Mass surveillance
| Mass surveillance link (social control, Civil_unrest/Preparation) | |
|---|---|
| File:Mass surveillance2.jpg Surveillance center for Venice, Italy. | |
| Wholesale surveillance of the citizenry is the new normal, introduced under the smokescreen of the "war on terror". In the "art of warfare" surveillance is taught as a preparatory act for more invasive measures such as the suspension of habeas corpus (i.e. the Patriot Act) or other covert operations. |
Mass surveillance is increasingly carried out by governments the world over. The most common purported justification is the "war on terror". The extent is not publicly disclosed, but rapid development in mass surveillance technologies and large budgets which remain classified behind veils of "national security" suggest that its extent and sophistication may be more than is generally realised. In military or intelligence terms surveillance is often a preparation for an attack.
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“Extreme forms of monitoring, whether by the KGB in the Soviet Union, the Stasi in East Germany, or Big Brother in 1984, are essential elements of all tyrannies, and technology is making both monitoring and the consolidation of surveillance data easier than ever.”
Robert Epstein (18 February 2016) [1]
Official narrative
Mass surveillance is usually presented by the commercially-controlled media as being a necessary evil to fight the "war on terror". The official opposition narrative - the other end of the spectrum of opinion presented by corporate media - does not question that civil rights must be trade off for protection against "terrorism", so it differs only about only how much mass surveillance is an acceptable compromise between safety and liberty. Both the official narrative and its opposition neglect to mention that, since Edward Snowden's revelations have demonstrated that illegal mass surveillance was being carried out widely and systematically, and since no one has been charged - or even accused - as a result, it is reasonable to assume that the major limitations to mass surveillance are technical rather than legal.
Problems
No evidence has been presented that mass surveillance was intended to stopping "terrorism". Several NSA whistleblowers such as William Binney, Russell Tice and Thomas Drake have directly challenged this claim, arguing that by contrast, it makes the US public less safe rather than more.[2] The "Surveillance State Repeal Act" was introduced into US Congress in March 2015, to end the US PATRIOT Act and reform the NSA.
"Corrupt power grab?"
A simpler explanation suggests that it is "a corrupt power grab... not an effort aimed at stopping terrorism".[3] In 2017, the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy echoed this sentiment in more diplomat terms. Criticising recent mass surveillance laws in France, Germany, the UK and the USA, he stated that they are "predicated on the... disproportionate though understandable fear that electorates may have in the face of the threat of terrorism" but are informed by "little or no evidence" of their "efficacy or... proportionality".[4]
Surveillance capitalism
- Full article: Capitalism
- Full article: Surveillance capitalism
- Full article: Capitalism
Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from government surveillance, although the two can be mutually reinforcing. The concept of surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, is driven by a profit-making incentive, and arose as advertising companies, led by Google's AdWords, saw the possibilities of using personal data to target consumers more precisely.[5]
Increased data collection may have various benefits for individuals and society, such as self-optimization (the quantified self),[6] societal optimizations (e.g., by smart cities) and optimized services (including various web applications). However, as capitalism focuses on expanding the proportion of social life that is open to data collection and data processing,[6] this can have significant implications for vulnerability and control of society, as well as for privacy.
The economic pressures of capitalism are driving the intensification of online connection and monitoring, with spaces of social life opening up to saturation by corporate actors, directed at making profits and/or regulating behavior. Therefore, personal data points increased in value after the possibilities of targeted advertising were known.[7] As a result, the increasing price of data has limited access to the purchase of personal data points to the richest in society.[8]
- ~ Wikipedia: Surveillance capitalism
"War on Terror"
- Full article: War on Terror
- Full article: War on Terror
The "War on Terror" has repeatedly used false flag terror attacks, in conjunction with a compliant commercially-controlled media to try to instill fear in people. Deliberate vagueness about laws and increasing use of guilt by association are intended to chill dissent in an effort to introduce new mass surveillance technologies. This has been particularly useful in countries such as the USA and the UK which had laws and traditions about privacy which, if enforced, would have prevented such surveillance. A widespread culture of impunity for those who control the structures of Western nation states mean that few (if any?) serious commentators regard such objections to mass surveillance as effective in practice - the only remaining limitations on data collection are purely technical in nature. UN Special Rapporteur on Privacy, Joseph Cannataci referred UK's oversight of surveillance as “worse than a bad joke.”[9]
Origins
Panopticon
- The panopticon is a design of institutional building with an inbuilt system of control, originated by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in the 18th century. The concept is to allow all prisoners of an institution to be observed by a single corrections officer, without the inmates knowing whether or not they are being watched.
- ~ Wikipedia: Panopticon
But who watches the watchmen? (Wikipedia: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?)
Citizen spy system
Harry S. Truman was concerned about the power accrued by both the CIA and the FBI. In 1947 he wrote about the FBI: "Edgar Hoover's organisation would make a good start toward a citizen spy system. Not for me."[10]
Emerging surveillance Technologies
- Full article: Mass surveillance/Technology
- Full article: Mass surveillance/Technology
The US military has developed new surveillance technologies which - with or without trialing in war zones overseas - are being rolled out across the country. Legal barriers are no effective impediment in what many have termed a police state. These include surveillance by Reaper Drones[17], Hand Held Radar[18], Cellphone Surveillance Tools[19], X-Ray vans[20] and automatic recognitino of faces, car license plates and other data from CCTV by computers.[21][22]
Modern Methods
The rise of electronic communication methods have lead to a burgeoning of the mass surveillance in the 21st century. The blatant - and unpunished - disregard for the law by both NSA and GCHQ should leave little doubt that legal restrictions are mostly left for show.
Audio Surveillance
Various electronic devices have made audio recordings and for internet behaviour.[23][24]
Voiceprint
The NSA can, from audio recordings, create a voiceprint that makes it possible to track a person globally when he/she makes a call via regular connection, cell or landline.[25] The technology was developed from the mid-2000s onwards,[26][27] while “machine transcribed speech” was discovered in patents back in 1999.[28]
Televisions
Television sets have been hacked to bring them into a "fake off mode".[31]
XBoxes
In August 2019, Motherboard wrote that Microsoft contractors have admitted to listening to users of XBoxes they "said that recordings were sometimes triggered and recorded by mistake".[32]
Cellphone location data
In 2013, in response to a subpoena for cellphone data, the NSA claimed that "The government does not possess the records the defendant seeks", i.e. specifically denied that they had collected cellphone data, although the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order stated that they could have collected this data.[33] At the same time all of this type surveillance data is available for the cellphone network providers, whose data the NSA may access with ease, irregardless of any legal regulation. Apple and others do have a history of collecting location data secretly.[34][35]
Covid-19 pandemic
Many governments of the world admitted to using cellphone data during the Covid-19 pandemic, prompting questions about whether it would ever be rolled back.[36][37][38]
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“Always keen to get the latest smartphone? Soon it won’t matter, said Mike Bechtel, Chief Futurist at Deloitte. “Over the next 10 years its going to be about moving beyond the device,” he said. “We can’t realistically have 15 smart speakers everywhere we go....We are going to be moving to ambient experiences, which is shorthand for a sort of digital Downton Abbey where we don’t ask Echo or Google ‘What’s the weather?’, we just say ‘What’s the weather?’ and the right agent jumps up at the right time to give the right answer.”
Mike Bechtel (16 Apr 2021) [39]
Internet Surveillance
- Full article: Internet/Surveillance
- Full article: Internet/Surveillance
While the Internet was designed to be decentralised, and so non-trivial to censor/monitor, the NSA has been consistently trying for decades to stifle an effective roll out of cryptography for decades. Several whistleblowers have revealed that the NSA has fiber optic splitters which allow for monitoring of huge amounts of data. The connection with internet censorship is clear; when everyone's posting is watched, unwanted content is easily removed, moreover, self-censorship may become endemic due to fear of reprisals - Webster Tarpley and others have suggested that this perspective may help understand the Edward Snowden Affair, and would tally with a large number of disclosures of mass surveillance of other natures made recently.
Operating Systems
Common operating systems on the market like Microsofts Windows, Apples IOS and Googles Android are mostly used with an online connection. The devices that run these operating systems, by design will become the first functioning part of the data collection process over the Internet which the user has no real overview of.
Postal surveillance
- Full article: Mail Isolation Control and Tracking
- Full article: Mail Isolation Control and Tracking
After the 2001 anthrax attacks, which were initially blamed on "Islamic terrorists", although the anthrax was later proved to have come from a US military laboratory, the US government secretly instituted a program to photograph all the mail sent in the US. This went undisclosed to the general public for over a decade. In 2015, it was revealed that the US Postal Inspection Service had installed a utility box "positioned to capture and record the license plates and facial features of customers leaving a Golden Post Office." [40]
Watch lists
- Full article: Watch lists
- Full article: Watch lists
The official narrative of watch lists is that they help assist law enforcement in prevention of terrorist activity. In practice, however, they are better understood as a means of mass surveillance (because everyone has to give their details, to prove that they are not on a watch list). Since the management of these lists is completely opaque, they can also be understood as a precursor to the enforcement of a heavy-handed police state - one in which individual rights are conditional and can be revoked at a moment's notice without the need for such matters as evidence of wrong doing.
Response
The commercially-controlled media has not dwelt on the illegality of mass surveillance carried out continuously by intelligence agencies. Instead, the political establishment has moved to legalise such actions, under the pretext of the threat of "terrorism". Only token discussion has ever been made in corporate media about whether mass surveillance is helpful in this regard.
{{#subobject: |Has superobject=Mass surveillance |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=Amanda Power|+sep=, |Has text=“Perhaps the most curious thing about the response to revelations concerning the extent of modern mass surveillance is that most people in the West have not seemed to mind; we have not perceptibly altered our online behavior or demanded a response from our governments. We seem not able or willing to grasp the implications, and we have shown a weary cynicism that evidently masks a deeper indifference. Many have shown an eager complicity, free of defensiveness. If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear, we insist, forgetting the innocence of millions interned and murdered by Western governments within living memory. Surveillance will keep us safe from our enemies, we say, obediently accepting the pronouncements of our governments on the identities of our enemies and the proper sources of our terror.” |Is about=Mass surveillance,Mass surveillance|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate=February 2016 |Sourced from=Lapham's Quarterly |Has sourceDetails= |Has sourceTitle=Under Watchful Eyes |Has sourceName=Lapham's Quarterly |Has sourceURL=https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/under-watchful-eyes
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“Perhaps the most curious thing about the response to revelations concerning the extent of modern mass surveillance is that most people in the West have not seemed to mind; we have not perceptibly altered our online behavior or demanded a response from our governments. We seem not able or willing to grasp the implications, and we have shown a weary cynicism that evidently masks a deeper indifference. Many have shown an eager complicity, free of defensiveness. If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear, we insist, forgetting the innocence of millions interned and murdered by Western governments within living memory. Surveillance will keep us safe from our enemies, we say, obediently accepting the pronouncements of our governments on the identities of our enemies and the proper sources of our terror.”
Amanda Power (February 2016) Under Watchful Eyes [41]
References
- ↑ https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-new-mind-control-subliminal-stimulation-controlling-people-without-their-knowledge/5511628 Global Research
- ↑ http://www.911truth.org/trump-bush-had-advanced-notice-of-911/
- ↑ http://www.911truth.org/trump-bush-had-advanced-notice-of-911/
- ↑ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/10/united_nations_special_rapporteur_on_privacy_report/
- ↑ Zuboff, Shoshana (January 2019). "Surveillance Capitalism and the Challenge of Collective Action". New Labor Forum. 28 (1): 10–29. doi:10.1177/1095796018819461. ISSN 1095-7960. Unknown parameter
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|s2cid=ignored (help)Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto module"). - ↑ Cadwalladr, Carole (20 June 2019). "The Great Hack". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 4 February 2020. Retrieved 6 February 2020.Page Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css must have content model "Sanitized CSS" for TemplateStyles (current model is "Scribunto module").
- ↑ http://www.rt.com/uk/314157-britain-surveillance-dangerous-un/
- ↑ Robert H. Ferrell (ed.) Dear Bess: The Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983), 550.
- ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Dogs
- ↑ https://me-en.kaspersky.com/about/press-releases/2014_ubisoft-consulted-with-kaspersky-lab-to-authenticate-watch-dogs-script
- ↑ http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/papers/wivi-paper.pdf
- ↑ https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/09/12/140293/dina-katabi-emerald-walls/
- ↑ https://medium.com/syncedreview/seeing-through-walls-with-adversarial-wifi-sensing-attack-and-defence-strategies-7ee2559a7f8
- ↑ https://arxiv.org/pdf/1810.10109.pdf
- ↑ http://www.defensenews.com/story/defense/international/europe/2014/12/17/italian-reaper-drones-to-be-used-for-crowd-monitoring/20528495/
- ↑ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-see-through-walls/22007615/
- ↑ https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/02/secretive-stingray-surveillance-tool-becomes-more-pervasive-questions-over-its
- ↑ http://www.propublica.org/article/judge-orders-nypd-to-release-records-on-x-ray-vans
- ↑ http://21stcenturywire.com/2015/01/29/revealed-the-tsas-new-computerized-facial-and-emotional-recognition-system/
- ↑ http://motherboard.vice.com/read/us-customs-quietly-launches-facial-recognition-experiment-at-dc-airport
- ↑ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/26/siri-recordings-regularly-sent-to-apple-contractors-for-analysis-claims-whistleblower/
- ↑ https://www.naturalnews.com/2019-01-10-google-caught-secretly-recording-conversations-mobile-device.html
- ↑ https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/20/the-nsa-can-recognize-you-by-just-your-voice-predating-apple-amazon.html
- ↑ https://www.biometricupdate.com/201801/nsa-voice-recognition-capabilities-appear-to-be-more-advanced-than-previously-thought
- ↑ http://archive.today/2024.11.01-161853/http://www.nbmachinetool.com/content-about-the-power-of-the-3145.html
- ↑ https://theintercept.com/2015/05/11/speech-recognition-nsa-best-kept-secret/
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20200911200826/https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1505138/00-wallsensorreport-508.pdf
- ↑ https://reason.com/2015/01/20/police-use-radar-device-to-see-inside-yo/
- ↑ https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/privacy/a-closer-look-at-the-tvs-from-the-cia-vault-7-hack-a1864416431/
- ↑ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/43kv4q/microsoft-human-contractors-listened-to-xbox-owners-homes-kinect-cortana
- ↑ http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2013/06/nsa-claims-it-doesnt-track-movements-cell-phone-users
- ↑ http://web.archive.org/web/20150417071618/http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/04/apple-location-tracking.html
- ↑ http://archive.today/2020.12.04-174303/https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703983704576277101723453610
- ↑ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/14/contact_tracing_exit_strategy/
- ↑ https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/they-are-rolling-out-the-architecture-of-oppression-now-because-they-fear-the-people-d0d374509d
- ↑ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bvge5q/snowden-warns-governments-are-using-coronavirus-to-build-the-architecture-of-oppression
- ↑ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/global-technology-governance-summit-gtgs-future/
- ↑ http://gizmodo.com/u-s-post-offices-have-installed-hidden-spy-cameras-to-1691112318
- ↑ https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/spies/under-watchful-eyes Lapham's Quarterly