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.