Disclaimer: Even though I was in college during the radical sixties, I know nothing about psychedelics or acid, or even kool-aid and, I suspect, that the gang in the White House doesn't either. What I mean to suggest with this title is that they've "drunk the kool-aid," as in consuming an elixir, holding a promise that is ultimately not realized.

Yes, I'm referring to the current denizens of the White House as a gang. They are a group that's dedicated to extra-legal, if not illegal, activity and are tied to each other by their commitment to evading the law. Which is not to say that their behavior is criminal. I think it's important to make the distinction that the relationship between an ordinary individual, or person (as the Constitution of the United States defines one of the people from whose consent the power to makes rules and regulations is derived) and an agent of government. The agents of government, whether elected or appointed, are bound to perform those tasks and fulfill those obligations which the Constitution specifies--no more and no less. That means that the agents of government operate in a permissive environment; they are permitted to act. Individuals, on the other hand, operate in a prohibitive environment in that they are forbidden to engage in certain behaviors and everything that's not forbidden is OK.

The gang currently occupying the White House prefers a different interpretation. They'd like to think that they are not only the source of law, which they themselves will or will not follow at their pleasure, but that the people whom they presume to rule are to conform their behavior to the minutest regulations, limited only by the "rights" assigned them by the constitution.

On the other hand, and this is important, their appreciation for the designation of private corporations is keen because of the right to privacy (a right grudgingly recognized as adhering to the individual person) which strikes them as particularly useful when public access to information about what the agents of government are actually doing is an issue. That's because the people's right to know what it being done in their name (even if they are powerless to affect it) has been considerably expanded by judicial decisions and represents a restriction on the exercise of power which is significant. Clearly, if the agents of government can be called to account for decisions and management of the people's assets, then their power is not absolute. Besides, getting rid of responsibilities is also power-enhancing. So, that's another reason for shifting traditional government functions to the private sector. Privacy = secrecy and secrecy = power. And power is what it's all about.

How three hundred million people are going to be made to toe the line, to do what they're told and when, without revolting is the challenge. For that matter, since the ambition to exert power is obviously global, the task is even more gargantuan. The solution they seem to have settled on is electric--as in electric surveillance of communications and behavior, electric collection of information, and the electric dispatch of the instruments of control--i.e. weapons.

Even though Donald Rumsfeld, when he was still Secretary of Defense went to great lengths to explain that the penetration of our airspace and the crashing of high-jacked planes was the result of a failure of our electronic early warning and intelligence gathering facilities and that, in future, we would rely on "human intelligence" and boots on the ground to let us know what's going on around the globe, that's clearly not what's happened. As far as anyone can tell, the reliance on satellites and the interception of electronic communications is still the top priority. Why else are they badgering Congress to approve the collection of electronic information at the transfer nodes and why else are they looking to "protect" the private corporations who have provided them with such information in the past by immunizing them from being liable for the injuries suffered by persons who don't want their privacy invaded by the agents of government's surrogates?

For that matter, why, instead of rebuilding what our missiles and bombs have destroyed in Iraq, is the U.S. busy laying down a grid of military bases, connected by fiber optic cables, to a central processing center in the so-called embassy facilities in Baghdad? The logical explanation would seem to be that, the goal of a satellite based missile defense (Star Wars) having proved impractical, the plan now is to set up ground-based missile intercept facilities, as Rumsfeld actually explained in the context of the BRAC process (missile batteries would be redeployed from Germany to the desert, where families would not want to live, and, by instituting short rotations for the technical forces, the U.S. would be able to save the expense of maintaining military families overseas), along with the requisite radar installations on the plateau and plains of Iraq, where the mountains would not interfere with the transmission of signals. Clearly not an example of putting more people on the ground to learn to speak the language and be in tune with what the people of the region actually want.

Electricity will rule the world. And he who controls the energy source will be in charge. It seems that's what a lot of them thought. The irony is that the people who are hatching these schemes, the Rumsfelds and Cheneys, most likely haven't a clue how electricity actually works. Bush Two says he doesn't even use e-mail and I believe him. Rumsfeld, famously, stood at his desk, making notes and writing memos by hand. Ditto for the geniuses in the Congress who thought elections could be made easy, quick and painless, by letting the machines do it. Nobody clued them in to the fact that, even if the technicians who need to service and calibrate the machines are honest and competent, the electrons are tricky. They are affected by the weather; not just lightning strikes, but humidity and temperature and atmospheric interference. They spill out of some containers and not others. Indeed, the fiber optic cable which transports packets of information almost at the speed of light and leaks almost no energy has turned out to be a major headache for just that reason. Where it used to be possible to collect information by laying a tap along side a cable, the absence of leaks makes it necessary to capture information at points where the various parts of the network intersect and, probably because of the high speed of the transmission, capture a whole lot of stuff that has absolutely no meaning.

Lord only knows how much time, money and energy has been wasted on computerized information systems which either don't work or process so much stuff that nobody can keep up. And what happens when there's information overload is that the systems just shut down. The paranoid among us suspect that the reasons there's less and less real information coming out of our federal government in a timely manner because our agents of government have become obsessed with keeping secrets. Just as likely, for example, is that the Veterans Administration is no longer reporting data on their cancer patients (they claim patient privacy is being threatened) because their information systems still don't work and the people who might know how to make it work are being snapped up by private industry.

There's a long tradition of our government bureaucracy being resistant to sudden policy shifts, making it hard to control. So, it was logical for people whose primary interest is control to want to replace bureaucrats with machines; and electronic machines, at that. Even though everybody knows that the information that comes out is only as good as what goes in and even automatic feeds have to be monitored.

So, we've got a mess. That people like Brent Wilkes were able to get contracts from the Pentagon to transfer documents relating to the invasion of Panama into an electronic digital format for no apparent useful purpose (the Pentagon claims the task had already been accomplished) just seems like another example of people taking advantage of a fascination with "information technology" by people who don't know the first thing about it. Which, aside from the fact that hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in Iraq to set up an electronic monitoring and missile defense shield, is actually sort of reassuring. None of what they're planning will actually work. And, as soon as we get over being afraid of the bits and the bots and throw them all out, we can get back to living life as it ought to be lived--caring for each other and trusting and having no need for spying. And that's how we reclaim our liberty.

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