When Big Brother Gets A Little Too Close...

Last week I discovered that I have a file held by the Lebanese Internal Security Forces. This doesn't surprise me: I'm a foreigner, I work for an organisation funded by the U.S. and operating under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy. The name on my file is mine, with the bracketed appendage "a.k.a. Koutalakis." Now, that 'nickname' is used for many things: three of my e-mail accounts have it or a version of it as the name; one of those accounts is linked to this blog so I have to suppose they are reading this too. it is also my Flickr and Facebook name. It's not that difficult to find this out and link them to me, though I think what surprises me is that anyone would bother. I suppose, charitably, that they didn't know that I wasn't a threat to national security until they had researched and found out that I wasn't. Fair enough.
...and I wonder what else the file contains. Not much, probably, otherwise I would have been either arrested and/or deported by now.
However, the circumstances surrounding my finding out about this file are what interest me. A colleague, in the presence of a third person, happily blurted out that he knew this about me because he has a friend at the ISF who let him, or allowed him, or didn't prevent him from, seeing the files (plural). In one sense this doesn't surprise me either: such is Lebanon. I told my boss about it and asked him to give this colleague of mine the third degree, for obvious reasons. It's partly an issue of confidentiality, but not really that either: when a society is based on transparent superficiality, information becomes a commodity to be traded. So it is everywhere of course, but the information that is most privileged here is trivial information, gossip. From the upper echelons of politics in Lebanon down to the corner cafe discussions, the exchange and possession of the trivial and the superficial become a modus operandi; witness the amount of 'celebrity' magazines, pages in newspapers, and TV shows. So it is almost everywhere, of course, but in a country where even MacDonalds have a valet service and VIP parking, what appears to be so is so, irrespective of any serious criteria.
What makes this different is that this act of reductionism, this particular piece of gossip, was lifted from the secret police. What disturbs me is that I am not at all disturbed by either the existence of the file nor by the fact that whoever is in charge of it shows it to anybody he wishes to. That's Lebanon. Excellent. They can't even get internal security right...