I’m a privacy maven. Always have been, probably always will be. I was one of those seven year old girls who had a diary complete with lock and key – and said diary was always kept locked and hidden, and the key kept in a separate location, and for good measure, also hidden.
I tried to get away from privacy by almost becoming a paleontologist, but dinosaurs and trilobites lost, and privacy won. I’ve worked in the privacy and civil liberties community for almost twenty years, writing and speaking about privacy. Even chaired a conference on the subject, and I’ll be co-chairing that conference again in June, 2017. Privacy and surveillance issues are topics that I’ve thought deeply about.
Horror stories of all kinds have also been a favorite since I was a kid. Comics, movies, books – I love it all. I’ll happily watch the A and B movies, but I’ll happily sit through the Y and Z movies too. I’m not proud.
Sooooo, about zombies. For a long time I regarded them with disdain – even after George Romero made them infinitely more interesting than the zombie movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Not that White Zombie was a bad movie, okay, maybe it was, but it wasn’t as bad as I Walked With A Zombie. And really, these zombies weren’t the undead, they were the victims of spells or voodoo, and still very much alive. They did their master’s bidding, and well, yawn.
Romero zombies were terrifying, mindless eating machines, with only one goal – to have you for lunch. Again, kind of boring – you try to run away, they eventually catch you, they kill you and eat you. Shrug.
But then I realized how perfect zombies really are, especially from a civil liberties point of view. They’re so — multipurpose. They’re the threat that you have to deal with whether you like it or not. You can’t reason with them, and you can’t bring them around to your way of thinking by convincing them that you’re right. You can’t beg them to leave you alone, and sometimes it’s better to just leave. Quickly. Like bad diseases, zombies can be created by evil scientists, nuclear war, or they can just spontaneously appear. One day you’re shopping at the mall, the next day you’e fending off zombies at the mall. They’re ubiquitous. You can find them in cities, rural areas, desert islands, planes, and on the ocean floor. And finally, they’re political. Every single George Romero zombie movie had a political message to it. So yeah, I can use them for just about anything.
Here on this blog, I’m marrying civil liberties with zombies. The topics can be endless. What happens to privacy and civil liberties at the beginning of a zombie apocalypse? Medical records and privacy? All of it, out the window. Law enforcement actions? You’d better be prepared to obey. Mandatory quarantines? Oh, yes. And those of you who want to rely on the Posse Comitatus Act when the military starts to take over? Forget about it. But those are the short answers, the long answers are where we dig in and get to the meat of the issues.
So let’s get to it, shall we?
P.S. Here’s a great site – and a list of their 40 best zombie movies. See if you agree. Personally, I’m a big fan of Dead Snow and the sequel.