“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.”
—Eric Schmidt
Some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley recently
announced that they had gotten together to form a new forward-thinking
organization dedicated to promoting government surveillance reform in the name
of “free expression” and “privacy.”
The charade should have been laughed at and mocked — after
all, these same companies feed on privacy for profit, and unfettered
surveillance is their stock and trade. Instead, it was met with cheers and fanfare
from reporters and privacy and tech experts alike. “Finally!” people cried,
Silicon Valley has grown up and matured enough to help society tackle the
biggest problem of our age: the runaway power of the modern surveillance state.
The Guardian described the tech companies’ plan as
“radical,” and predicted it would “end many of the current programs through
which governments spy on citizens at home and abroad.” Laura W. Murphy,
Director of ACLU’s DC Legislative Office, published an impassioned blog post
praising tech giants for urging President Barack Obama and Congress to enact
comprehensive reform of government surveillance. Silicon Valley booster Jeff
Jarvis could hardly contain his glee. “Bravo,” he yelped. “The companies came
down at last on the side of citizens over spies.” And then added:
"Spying is bad for the internet; what’s bad for the
internet is bad for Silicon Valley; and — to reverse the old General Motors saw
— what’s bad for Silicon Valley is bad for America."
But while leading tech and privacy experts like Jarvis
slobber over Silicon Valley megacorps and praise their heroic stand against
oppressive government surveillance, most still don’t seem to mind that these
same tech billionaires run vast private sector surveillance operations of their
own. They vacuum up private information
and use it to compile detailed dossiers on hundreds of millions of people
around the world — and that’s on top of their work colluding and contracting
with government intelligence agencies.
If you step back and look at the bigger picture, it’s not
hard to see that Silicon Valley is heavily engaged in for-profit surveillance,
and that it dwarfs anything being run by the NSA.
We learned that Google had used its Street View cars to
carry out a covert — and certainly illegal — espionage operation on a global
scale, siphoning loads of personally identifiable data from people’s Wi-Fi
connections all across the world. Emails, medical records, love notes,
passwords, the whole works — anything that wasn’t encrypted was fair game. It
was all part of the original program design: Google had equipped its Street
View cars with surveillance gear designed to intercept and vacuum up all the
wireless network communication data that crossed their path. An FCC
investigation showing that the company knowingly deployed Street View’s
surveillance program, and then had analyzed and integrated the data that it had
intercepted.
Most disturbingly, when its Street View surveillance program
was uncovered by regulators, Google pulled every crisis management trick in the
book to confuse investors, dodge questions, avoid scrutiny, and prevent the
public from finding out the truth. The company’s behavior got so bad that the
FCC fined it for obstruction of justice.
The investigation in Street View uncovered a dark side to
Google. But as alarming as it was, Google’s Street View wiretapping scheme was
just a tiny experimental program compared Google’s bread and butter: a massive
surveillance operation that intercepts and analyzes terabytes of global
Internet traffic every day, and then uses that data to build and update complex
psychological profiles on hundreds of millions of people all over the world —
all of it in real time. You’ve heard about this program. You probably interact
with it every day. You call it Gmail.
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