The United States of China
5 Stealthy Ways in Which Surveillance Threatens our Freedoms Today
An earlier version of this story was first published here.
The term “total surveillance” conveys images of oppressive governments, jails, East Germany’s Stasi, Xinjiang, and North Korea. Usually, though, we fail to see the direct relevance for our own lives in the “free world.”
Private surveillance can erode the foundations of liberty, too.
The United States is not a totalitarian country. We are rarely threatened by our government. Stealthily, though, emerging technologies and new platforms are introducing totalitarian capabilities that challenge the core fabric of our society and lives. Unlike in some other countries, the immediate menace is not a specific party or political faction. It is the abdicating of control, the endangering of our ability to think and decide independently, and the erosion of trust in our most cherished institutions. In that, all three branches of our government are complicit, because they advocate more centralized powers, support barely checked surveillance, and object to the strengthening of our defenses via encryption.
“To say ‘privacy does not matter because you have nothing to hide’ is the same as to say ‘freedom of speech does not matter because you have nothing to say.’”
Many wonder why to worry if we have nothing to hide. But, as a wise person stated, “to say ‘privacy does not matter because you have nothing to hide’ is the same as to say ‘freedom of speech does not matter because you have nothing to say.’”
It matters, and in ways that may surprise those that focus on governmental intrusion. Already today, and privately run, five dimensions of surveillance and lack of privacy hurt us and profoundly challenge our liberties.
(1) What we Control: Our own Front Doors
Even in so-called ”free” Western societies, almost every person already is subject to near-total surveillance. We do some of this to ourselves. ”Everything goes” for the watchers when we use our Chinese-made Android phones, Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp installed, logged on to our Google accounts, our smart assistants activated, and connected to our unsecured home wifi or just about any public alternatives.
We invite everybody to feast on data from the computers we use, via our digital “fingerprints”, the Facebook apps scanning and sharing our address books and online and offline activities, the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) reading our emails and recording what we do on the Internet, the cloud providers sifting through our emails and our files, the unprotected browsers, and our data-thirsty Google and Facebook accounts.
The cookies and hidden code tracing all our online activities are now even formally authorized via stipulations of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by asking us to press “OK” to accept data collection on nearly every site we visit.
(2) Beyond the Internet: Our Neighborhood
As we physically move around our neighborhoods, with or without our phones and watches, facial recognition cameras track us and store our locations and actions. So do number plate scanners, radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers, and car assistants, plus a myriad of ways that other people and Internet of Things (IoT) devices identify and trace nearly every one of our actions much more surreptitiously. It is what every crime fighter, Stasi-like secret service, and intelligence agency dreamed of — and what advertisers, political masterminds, and criminals want.
Usually, we do not worry about businesses we patronize and partners we know. Freely, we let our devices, computers, and applications identify, track, record, and analyze everything we do: each step we take, every mouse movement and keystroke we make, every word we utter or read, what we buy, what we like and look at, who is near us and what they say.
But not only the AI on our local machines accesses this. Within milliseconds our data is on its way. We have not yet walked by the storefront that just scanned our phones, not yet looked at the results from our Google search, not finished our sentence on the phone, not yet scrolled down the article we just read. Already the transaction is complete. Data sold. Target acquired.
(3) Everybody’s Spying on Everybody Else: The Anonymous World
For often just minimal additional convenience, we accept that our family, friends, and an unknown number of total strangers take pictures and videos of us and talk about us. Their phones’ Instagram, WhatsApp, and Siri apps track us and record us. And so do their social media posts and comments when they upload our joint actions to the cloud, automatically identified and probed by AI assistants. This is more tricky to avoid. We could hardly have privacy even if we got rid of all our own devices and stayed offline. But most of us don’t even try.
(4) Just the Cost of Doing Business: Big Data
Most web sites and cloud storage in the world are using Amazon servers. We all use Google services from searches to email and phone accounts and productivity tools. And billions of us communicate via WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. And so, Big Data businesses like Facebook, Google, and Amazon inhale as much data as they can — and that is a lot.
We tolerate it and voluntarily grant far-reaching authorizations based on confusing disclosures and long-winded legal statements that we could not possibly read anyway. We just automatically agree. At the surface, it looks like a small price to pay.
What does not enter into the equation is that thebusiness models of those surveilling us share one common theme: selling this data, to whoever wants to do something with it. And then we are paying, but not just with money.
We have not yet walked by the storefront that just scanned our phones, not yet looked at the results from our Google search, not finished our sentence on the phone, not yet scrolled down the article we just read. Already the transaction is complete. Data sold. Target acquired.
The buyers get to work on many levels. They correlate it with other data they stored about us. Most of them just max out the grey zones but keep it formally legal. They make us see custom advertisements and pay more for the same products than our neighbors, look at different search results, read different news, start thinking and then voting differently. Artificial intelligence (AI) influences and directs individuals via powerful algorithms that filter, censor and present personalized information, products, and “solutions.” To get the mix “right,” targeted predictive analytics and personalized feedback loops pander to our deepest instincts, biochemically enforced. It may be legal, but is it right?
(5) Criminal Cyber-Attacks: The Really Bad Guys
Advertisers, of course, enrich Sergei, Mark, Jeff, and their friends, employees, and investors. But part of these profits also come from selling our data to criminals, terrorists, foreign intelligence agencies, and state actors pursuing military objectives.
Using what is in the public realm, these phish and spear-phish to influence and dig deeper. Then, they target and directly manipulate the way we think, act, buy, get our “news”, and cast our votes. They compromise our identities and steal our property or our employers’. They access control systems and destroy our infrastructure. And then they break into and encrypt our systems, falsify information, stop hospitals from operating, and our weapons from functioning — and with that they hurt us physically.
Good guys and bad guys manipulate us with our data and let us even pay for it — but the bad guys go further and steal, destroy, and hurt us physically.
Often safely sitting thousands of miles away and using botnets that mask their real identity, they can enhance this already profligate data they legally acquired in the public sphere and help themselves on the Dark Web. There, just a few clicks and payments via other people’s credit cards away, are the billions of records of stolen personal identifiable information, from credit card numbers, passport numbers, social security numbers, travel profiles, medical records, purchase history, credit ratings, passwords, mothers’ maiden names, compromising information from background checks, and so much more. The bad guys cross-reference all this — and are now playing at the Cyber-Olympics.
We Can Act: Wither the Eroding of Foundations and Smashing of Pillars
But the biggest threat is indirect, subversive, but much more corrosive: others taking over our way of life. Just like the government does in countries like China. Big data and AI algorithms grind down the trust in our modern-day digitized and connected systems and institutions. Is what we see in our databases correct? Are the “others” really vicious, stupid, bought-off, selfish fascists? Can we believe the search results and news we get? Are the emails and the people we interact with real? Is our data secure? Will semi-autonomous machines and robots harm us? Are we safe?
Total surveillance pounces the pillars of liberty and threatens to crush them. At the same time it erodes freedom’s foundations. We cannot let this happen, and don’t have to if we follow some simple steps.
We can uninstall spying apps and switch to secure alternatives, install different browsers, encrypt our emails and data and stop blindly trusting cloud providers, use password managers, Yubikeys, and multi-factor authorization, connect via virtual private networks (VPNs), stay logged out of social media accounts unless we actively use them, lock down our devices and computers, and turn off authorizations to track our locations, access our address books, and liberally collect and share our data.
We can teach big data with our wallets. Even the big data companies Facebook, Amazon, and Google have competitors. Technology is moving on, with more secure blockchain-based solutions around the corner. If big data corporations want to stay in business, they will (need to) follow the market and come around. We are this market. As we remove our WhatsApp apps and use Signal, add encryption services to standard cloud offerings, and lock down our devices we can send powerful messages: Change your business model!
To fight criminals and cyber-attacks, we need to change underlying economic motivations. We must resist the centralization of platforms, and the lobbying power of big tech. Instead, we have to urge our governments to support decentralized platforms, encryption and privacy-protecting solutions. We need to be able to defend our systems and data. Only this can ensure genuine resilience.
Putting this in place today, or failing to do so, has far-reaching consequences. Emerging technology trends are clear. IoT, 5G, and ever faster computers will exponentially grow our vulnerabilities. In about 20 years, we will deal with millions of times as much data as today, with thousands or a million times the number of devices connected, all operating at currently unimaginable speeds. The platforms and rules we put in place today will then (need to) be run by AI.
These AI will either empower us or give total control to centralized powers. That is our choice, and we must choose today.
