The battle between individual rights and the powers of the State is reaching a frenzy across the globe. Never before has technology given us such freedom to create, to invent, and to escape traditional boundaries. And never before has technology given the State such a chance to control us. In this series of articles exclusive to Free Software Magazine, I’ll take you into some of the warzones and show you what it’s like at the front-line…

The rise of the machines

As a teenager, I once played a Vic-20 cassette in a normal player and listened to the sounds it made. This was the first time I heard what machine voices sounded like. Ten years later in the nineties, to millions like me around the world, the machine voices of our modems were our Pavlov’s bell, signalling our connection to the wide world of bulletin boards, gopher sites, access points, remote shells, FTP sites, and finally web sites.

If there is a single sound that represented the rise of the age of the machines, it was the sound of a modem blasting its square waves across crude copper wires, creating a circuit, carrying bits, bytes, kilobytes, megabytes down the ether to our PCs.

If there is a single sound that represented the rise of the age of the machines, it was the sound of a modem blasting its square waves across crude copper wires

Fast forward ten more years and the machines have literally taken over our lives. I can’t complain. Every technological wet dream I ever had has come true. My huge music library is digital, my friends are online, across the globe, my family are a mobile phone call away. The crutches of the physical world have fallen away, and we run free, carried by wave upon wave of chattering digital devices.

The bitter irony is that the same technology that gives us Google has also enabled the rise of a new kind of autocracy, one based on the same information systems that I, as a programmer, helped build.

The virtual walls

The European Union (where I live) is going to build the largest database in the world. Well, that’s what they say. I think there are larger databases, but this one is going to be pretty huge anyhow. The idea is that every time you apply for a visa to any Schengen country, your data will be registered centrally. Today it’s a mess. You can ask for a visa from the Spanish embassy, and if they say “no”, you pop down the road to the French embassy and try there. This is such a big loophole that millions of people from warm countries still manage to sneak into Europe every year.

I’m often impressed by the courage of immigrants, who basically leave everything behind to start a new life in a cold, strange, basically hostile country. Most never regain any kind of prosperity. I’ve seen Congolese bankers and managers work as van drivers. They do it because at least their kids will get a chance at a decent education, and a life without violence.

You’d think that the EU, starving of young people, with huge ranks of pensioners to feed and look after, would welcome these immigrants with open arms. After all, they are people who have crossed deserts and oceans and mountains. They are by definition the most ambitious, the hardest working, the toughest. You’d think that the US model, where generation after generation of immigrant has kept the economy vibrant and healthy, would inspire Europe to at least offering a green-card style programme.

You’d be wrong. Europe’s elite considers immigrants to be alien, dirty, and noisy, and wants to keep them out. So, Europe is going to build a wall, the largest wall ever seen, that will protect Europe’s long borders from this wave of unwanted humanity. It can’t build a physical wall of stone and mortar, as China did during the Chin dynasty. So, it’s building a virtual wall, from databases and computers.

The mandarins

Europe’s Great Wall, which will track the comings and goings of its unwanted aliens, is just one of many projects. Politics, you see, is not a single-minded thing. It’s all about ambitious individuals who spend their days and nights hacking their own systems to try to get more budget, more power, more leverage.

Somewhere, in an office in Brussels, sits a man. He is not elected, he is a permanent part of the EU structures, a nameless mandarin who works for the Commission. He has been pushing to get the Great Wall project approved. There was huge resistance from the privacy and human rights organisations. National governments opposed his ideas, sensing that their electorates would distrust such a plan. But he was prepared for that. The plan is now a “Directive”, and will soon be put onto paper by his people, presented by the Commission to the Council for a vote, and thus to the Parliament.

The European Parliament, who quite hate the Commission and Council, will try to change, or reject the directive. Our mandarin expects this; so, like a good negotiator, he has added a number of very extreme clauses and based the entire directive on the “need to fight terrorism”.

Sometime next year, this directive will come before the Parliament, which will have only a week or two to study the large and complex text. Parliament votes on ten or more directives each month. Most votes follow party lines. The mandarin has spent considerable effort, money, and political favours, in making sure the leaders of the two main parties will promote his cause and force the MEPs to vote correctly. They will insist on a public show, for their parties, in which they will “force” the Council of Ministers to accept a “compromise agreement”, taking out all of the extreme articles and leaving just the essentials behind.

The directive will pass, almost unnoticed by the media. Large businesses will tender for the project, and several billion Euro will be budgetted for the work.

The genius who designed the Great Wall is now promoted as the man to make it work. He has a new salary, assistants, travel expenses, and for the four or five years it will take to build this system, plus ten years of running it, he will live like a king. You’d think that our political systems were driven by some higher purpose than the amoral self-interest of individuals, but this is what it comes down to: a few people who manipulate the system into spending billions on dubious projects so that they can take their direct or indirect cut.

My story about the Great Wall of Europe is true, though I’ve imagined the main character, and the story is not yet finished. The directive has not yet been given any “legal basis”, it’s still just a well-developed plan. Like many plans—including a similar one to finger-print and ID every EU citizen—it depends on darkness and obscurity, on stealth and surprise.