I wrote Dangerous Wind partly as a cautionary tale. What will the heads of governments do to stop what they perceive as a threat to them? Government officials tell us, “You don’t have to worry (about our information gathering, searches, etc.) if you’re not doing anything wrong.” But what if the laws are written in such a way that every one of us is doing something wrong? Or even worse, what if government is defining what is right and wrong instead of we the people?
George Washington, the president I admire most, said, “Government is not reason, it is not eloquence. It is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearsome master.”
Since my book was published, stories of malfeasance by the IRS and NSA and perhaps other alphabet agencies have come to light. (Love those initials.) Stories of groups being treated differently, depending on their beliefs; stories of reams of information being collected on everybody. Where has our privacy gone? Where have our rights gone?
Government officials say to trust them; they are collecting information to root out terrorists. How do we know this? They can’t tell us what they’re doing with this information because that would help the terrorists. Oh, I get it. In order to protect us you have to keep us in the dark. Keep us in a constant state of blind panic and we’ll let you do anything.
Dangerous Wind is the story of governments going after a man who they claim is trying to bring about their downfall. Is he doing anything illegal or is he just making governmental officials nervous because he’s uncovering weaknesses in the system? Weaknesses propagated by these same officials? Are they fearful they might be stripped of their power? Power, as Lord Acton told us, tends to corrupt people. Once they have power they will go to extremes to hang onto it.
Dangerous Wind is fiction, but is fiction becoming reality faster than I’d hoped it would? At the end of the Constitutional Convention Ben Franklin is supposed to have said, in answer to a question, that we have a republic rather than a monarchy—“…if you can keep it.” Can we keep it?
Technology will move forward with free enterprise motivation and innovation inexorably. I am finding it difficult to imagine the computer technology of as little as 20 years from now. Will it, like air travel, be stalled at the same speed reached in the 1950s having regressed from supersonic flight back to subsonic, or nuclear power having reached fission, never realized fusion as a commercial source.
With that in mind, we have to wonder with the power of information technology to both collect and to analyze information, whether or not access to this information should be in political hands of those in power or open to the people. In any event, we're finding out who has no clothes or not.
Ron