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by John W. Whitehead
February 26,
2019
from
RutherfordInstitute Website
"We know
where you are.
We know where
you've been.
We can more or
less know what you're thinking about…
Your digital
identity will live forever...
because there's
no delete button."
Former Google CEO
Eric Schmidt
Uncle Sam wants you. Correction: Big Brother wants you...!
To be technically accurate,
Big Brother - aided and abetted by
his corporate partners in crime - wants your data.
That's what we have been reduced to in the eyes of the government
and Corporate America:
data bits and
economic units to be bought, bartered and sold to the highest
bidder.
Those highest bidders
include America's political class and the politicians aspiring to
get elected or re-elected.
As the Los Angeles
Times
reports,
"If you have been to
a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a
campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being
tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll
of campaigns."
Your phones, televisions
and digital devices are
selling you out to politicians who
want your vote.
-
Have you shopped
at Whole Foods?
-
Tested out target
practice at a gun range?
-
Sipped coffee at
Starbucks while surfing the web?
-
Visited an
abortion clinic?
-
Watched FOX News
or MSNBC?
-
Played Candy
Crush on your phone?
-
Walked through a
mall?
-
Walked past a
government building?
That's all it takes for
your data to be hoovered up, sold
and used to target you...
This is the age of surveillance
capitalism.
Incredibly, once you've been identified and tracked, data brokers
can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where
you've been, who you've been with, what you've been doing, and what
you've been reading, viewing, buying, etc.
Once you've been identified in this way, you can be tracked
endlessly.
"Welcome to the new
frontier of campaign tech - a loosely regulated world in which
simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at
a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data
broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the
location information and sell it to a political candidate who
can use it to surround you with messages,"
writes journalist Evan Halper.
No one is spared...
In this regard, we are all equals:
equally suffering the
indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the
most intimate details of one's life turned into fodder for
marketers and data profiteers.
This creepy new era of
government/corporate spying - in which we're being listened to,
watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted -
makes the NSA's surveillance appear almost antiquated in comparison.
What's worse, this for-profit surveillance capitalism scheme is
made possible with our cooperation.
All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the
ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the "Agree"
button at the end so you can get to the next step - downloading
software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to
your phone or computer - those signify your written consent to
having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.
Think about it...
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched,
and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes
you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.
On any given day, the average American going about his daily
business will be monitored, surveiled, spied on and tracked in more
than 20 different ways by both government and corporate eyes and
ears.
A byproduct of this new
age in which we live, whether you're walking through a store,
driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family
on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is
listening in and tracking your behavior.
With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every,
...account we open, every
frequent buyer card we use for purchases - whether at the grocer's,
the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store - and every
credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we're
helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government
counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money,
and how we spend our time.
The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political
campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually
build "digital fences"
around your homes, workplaces, friends and family's homes and
other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially
crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.
If anyone else stalked us in this way - tailing us wherever we go,
tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out
our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and
activities - we'd call the cops.
Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with
Stingray devices and other
Peeping Tom
technologies) are also in on this particular scam.
It's not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your
data that is worrisome.
The ramifications of a government - any government - having this
much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and
detain its citizens is beyond chilling.
Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany
could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.
Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany's footsteps
will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly
moving in that direction.
We've made it so easy for the government to watch us.
Government eyes see your every move:
what you read, how
much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you
wake up in the morning, what you're watching on television and
reading on the internet.
Every move you make is
being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to
form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to
control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
If you're an activist and you
simply like or share this article
on Facebook or retweet it on Twitter, you're most likely flagging
yourself as a potential renegade, revolutionary or anti-government
extremist - a.k.a. terrorist.
Yet whether or not you like or share this particular article, simply
by reading it or any other articles related to government
wrongdoing, surveillance, police misconduct or civil liberties is
enough to get you categorized as a particular kind of person with
particular kinds of interests that reflect a particular kind of
mindset that might just lead you to engage in a particular kinds of
activities.
The corporate state must
watch and keep tabs on you if it is to keep you in line.
Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you
have already been assigned a
color-coded threat assessment score,
... so police are
forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker
depending on whether you've had a career in the military, posted a
comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a
particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who
might have committed a crime.
In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially
anti-government in a government database somewhere -
Main Core, for example - that
identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and
detained in times of distress) who aren't inclined to march in
lockstep to the police state's dictates.
The government has the know-how.
As The Intercept
reported, the FBI,
CIA,
NSA and other government agencies
are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance
technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on
social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in
order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage
in future acts of anti-government behavior.
It's happening already in China...
Millions of Chinese individuals and businesses, blacklisted as
"unworthy" based on social media credit scores that grade them based
on whether they are "good" citizens, have now
been banned from accessing
financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.
Among the activities that
can get you labeled unworthy are,
Get ready, because all
signs point to China serving as the role model for our
dystopian future...
When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of
laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal
and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you've got nothing to worry
about if you've got nothing to hide no longer applies.
Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels
justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its
ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and
control them, there's also the covert dangers associated with a
government empowered to use these same technologies to influence
behaviors en masse and control the populace.
In fact, it was President
Obama who issued an executive
order directing federal agencies to
use "behavioral science" methods to
minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to
government programs.
It's a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that
tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government
program that tries to shape the public's views about other, more
consequential matters.
Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies
and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential
danger and spin a sticky spider-web of
threat assessments, behavioral
sensing warnings, flagged "words," and "suspicious" activity reports
using,
...and you having the
makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare.
This is the kind of oppressive
pre-crime and
pre-thought crime package
foreshadowed by George Orwell (1984),
Aldous Huxley (Brave New
World) and
Philip K. Dick.
Remember, even the most well-intentioned government law or program
can be - and has been - perverted, corrupted and used to advance
illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the
equation:
...all of these programs
started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have
since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state's
hands.
In the right (or wrong) hands, 'benevolent' plans can easily be put
to malevolent purposes.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American
people - weapons of compliance and control in the government's
hands, especially when the government can,
-
listen in on your
phone calls
-
monitor your
driving habits
-
track your
movements
-
scrutinize your
purchases
-
peer through the
walls of your home,
...add up to a society in
which there's little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts
of independence.
This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the
American police state: the very technology we hailed as
revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer,
probation officer,
Big Brother and Father Knows Best
all rolled into one.
It turns out that we are
Soylent Green.
The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward
G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving
New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods
manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.
Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the
grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent
green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved
population.
"It's people. Soylent
Green is made out of people," declares Heston's character.
"They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be
breeding us like cattle for food."
Oh, how right he was...!
Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent
Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used
by corporations and the government to entrap us.
We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food. Rather, as I
make clear in my book 'Battlefield America - The War on the American
People,' we're being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.
As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and
Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with
every passing day, there's virtually no way to opt out of these
assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day
Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.
Indeed, George Orwell's description of the world of
'1984'
is as apt a description of today's world as I've ever seen:
"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."
What we desperately lack
and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that
protects "we the people" from predatory surveillance and data-mining
business practices.
Without constitutional protections in place to guard against
encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won't be
long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson's
character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with
longing, back to an age where,
we could speak to
whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without
those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed
and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to
government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us
by militarized police with their army of futuristic
technologies.
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