The Hightower Lowdown

A PAL FOR EVERYONE

Would you like to have a PAL -- someone who shares your comings and goings, knows you about as well as you know yourself, can help you remember and understand what's going on around you, and becomes your lifelong buddy?

Well, good news -- the Pentagon, using a few million of our tax dollars, is developing a PAL for you, me, and everyone! PAL is Pentagonese for "Perceptive Assistant that Learns." It's a small, supersophisticated, wireless computer that you wear without others knowing about it. Your PAL has sensors that see, hear, read, taste, touch, collect, and store all that you experience. It becomes a secret part of your apparel and existence, allowing you to keep not merely a record of your every encounter, but to have any detail of your experiences instantly retrievable and made comprehensible.

PAL is the gathering device that assembles a little digital "you" through its sensors, plugging this "you" into a centralized database and a cognitive computer system that the Pentagon calls: LifeLog. The total package is some combination of cyber-scrapbook, Harvey the Rabbit ... and an Orwellian nightmare.

Oh, don't be alarmist, assert the Dr. Strangeloves pushing this system at the Pentagon, insisting that it's all voluntary. The official description of LifeLog says: "The goal of the data collection is to 'see what I see,' rather than to 'see me,'" noting that the user's privacy is assured since said user can click off PAL's sensors at any time.

Do they think we have sucker wrappers around our heads? Maybe the user can switch off PAL, but the unsuspecting people that the user encounters, records, sniffs, and otherwise experiences can't. We'll all have PALs, silently snooping on one another and dumping this whole load of personal data into the Pentagon's LifeLog computer that will provide total recall for whomever has access to it.

With a PAL like this, who needs enemies?

---

THE CENTRALIZATION OF LOCAL NEWS

The television anchor for WSMH -- the Fox

TV affiliate in Flint, Mich. -- recently gave listeners the local weather forecast, saying it's going to be a high "of 57 for us here in Flint."

Us? This anchor was actually hundreds of miles away in the Baltimore area, working out of the centralized television studio of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns 62 television stations in cities like Flint, Tampa, Pittsburgh, Raleigh, Rochester, Birmingham, and Oklahoma City.

Weather is not the only news item removed from local control by the Sinclair chain -- for example, Flint's local news team gets seven minutes on the 10 o'clock news, then the station switches to yet another anchor who's also in faraway Baltimore, but pretending to be in Flint as part of the "local" broadcast. Sinclair refers to this deception as "central casting."

Welcome to your "news" future under the magic of the recent unregulation of our public airwaves by the Federal Communications Commission, allowing more profiteering conglomerates to seize control of our independent, local sources of news and information. Under the monopoly-friendly rules rammed through by industry lobbyists and Bush appointees to the FCC, we're headed for an orgy of media mergers, giving even greater control to a handful of giants over what we see, hear, and read.

As one of the industry's leading investment analysts so starkly puts it: "The biggest implication of the rule changes is that everyone has to decide whether they want to be a buyer or a seller in the next five years. The map will change within that time period. The big are going to get bigger." Swell. As they get bigger, our news gets more consolidated and centralized, reduced to remote, cookie-cutter, corporate homogeneity -- and our democracy shrinks.

To fight this monopolized mono-casting and theft of our public airwaves, call the Media Access Project: 202/232-4300.