Eye On America [Jun 12, 2003]

The recent resignation of Howell Raines from The New York Times, which I celebrated by renting a loft in Soho and throwing a massive teabagging party with all my friends, is conclusive proof that blogs have arrived as the primary form of character assassination in America. And when I say "character assassination," I mean "cleaning out the Fifth Column gutter by blowing minor details of a story way out of proportion." Without the analytical work of hundreds, nay, thousands, of creepily-obsessed geeks with an inflated sense of self-importance, King Howell would still be spreading his lies today.

That doesn't mean, of course, that you can trust everything you read on the Internet. It used to be that way, but democracy means that lies sometimes leak into the water supply. For instance, read this article by Elaine Cassel in Counterpunch, a normally reliable, even-handed publication. Cassel claims to be a "lawyer" and a teacher of "psychology." She reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered his prosecutors to review decades-old wiretaps and secret searches on more than 4500 people. She thinks this is a bad thing. But Ashcroft is just trying to determine if those people can be slapped with criminal charges under the totally just anti-terrorist legislation we call The Patriot Act.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with examining documents based on 25-year-old spy materials and using them to arrest people in secret in the middle of the night and subsuquently hold them indefinitely without charges. Falsifiers of the truth, like Cassel, still seem unwilling to realize that we're at war, facing a faceless enemy without name. Any one of her friends, or enemies, or someone she sees at the store, could be a terrorist who wants to kill her. No amount of paranoid dissembling is going to change that reality.

I suppose the good psychologist is also opposed to the new "Life Log" program being developed by DARPA, a strange but necessary cabal of scientists favored by the Bush Administration. What could be more benign than a centralized electronic system to keep track of every movement of every person in the United States? In fact, I don't think Life Log goes far enough. At SurveillanceCon 2002, my beleagured manservant Roger and I unveiled an idea for an invention that we'd hatched mostly to help us get out of debt.

It's called PeeTracker. Under our plan, every person in the United States would have a tiny microchip/satellite dish installed in their urethra. Therefore, when you pee, each molecule of your urine would contain a clear, easily traceable signal full of information. The second your toilet flushed, the government would know your exact location, your general mood, and whether or not you'd eaten asparagus recently. Your urine would be genetically branded, so if terrorists set off a nuclear bomb killing everyone on the Eastern Seaboard, we could reproduce the Eastern Seaboard through cloning. Only this time we'd get it right and populate the coastal plains with people who bear the "proper" genetic stamp.

Oh, I know it seems like a pipe dream. But five years ago, didn't the fact that bloggers would bring down the editor of the world's greatest newspaper also seem like a pipe dream? On the Internet, anything is possible.