Don't read this

5 min read LUIS BRITTO GARCÍA 0 comments

LUIS BRITTO GARCÍA

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Everything you read, write, speak, record, photograph, or communicate on a computing device will surely end up in the hands of a US law enforcement agency or its accomplices. The same will happen with your own data, that of your loved ones and your recipients, with information about everything you own, use, buy, rent, consume, borrow, throw away or want. The same will happen with your trips, infractions or contraventions: everything will be recorded and preserved even after you have forgotten it or die, for the exclusive use of surveillance agencies or monopolies. Such is the conclusion of Edward Snowden in his chilling book Permanent Surveillance, a memoir of his eventful time as a volunteer in the US Army, hired by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA), and perpetual exile in Russia to escape the persecution of his former colleagues.

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How does a more or less naive teenage hacker go from being a spy agency technician to being a fugitive from almost every political police force? The process is parallel to the degradation of the World Wide Web, a miraculous network that made all the world’s knowledge available to anyone and made remote work and organization possible, which was reduced to a dismal instrument of espionage at the service of governments that are themselves immune to any investigation. As Snowden points out, “the cables, the satellites, the servers, the towers… So much of the Internet infrastructure is under American control that more than 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies whose development, ownership and operation are the responsibility of the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on U.S. territory(…)” (Snowden, 155).

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At first, the web sheltered heterodox computer scientists who hid their identity but freely expressed their ideas; Soon the consortia turned it into a showcase for the false identities of those who lacked ideas. In his book The Lonely Crowd, Vance Packard demonstrated that the agglomeration in cities of crowds who had lost their family and regional ties created a devastating feeling of isolation and loneliness.

Mark Zuckerberg devised promoting a fictitious companionship, applying the cheesy model of family albums where relatives recorded their anodyne incidents and adulatory notes from visits. Facebook is a computerized family album where the masses record trivial personal events to share with audiences of friends as fictitious as the identities they display therein. That garbage dump, however, is gold for marketing and political espionage companies.

In “social” networks, all the data that interests economic and political powers are trapped like fish: income level, family group, consumption habits, properties, tastes, hobbies, sentimental preferences, friendships, enmities, vices, prejudices, shortcomings: everything the power wants to know about you, voluntarily contributed by yourself. Let us add that portals and networks claim to be the owners of whatever content is deposited in them, and they store them in “clouds” where they remain eternally, without the informant having a certain right to recover or delete them.

An entire society reduced to information, and all information absolutely appropriated by an elite that is accountable to no one. As Snowden points out: “all of our devices, from our phones to computers, are basically miniature census takers that we carry in our backpacks or pockets: census takers that remember everything and forget nothing” (Snowden, 176). And to top it all off, every web page you open tries to implant a cookie, a full-time spy mechanism.

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The second degradation of computing is the privatization of security. After the inexplicable lack of alerts regarding the attack on the Twin Towers, a security hysteria broke out in the United States and its semi-colonies. Almost omnipotent agencies, such as the CIA and the NSA, to avoid parliamentary controls turned to private contractors, who in order to save salaries and social benefits subcontracted with exploited hackers without the status of public servants.

This explains why one of these, Edward Snowden, discovered that the NSA, far from protecting the country, had developed a colossal secret spy apparatus against its own citizens. The number of Americans subjected to surveillance operations was greater than the number of foreigners who were victims of them. These operations were carried out without the knowledge of the affected person, a court order, the right to defense or an expiration date, and with kidnappings and torture in extraterritorial bases beyond the reach of the courts, such as Guantánamo. Ira Hunt, the CIA's chief technology officer, openly stated that there "we basically tried to collect everything and store it forever." And he added: “we practically have within our reach the possibility of processing all the information generated by human beings.” The United States had become a police system.

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Who could shake this invulnerable and uncontrollable colossus that claimed absolute power over the American people and the rest of the planet? You guessed it: a nightmarish idealist. The young hacker Edward Snowden couldn't sleep thinking that he, his family, his girlfriend Lindsay, were being incessantly spied on by a device that violated the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution: "the right of the people to be secure from unreasonable search and seizure shall never be violated."

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How to enforce the Constitution? Through public complaint. Snowden became a voluntary fugitive and fled to Hong Kong to deliver his reports to journalists. He planned to fly to Moscow, Havana, Caracas and Quito, to request political asylum there. The United States revoked his passport and he remained stuck in Russia. In the face of the news scandal, President Obama reluctantly removed some surveillance of his fellow citizens, but continued spying on the rest of the planet. Elites about whom we know nothing know everything about everyone. About you and me. Every man for himself.