“[A security camera] doesn’t respond
to complaint, threats, or insults. Instead, it just watches you in a
forbidding manner. Today, the surveillance state is so deeply enmeshed
in our data devices that we don’t even scream back because technology
companies have convinced us that we need to be connected to them to be
happy.”—Pratap Chatterjee, journalist
What is most striking about the
American police state is not the mega-corporations running amok in the
halls of Congress, the militarized police crashing through doors and
shooting unarmed citizens, or the invasive surveillance regime which has
come to dominate every aspect of our lives. No, what has been most
disconcerting about the emergence of the American police state is the
extent to which the citizenry appears content to passively wait for
someone else to solve our nation’s many problems. Unless Americans are
prepared to engage in militant nonviolent resistance in the spirit of
Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, true reform, if any, will be a long
time coming.
Yet as I detail in my book A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, if
we don’t act soon, all that is in need of fixing will soon be
unfixable, especially as it relates to the police state that becomes
more entrenched with each passing day. By “police state,” I am referring
to more than a society overrun by the long arm of the police. I am
referring to a society in which all aspects of a person’s life are
policed by government agents, one in which all citizens are suspects,
their activities monitored and regulated, their movements tracked, their
communications spied upon, and their lives, liberties and pursuit of
happiness dependent on the government’s say-so.
That said, how can anyone be
expected to “fix” what is broken unless they first understand the
lengths to which the government with its arsenal of technology is going
in order to accustom the American people to life in a police state and
why being spied on by government agents, both state and federal, as well
as their partners in the corporate world, is a problem, even if you’ve
done nothing wrong.
Indeed, as the trend towards
overcriminalization makes clear, it won’t be long before the average
law-abiding American is breaking laws she didn’t even know existed
during the course of a routine day. The point, of course, is that while
you may be oblivious to your so-called law-breaking—whether it was
collecting rainwater to water your lawn, lighting a cigarette in the
privacy of your home, or gathering with friends in your backyard for aSunday evening Bible study—the government will know each and every transgression and use them against you.
As noted by the Brookings
Institution, “For the first time ever, it will become technologically
and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly
everything that is said or done within their borders — every phone
conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the
movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every
street corner.”
As the following will show, the
electronic concentration camp, as I have dubbed the surveillance state,
is perhaps the most insidious of the police state’s many tentacles,
impacting almost every aspect of our lives and making it that much
easier for the government to encroach on our most vital freedoms,
ranging from free speech, assembly and the press to due process,
privacy, and property, by eavesdropping on our communications, tracking
our movements and spying on our activities.
Tracking you based on your consumer activities:
Fusion centers, federal-state law enforcement partnerships which
attempt to aggregate a variety of data on so-called “suspicious
persons,” have actually collected reports on people buying pallets of
bottled water, photographing government buildings, and applying for a
pilot’s license as “suspicious activity.” Retailers are getting in on
the surveillance game as well. Large corporations such as Target have
been tracking and assessing the behavior of their customers,
particularly their purchasing patterns, for years. In 2015, mega-food
corporations will be rolling out high-tech shelving outfitted with
cameras in order to track the shopping behavior of customers, as well as
information like the age and sex of shoppers.
Tracking you based on your public activities:
Sensing a booming industry, private corporations are jumping on the
surveillance state bandwagon, negotiating lucrative contracts with
police agencies throughout the country in order to create a web of
surveillance that encompasses all major urban centers. Companies such as
NICE and Bright Planet are selling equipment and services to police
departments with the promise of monitoring large groups of people
seamlessly, as in the case of protests and rallies. They are also
engaging in extensive online surveillance, looking for any hints of
“large public events, social unrest, gang communications, and criminally
predicated individuals.” Defense contractors are attempting to take a
bite out of this lucrative market as well. Raytheon has recently
developed a software package known as Riot, which promises to predict
the future behavior of an individual based upon his social media posts.
Tracking you based on your phone activities:
The CIA has been paying AT&T over $10 million per year in order to
gain access to data on Americans’ phone calls abroad. This is in
addition to telecommunications employees being embedded in government
facilities to assist with quick analysis of call records and respond to
government requests for customer location data. They receive hundreds of
thousands of such requests per year.
Tracking you based on your computer activities:
Federal agents now employ a number of hacking methods in order to gain
access to your computer activities and “see” whatever you’re seeing on
your monitor. Malicious hacking software can be installed via a number
of inconspicuous methods, including USB, or via an email attachment or
software update. It can then be used to search through files stored on a
hard drive, log keystrokes, or take real time screenshots of whatever a
person is looking at on their computer, whether personal files, web
pages, or email messages. It can also be used to remotely activate
cameras and microphones, offering another means of glimpsing into the
personal business of a target.
Tracking you based on your behavior:
Thanks to a torrent of federal grants, police departments across the
country are able to fund outrageous new surveillance systems that turn
the most basic human behaviors into suspicious situations to be studied
and analyzed. Police in California, Massachusetts, and New York have all
received federal funds to create systems like that operated by the New
York Police Department, which “links 3,000 surveillance cameras with
license plate readers, radiation sensors, criminal databases and terror
suspect lists.” Police all across the country are also now engaging in
big data mining operations, often with the help of private companies, in
order to develop city-wide nets of surveillance. For example, police in
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, now work with IBM in order to “integrate new
data and analytics tools into everyday crime fighting.”
Tracking you based on your face:
Facial recognition software promises to create a society in which every
individual who steps out into public is tracked and recorded as they go
about their daily business. The goal is for government agents to be
able to scan a crowd of people and instantaneously identify all of the
individuals present. Facial recognition programs are being rolled out in
states all across the country (only twelve states do not use facial
recognition software). For example, in Ohio, 30,000 police officers and
court employees are able to access the driver’s license images of people
in the state, without any form of oversight to track their views or why
they’re accessing them. The FBI is developing a $1 billion program,
Next Generation Identification, which involves creating a massive
database of mugshots for police all across the country.
Tracking you based on your car:
License plate readers, which can identify the owner of any car that
comes within its sights, are growing in popularity among police
agencies. Affixed to overpasses or cop cars, these devices give police a
clear idea of where your car was at a specific date and time, whether
the doctor’s office, the bar, the mosque, or at a political rally. State
police in Virginia used license plate readers to record every single
vehicle that arrived to President Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009
from Virginia. They also recorded the license plates of attendees at
rallies prior to the election, including for then-candidate Obama and
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. This data collection
came at the request of the U.S. Secret Service. Incredibly, Virginia
police stored data on some 8 million license plates, some for up to
three years.
Tracking you based on your social media activities:
The obsession with social media as a form of surveillance will have
some frightening consequences in coming years. As Helen A.S. Popkin,
writing for NBC News, has astutely observed, “We may very well
face a future where algorithms bust people en masse for referencing
illegal ‘Game of Thrones’ downloads, or run sweeps for insurance
companies seeking non-smokers confessing to lapsing back into the habit.
Instead of that one guy getting busted for a lame joke misinterpreted
as a real threat, the new software has the potential to roll,
Terminator-style, targeting every social media user with a shameful
confession or questionable sense of humor.”
Tracking you based on your metadata:
Metadata is an incredibly invasive set of data to have on a person.
Indeed, with access to one’s metadata, one can “identify people’s
friends and associates, detect where they were at a certain time,
acquire clues to religious or political affiliations, and pick up
sensitive information like regular calls to a psychiatrist’s office,
late-night messages to an extramarital partner or exchanges with a
fellow plotter.” The National Security Agency (NSA) has been
particularly interested in metadata, compiling information on Americans’
social connections “that can identify their associates, their locations
at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal
information.” Mainway, the main NSA tool used to connect the dots on
American social connections, collected 700 million phone recordsper day in
2011. That number increased by 1.1 billion in August 2011. The NSA is
now working on creating “a metadata repository capable of taking in 20
billion ‘record events’ daily and making them available to N.S.A.
analysts within 60 minutes.”
Tracking you from the skies:
Nothing, and I mean nothing, will escape government eyes, especially
when drones take to the skies in 2015. These gadgets, ranging from the
colossal to the miniature, will have the capability of seeing through
the walls of your home and tracking your every movement.
To put it bluntly, we are living in
an electronic concentration camp. Through a series of imperceptible
steps, we have willingly allowed ourselves to become enmeshed in a
system that knows the most intimate details of our lives, analyzes them,
and treats us accordingly. Whether via fear of terrorism, narcissistic
pleasure, or lazy materialism, we have slowly handed over our
information to all sorts of entities, corporate and governmental, public
and private, who are now using that information to cow and control us
for their profit. As George Orwell warned, “You had to live—did live,
from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you
made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement
scrutinized.”
Thus, we have arrived in Orwell’s
world. The question now is: will we take a stand and fight to remain
free or will we go gently into the concentration camp?
No comments:
Post a Comment