Noam Chomsky: A Surveillance State Beyond Imagination Is Being Created
It's interesting to me how my perspective is changing on these issues as years go by and I have time to think about it. One troublesome point is the role democracy is playing in all this. This harks back to some earlier Chomsky ideas about "Manufacturing Consent."From my (removed, I am not American) perspective, it seems ridiculously obvious that terrorism is not anywhere near a big enough threat to justify the counter measures, loss of privacy , freedom and the threat of a scary totalitarian future. It's like burning down every piece of wilderness on the continent to prevent deer-car collisions.The war against an irrelevant tribal society on the Afghan-Pakistan border and the rise of a surveillance state in the US (and elsewhere) is connected by democracy.A somewhat tangental notion is that this is just another inevitable consequence of digitisation. In the US I think a lot of the attention has been on the actual 'surveillance' part. Some act which is similar to phone tapping, intercepting letters or rummaging through your drawers. Things like PRISM. This is the part that has a history of legislation related to it. The part that's actually worrying in my opinion, is the aggregation and analysis.Aggregating and storing data is the default behaviour of a digitised world, especially communications. I think I see a parallel between digital surveillance and file sharing. It's a "natural" side effect of digitisation.We need to worry about corporate surveillance as much as government and foreign government surveillance and I don't think we can stop it.The last time I went to Heathrow Airport I was thinking about those face recognition cameras logging you in and about of the country. The way they look screams techno dystopia. I was thinking about super HD panoramic cameras placed strategically around a city. I can easily imagine the tech being widely available. We could have several competing networks of Google Analytics for the physical world logging "clicks" every time a person walks enters a mall, walks down a street, drives under a bridge or gets picked up by a $99 GigaPan drone.The line between our physical and digital lives is melting away. That means everything will be recorded and stored like emails. That inevitably leads to storage and aggregation, which means the end of privacy.As something of a counterweight, Snowden's whistle blowing is itself a consequence of these same forces. The reason this information could be aggregated, "stolen" and leaked is because it was digital.Perhaps the end of privacy applies equally to those in power. Maybe we'll get "power exposed to sunlight" that Chomsky wants.In any case, Chomsky always seems like a caricature to me. He seems to think of these issues in political-legal terms. I think the NSA/Snowden story has a lot more to do with Google Analytics than Guantanamo Bay.That's a lot more worrying to me. Trying to shut down this kind of surveillance is like Disney trying to shut down BitTorrent, if Disney didn't have any money.