By Brendan Ulmer
Ulmer Uncensored
We are being watched.
In the private sector, data brokers are creating detailed profiles complete with personal information (home and email addresses, phone numbers, etc.), internet and purchase history, health information, and much more. They’re doing this constantly, and they’re doing it to everybody.
In my opinion, their methods are somewhat unsavory, but their goal is banal. They’re trying to give you ads they think will be more relevant to your interests.
In the public sector, the government has sweeping capabilities, as well as robust legal cover from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Patriot Act, for both foreign and domestic surveillance.
Just this year, the federal government has awarded the data mining company Palantir with hundreds of millions of dollars for the purpose of utilizing their software within and across government agencies to create detailed profiles of United States civilians.
Earlier this month, I interviewed a man named Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group. While we mostly discussed Flock cameras, we also talked a little about the modern surveillance state.
“The surveillance industry is a multi-billion-dollar private industry that gets rich when people are afraid, or the government thinks they need to surveil people,” Guariglia said. “So the government is contracting with companies to outsource so much collection of data, the storage of data, the analysis of data, in part because it’s such a big job to spy on all of us.”
Guariglia believes this widespread surveillance flies in the face of how our justice system is supposed to work.
“A really important rule here is that in this country we have a presumption of innocence, that you are innocent until proven guilty,” Guariglia said. “When you spy on everybody, what you’re saying is, ‘You are all guilty until we prove that you’re innocent.’ Mass surveillance has kind of flipped that on its head.”
In my column a few weeks ago, I wrote about the silent problem of alienation, a problem that I believe is exacerbating many of our other societal issues. I believe that surveillance is another divider being placed between civilians and their government. Every camera breached, every monitored conversation is a quiet but clear message to the people, “We do not trust you”.
“It’s basically a meme or a joke at this point that you apologize to the FBI agent looking through the webcam of your phone or your computer, or you leave certain rooms to have conversations because that’s where the Alexa is,” Guariglia said. “I think it’s kind of a general, accepted part of life that the government spies on us.”
An important thing to note about this issue is that it’s not a partisan one, at least not meaningfully (in my opinion). At any given time, you may trust that a particular politician or administration has their best interests at heart in collecting your data, but once the government has access to these tools, they will not go away if a politician you don’t care for takes power.
How did we get here in what is supposed to be a representative democracy? I do not know. Personally, I think it is paramount that the surveillance state is corralled significantly because, as scary as it is, the tools a totalitarian would need to stalk their citizens are already here.
All this is being done in the name of safety, but I don’t know if anyone feels any safer. You would hope that these big government agencies could use these tools to prevent things like mass shootings, but those have been rising steadily, right alongside the government’s surveillance capabilities. It begins to feel like massive liberties have been taken with our privacy for a rather limited end.