Big Brother's Big Eye

An elderly Albuquerque couple, lounging in the backyard one cool New Mexico evening, heard a roar from above. Then a light appeared, focusing with terrifying intensity on the man and woman. A UFO? Hallucination? Not at all. The source was the Albuquerque police department's "spy in the sky" plane on a routine patrol. "It scared the world out of us," the man said later. "It reminded us of George Orwell's 1984." The low-flying craft operates by daylight too. A woman complained that she could no longer sunbathe on her roof because the plane kept circling overhead.

More than 100 complaints about assorted varieties of snooping have been filed by Albuquerque-area residents in response to an unusual month-long educational campaign by the New Mexico Civil Liberties Union. If any area resident was unaware of Big Brother when the $50,000 publicity effort began, he was saturated with the image by last week. Along the freeways, billboards were filled with an eerily staring human eye. Similar eyes glared balefully from a dozen small ads in a single day's newspaper. Television spots showed a grade-school girl playing unconcernedly, then frozen into a prisoner-like pose with a Social Security number on a placard hung from her neck.

A "Mission Control" sequence depicted the launching of a pyramid with a staring eye on top, like that on the reverse of a dollar bill.

The idea was first promoted by a group of self-styled "alternative culture" activists, then endorsed by no less a conservative than Congressman Barry Goldwater Jr. Designed as a pilot program, the campaign and its response have provided a representative sample of what--and who--is bugging citizens all over the U.S. The most common complaints concerned the difficulty of penetrating the bureaucratic labyrinth, only to find a Minotaur at the end. Almost as numerous have been insoluble hassles with billing computers and instances in which a would-be buyer was turned down because a credit bureau provided a report based on unfavorable but unchecked information. (Some credit-bureau employees admitted that investigators are afraid of losing their jobs if they fail to turn in any unfavorable material about a subject; they occasionally fabricate negative information.) Many complaints involved the improper release of military records--in most cases, from cryptic, numbered coding on supposedly honorable discharges--and the illegal disclosure of bank data.

The project directors were determined to go beyond invasions of privacy, however serious, to the broad area of "control by technology, whether by a king or a computer or a bureaucracy." An especially chilling example of such control came from a woman who said she had worked all her life to be sure her daughter could go to college. Then she found that the high school girl had been suddenly transferred from a college preparatory curriculum to vocational courses. The school refused all information, and officials of the federally funded vocational program to which the daughter was assigned would give no reasonable explanation. Their response amounted to: "This was devised by experts who know what's in the best interests of your daughter." From such cases the Civil Liberties Union will choose which of Big Brother's practices will be the targets of court action.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.