Then there's your Media Access Control, or MAC, a 12-digit identification number used in networking. Every Ethernet card has a unique and permanent MAC address. Microsoft has placed MAC addresses within Word documents and within GUIDs.

Then there's Web bugs. A Web bug is a graphic image used to monitor who is reading a Web page or e-mail message. It is often transparent and only one pixel large, i.e., the size of a dot. A Web bug is not necessarily invisible. Any graphic on a Web page that is used for monitoring purposes can be considered a Web Bug. When they are made to be invisible it is to hide the fact that monitoring is taking place. For more on Web bugs, click here.

Faceless entities surreptitiously monitor your activities, online and elsewhere. To some this may appear hardly worth fretting over. The worst thing most people imagine is that corporations will use this information to devise advertising campaigns, targeted toward specific groups or individuals. Most people trust the corporate-government complex and willingly allow it to act as a sort of surrogate parent. They see nothing wrong with being tracked from cradle to grave, herded like livestock, thought for as if they were children, and experimented on without their knowledge or consent. This is a serious mistake. Sooner or later it will come home to roost.

Those of us who think for ourselves find it scary to contemplate how such an intimate knowledge of our personal preferences and private activities might eventually be used to brand each of us as members of a particular group. Imagine, for example, one day being denied health insurance because your care provider had access to records of your family's grocery shopping habits and concluded on the basis of what you ate and drank that you were not a good financial risk. Sound farfetched? Think again. What happens if the corporation that owns your grocery shopping records merges with the corporation that owns your health insurance provider? What if you try a different insurance provider only to discover that (surprise!) insurance providers pool data? The short version is you're Still Out of Luck (SOL).

This is not an unrealistic scenario. Mergers are the order of the day. Early last year DoubleClick Inc. announced a $1 billion merger with Abacus Direct Corporation. Abacus is a major catalog buying-behavior database manager.

The combination of DoubleClick's Internet presence and ability to use cookies to follow users around the Internet and Abacus's vast consumer database allows the new merged company, which operates under the name of DoubleClick Inc., to merge an Internet user's online habits with their real world habits and identity. For DoubleClick's customers this means the ability to "provide highly efficient, targeted and measurable marketing and advertising solutions through the Internet and other media." For consumers this represents an unprecedented level of monitoring. A lengthy discussion of this topic, including both general and technical viewpoints, is available (here).

– Richard Smith, Clamor February 2000

It gets worse. On Feb. 17, 2000 APB.com reported that both federal and New York-state authorities had launched separate inquiries into whether DoubleClick improperly amassed personal details about Internet users. Given law enforcement's long, sordid history of abusing the privacy of innocent citizens, it is difficult to imagine such inquiries not involving a long hard look at the dossiers themselves.

For that matter, go to APB.com's main page and check out the site's search engine. Ask it about DoubleClick. You'll have a very educational experience. Another good way to get up to speed on this stuff is to set your browser to ask you before it lets a server set a cookie. When a server tries to set a cookie a dialogue box will appear on the screen. Pay special attention to the part where it tells you how long the cookie will last. Sometimes it tells you. Sometimes it doesn't. Some cookies last for decades.

Of course you don't have to be online to be under surveillance. If you shop, if you drive, if you use public transportation, you could be under surveillance at any time. Just going for a walk is enough in some places to warrant a video of your activity being transmitted to remote location, recorded, and analyzed, all "for your protection" of course.

According to the Boston Globe artificial intelligence face-recognition software on the market since 1997 has set your face well on its way to becoming your official "fingerprint." In the all-too-near future you'll use it for accessing ATM machines, entering the workplace, checking in at airline ticketing counters, and even for getting into your own computer. And a lot of people will go along with this without thinking twice.

Imagine the ease of no longer having to remember and punch in a series of numbers to prove to the world that you are who you say you are. Instead you will turn your face toward a closed-circuit TV camera. In less than a second face-recognition software will scan your features while it electronically riffles through millions of stored "faceprints" to find the proper match and signal an OK or flash a warning sign that the face its scanning isn't yours. It sounds like science fiction, something out of Philip K. Dick perhaps, or maybe William Gibson. Think again. This is now.

Fix the date firmly in your mind. Now consider that this technology has military applications, intelligence applications, and law enforcement applications. Ergo, it is safe to assume that the military, the intelligence community, and law enforcement was by whom and for whom this technology was developed in the first place. It is also safe to assume that, like most such technology, the version now available to the public is decades out of date. What are they using today that we won't hear about for another 20 or 30 years? Whatever it is, it's state of the art. Of that we can be certain.

Then there are the low-flying telescope satellites. You've heard about the Hubble telescope. The Hubble telescope looks up at the great universe beyond. Other orbiting telescopes look not up but down at us. About them we don't hear quite so much. Still less of what we hear is true. But they're up there watching us all right, no doubt about it. And we paid their way. If they can spot a golf ball from nine miles up, imagine what they can do with your face. Go outside. Look up. Smile. Wave. Does some government surveillence computer somewhere instantly recieve and identify your image? It can if it wants to.

In some places just being an employee makes one a suspected criminal and the subject of increasingly sophisticated investigation. Pinhole video cameras less than one inch square are hidden in lockers, clocks, computers, phones, and (presumably) watercoolers. They have even been found in employee washrooms. There is something structurally wrong with a society in which ordinary people who have done nothing wrong are routinely investigated as if they were criminals. Yet that is ever more the trend. Even in his most paranoid moments, Orwell never imagined a world where bladder inspections were a prerequisite to employment. But it's come to that. And it's getting worse.

Even our DNA, the very essence of what makes us who we are, is coming under surveillance. April 6, the Sydney Morning Herald announced that the police would ask the entire male adult population of the northwestern town of Wee Waa to undergo a voluntary DNA saliva test, in what police hope will solve the bashing and rape of a 93-year-old woman 16 months ago.

The move is unprecedented in Australian criminal investigation. It comes in the absence of legal powers that can compel those questioned by police about a crime to submit to a DNA blood test. Needless to say, the government is working up a legal framework for a compulsory, national DNA database of criminals. Under one plan, the police would only be able to take saliva samples from prisoners convicted for crimes that carry a minimum sentence of five years. Under another plan it would include people convicted for petty offenses. If the first stages of this egregious incursion are successfully implemented, it is only a matter of time until people are willing to accept being DNA tagged at birth.

It is painfully obvious by now that Australia's recent draconian gun control legislation, which disarmed millions of law-abiding citizens, has led to a dramatic rise in the level of crime. Has it also led to the beginning of a terminal decline in the civil liberties of Australian citizens? Or are both phenomena part of the same syndrome? Time will tell.

We live in a burgeoning virtual panopticon. The political implications of such power are staggering. During the occupation of Tienemien Square the government set up video surveillance of the entire area. The demonstrators didn't take the hint. When the clampdown came, nearly all the leaders were arrested. Only a handful escaped. Surveillance technology has become far more sophisticated since then, and far wider spread.

The death of anonymity strikes a foreboding chill into organized political dissidence the world over. The more technologically advanced the country, the scarier it is to be a leader of resistance.

Oh sure, the drug squad may kick a lot of wrong doors. They even kill a few people at it now and then. But when the clampdown comes, rest assured that the New World Order's snatch squads won't be so clumsy. They will know exactly where every leader lives and exactly what (s)he looks like. Sooner or later the clampdown will come, make no mistake about it. Do not mistake the velvet glove for the iron fist inside. When the glove comes off, the fist comes down, then devil take the hindmost. The current economic bubble is long overdue to burst. With economic stability will go political stability. This pattern has gone on on every continent for millennia. There is no sound reason to believe it should come to an end in our lifetimes. At least we shouldn't bet our lives on it doing so. We probably shouldn't bet the farm, either.

This does not mean we should not resist. We have no choice but to resist. If we do not choose to resist we shall soon have no choices at all. They will all be made for us. But if we predicate the success of our resistance on having leaders, our resistance shall fail for sure.