Spitzer and the Security State

Atomized Junior on Eliot Spitzer and what his fall portends:

What elites have to fear is other elites. Elites are insulated from ordinary rules and trouble. They do not fall unless enemies they have manufactured among the powerful tip them to the mob. All this is no more than tempest in a teapot. A theatre in which celebrity is the usual echo or shadow.

A observation (via Laura Rozen's War and Piece) made by Jack M. Balkin in the web log he maintains, The Spitzer Case and the National Surveillance State - Balkinization, that the newly created rules for financial transaction observations under the Patriot act were leveraged against Eliot Spitzer. This as he argues point out the potential danger of such surveillance being continually refined, extended in scope and narrowed in focus until it can be used to target anyone and anything. Protected from observation of its decision process, out of reach of any meaningful oversight, by its National Security status. The only outcome of the confluence of such degrees of power and secrecy is immediate even instantaneous malfeasance corruption and criminality. You damage more than you protect.

The defensive and entranced nature of the security state into which the United States is descending looks towards a coming class of supremely empowered elites who will place themselves with deliberate care at the head of technological and particularly informational apexes, out of which they will declare a protected property. We glide smoothly towards a gilded era of mass society police state.

Comments

[JJ Commoner]

These paras from Atomized Junior remind me of what could be called the dark side of wirearchy.

[Phil]

Peer to peer and transparent is one thing, but one way surveillance from the top down, from behind a firewall protected by laws, propaganda, and brute force, is something else again. How Homeland Security completes the project of J. Edgar Hoover to have a control file on all political enemies seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the public press. Maybe the editors are concerned about the file being kept on them?