Berlin’s digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA
I'm going to quote two paragraphs verbatim, because they distill the practical extent of a universal, collect-it-all surveillance.Anne Roth, a political scientist who’s now a researcher on the German NSA inquiry, tells me perhaps the most chilling story. How she and her husband and their two children – then aged two and four – were caught in a “data mesh”. How an algorithm identified her husband, an academic sociologist who specialises in issues such as gentrification, as a terrorist suspect on the basis of seven words he’d used in various academic papers.Seven words? “Identification was one. Framework was another. Marxist-Leninist was another, but you know he’s a sociologist… ” It was enough for them to be placed under surveillance for a year. And then, at dawn, one day in 2007, armed police burst into their Berlin home and arrested him on suspicion of carrying out terrorist attacks.This is not tinfoilhattery or paranoia, not anymore. Get flagged once for any reason at all, and EVERYTHING in your communication history gets reviewed, re-interpreted, with the already established bias of guilt. This is not even a perversion of justice, because the term implies that justice system was actually involved.And that was in 2007.I once quipped that Orwell was an optimist. In the brave new world we live in, that statement has finally lost its amusement value.