Surveillance

The current pandemic has changed the patterns of daily life for all of us. More people work from home. More students go to school from home. Romper Room of from previous generations has been replaced by romper zoom. Parents who work from home are having to deal with kids who go to school from home. It is hard on parents, it is hard on teachers, and children trapped in a house all day with excess energy get to mischief quick.

The proliferation of end to end encryption in the civilian sector is something that causes the secret police of the world deep frustration. The desire to at least possess the ability to read the contents of every email has been the stated policy of the American State since the Clinton Administration. The inability of the FBI to crack into the contents of a dead person's iPhone was put on display by former FBI director James Comey in 2016.

The so-called internet of things was always a solution in search of a problem. The promise of an automated house that would behave just the way you like is one of convenience, set up so you “just don't have to worry about that.” Whatever “that” is, perhaps it needs some worrying about. Did I turn the coffee pot off before I left? This is something both to worry about and not worry about. The answer is: Finish your coffee and you will remember to shut the damn thing off. If you don't finish your coffee, you should not be going anywhere.

Since the NSO / Pegasus investigation broke there are now 18 high end global media outlets that are working in consortium to track the story and the fallout. They have the data, and we rely on them. This is a very different set of circumstances than the Snowden revelations eight years ago. With that story, only two outlets had real access. Those outlets were firmly dealt with by the Anglo American intelligence community.

The Guardian.UK has recently released a series of stories on NSO Pegasus, which is privately funded spyware used by goverments around the world to hack the cellphones of targeted so-called terrorists. Since 2019, this spyware has turned up on the phones of over 180 dissident journalists, and humand rights activists as well as lawyers and loved ones.

Watch what you say online. Always say pro-social things. Say normal things. Act like you came here from the 1950s. Do not support sex workers or be a sex worker. Remember that we are watching you. Obey, or you will sleep in the cold. All of those commands and the punishment sound like lines to be said by a b-movie villain. They are not. They are the corporate policy of America's #1 not landlord landlord, AirBnB.

A few months ago a Facebook advertisement piqued my interest about how the company was leveraging my user data to target ads in my feed. What began as a passing curiosity about how the company targets advertising, turned into a deep dive at big tech's hidden and unregulated practices. The research led me to construct an experiment that exposed not only a deep level of corporate surveillance into our everyday lives, but also a cross-platform and cross-company effort to integrate our personal data, and use it to manipulate user behavior.

“Amazon Ring” is owned by and branded as Amazon but the company had a life of it's own before it's acquisition and re-branding. It has been a local law enforcement favorite. It's partnership with Amazon puts all it's data in the Amazon cloud which was funded with the same money that Jeff Bezos went on to buy the Washington Post with. It provides users with a “Ring Neighbors” app that allows them to gossip about the brown people they see near their white picket fences. What happens with the data flow? The short answer is anything the police and intelligence services want to happen.

Without former Cambridge University professor Alexander Kogan’s desire to obtain Facebook data for his research, Cambridge Analytica would never have had access to the 87 million profiles they used to elect Trump in 2016.

Children born 18 years ago this week have lived their whole lives with their country at war. They are old enough to enlist without parental consent and according to CDC birth records there are enough of them, 362,000, to completely replace the active duty component of the Marine Corps, 181,000 twice That number does not account for the United State's leadership of the developed world in infant mortality, which would place the number at 344,000, or not quite enough to double the size of the Marine Corps but still larger than the Air Force.