Mass Surveillance, Alive and Kicking

Mass surveillance. Back in the 20th century, it was something we associated with the communist regimes of eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. After their collapse, some of those countries threw open the books, writes Neal Ascherson:

“For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation compiled by the spooks of communist Europe.”

And the portrait people see of themselves is scary:

“These portraits may be the result of years of painstaking, insanely minute watching and eavesdropping by one or several security teams. Almost always, much of their detail comes from informers. Some informers won’t be identifiable. Some may be fictional, invented by idle security officers bumping up their expenses. But some will turn out to be the reader’s intimately trusted friends or lovers.”

The amount of information gathered, the sheer “omnipresence of this invisible army of watchers and listeners” is staggering.

But all that’s over now, right? Wrong. Because now it happens all over the world. Recall that creepy feeling when you see an online ad that seems to be about precisely that thing you are interested in? Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne created this site called New Organs to collect “first-hand accounts of these seemingly paranoiac moments”, writes Oscar Schwratz.

So are tech companies are spying on us via their apps and (shudder) our smartphones? Almost certainly not, says Brain, because that would be a violation of so many US laws that it would just take a single whistleblower to bring down the company (and prison sentences). That said, he points out:

“We are stuck in this 20th century idea of spying, of wiretapping and hidden microphones. But really there is this whole new sensory apparatus, a complicated entanglement of online trackers and algorithms that are watching over us.”

It is well known that websites have cookies to track us. But what’s less well known is that companies purchase information from commercial data brokers to know, for example, what we purchase using our credit cards. All this data is then “triangulated with friends’ data” to get an eerily good idea about us. In all probability, the algorithms already decipher things that no human can even begin to understand.

Which is probably why Ascherson ended his article with these lines:

“Those (eastern European) files told us that we had never walked alone. Now we begin to see that we never will.”

The more things change, the more they remain the same…