The authoritarian government of Cambodia is currently cracking down on dissidents. They have suspended the right to assemble in public, rounded up political leaders that opposed the current government, in other words, the usual grab bag of repression.
I wish that people who don’t worry about the NSA, drones, indefinite detention, legalize torture, Guantánamo, and so on would consider how the Cambodian experience supplies to them.
It is, after all, only a matter of time before the US government faces some sort of challenge to its authority. Nobody knows how or when, but the fact is, civilians need the right to challenge or even change their government from time to time. Without that right, there is no freedom, and the government does not represent them in the least.
Even if you believe that the Obama administration or the next president or the one after that would never use tools like the NSA or drones or indefinite detention against American citizens – even though, in fact, they already have – what about the future?
The only way that we can protect our children and grandchildren’s generations from the kind of crackdown that we are seeing in Cambodia – amped up by awesome technology – is to make sure that that technology isn’t available to the government now.
As we are seeing currently in Cambodia, and have seen countless times before and will many times in the future, fighting back against a repressive regime is hard enough.
The last thing the revolutionaries and political dissidents of the future need are killer flying robots blowing them up with missiles as they march down the street. Or a government able to track them down with ruthless efficiency with the push of a button.