Hola,
el otro día me encontré con esta charla del Chaos Computer Congress
sobre Hannah Arendt y la posible aplicación de su análisis sobre el
totalitarismo al régimen de espionaje global. Creo que puede resultar
interesante para más de uno en esta lista:
https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7342-household_totalitarianism_and_cyberspace#video&t=1
Lo que más me llamó la atención de la charla es el párrafo que os
adjunto a continuación, correspondiente a su descripción de las
prácticas y los sistemas de clasificación de la policía secreta zarista.
No deja de sorprenderme que el libro se escribiera en 1951, dado que
describe a la perfección prácticas bien actuales de la inteligencia en
general:
“The Okhrana, the Czarist predecessor of the GPU, is reported to have
invented a filing system in which every suspect was noted on a large
card in the center of which his name was surrounded by a red circle; his
political friends were designated by smaller red circles and his
nonpolitical acquaintances by green ones; brown circles indicated
persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him
personally; cross-relationships between the suspect’s friends, political
and nonpolitical, and the friends of his friends were indicated by lines
between the respective circles. Obviously the limitations of this method
are set only by the size of the filing cards, and, theoretically, a
gigantic single sheet could show the relations and cross-relationships
of the entire population. And this is the utopian goal of the
totalitarian secret police: a look at the gigantic map on the office
wall should suffice at any given moment to establish, not who is who or
who thinks what, but who is related to whom and in what degree or kind
of intimacy. The totalitarian ruler knows that it is dangerous to send a
person to a concentration camp and leave his family and particular
milieu untouched; the map on the wall would enable him to eradicate
people without leaving any traces of them-or almost none. Total
abolition of legality is safe only under the condition of perfect
information, or at least a degree of knowledge of private and intimate
details which evokes the illusion of perfection”.
