Friends,
Today’s New York Times has a story about Russia’s powerful internet regulator, Roskmnadzor, whose collection of personal data about average Russians has, in the Times’s words, “catapulted Russia, along with authoritarian countries like China and Iran, to the forefront of nations that aggressively use technology as a tool of repression.”
A few weeks ago, the Times ran a story about China’s collection of personal data on its citizens through phone-tracking devices, voice prints, one of the largest DNA databases in the world, facial recognition technology, and more than half of the world’s nearly one billion surveillance cameras.
This is important and useful reporting. But pardon me if I ask an impertinent question: Why aren’t we hearing more about corporate surveillance of employees in the United States? Or about corporate surveillance of Americans in general? Or how this corporate surveillance is being used by the US and state governments?
Even if Russia’s and China’s surveillance states are far more dangerously intrusive than America’s surveillance capitalism, shouldn’t we know more about how the same or very similar technologies are being utilized here?
Since I was secretary of labor, I’ve seen American companies load up on monitoring software — to watch what workers are doing every minute of the day. Workers are now subject to trackers, scores, and continuous surveillance of their hands, eyes, faces, and bodies. And increasingly, they’re paid only for the minutes (or seconds) when the systems detect they’re actively working.
Kroger cashiers, UPS drivers, and millions of others are monitored by the minute. Amazon measures seconds. J.P. Morgan — the largest bank in the United States — tracks how its workers spend time, from making phone calls to composing emails. At UnitedHealth Group, low keyboard activity can affect compensation and sap bonuses. In Amazon warehouses, some workers don’t get enough time to go to the bathrooms. ESW Capital, a Texas-based business software company, tracks workers in 10-minute intervals during which — at some moment that workers can’t anticipate — cameras take snapshots of their faces and screens.
“Digital productivity monitoring” — isn’t that an innocent-sounding phrase? — is spreading even to white-collar jobs requiring graduate degrees. Radiologists get scoreboards showing “inactivity” time and comparing productivity to their colleagues’. Doctors and nurses describe increasing electronic surveillance over workdays. Even lawyers are being closely monitored.
Firms selling all this monitoring technology gush with testimonials from supervisors describing newfound powers of “near X-ray vision” into what workers are doing other than working: watching porn, playing video games, using bots to mimic typing, two-timing. Dystopia now!
Russia’s and China’s growing surveillance systems seem more dangerous and intrusive than America’s increasing surveillance of our workers because the information Russia and China collect can stifle dissent.
But are the surveillance systems really that far apart? Big corporations that gather loads of data on exactly what their workers do all day (and sometimes into the night) — including in their purview the growing ranks of remote or gig workers — can stifle workers’ efforts to form labor unions or show any disgruntlement at all.
Russia’s and China’s surveillance of their inhabitants and America’s surveillance of our workers are starting to overlap because the technologies are starting to overlap.
A technology company in eastern China even designs “smart” cushions for office chairs that record when workers are absent from their desks. How long before we see smart cushions in American offices?
And more and more, we’re being surveilled without knowing it. Delta Air Lines boasts that its Atlanta airport’s Terminal F is the “first biometric terminal” in the United States where passengers can use facial recognition technology “from curb to gate.”
The Financial Times reports that a Microsoft facial recognition training database of 10 million images drawn from the internet without anyone’s knowledge is utilized by agencies that include the United States and Chinese military.
A new joint report from the Associated Press and Electronic Frontier Foundation highlights a major surveillance tool, known as “Fog Reveal,” now being used by dozens of local law enforcement agencies across the United States to collect personal data without a warrant. The tool makes use of advertising data — including location, timestamp, and a unique advertising ID tied to individual devices — to construct a searchable database that enables law enforcement to either track an individual device or see which devices passed through a certain area.
Where does this end?
A few years back, Mark Zuckerberg predicted that “Facebook will know every book, film, and song you ever consumed, and its predictive models will tell you what bar to go to when you arrive at a strange city, where the bartender will have your favorite drink waiting.”
Well, that day has just about arrived.
Google’s Eric Schmidt has said, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We more or less know what you’re thinking about.”
With Google using my search data and its high-tech trucks surveilling my neighborhood, I’m sure Schmidt is right.
As Shoshana Zuboff noted in her brilliant The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, we once celebrated these new digital services as free but we are learning that the platforms are hyper-velocity global bloodstreams into which almost anyone may introduce a dangerous virus without a vaccine, or from which big corporations and government can draw anything they’d like to know about us.
I’m not so sure we should be so disdainful of Russia’s and China’s surveillance systems, given what’s happening in the United States.
Isn’t it time we got serious about protecting our freedom from being watched, monitored, examined, and exposed? Otherwise, the surveillance state and surveillance capitalism merge — and we’ll have no place to hide.
Russia's and China's surveillance states, and America's surveillance capitalism
In his masterpiece 1984 George Orwell predicted a similar dystopia. His only mistake was choosing that year for his title.
After you listen to former NSA Chief Technical Director William Binney speak you realize that one of the primary purposes of US government data surveillance inside the United States is not to protect against terrorist attacks as much as it is for political blackmail.
William Binney emphasizes this point when he tells the story about during his career, once in a while a government employee would come in to the office and hand a piece of paper with a phone number, date and time on it to one of his NSA operator co-workers and ask them to pull the audio file on that cell phone call and the NSA operator would do it for them.
Binney is very worried our gov't is going to destroy your right to privacy expectations in America.
Therefore President Biden and the Democrats absolutely must expand the U.S. Supreme Court and the lower courts with a Democratic Party majority because this whacked out Republican majority on the Supreme Court is hell bent on destroying your right to privacy expectations for corporate America.
And they will not stop there - next month they are going to rule on a case that would literally destroy the U.S. Supremacy Clause of the Constitution which says federal law supercedes state law and U.S. Constitutional rights supercede state law.
This Republican majority on the Supreme Court is the most dangerous body ever known in the U.S. government to date. They hate the federal government so much they want to shrink the federal government down enough so they can drown it in a bathtub, so to speak, and are hell bent on destroying 50 years worth of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases; including your right to privacy and abrogating your First Amendment rights as well, not to mention the individual liberties protected by decades of landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases.
But the biggest danger is next month when this GOP Supreme Court majority rules on a case that could effectively turn the clock back to the Civil War during a time when Confederate states ruled their own destiny and they were the fighting enemy of the United States government.
These Confederate morons and their mindset are alive and well and kicking and destroying democracy, U.S. Const. rights and the federal gov't today.
We live in a 60/40 America where 60% are dare I say "normal people" and the 40% are rightwing conservative nutjobs such as MAGA and Trump.
Then there are the 60% of Republicans who believe America should be a Christian Nation and want the Supreme Court to convert America into a theocracy owned and operated by corporations.
It's called Cristofascism. WILLIAM BINNEY: first >>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1JDqNKMaus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M66saPW2Gq8