Rumors of New Words

Execupundit put up this quote:

The data bank society is nearly upon us now. We must program the programmers while [there] is still some personal liberty left. - Senator Barry Goldwater, 1974

The 'data bank society'. That's a new term for me. Try and look up the quote but got almost nothing. I did find that 'data bank society' is the title of a book written by Malcolm Warner and Mike Stone, whoever they are.

Goodreads has this to say about it:

This study, written in the context of its first publication in 1970, discusses and documents the invasion of privacy by the corporation and the social institution in the search for efficiency in information processing. Discussing areas such as the impact of the computer on administration, privacy and the storage on information, the authors assess the technical and social feasibility of constructing integrated data banks to cover the details of populations. The book was hugely influential both in terms of scholarship and legislation, and the years following saw the Data Protection Act of 1984, which was then consolidated by the Act of 1998. The topics under discussion remain of great concern to the public in our increasingly web-based world, ensuring the continued relevance of this title to academics and students with an interest in data protection and public privacy.

The 'data bank society'. I suppose that's who we are now. We have computer records about all kinds of things. Is it going to be a threat? Depends on what we want to spend our money on.

Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, half of the people in East Germany worked for the secret police (Stasi). Okay, it wasn't half, but it was a heck of large percentage. You wanna keep the proles in line, you gotta have people out there with billy clubs making sure they're toeing the line. Not to mention the huge administrative complex you would need to accept and process all the reports of indiscretions. You want to run a totalitarian state, you have to divert a large portion of your budget into keeping the lid on the proles.

Espionage is very similar. It takes man-days to keep an eye on a person, follow them around and not get caught. This showed up in Perry Mason the other night. Mostly cop shows don't show you horribly boring stake outs, they just mention it passing. Occasionally we get a few seconds of a stake out where one of the characters makes a witty remark. In Perry, we've got Paul hiring his buddy to stake out a corner where the bad guys hang out. Cash money, by the hour, I think they were trading eight hour shifts, went on a for a couple of days at least. 

I was going to say something about how we are spending too much money on other things for any of the national agencies, the ones who have access to the data bases, to have the man power to bother everyone, but since all the money seems to being pulled out of thin air, I don't know if it makes any difference.