Can science fiction show average Americans a way to take back their government? Is there a high-tech equivalent to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington or All the President’s Men? I’ll explore the concept in this series of blog posts. You can find part one and part three at the links.
“My tearless retina takes pictures that can prove”
Last time, I hinted that we can clear up conspiracy-theory levels of misinformation about the inner workings of the US government and give the average American faith that the government is living up to civics class ideals. On top of that, we can implement it with off-the-shelf technology, for a pittance relative to the US Federal budget, and it would almost certainly pay for itself many times over.
What is it?
A similar concept, but one we could implement today, builds on the concept of The Transparent Society* described by frequent Analog contributor David Brin. However, the particular embodiment is original to me AFAICT:
Audio-video recording teams follow the President, Vice-President, every Cabinet secretary, every member of the House and Senate, every Supreme Court justice, and every other presidential appointee at all times. Okay, the camera and microphone teams won’t follow the elected or appointed official into the bathroom, the bedroom (but only if they go in with their spouse), or in private time with their families.
We won’t stop there. We’ll record their phone calls; copy their emails; and scan their postal mail. Plus, we’ll track the debits and credits in their bank accounts and the buys and sells in their stock holdings.
On top of all that, we’ll post every recording and all the data we collect online for any US citizen to access for free.
We might permit a few narrow exceptions. Ambassadors speaking with foreign governments. Military strategy discussions during wartime. But few and narrow. Perhaps we’ll record the meetings but not release them for a year.
In sum, we’ll subject our politicians to round-the-clock surveillance. Maybe we’ll call it Electric Eye 2.0*.
But, but…
Impractical?
Maybe.
Impossible?
Not at all.
Let’s add up the numbers. The President, VP, and Cabinet secretaries = 17. There are 535 members of the House and Senate (538 if we include the observers from DC, Guam, and Puerto Rico). About 180 ambassadors. And in the ballpark of 1000-1200 other positions (Federal judges, commissioners of independent agencies, very senior military officers, etc). Rounding up, call it 2000 politicians.
Assume each monitored politician requires four teams of two people to record them around-the-clock. That’s 4 * 2 * 2000 = 16,000 workers on recording teams. Double that to cover the recording of phone calls, emails, letters, and the IT required to keep it online. Then add 50% for support staff. That’s 48,000 employees. At an average federal government employee annual salary of about $90,000 (nice work if you can get it), monitoring politicians around the clock would cost taxpayers $4.32 billion per year. We can round that up to $10 billion per year to cover the cost of the server farm providing the data, etc.
(If that number seems off, leave a comment or email me. Even if the number is closer to $100 billion, the reasoning holds up).
As I said last time, $10 billion is not a lot of money in comparison to the US federal budget (~$6.6 trillion in fiscal year 2020, or about 0.15%). (For comparison, $10 billion comes to about 1/5 of NASA’s annual budget).
On top of that, you and I both know it would pay for itself many times over.
It should be obvious why. America’s elites use lobbyists and lawyers to get politicians to pass legislation and regulatory agencies to give them approvals, the good of society and the preferences of voters be damned. This corrupt traffic is only successful because it’s conducted in private.
Which is why any serious effort to implement this idea will raise a storm of opposition from elected officials from both major US political parties. (Yes, I know the politicians from your party are selfless public servants, and only the ones from the other party are the problem. Humor me).
However, we can rebut them with the same line they fed us, when the Patriot Act impinged on civil liberties after passing both houses of Congress by huge majorities (357-66 and 98-1): “The innocent have nothing to fear.”
Raymund, don’t you always say, “stories only happen when things go wrong”?
Assume an overwhelming wave of popular outrage at the DC sausage factory forces Congress and the President to bend the knee and agree to put themselves under the microscope. Problem solved! Politicians will never again take bribes. Lobbyists will never again push sweetheart laws through Congress unread by the Representatives and Senators voting on them. The US will never again bomb a country based on bad intel. The American people will rest assured that the vision of the Founding Fathers or their favorite precedent-setting Presidents will be implemented. If any conspiracies have taken root in DC, they’ll be exposed and eliminated.
Except we all know, if there’s a system, someone will try to game it.
First, presidential sons and sons-in-law have long histories of using their position to enrich themselves. Whether their fathers knew remains a matter of conjecture. If politicians can communicate with their children without fear of eavesdroppers, unscrupulous politicians (is the adjective redundant?) can launder influence peddling through that family relationship.
Second, there are other ways to hide communications and other malfeasance. Burner phones or handwritten letters left by the cleaning service in the politician’s private quarters. Private codes worked out with a crony before a politician reaches office, reminiscent of Mafia dons ordering hits by referring to the target as “a rock in my shoe.” Anonymous offshore bank accounts to hide bribes until politicians leave office. Of these concepts, hidden communications were the first work-around to occur to me, of which I’ll talk more in a few days.
Third, decision making can get pushed down to lower levels of government. Politicians, generals, and admirals can order their aides and subordinate officers what to do for the benefit of the cameras, with a tacit understanding that they really should do the opposite. Though aides and subordinates might not get the hint. Another point: they might get the hint but balk at doing something shady or criminal, because if they get caught, they’ll twist in the wind, while the boss who hinted they should commit the foul deed will claim plausible deniability.
Summing up, even if thousands of camera crews and millions of Americans through them watch politicians like hawks, the solution isn’t perfect. As Thomas Jefferson didn’t actually say, “The price of liberty is eternal vigilance.”
Maybe so, but after decades of declining trust in most American institutions, an imperfect solution is better than none.
This post is adapted from my essay “How to Save the World” published at The Astounding Analog Companion
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