How do you like having a foreign government's computer following you around? How do you like having your e-mails screened? How do you like having your browsing history traced and analyzed? How do you like having your online transactions booked and monitored? How do you like a foreign government that might not share your values or opinions forming a profile of you? And how do you like that foreign government sharing all of that information and its assessments with other foreign governments, including your own? How do you like knowing that an algorithm can brand you as suspicious, unreliable or even dangerous, a potential enemy of the state?
Welcome to our very real, Brave New World. It's a world that wouldn't seem particularly unfamiliar to Huxley or Orwell.
We know that we're caught in cyber-thumbscrews but we don't know what that means for us, individually, or what it will take for the thumbscrews to be turned.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge of you is power over you. Ask any public relations practitioner. Ask Google. Ask Visa or American Express. Ask any High Priest of the dark art of data mining.
The Guardian's Bruce Schneier has written a piece on how you can make your computer a bit more resistant to the NSA's prying. His take is that all we need to do is find ways to make it costlier for the NSA to prowl our online activities and, collectively, we can run them to ground financially. Only Bruce apparently doesn't realize we're not organized to do this collectively, as a society, and the NSA is constantly working on making their systems more efficient, less costly.
My guess is that targeting an agency, trying to outwit it, is futile. We have to target the governments that target us. We have to make them change their ways. We need them to respect our privacy and thereby restore our integrity. It's hard to know if that's even remotely possible in this era of double-speak that empowers those who would sweep logic and reason aside as mere inconveniences.
A fine example of the role double-speak plays even in today's White House is provided in this video from BraveNewFoundation.
This is the world we now inhabit. If people can be summarily killed on the strength of double-speak by what is supposedly a Western democracy, our world is stood on its head. And if they will freely take peoples' lives this way, what matter is it to them if they're using your information against you whether that takes the form of misleading you, manufacturing your consent or outright coercion?
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