Terry Gilliams 1985 tragicomedy Brazil begins with a houseflys misadventure. After an annoyed civil servant flattens the insect, it falls into a teletype machine cranking out a list of terror suspects. The name Tuttle is misprinted as Buttle.
In a paramilitary raid on Christmas Eve, Archibald Buttle is arrested, hooded and shackled in a manner that anticipates the imagery of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib. The hurried recitation of his rights, which leaves no doubt that he has none whatsoever, plays like a preview of Homeland Security overreach.
To question the state is to invite punishment. Buttles neighbour becomes a terror suspect herself when she petitions the regimes bureaucracy for answers to his fate.
Three decades on, Gilliams absurdist sci-fi seems that much closer to a documentary. The nominal hero of the tale, Sam Lowry, is a civil servant pummelled nightly by visionary dreams. He becomes something a fly himself, caught in the nightmare gears of a surveillance state dependent on both real and manufactured fears.
Brazils security apparatus is really after Archibald Tuttle, a renegade air conditioning specialist who merrily breaks into buildings and homes to fix malfunctioning ventilation ducts. His unauthorized break-ins are echoed today by the whistleblowing exploits of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange and USA army private Bradley Manning. Their expressed motivations have been the same: to fix broken systems. Respectively on the run, cornered, and on trial, they are said to have compromised national security through the release of classified material. They are todays Tuttles.
U.S. president Barack Obama made an election promise to close Guantanamo Bay, and is still working on that file five years on. If thats not evidence for a broken system, what is? In 2009, former State Department official Lawrence Wilkerson said most of the prisoners at the black site were innocent. They were noncombatants who were in the wrong place at the wrong time: Buttles rather than Tuttles. (Prisoner releases and transfers have since reduced the Guantanamo numbers from a reported 240 to 166.)
Obamas administration has prosecuted more whistleblowers than any president before him. In an attempt to plug leaks, the White House has introduced The Insider Threat Program, a government program requiring federal employees to keep tabs on their co-workers for suspicious behaviour. Hammer this fact home ... leaking is tantamount to aiding the enemies of the United States, reads a 2012 Defense Department document on the snitch program, as revealed by McClatchy news. Prime Minister Stephen Harpers muzzling of Canadian federal scientists seems like kindergarten in comparison.
Nobody is listening to your telephone calls, the president assures Americans. If he is referring to the telecom-scraping PRISM system revealed by Snowden, thats technically correct it operates by reading metadata only: the time, length, and addresses of communications. This may actually be even worse than outright listening in, says author Christopher Simpson. Any kind of communication, from a wrong phone number to an email forwarded from someone you barely know, can plunk your particulars into a network subsuming persons of interest.
Canadians are hardly outside the Anglo-American panopticon, with its top-down transparency and bottom-up brick walls. Canadas Communication Security Establishment also trolls Internet, telephone and other traffic for metadata, according to the Globe and Mail. Britains Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) regularly taps transatlantic optic fibre cables for vast quantities of Internet and phone traffic, which it shares with the NSA.
Could these headline stories have a chilling effect on free speech, by making people anxious about their communications, both online and off? Absolutely, and the recent leaks may not be a total bother for the Powers That Be. From their perspective, its win-win if initial media focus and public outrage pales into yesterdays news, leaving behind a mildly paranoiac citizenry thats more cautious about what they tweet, text, blog, phone and publish.
Julian Assange has said that social networking sites like Facebook have turned the Internet into the biggest spy machine in history. Were all potential Tuttles and Buttles for the time being, at least until the tools of digital media are used to forge a true global democracy, rather than a real-life version of Terry Gilliams slapstick dystopia.
www.geoffolson.com
