America Has Become a ‘Surveillance Prison’ – Our Devices and Our Government Are Spying on Us
Many of us are under surveillance, at this very moment. No warrants are needed, and no laws are broken.
The most obvious culprit is all the cameras, and America has as many surveillance cameras per person as Communist China. Police departments in America’s largest cities, from New York to L.A., are combining these cameras with facial recognition technology to track everyone.
You’re also giving away your personal information, about where you are, what you like, even about your mental health without even realizing it. Every click, purchase, and “like” is harvested and sold for profit by data brokers, feeding a growing digital advertising market that is close to one trillion dollars in value. Even your car tire sensors allow you to be tracked.
Byron Tau, author of the book Means of Control, says, “Those data brokers make that data available for sale to researchers, to marketers, to companies, and even to governments. So, it’s very, very difficult to escape, the kind of logging and surveillance that modern technology brings along with it.
It’s being called “surveillance capitalism.”
“The internet is now a prison,” says Shoshana Zuboff, author of the book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. “It’s a surveillance prison. It is owned and operated by private capital.”
Tau says data brokers “…want to access to our contacts. They want access to our calendars. App developers take that information, and they suck it up. They vacuum it up. They know who your friends are. They know where you go. So, that kind of information is available for sale.”
Your data is also being sold to the police and the federal government. A product called “Fog Reveal” allows police to create what are called “patterns of life” on a person, to possibly track someone without a warrant.
The government is also continuing to use a back door in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, to spy on Americans, which is supposed to be illegal.
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But what really bothers Dave Mass, the director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, are license plate readers, used by many police departments.
“This is one of the most pernicious and offensive technologies in the United States,” Maas told us. “It is misrepresented to the public in such a way that people think it’s doing one thing, but it’s actually doing another.”
“So, for your audience, license plate readers are cameras that take a picture of your car and digitize the license plate, as well as other elements to it, your bumper sticker, the color make, model year, whether you have damage to your vehicle, and uploads that to a central database along with where your car was seen and when. So, a police officer can sit down in a computer and type in your license plate and see everywhere across the country that your vehicle was caught on camera, sometimes going back years and years and years. They have no reason to keep this data. It doesn’t matter whether you are tied to a crime or not. They’re capturing it on everyone,” he said.
A Duke University study found that data brokers are also selling lists of people with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and PTSD, all harvested from medical apps and websites.
Constitutional Attorney John Whitehead says this is all a clear violation of the Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.
White says, “The Fourth Amendment’s dead. Because on their phones and laptops, they have all this information on you. It’s called ‘predictive policing.’ And they’re watching everything people are doing.”
The surveillance of Americans is an issue that should unite both the political Right and Left, because we’re all losing an important constitutional protection.
Maas says, “If you care about something, then you should be worried about surveillance. I don’t care what the issue is that you care about. It could be gun rights. It could be the rights of Palestinians. If you care about something, surveillance is going to harm your rights.”
We asked the FBI if it is still buying the data of Americans. It did not respond.
The question is, can Americans roll back this surveillance state, when data harvesting is now such a large part of the economy, and so little is being done to stop it? The issue has been raised on Capitol Hill, but a new law this year only protects Americans’ data from being sold to some foreign governments.
Tau says consumers need to realize that most of the apps on their phones are trying to gather data to be sold. Beware of granting location permissions to apps. Use only encrypted messaging services and search engines that promise not to track you.
You can go into your phone and delete your phone’s advertising ID, which can be used to track your habits and movements. You can also buy services that remove your data from the marketplace.
For there to be any fundamental return to privacy in America, however, experts say more Americans are going to have to demand change from Washington.
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