Terry Gilliam's 1985 tragicomedy Brazil begins with a housefly's 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. Buttle's neighbour becomes a terror suspect herself when she petitions the regime's bureaucracy for answers to his fate.
Three decades on, Gilliam's 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.
Brazil's 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 today's Tuttles.
U.S. president Barack Obama made an election promise to close the detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, and is still working on that file five years on. If that's 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.)
Obama's 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 Harper's muzzling of Canadian federal scientists seems like kindergarten in comparison.
"Nobody is listening to your telephone calls," the president assures Americans. The previously secret surveillance programs supposedly operate by reading metadata only: the time, duration, subject headings, and addresses of communications.: 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. Canada's Communication Security Establishment also trolls Internet, telephone and other traffic for metadata, according to the Globe and Mail. Britain's 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, it's win-win if initial media focus and public outrage pales into yesterdays news, leaving behind a mildly paranoiac citizenry that's 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. We're 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 Gilliam's slapstick dystopia.
www.geoffolson.com
