"So the combination to the air shield," intones Rick Moranis as Dark Helmet in the classic Mel Brooks film "Spaceballs," "is one, two, three, four … five? … That's the stupidest combination I've ever heard ... the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!" It's a funny moment in a funny movie, the kind of thing that college students used to quote to each other when they weren't repeating lines from Monty Python sketches. For all I know, they still do ... but maybe they're Twittering those lines to each other now.
The U.K.'s The Register recently reported on data from a phishing attack on Hotmail e-mail accounts. The data from the attack provided analysts with a window into the luggage-combination idiocy of quite a few e-mail users, because the most common password discovered – meaning the most common password used by e-mail account owners operating independently of each other through this particular provider's sample – was "123456."
Now, obviously, this isn't a good idea. Your password should be much "stronger" than that. It should be a nonsense word or phrase that only you know, something you never speak aloud and that has no specific associations to you. It should contain upper and lower case letters, numbers, and even random punctuation. It should be changed often.
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Given this, which most of you know already, I'm going to ask you a seemingly random question: What do the movie "Spaceballs," the password habits of e-mail users, omnipresent electronic technology and New York City's leftist mayor, Michael Bloomberg, have in common? By this I mean apart from the immediate association one may draw between Mel Brooks' fumbling, incompetent "President Skroob" and the unctuous Bloomberg, whom I'm willing to believe would actually, physically use as toilet paper an original copy of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights if he thought no one was looking.
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No, what all of these concepts have in common, apart from their relation to the electronic technology that pervades, facilitates and even vexes every aspect of human endeavor in modern society, is a very simple, even timeless theme. That theme is control.
The New York Times recently quoted Bloomberg uttering the sort of casually chilling language one expects from statist politicians. It is no less disturbing for being typical of Bloomberg and his ilk, however. It seems New York City will be expanding a "network of private and public surveillance cameras, license plate readers and weapons sensors already established in Lower Manhattan" to a large portion of Midtown Manhattan, using $24 million in grant money from the Department of Homeland Security. The baleful, glassy gaze of Big Brother will thus extend its fish-eye lens to an even greater sweep of public life in New York City, no doubt making the Big Apple "Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes." So what did Bloomberg say? "We live in a world where we have to have a balance," he bleated smugly. "We can't just say everybody can go everyplace and do anything they want."
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Why, imagine that. A nation in which people can ... sharp intake of breath … go "everyplace"? And then, once they get there ... do anything they want? Why, it's unthinkable. The idea that you could, you know, travel to Midtown Manhattan and actually go into a Starbucks and get a tall Cafe Mocha without actually being under constant surveillance by your government, why ... that's nothing less than anarchy.
You may be smiling at my wry sarcasm, or you may not. What's truly not funny about this is that, to a tin-plated would-be dictator like Bloomberg, the idea that somewhere in Manhattan are citizens who are not conducting their business under the watchful and all-seeing high-tech cameras and license-plate readers of their government truly is anarchy.
Among our society's holders of power are those who believe their fellow citizens' freedom of action is a benefit to society – one that accrues to all – and those who believe others' freedom of action is a threat, a societal blight that must be curtailed for the general welfare of the community. Those who hold the latter view believe the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. They believe that community trumps individuality and that the individual is subordinate to the state. They pass laws seeking invasive search and seizure rights in ever-more-intimate areas of your life. They build infrastructure, most often using modern technology, to monitor, record, constrain and redirect your day-to-day conduct.
To leftists, to statists, to the leadership of the Democratic Party and to that party's fellow travelers among the "moderates" and liberals of the Republican Party, your freedom of action, your liberty to live your life as you see fit, is dangerous. That danger, to people like Bloomberg, must be stamped out. Statists of this type are smart enough to know that their power grabs must be incremental, but they are working toward controlling every part of your life nonetheless.
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You've known for a long time that you should change your password periodically, and that your password should be hard to guess. Regardless of your knowledge of this, many websites, software programs and operating systems force you to change your password, or to make your password "strong," nonetheless. The risk should be yours to assume, based on your own rational, adult decisions – yet technology takes this simple choice from you.
It is through technology like Bloomberg's inexorably creeping network of surveillance devices that many more, much more important choices will be taken from you. Your willingness to assume risk will no longer be a joke, to be repeated by moviegoers. Eventually it will be considered some manner of secular sin, if not a crime outright. Through the smallest increments are we dragged, password by password, website by website, toward a totalitarian future. From our fear and through our willingness to buy security with our freedoms will we be pushed, camera by camera, toward statist control of a formerly free citizenry.
