Who Is Watching You?

In an excellent article at Dissent Magazine David J. Phillips explains exactly how our obsession with gadets -- especially communications gadgets -- has led to a situation where governments and corporations monitor virtually everything you do. Phillips begins by reminding us that:

"Every day, we are identified, monitored, and tracked. Supermarket loyalty cards record our purchases, online data collectors record our mouse clicks, airlines record our travels. These records of our activities are analyzed to create statistical knowledge, and that knowledge is used to construct the world we live in and our place in that world. New brands are created in response to newly discovered market trends. Ad campaigns are designed with a specific demographic in mind, and the ads are delivered only to those individuals who fit the demographic. "Normal" travel patterns are discovered, and deviants from that normalcy are subjected to greater scrutiny at the airport ...

Today the United States has at least 130 million cell phone users. All are subject to increasingly precise tracking. The infrastructure that supports such tracking has evolved rapidly through a series of technical, legal, and political mutations, all stemming from the choices of highly interested actors. The resulting configuration of laws, networks, and corporate interests determines who is able to use the phone system to gather information about the mobility, not only of individuals, but of the population as a whole."

Phillips interestingly traces a technical history linking the original 911 emergency phone system with the current ability to track the exact position in real time of a cell phone in use, concluding that

"Taken together, changes invisible to ordinary citizens have moved us into a world where all mobile phone users are potentially subject to precise monitoring. Specialized location systems pinpoint calls. Specialized database systems collect and distribute that data. Specialized routing systems determine where to send calls from particular locations. Specialized decision software determines how to respond to calls. All of these systems are designed to be adaptable as emergency calls start coming from handheld computers rather than cell phones, or as calls arrive through the Internet rather than through the telephone network ... For the most part, these systems are operated by private companies. Yet they have been developed with public money ... In effect, then, what has developed in the United States in the past decade is a publicly funded, privately operated, generic, adaptable, and pervasive surveillance infrastructure."

So, OK, perhaps you can rationalize away this lack of privacy safe in the knowledge that, should you need it, an ambulance will be speeding toward you in the most efficient fashion. But is that all it is used for? You wish!

"[W]ireless carriers are exploring the possibilities of linking data generated by the systems described above on phone users' location and movements to commercially developed marketing data on users' social characteristics and purchasing patterns. Think of the possibilities: when certain trigger conditions are met-when the right sort of person appears in the right sort of region at the right sort of time-the carrier could deliver an advertiser's message to the user. Nearing a Pizza Hut, one could find one's cell phone ringing with a recorded ad suggesting that a snack is waiting at the next fork in the road."

That sounds really annoying to me, but not life-threatening. However, how about this?

"Police and national security agencies increasingly seek to use the vast amounts of locational data generated by emergency calls, not simply to respond to particular callers, but to trace patterns of normal and aberrant behavior. For example, some regional call centers share the locational data from medical emergency calls with third parties. Those third parties then analyze that locational data to look for patterns suggesting an epidemic or bioterrorism ...

[I]nitiatives such as Total Information Awareness (TIA) (now strategically renamed "Terrorism Information Awareness") and the Computer Aided Passenger Profiling System (CAPPS) are intended to churn huge amounts of personal data in order to find patterns of normalcy and deviance. After those patterns are established, they are used to profile individuals and assign them a certain risk level. JetBlue Airlines recently transferred to a Department of Defense contractor over a million passenger travel records, which the contractor then merged with other public and private databases records and subjected to statistical analysis. Particular individuals, though unnamed, were isolated as exemplifying specific levels of threat."

These examples show that we must carefully analyze the potential side effects of any system or gadget or "improvement" that appears to bring certain limited "benefits". Generally, these "benefits" are really only of benefit to the health of the capitalist system, encouraging further consumption, perhaps, or to its bureaucratic arm, the government for use in furtherance of its control.

No one NEEDS a cell phone or a supermarket loyalty card or a system that books airline tickets in one minute rather than five minutes. None of these things even existed ten years ago and there were no horrific consequences. And yet each of these things has brought us closer to the ideal police state, where surveillance is constant and invisible.

Think before you buy!