Poul Anderson’s short story “Sam Hall,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1953, foresaw a 21st century U.S. police state which dominated the world, through use of advanced computer and surveillance technology.
Citizen Blank Blank, Anytown, Somewhere, U.S.A., approaches the hotel desk. “Single with bath.” … …
Citizen Blank takes out his wallet, extracts his card, gives it to the registry machine, an automatic set of gestures. Aluminum jaws close on it, copper teeth feel for the magnetic encodings, electronic tongue tastes the life of Citizen Blank.
Place and date of birth. Parents. Race. Religion. Educational, military and civilian service records. Marital status. Children, Occupations, from the beginning to the present. Affiliations. Physical measurements, fingerprints, retinals, blood type. Basic psychotype. Loyalty rating. Loyalty index as a function of time to moment of last test given. Click, click. Bzzz.
“Why are you here, sir?”
“Salesman. I expect to be in Cincinnati tomorrow night.”
The clerk (32 yrs., married, two children; NB, confidential, Jewish. To be kept out of key occupations) pushes buttons.
Click, click. The machine returns the card. Citizen Blank puts it back in his wallet. … …
The machine talks to itself. Click, click. A bulb winks at its neighbor as if they shared a private joke. The total signal goes out over the wires.
Accompanied by a thousand others, it shoots down the last cable and into the sorter unit of Central Records. Click, click. Bzzz. Whrrr. Wink and glow. The distorted molecules in a particular spool show the pattern of Citizen Blank, and this is sent back. It enters the comparison unit, to which the signal corresponding to him has also been shunted. The two are perfectly in phase; nothing wrong. Citizen Blank is staying in that town where, last night, he said he would, so he has not had to file a correction.
The new information is added to the record of Citizen Blank. The whole of his life returns to the memory bank. It is wiped from the scanner and comparison units, that these may be free for the next arrival.
The machine has swallowed and digested another day. It is content.
The surveillance technology that Poul Anderson envisioned in 1953 is today’s reality. Every telephone call, every credit card transaction, every Google search is on record and available to Homeland Security. The fascist government in Poul Anderson’s story does not exist, but we’re closer to it that we were in 1953, and the legal, institutional and technological infrastructure needed to implement such a police state is in place.
One of Anderson’s characters reflected on how this came to be.
A recollection touched him, booklegged stuff from the forties and fifties of the last century which he had read: French, German, British, Italian. The intellectuals had been fretful about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, hard sells, enormous chrome-plated automobiles (dollar grins, the Danes had called them), chewing gum, plastics. … None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: bloated government, unlimited armament, official nastiness, censors, secret police, chauvinism. … Well, for a while there had been objectors, but their own excesses and sillinesses discredited them, then later. …
It would be mean-spirited, small-minded and incorrect to blame Europeans for setting a bad example. But if somebody had described our present Homeland Security state to me back in 1953, I would have thought the person was talking about some central European dictatorship. I would have thought of our present reality as science fiction.
The NSA Is Building the World’s Largest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) for an article by James Bamford in Wired. Hat tip for this to Hal Bauer.
Click on Assange ‘The World Tomorrow’ — Cypherpunks uncut version for an extended discussion of Internet surveillance, privacy and freedom.
