Bob Barr

Big Brother Not Only Watches Us, It Toys with Our Children

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

February 15, 2006

One of our grandkids is a genius with Legos, the small plastic bricks that form the building blocks of virtually everything or anything kids can imagine, from small farmyards to futuristic spaceships and motorcycles. I swear, when he was younger, our grandson had every Lego set ever produced, and could build the most sophisticated item in the company's vast inventory with his eyes closed. For kids of my generation—or at least for this grandfather of my generation—for whom constructing a square home of Lincoln Logs or a ladder from Tinker Toys was a major achievement, watching both my sons and my grandkids build and use sophisticated playthings that would have been far beyond my meager resources to handle truly is a wonder to behold.

I have, however, noted a distressing trend in some manufacturers of modern toys, including Lego and another popular line of plastic figures for smaller children—Playmobil. These manufacturers of what used to be nonpolitical plastic figures and construction blocks are subtly moving into the arena of toys with a social message—one that supports and fosters the climate of fear and submission to government power that has unfortunately become the hallmark of American society since Sept. 11, 2001.

Lego, for example, in 2003 began marketing a plastic construction set depicting a police 18-wheeler housing a surveillance unit, complete with monitoring devices and control panels to track movements of little Lego citizens. The official Lego description of the "play set" enticed children and their parents by noting that when the "surveillance truck is on the scene, you know the police are on the job!" Further encouragement to hone one's surveillance skills was to be found in the "technology to monitor" included in the toy.

While the Lego surveillance play set is—according to the company—oriented toward 8-year-olds, a rival company, Playmobil, which produces plastic figures for younger darlings, apparently has determined there is a market for toys teaching 4-year-olds the benefit of submitting oneself to intrusive police searches. It markets a "play set" consisting of two uniformed police figures with side arms and metal detectors, ensuring that a unisex figure in bright, colorful clothes submits to a wanding as his or her suitcase goes through an X-ray machine. Interesting that all the Playmobil figures are smiling as they either submit to being searched or are searching through the other's personal belongings. Being searched at gunpoint and having the government rummage through your most personal belongings are such happy events!

Of course, with some schools moving to require youngsters to wear badges with radio frequency identification chips embedded therein, and others forcing parents to submit to a retinal scan simply to visit their youngsters at school, I suppose it should not surprise us that toy manufacturers are becoming part of the acculturation process whereby the coming generation views pervasive surveillance and government power as not only a fact of life but highly desirable.

Yet, even as we enlist toy manufacturers to assist Western society in accelerating the move toward the Brave New World of a universally submissive society, the government continues to make it more difficult to watch all this with warm and fuzzy feelings.

In Fairfax County, Va., just outside our nation's capital, a police tactical squad recently accidentally shot and killed an optometrist as they were about to arrest him for gambling. Despite the fact the police had no evidence the suspect was armed (he was not), and even though there was nothing to suggest violent behavior on the part of the optometrist, what should have been at worst a routine arrest of a suspect for a nonviolent offense involved a unit of heavily armed officers with guns drawn. While the local police chief expressed regret for the accidental fatal shooting, the official condolences were tempered by a spokesman explaining that "such things do occur."

The accidental shooting in suburban Washington followed by only weeks the fatal shooting of an airline passenger in Miami by air marshals, following aberrant behavior by the deplaning passenger. Turns out he, too, was unarmed. That tragedy was touted by officials in Washington as proof that the air marshal program had "worked beyond [their] expectations." While I support the armed air marshal program, I fail to see how shooting an unarmed passenger as the plane was already at the terminal proves the program works.

Stories of similar shootings, including of students, pepper the local and national news regularly. Such incidents make the job of transforming our society into one peopled by fearful citizens eager to be surveilled and pacified—a task to which at least some toy manufacturers apparently are committed—slightly more difficult. However, the government apparently doesn't have too much to worry about. A poll conducted shortly after the shooting of the unarmed passenger at Miami International Airport indicated the incident made air travelers feel safer.

Bob Barr occupies the 21st Century Liberties Chair for Freedom and Privacy at the American Conservative Union Foundation.