Twenty five years of what? As Bruce Schneier says, 25 Years of Mass Surveillance Is Enough. The post at the link is a long article with Cindy Cohn that originally appeared in Lawfare. It’s a long look at how mass surveillance—both governmental and commercial—has become institutionalized in our society. That, by itself, is a sad tale but even worse is the effect it’s had on our world.
The government, of course, conjures up its usual spectre of the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse to justify hoovering up every bit of information about us that they can. The commercial sector, in the meantime, tries—depressingly successfully—to track our every movement through the Internet. All this in furtherance of the “targeted advertising” that follows us everywhere we go on the Internet.
But wait. There’s more. Despite the weak tea that constitutes control over the government’s intrusion into our private affairs, the 3 letter organizations feel themselves unfairly constrained and are avoiding those controls by buying information from the private sector. It’s a wonderful solution because it does away with all those pesky warrant and probably cause issues.
Schneier considers how we can reverse course. That mainly involves starting to take the 4th amendment seriously again. We can’t depend on the politicos or usual suspects for this. We have to do it ourselves. Schneier points to the Automated License Plate Reader controversy—think Flock—as an example of how that can happen. People throughout the U.S. are upset over this issue and are doing something about it. Many communities have bowed to their citizens’ fury and removed the cameras.
It’s been suggested that posts like this violate Irreal’s strict rule against covering political issues but I don’t consider this sort of thing a political issue. It’s a human rights issue and one, by the way, that just about every political persuasion feels free to violate.