The following story is taken from The SPOTLIGHT newspaper,
published weekly in Washington, D.C. by Liberty Lobby.
Subscriptions, $36/year. Contact, The SPOTLIGHT, 300 Independence
Ave., SE, Washington, D.C. 20003, or call (202) 546-5611.


TECHNOLOGY & LIBERTY

 Deep in the heart of America's defense
and national security Establishment--far from
prying eyes, congressional scrutiny and cranky
civil libertarians--there is an ongoing project
code-named Tesserea. Tesserea is part of a
larger and even more mysterious program
that's called Mosaic.

 Tesserea is a Smart-Card development
project. Supposedly, the Pentagon's boffins are
trying to improve on the time-honored GI
"dogtag" so familiar to American veterans.
They're trying to make dogtags "smart." At least
that's what they have told sources about
Tesserea and Mosaic.

 Word is that these Pentagon scientists
have succeeded in astonishing ways. Is that
good news? Read on about Tesserea and decide
for yourself.

'TESSEREA'

 What are we talking about here? Let's
define our terms. I used Webster's Unabridged
Dictionary and several texts on classical history.
The results were interesting, to say the very
least.

 "tesserea n. Lat. (pl. tessereae): 1) Four-
cornered, 2) The quality of being four-sided,
'four-sidedness'; tesserea referred to four-
cornered objects like chairs, tables, stools, dice
etc, 3) (Art) A piece of mosaic tile; a single
piece of a mosaic [emphasis mine], 4)
(Politics) An identity chit or marker
[emphasis mine]; in ancient Rome, tessereae
were identity tokens issued to legionnaires,
conquered peoples and slaves. Slaves or Gauls
who refused to accept tesserea were often
branded or maimed for purposes of
identification and taxation [emphasis
mine]."

 What kind of "smart" GI dogtag is this?

 What manner of American military
identification system would take its name from
the hated identity chits of Roman conquerors, as
they enslaved the entire known world 2,000
years ago?

MOTHER OF ALL SMART CARDS

 If Tesserea sounds bad, Mosaic looks even
worse. In fact, if the stories about it are true,
Mosaic could be the mother of all Smart-Card
projects--Tesserea included. Mosaic reportedly
goes far beyond personal identification devices,
like Smart Cards or "smart" computer databases,
such as the one proposed by Hillary Clinton for
her National "Health" Security identification
system.

 Mosaic is said to be literally global in
scope. It reportedly involves state-of-the-art
wireless communications technology and
regional monitoring systems to track the
Tesserea identity devices. Initially, cellular-
telephone-like communications networks will
do the monitoring, but eventually space-based
satellite networks will do it. Today's existing
satellite networks can already locate ships and
aircraft within 500 feet of their actual position,
anywhere on earth.

'SMART' DOGTAGS?

 For the military, the idea of "smart"
dogtags sounded reasonable, even laudable.
Imagine a military ID that can be instantly
located anywhere in the world, so
reinforcements or rescuers can be dispatched to
soldiers, sailors or fliers in trouble within
minutes, either in peacetime or war.

Who knows? Such devices could even be
implanted into servicemen and women. They
could be powered by the person's body heat
through a simple, low-voltage thermocoupling
element. They'd be a permanent military
security device, right out of Star Trek.

 With the heartbreak of America's
Vietnam-era MIAs still fresh in people's minds,
such "smart" dogtags sound like an exciting and
innovative prospect. How many of those missing
men might have been saved if rescuers had
been able to instantly "zero-in" on them in the
jungles or rice paddies of Southeast Asia?

KNOWING & GOING

 Then it dawned on me: By all indications,
six U.S. administrations, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs
of Staff--even the KGB--always knew more-or-
less where our MIAs were. Even today, they
apparently know where "bodies are buried" (or
stacked up, to be more precise--the remains of
America's inconvenient MIAs are consistently
reported to be stored in above-ground
mausoleums in Hanoi).

 My point is this: Tesserea and Mosaic
won't necessarily guarantee a different
outcome, if the Vietnam MIA tragedy is ever
repeated. "Knowing" and "going" are two
different things. "Inconvenient" servicemen and
women--those who support covert operations, or
government-organized crime, or who simply
know too much or cost international finance
capital too much--will undoubtedly continue to
be abandoned. With or without Tesserea cards.

 Furthermore, once these devices are
perfected and deployed--and they may be
working just fine, right now--will they be
limited to the armed forces? Or will they serve
as prototypes for more general Smart Carding?
Will the people who carry them even know
what these things are?

 Personally, I'm not persuaded Tesserea's
Smart-Card "dogtags" are intended only for
servicemen and women. On the contrary, it
appears likely that the Smart Card technology
being developed in these shadowy programs
could be bad news for all Americans, who are
already hard-pressed to safeguard the
remaining shreds of their personal privacy.

 That's been the pattern--these frightful
projects move around, from one secret agency
to another, sucking up public funds and then
vanishing into covert "blackness", only to
resurface somewhere else. More advanced,
more pervasive, and usually masquerading as
something else.

VICTIMS OF CLASSICAL EDUCATION

 We live in an age when secret government
code-names are almost always gibberish-words
randomly generated by computer. So where did
the exquisite, archaic logic of these two code-
names come from?

 Tesserea for the identity
device . . . Mosaic for an awesome, space-
based monitoring program to track all the
identity devices. All the people forced to carry
these things would be reduced to a vast
mosaic--instantly identifiable and findable,
wherever in the world they may be.

 In my college days, I was privileged to
attend a school with a pretty good classical
history department. We used to kid the
fledgling classicists, calling them "victims of a
classical education". But we all knew there were
powerful lessons to be learned from classical
history, however.

 Nowhere are those lessons more poignant
than in the frightful slave-empire of ancient
Rome. If these frightful plans Tesserea and
Mosaic go forward and become America's
"Health" Card system (or something else), we
could all become the victims of "someone's"
classical education.

