Individuals have change into simple prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.
However don’t be fooled into considering the federal government is defending you.
On the contrary, the U.S. authorities is promoting us (or slightly, our knowledge) to the best bidders.
By the way in which, these highest bidders additionally embrace America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. Because the Los Angeles Occasions studies, “In case you have been to a political rally, a city corridor, or simply match a demographic a marketing campaign is after, chances are high good your actions are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by knowledge distributors on the payroll of campaigns.”
Your telephones, televisions and digital gadgets are promoting you out to politicians who need your vote.
“Welcome to the brand new frontier of marketing campaign tech — a loosely regulated world wherein merely downloading a climate app or recreation, connecting to Wi-Fi at a espresso store or powering up a house router can permit an information dealer to observe your actions with ease, then compile the placement info and promote it to a politician who can use it to encompass you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.
On this means, “we the individuals” have been lowered to financial items to be purchased, bartered and bought by one and all.
Each day, Individuals have been made to relinquish essentially the most intimate particulars of who we’re—our organic make-up, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial traits and construction, fingerprints, iris scans, and so on.)—with a view to navigate an more and more technologically-enabled world.
These intimate particulars, in flip, have change into the constructing blocks of huge databases accessed by the federal government and its company companions in crime, weak to knowledge breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.
For years now, and with little actual oversight or restrictions, the federal government has been compiling huge databases comprised of all method of delicate info on the citizenry.
Biographical info. Biometric info. Felony backgrounds. Journey data.
There’s not a single particular person within the U.S. who shouldn’t be in some authorities database or one other, and these databases are more and more being shared between companies, fusion facilities, and the police.
The federal government has additionally, with little oversight and few pointers, been including to its huge trove of knowledge on Individuals by shopping for commercially accessible info (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Workplace of the Director of Nationwide Intelligence revealed:
“[Commercially purchased data] can reveal delicate and intimate details about the private attributes, personal conduct, social connections, and speech of U.S. individuals and non-U.S. individuals. It may be misused to pry into personal lives, spoil reputations, and trigger emotional misery and threaten the protection of people. Even topic to acceptable controls, CAI can improve the facility of the federal government’s capability to look into personal lives to ranges which will exceed our constitutional traditions or different social expectations.”
In different phrases, that is the diabolically sneaky means wherein the federal government is making an attempt to sidestep the Fourth Modification, which requires that authorities brokers have possible trigger and a warrant earlier than spying on Individuals or looking out and seizing their personal property.
It’s unhealthy sufficient that the federal government is constructing huge databases comprised of our private info with out our data or consent, however then they get hacked and we undergo for it.
Earlier this yr, as an example, a number of federal companies, state governments and universities had been focused in a world cyberattack that compromised the delicate knowledge of hundreds of thousands of Individuals.
Did that cease the federal government’s quest to maintain constructing these databases which compromise our privateness and safety? In fact not.
In reality, the federal government has additionally been promoting our personal info. In response to Vice, Departments of Motor Autos in states across the nation have been promoting drivers’ private info “to 1000’s of companies, together with personal investigators who spy on individuals for a revenue.”
The place there’s a will, there’s a means, and the federal government has change into a grasp at discovering loopholes that permit it to take advantage of the citizenry.
Thus, though Congress handed the Driver’s Privateness Safety Act (DPPA) in 1994 to stop the disclosure of private info, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in hundreds of thousands by promoting driver knowledge(names, dates of delivery, addresses, and the automobiles they personal) to 3rd events.
That is only a small a part of how the federal government buys and sells its residents to the best bidders.
The why is at all times the identical: for revenue and energy, in fact.
Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.
Have you ever shopped at Entire Meals? Examined out goal apply at a gun vary? Sipped espresso at Starbucks whereas browsing the net? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX Information or MSNBC? Performed Sweet Crush in your cellphone? Walked via a mall? Walked previous a authorities constructing?
That’s all it takes on your knowledge to be hoovered up, bought and used to focus on you.
Extremely, when you’ve been recognized and tracked, knowledge brokers can journey again in time, digitally talking, to find the place you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been studying, viewing, shopping for, and so on.
When you’ve been recognized on this means, you will be tracked endlessly.
Nobody is spared.
On this regard, we’re all equals: equally struggling the indignity of getting each shred of privateness stripped away and essentially the most intimate particulars of 1’s life become fodder for entrepreneurs and knowledge profiteers.
This creepy new period of for-profit surveillance capitalism—wherein we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, adopted, mapped, purchased, bought and focused—is made doable with our cooperation.
All these disclaimers you scroll although with out studying them, those written in minute font, solely to rapidly click on on the “Agree” button on the finish so you may get to the subsequent step—downloading software program, opening up a social media account, including a brand new app to your cellphone or laptop—these signify your written consent to having your actions monitored, recorded and shared.
Give it some thought.
Each transfer you make is being monitored, mined for knowledge, crunched, and tabulated with a view to type an image of who you’re, what makes you tick, and the way greatest to affect and/or management you.
With each smartphone we purchase, each GPS gadget we set up, each Twitter, Fb, and Google account we open, each frequent purchaser card we use for purchases—whether or not on the grocer’s, the yogurt store, the airways or the division retailer—and each credit score and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re serving to Company America construct a file for its authorities counterparts on who we all know, what we predict, how we spend our cash, and the way we spend our time.
The know-how has superior thus far that entrepreneurs (political campaigns are among the many worst offenders) can really construct “digital fences” round your properties, workplaces, family and friends’s properties and different locations you go to with a view to bombard you with specifically crafted messages aimed toward reaching a selected final result.
If anybody else stalked us on this means—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, studying our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets and techniques, profiling and focusing on us based mostly on our pursuits and actions—we’d name the cops.
Sadly, the cops (outfitted with Stingray gadgets and different Peeping Tom applied sciences) are additionally in on this specific rip-off.
It’s not simply the surveillance and the shopping for and promoting of your knowledge that’s worrisome.
The ramifications of a authorities—any authorities—having this a lot unregulated, unaccountable energy to focus on, monitor, spherical up and detain its residents is past chilling.
Think about what a totalitarian regime akin to Nazi Germany might have performed with this sort of unadulterated energy.
Think about what the subsequent police state to comply with in Germany’s footsteps will do with this sort of energy. Society is unquestionably quickly transferring in that path.
We’ve made it really easy for the federal government to stalk us.
Authorities eyes see your each transfer: what you learn, how a lot you spend, the place you go, with whom you work together, if you get up within the morning, what you’re watching on tv and studying on the web.
Each transfer you make is being monitored, mined for knowledge, crunched, and tabulated with a view to type an image of who you’re, what makes you tick, and the way greatest to regulate you when and if it turns into essential to deliver you in line.
Chances are high, because the Washington Publish has reported, you could have already been assigned a color-coded menace evaluation rating—inexperienced, yellow or crimson—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker relying on whether or not you’ve had a profession within the navy, posted a remark perceived as threatening on Fb, undergo from a selected medical situation, or know somebody who is aware of somebody who may need dedicated against the law.
In different phrases, you would possibly already be flagged as probably anti-government in a authorities database someplace—Predominant Core, for instance—that identifies and tracks people (to allow them to be rounded up and detained in instances of misery) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
The federal government has the know-how.
As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and different authorities companies are more and more investing in and counting on company surveillance applied sciences that may mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms akin to Fb, Twitter and Instagram with a view to determine potential extremists and predict who would possibly have interaction in future acts of anti-government conduct.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the info mining of the American individuals—weapons of compliance and management within the authorities’s fingers, particularly when the federal government can pay attention to your cellphone calls, monitor your driving habits, monitor your actions, scrutinize your purchases and peer via the partitions of your own home—add as much as a society wherein there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.
That is the creepy, calculating but diabolical genius of the American police state: the very know-how we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has change into our jail, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Large Brother and Father Is aware of Finest all rolled into one.
It seems that we are Soylent Inexperienced.
The 1973 movie of the identical identify, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is ready in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, ravenous New York Metropolis whose inhabitants rely upon artificial meals manufactured by the Soylent Company for survival.
Heston performs a policeman investigating a homicide, who discovers the grisly reality in regards to the main ingredient within the wafer, soylent inexperienced, which is the principal supply of nourishment for a starved inhabitants. “It’s individuals. Soylent Inexperienced is made out of individuals,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our meals out of individuals. Subsequent factor they’ll be breeding us like cattle for meals.”
Oh, how proper he was.
Soylent Inexperienced is certainly individuals or, in our case, Soylent Inexperienced is our personal private knowledge, repossessed, repackaged and utilized by firms and the federal government to entrap us.
We, too, are being bred like cattle however not for meals.
Reasonably, as I clarify in my e-book Battlefield America: The Struggle on the American Folks and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, purchased and bought for our knowledge.
Because the insidious partnership between the U.S. authorities and Company America grows extra invasive and extra delicate with each passing day, there’s nearly no strategy to decide out of those assaults in your digital privateness wanting being a modern-day Luddite, utterly disconnected from all know-how.
What we desperately lack and urgently want is an Digital Invoice of Rights that protects “we the individuals” from predatory surveillance and data-mining enterprise practices.
With out constitutional protections in place to protect in opposition to encroachments on our rights within the digital realm, it gained’t be lengthy earlier than we discover ourselves, very similar to Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Inexperienced, trying again on the previous with longing, again to an age the place we might communicate to whom we wished, purchase what we wished, assume what we wished with out these ideas, phrases and actions being tracked, processed and saved by company giants akin to Google, bought to authorities companies such because the NSA and CIA, and used in opposition to us by militarized police with their military of futuristic applied sciences.
WC: 2031
