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Sometimes it seems as though everyone everywhere believes he has the right to know anything and everything about us. No matter how trivial, annoying, insulting, or irrelevant a fact might be, someone somewhere will make it his job to learn that tidbit of information.
I go into a large electronics store, they ask for my birth date.
I go into a discount variety store, they ask for my zip code.
I go into the hospital for an eye checkup, they ask me for a picture identification card.
I go online, they ask for my email address.
After awhile, what I really want to tell them is: Go to hell.
Sometimes I do. (Especially if it's a telemarketer who refuses to accept my polite, "Please remove this number from your call list.")
I have complained when a store requested information about me that has nothing to do with my business there. I offer them cash, they exchange the product I want for the green. If I charge the cost, then other than an electronic account-confirmation and my signature, they should need nothing else from me. In a few instances, the store has changed its policy and no longer asks when I was born or where I live.
As snoopy as private companies can be, if I grow sufficiently irate, I can simply leave the store empty-handed...and there's not a damn thing they can do about my exit. They lose my patronage, and I have to seek elsewhere for the good I want.
Oh, that I had that luxury when dealing with that ultimate snoop, the State...
Remember the census? Remember how long ago that was? For me, it was just last week. My "household" was one of the "lucky" ones chosen for an excruciatingly long follow-up period in which the busybodies and Peeping Toms of the Census Bureau bombard me with a host of queries that have exactly zilch to do with the actual purpose of the census, i.e., to determine apportionment for voting and representation (a dubious goal, even at that).
"Did you work last week?" "How many hours did you work?" "Where did you work?" "What level of education do you have?" "Has that changed since I last spoke with you?" (As though I'm constantly earning new degrees every friggin' month...) "What about your spouse?" "Have you taken a shower in the past week?"
(Okay...that last one isn't real...though I wouldn't put it past the State to seek such information.)
As it is, I would be inundated with a flood of even more immaterial and impertinent questions if I did not make it frostily clear that I will only answer those questions mandated by law. (I suppose I could refuse to answer any questions and deal with the penalties and/or prosecution resulting from my obstinance, but if and when I decide to martyr myself, it will be for something more significant and important to me than the census.)
The insatiable gluttony of the State for information about its subjects is, of course, completely intelligible. Information is power. With power comes control. With control comes the ability to steal, to dictate, to mold, to destroy.
Plus, for the minions of Authority and Domination, such meddling, such voyeurism is no doubt a rush, better than sex, better than drugs, better than a week in Vegas.
Prodding, probing, searching, rummaging, rifling, inspecting, scrutinizing, scanning, examining, frisking...whatever kind of shakedown is afoot, you may rest assured that the State will ferret out your deepest, darkest, most guarded secrets as it ransacks your life to further its own nefarious ends. In an age of diminishing privacy even in "private" life, your "public" self is subject to a scrutiny that would put a proctologist to shame.
I've written before about the idiocy and anti-liberty nature of State-mandated ID cards (see, for example, "Your Papers Please"). The corrosive, intrusive nature of coercively imposed identification and registration is a tool well-suited to a government intent more on consolidating its grip around our throats than in upholding its obligation to protect our rights. As Ayn Rand said, "Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy... Civilization is the process of setting man free from men." (The Fountainhead)
By that standard, we are sliding inexorably towards a greater and more vicious savagery.
Unlike some libertarians who think the answer to a forced loss of our privacy is to abandon all privacy -- i.e., to live "transparently" -- and who naively believe the State will accede to full disclosure of its own machinations in tandem with its reaming of us for info, I maintain that the State has no right to any information about who I am or what I am doing that I do not choose to share with it. (This assumes, of course, that I am not, for instance, a legitimate suspect in an actual rights-violating crime or some similar, rarely occurring situation.)
In a moral society, my life would belong to me...and so would my privacy.
In a moral society, I would not have to register my car or provide a license to prove who I am to any police officer who felt the odd urge to stop me.
In a moral society, I would not be subject to random checkpoints designed to catch such "ne'er-do-wells" as seat belt violators, social drinkers, or casual drug users. (If someone is driving impaired and "under the influence," the minor matter of "probable cause" should guide any traffic citations and/or arrests.)
In a moral society, if an officer wanted to "browse" through my car if I were stopped for a traffic violation, a duly issued warrant would be required "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." (The Fourth Amendment, The Bill of Rights, The Constitution of the United States; source citation provided for any State-educated public "servants" who may yet remain innocent of knowledge regarding the supreme law of this country.)
The unprincipled members of our schizophrenic United States Supreme Court, unfortunately, find such concerns for privacy unfounded, unnecessary, and unjustified.
In a pair of recent cases, the Supremes let stand without review an expansion of police power that sanctions State agents foraging through a private citizen's car if he refuses or fails to provide a vehicle registration or driver's license.
In an AP story, Gina Holland reports that, "Officers decided to search themselves [sic; if only they had just "searched themselves"...] for registration and in both cases found drugs under the seats. The [California] state [supreme] court said warrant-less searches were allowed anywhere documents 'reasonably may be expected to be found.'... Under the latest decision, officers who stop someone for a traffic violation can look pretty much anywhere in a car -- possibly even the trunk."
In 1998, the Supremes told us "that lawmen cannot search people and their cars after ticketing them for routine traffic violations. Searches without suspicion of other wrongdoing are unreasonable and unconstitutional, the court held."
So much for consistency, the hallmark of objectively valid law...
When the State completes its ultimate usurpation of our autonomy -- whether directly by means of an officially sanctioned national ID card or surreptitiously via "consolidated" state drivers licenses -- it will be able to demand you prove who are you in a park, in your home, in your car, in a store, in a hospital, in your job, in your bank, or any other damned place it chooses to ask, "Who are you?"
And don't ask why.
They just really really wanna know.
Holland, Gina, "Supreme Court refuses to hear police search cases." 10-21-02. http://www.sacbee.com/state_wire/story/4882187p-5894441c.html
