Surveillance Archives

The Price of Our Silence

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

These words were written by Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) a German theologian. As a young man he was an avid and loyal German military officer, first in the Imperial German Navy, then in WWI a U-Boat commander. In 1920 he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and began seminary training at the University of Munster.

Niemöller was a staunch supporter of the coming of the Third Reich. Until in 1934 he along with two prominent Protestant bishops had a personal meeting with Adolph Hitler to discuss the state’s pressures on churches. At that meeting it became clear that Niemöller’s phone had been tapped by the Gestapo, and that the group he represented, the Pastors Emergency League, had been under close state surveillance.

That meeting was a wake-up call for Niemöller. It changed everything for him, and he began to see the Nazi state as a dictatorship. He devoted the remainder of WWII combatting Nazism from the inside. In 1937 he was arrested and eventually confined in the Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps. His crime was “not being enthusiastic enough about the Nazi movement.” Niemöller was released in 1945 by the Allies.

Today in Trump’s angry minorities of the far-right wing of American politics we see a similar danger to us that Niemöller saw in the emergent Nazi party of his days. There’s only one way: their way. Any and everything else is met with absolute annihilation. They are intolerant of any other option, any other path for America. During the past few months, I’ve seen a storm of articles The Washington Post, The New York Times, on CNN, MSNBC, the major networks, The Atlantic—the list goes on and on, warning America of the growing dangers of the Trumpian right-wing to American democracy. They all emphasize: this is a genuine threat, not a passing trend or phase. And it cannot be ignored.

There is a serious, organized effort underway to legitimize the views of the radical right-wing anger, along with all of its many prejudices. For example: ● at least 10 people involved in the Capitol riots were just elected to state and local office, ● at least 5 more are running for Congress.

We have to speak up, with our voices, with our votes. I underestimated Trump’s electability and appeal in 2016. I won’t do it again. And neither should you. The price of our silence will be our democracy.

The ever-changing dangers of the ever-changing Internet.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is sometimes heralded as “the ‘Magna Carta’ of the internet.” It was passed in 1996 to provide websites with incentive to delete pornography, but it has since evolved. It is now effectively a shield that websites use to protect them from responsibility for all sorts of activity on their platforms, from illegal gun sales to discriminatory ads.

This week The Markup reporter Sara Harrison examines the U.S. law that enables both the good and the bad of internet speech, and explores how the law might be reformed to meet the new challenges of the ever-changing Internet.

Excellent article.

Facebook and Its Secret Policies

Below is an article from today’s The New York Times by Shira Ovide who writes the On Tech column for them.

The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Facebook had studied for two years whether its social network makes people more polarized.

Researchers concluded that it does, and recommended changes to the company’s computerized systems to steer people away from vilifying one another. But the Journal reports that the company’s top executives declined to implement most of the proposed changes.

Fostering open dialogue among people with different viewpoints isn’t easy, and I don’t know if Facebook was right in shelving ideas like creating separate online huddles for parents arguing about vaccinations. But I do want to talk over two nagging questions sparked by this article and others:

In a new era, new challenges and new choices for how we want to live . . .

“The decades of economic injustice and immense concentrations of wealth that we call the Gilded Age succeeded in teaching people how they did not want to live. That knowledge empowered them to bring the Gilded Age to an end, wielding the armaments of progressive legislation and the New Deal. Even now, when we recall the lordly ‘barons’ of the late nineteenth century, we call them ‘robbers.’

“Surely the Age of Surveillance Capitalism will meet the same fate as it teaches us how we do not want to live. It instructs us in the irreplaceable value of our greatest moral and political achievements by threatening to destroy them It reminds us that shared trust is the only real protection from uncertainty. It demonstrates that power untamed by democracy can only lead to exile and despair. . . . it is up to us to use our knowledge, to regain our bearings, to stir others to do the same, and to found a new beginning. In the conquest of nature, industrial capitalism’s victims were mute. Those who would try to conquer human nature will find their intended victims full of voice, ready to name danger and defeat it. This book is intended as a contribution to that collective effort.”

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, (Public Affairs, 2019).

Surveillance Capitalism, the definition

Sur-veil-lance Cap-i-tal-ism, n.

1. A new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales; 2. A parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modifications; 3. A rogue mutation of capitalism marked by concentrations of wealth, knowledge, and power unprecedented in human history; 4. The foundational framework of a surveillance economy; 5. As significant a threat to human nature in the twenty-first century as industrial capitalism was to the natural world in the nineteenth and twentieth; 6. The origin of a new instrumentarian power that asserts dominance over society and presents startling challenges to market democracy; 7. A movement that aims to impose a new collective order based on total certainty; 8. An expropriation of critical human rights that is best understood as a coup from above; an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff, (Public Affairs, 2019).

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

To help you understand your new world environment, this is essential reading. It can be heavy lifting sometimes. But stick with it. It’s extremely enlightening. And I found it to be a sobering message about the unprecedented challenges we face as citizen of this American democracy, and our new world of global surveillance. Highly recommended.

The necessity of “thinking differently”.

Here are a couple of new articles from the Opinion page of today’s New York Times that are worth our serious consideration. As I’ve mentioned before, if you want to get a good sense for how the Times‘ readership feels about an article, go to their comments section and click on Reader’s Picks. You might be surprised.

Time to Break the Silence on Palestine, Michelle Alexander, which explores an old controversy that doesn’t seem to budge from it’s firmly implanted beginnings. Or does it? The reader’s comments seem to signal a changing perspective on some fronts.

If 5G Is So Important, Why Isn’t It Secure?, Tom Wheeler. We’re at another “new beginning” with the Internet, and as Wheeler points out, we’re about to make the same old mistakes with a great new opportunity.

It’s the End of News as We Know it (and Facebook is Feeling Fine)

This article in Mother Jones is an important summary of recent issues confronting Facebook, and how they’ve manipulated their response to the public and their users. I first saw this mentioned in a tweet by James Fallows. It’ll set your hair on fire. We can thank the British Guardian and the New York Times, for bringing this story to the public’s attention. Mark Zuckerberg tried to cover it up.

“You have no privacy . . . get over it.”

These words spoken by Scott McNealy, the founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, way back in 1999, open an article by Sue Halpern in the new issue of the New York Review of Books, in which she reviews four new books on privacy.

The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America
by Sarah E. Igo
Harvard University Press, 569 pp., $35.00

Habeas Data: Privacy vs. the Rise of Surveillance Tech
by Cyrus Farivar
Melville House, 281 pp., $27.99

Beyond Abortion: Roe v. Wade and the Battle for Privacy
by Mary Ziegler
Harvard University Press, 383 pp., $45.00

Privacy’s Blueprint: The Battle to Control the Design of New Technologies
by Woodrow Hartzog
Harvard University Press, 366 pp., $35.00

Because every intimate aspect of our lives is being collected and absorbed and processed and monetized by the digital services that have become essential to our modern lives, the issue of our privacy will continue to be increasingly important to us. As we learn the dangers of the digital media we’ve embraced, hastily, greedily, and without fully understanding it, we are only now realizing how much of ourselves we have freely given to them, often in return for nothing more than amusement.

Halpern says, “A survey recently published in The Atlantic found that ‘78.8 percent of people said they were “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the privacy of their information on social media, and 82.2 percent said they self-censor on social media.’”

Read this article, and the books Halpern discusses. Surveillance tech owns us. Only by understanding what we’ve done to ourselves through ignorance and unquestioning gullibility, can we hope to correct our mistakes