From Facetime to Facecrime

Salon.com is an independent web-based news source along the same vein as the Huffington Post, Slate, and a slough of other muck-raking sites that have extremely detailed and well-researched articles that publish information that mainstream journalism either can’t or won’t do because of corporate control, shareholder paranoia, and advertising influence.

The author (Anthony M. Townsend) of the following information, which I have cleverly paraphrased for you, excerpted the information from his own book, entitled Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia. This is his first published piece on the site, but it is indicative of the kinds of stories to be found. Salon was among the first sites (in 2006) to publish the torture pictures that came out of human rights scandal of Abu Ghraib that started in 2003. 

So what do torture and omnipresent digital surveillance have to do with teaching middle and secondary school children? The topics are timely, worldly, and if lessons, modules and units were to be crafted from information like this it would be a cross-collaborative effort involving math, history, English, physics, language, psychology … should I go on? While the Big Question for this week’s blog was to analyze the site and the author, the story that follows, which, as I mentioned, is paraphrased and lightly attributed, was extremely interesting in terms of the global reach and the not-so-subtle methods of giant corporations like Cisco merging with governments to gain a huge, unprecedented amount of control over civilians. Let it be known that any and all information that follows is derived from the article, save for the final few paragraphs—which are from little ol’ me.

"They" know where you are, what you're doing, and how much coffee you've had.

In 2002 the Pentagon launched a datamining program called Total Information Awareness (TIA), which was headed by Vice Admiral John Poindexter—the same man who had been convicted (it was later reversed) of lying to Congress in 1990 about the Iran-Contra affair. The program was a Defense Department baby designed to gather a centralized database of every government, commercial and private interaction on a geopolitical scale, under the pretense of seeking patterns of terrorist activity. Congress shut it down when it was determined that the same people it was hoping to find could use the information to profit from their crimes—“a virtual market for trading predictions.”

Pattern-matching algorithms have supplanted this relatively secret government program in the form of a fiber-optic feedstock that traces our every move in real time.

It’s called a cell phone.

One such system, called Footpath, recorded via network triangulation shopper demographics in California and Virginia malls in 2011. The data is used to determine retail store rental prices, and stores can place merchandise according to the pathways that shoppers tend to take once inside the store. Shoppers are given the option to turn off their phone and thus not contribute to the demographic, but otherwise the system collects your every move, pause, and transaction.

Most everyone heard of law enforcement requesting subscriber information from Verizon and AT&T, requests which Congress objected to, but off of American soil in 2010 American company Cisco began a collaboration with China to install 500,000 video cameras to watch the 6 million people living in Chongqing. By current digital costs, collecting a year’s worth of footage will cost $300 million. This “invasion of privacy” will play out differently depending on what government is in control: autocratic like the Middle East, authoritarian like China, or the legalistic mumbo jumbo of the American system.

Not surprisingly, the article conjures the dystopia of George Orwell’s “1984,” specifically to reference Cisco’s place in China’s Songdo, a civilization with two-way video screens meshed with biometrics. “It’s a future where police, bureaucrats, employers, and hackers may look out from every screen we look into.” Keep in mind also, that as Congress slaps the hand of the translucent data mining of TIA, clandestine black budget programs like the National Security Agency take its place—using the same technology.

As whistleblowers expose the conspiracies, it’s just a matter of moving to the next building to continue the process. In the continuing effort to track terrorism, which by association is a clever paraphrase of tracking every living person on the planet, our personal data is no longer personal, but a direct extension of what Amazon started years ago: a personal shopping experience with products and destinations geared precisely for you, at any given moment.

We all have cell phones, and a growing portion of the socioeconomically disadvantaged have hand-me-down phones. Everyone can be tracked and catalogued. Privacy advocates and watchdog organizations will continue to fight for what remains of our perceived privacy, but the indifferent complacency of the standard populace—meaning normal civilians who have no history of wrongdoing and would blanche at the prospect of jaywalking—will continue to be catalogued.

People who don’t have terrorist friends are being placed on the demographic wheel along with the supposed enemies, all to create one massive database of the human civilization. Once the information dissemination gurus determine that the information is no longer confidential, it’ll be the greatest census ever undertaken by man. Future generations will be privy to an unbelievable amount of information when it comes to looking at history books.

And if you aren’t doing anything wrong, is it really all that terrible to be catalogued and datamined? Shopping is easier, travel plans are determined in advance, our beverages of choice will pop up on our phones with a 10 percent off coupon as we walk by a coffee shop. If we’re law abiding citizens, who cares how much information they have on us?