Zbigniew Brzezinski's Pens Books On Police State

USA Today | September 28 2004

Imagine a chip implanted in your body that carries all your pertinent information as well as your current body temperature and, of course, your exact location.

Sounds harmless when applied in commerce to track shipments or in the livestock industry to monitor animals.

But when the idea is broached of injecting the chip into political prisoners, as is rumored in China, or into convicted sex offenders, a proposal in this country, then the name of George Orwell quickly surfaces.

Matthew Brzezinski explores this high-tech surveillance technology and other new and often frightening frontiers in a post-9/11 USA in his riveting Fortress America.

A siege mentality — a maximum security state similar to Israel — is emerging in the USA, he says.

The manufacture of such sophisticated hardware as the RFID — radio frequency identification — is easy, but moving it into place and solving delicate legal issues before another terrorist attack is the tricky part.

"The technological and legal foundations for blanket surveillance had already been laid in 2003," Brzezinski writes. "All that was lacking was the political and social will to bring all this technological wizardry to bear in the war on terror. It wouldn't happen overnight or without another catastrophic incident, something that upped the ante and put America in the same survival mode on par with Israel: a nuclear detonation, a biological outbreak, a mass casualty event. But if the stakes were high enough, would we be more willing to accept life in a maximum security surveillance state?"

As for RFID, the future is here. Brzezinski writes, "Special Ops forces reportedly had tiny chips injected in their hips on sensitive missions where they could not wear dog tags."

The former foreign correspondent at The Wall Street Journal and the nephew of Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser under President Jimmy Carter, Brzezinski takes readers inside a mock drill with first responders in Denver, to a simulation of an emergency session of the National Security Council and to the inner sanctums of the Department of Homeland Security.

And as the 9/11 Commission reported, Brzezinski confirms that the USA is vulnerable to attacks on its under-protected chemical and natural gas depots.

Readers are asked to contemplate the unthinkable. One doctor tells Brzezinski, "If I were al Qaeda I'd send twenty terrorist martyrs infected with smallpox or pneumonic plague to crisscross the country on as many domestic flights as possible." Brzezinski writes that "75 million people could be infected" within a month's time from the suicide infectors.

At the heart of Brzezinski's solid reporting and evenhanded summaries is this question: How much disruption will the American people tolerate as its government tries to find "the balance between security and liberty"?

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