This is not new. The Pilgrims would shun or even stone someone for not wearing the correctly modest dress. The Catholic Church during the Inquisition put people to death on nothing more than the word of one person that they were a witch. The Soviet era departments of Internal Security would send people for ‘re-education’ from which not many came back. Today, Mayor Daley wants to use cameras and microphones on every street corner.
Nothing much has changed, except the technology.
RoadDave 