Soon, you could own your very own satellite spy photos--for about $2,200 a shot. WorldView Imaging of Livermore, Calif., has become the first company to get a government license to launch small, inexpen- sive spy satellites...that take super-sharp photos from 250 miles up... WorldView's photos will be able to distinguish between two cars parked three yards apart.*
WorldView's chairman just happens to be Walter Scott, former head of the so-called "Star Wars" satellite program at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories.
THE FOLLOWING WILL TAKE A BIT OF READING ….BUT WELL WORTH THE EFFORT……..
"[E]x-Los Angeles police chief, now state senator Ed Davis (Republican - Valencia) has proposed the use of a geosynclinical space satellite to counter pandemic car theft in the region," writes Mike Davis. "Once in orbit, of course, the role of a law enforcement satellite would grow to encompass other forms of surveillance and control."* Davis augurs a near-future Los Angeles in which upper-class fear of racial unrest, compounded by hysteria over gangs, has ushered in the universal electronic identification of people and property, tracked through centralized surveillance. A geosynchronous satellite would extend an electronic net over Los Angeles's ever-expanding sprawl, exposing each tagged citizen or possession to the unblinking scrutiny of the eye in the sky.
Before dismissing Davis's speculations as sci-fi for disaffected leftists, one would do well to remember the tamper-proof electronic bracelets used to monitor prisoners under house arrest, and their workplace counterpart, the active badge, an I.D. card-sized, clip-on microcomputer invented at the Olivetti Research Laboratory, in Cambridge, England. Beaming signals to a central system, the badge allows employers to track employee movements, determining what room an individual is currently in and approximately how long he has been there. "The data from the badges can also be displayed on a screen showing a model of an entire office floor," a New York Times article reports, "thus visually indicating where each badge-wearer is in relation to everyone else."* Married to a radio satellite network such as the U.S. military's Global Positioning System, which transmitted geographic coordinates to ground troops during the Gulf War, thereby allowing soldiers equipped with hand-held receivers to pinpoint their locations within 10 feet, such badges and bracelets might make the uninterrupted tracking of each and every citizen a reality.
For now, though, law enforcement will have to content itself with surveillance technology of the sort used by the LAPD's "Astro" program---French Aerospatiale choppers whose "forward-looking infra-red cameras are extraordinary night eyes that can easily form heat images from a single burning cigarette, while their thirty-million-candlepower spotlights, appropriately called 'Nightsun,' can literally turn the night into day."*
Meanwhile, on the ground below, growing numbers of Americans are turning arcane gadgets formerly known only to CIA operatives and political dirty tricksters on each other. A book called How to Eavesdrop on Your Neighbors is readily available, as is the Listenaider, a listening device disguised as a Walkman, and the Mail Inspector, a spray that renders envelopes transparent.* A New York City snoop shop called Spy World does a brisk business in night vision goggles, briefcases with secret cameras, and Spy Glasses with rear-view mirrors. The owner, a former "bug planter" for the NYPD, will install concealed cameras for jealous spouses or lovers who wonder what goes on in the bedroom when they're not home. Of course, unfaithful partners can always turn the tables with a visit to Manhattan's Counter Spy Shop, where cameras disguised as cigarette lighters, lie-detector telephones that measure microtremors in a caller's voice, and $14,000 "Pentagon level" digital phone tap detectors can be had.
"It is phenomenal what is available out there," marvels Tom Carpenter, an attorney with the Government Accountability Project, a private group that protects whistleblowers from corporate surveillance, among other things. "You have remote-control cameras, long distance microphones, cellular phones---all perfectly legal---that can be operated by one person with a modem, who can spy on you from his own home."*
What was once the stuff of paranoid delusions is, increasingly, quotidian reality. Sifting through my mail, I find yet another letter warning me that time is running out on a limited offer to sign up, free of connection charge, for Call ID, a PHONESMARTsm service that displays the phone numbers of incoming calls on a small box attached to the subscriber's phone. The letter is from New York Telephone, whose unintentionally Orwellian tagline---"We're all connected"---hints at the dark side of McLuhan's global village. You can run but you can't hide, in a wired world. "The entire globe is turning into one nervous system," observed writer William E. Burrows in the PBS program, Space Age. "When we sneeze, the Germans hear it; when the Japanese hiccup, the Italians hear it."
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault considered the rise of the disciplinary society, governed not by "the relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline,"* during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The disciplinary society, which Foucault argues had its inception in "lock up" measures taken in plague- stricken towns, is characterized by a body of "physicopolitical" techniques: enclosed, partitioned spaces; unrelieved inspection by unseen but all-seeing observers; and the registration, classification and never-ending examination of the individual by means of a bureaucratic network linking the periphery of power with a centralized data-processing agency. Moreover, Foucault emphasized, these techniques may be abstracted from the specific historical institutions and apparatuses with which they are associated, into the "infinitely generalizable mechanism" of "panopticism" (after the institution set forth by Jeremy Bentham in his 1791 treatise, Panopticon).
Bentham's dream of "a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society without interruption in space or in time"* comes true in an image world whose inhabitants have internalized the paranoid psychology of high-tech panopticism. It is in the insidious nature of panopticism, maintains Foucault, that he who is under surveillance and is aware of his predicament "assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection."* A character in DeLillo's Running Dog dances around this idea, observing,
"When technology reaches a certain level, people begin to feel like criminals... someone is after you, the computers maybe, the machine-police. The facts about you and your whole existence have been collected... It's the presence alone, the very fact... of technology, that makes us feel we're committing crimes".*
Panopticism, in a cybernetic society, has given rise to an ocular culture in which scopophilia, voyeurism, narcissism, and "technommetaphobia," the fear of inhuman eyes,* are everywhere in evidence. Their traces are legible in the amateur porn that affords a peephole into the Joneses' bedroom; in Totally Hidden Video, which turns covert operations into practical jokes (and vice versa); and in I Witness Video, a show that airs news footage shot by junior Zapruders. During commercial breaks, children are beguiled by ads for Nintendo's Superscope 6, a video game-cum-spyglass that seems to belong in 1984 ("Hardly a week passed in which the Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdrop- ping little sneak... had denounced his parents to the Thought Police").
