Bits in the Wind
Being a less than enthusiastic fan of popular culture, I sometimes get dragged into conversations on subjects about which I know roughly nothing, and they frequently resemble something like this: “Did you see [TV-Show] last night?” Me: “No, I’ve never heard of it.” Questioner: “Where have you been?” The implication is that I’m some kind of a dolt because I don’t watch much of the pop-culture garbage being spewed out of television networks and movie studios. It’s true, but only if your standard of reckoning is measured against knowing what had been on television last night. In light of Edward Snowden’s disclosures, there has been a good deal of shock and a widespread sense of contempt for a government that is able and willing to spy on the intimate details of the daily lives of Americans. Stories have been cranking out about the degree to which government is able to record all the daily activities of citizens, and the extent to which large corporations have climbed into bed with government to provide information on their own customers. Perhaps it is because I have a little of the Devil in me, or perhaps it’s because I have this innate compulsion to say “I told you so,” but either way, to all those Americans who are breathlessly gobsmacked over the spying our government does on its own people, I can ask only: “Where have you been?”
Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that in some form or fashion, this has been going on for years. I fully expected that government would be in bed with every cellular provider and you should have expected it too. After all, those companies have broadcasting facilities dotting the countryside, and just as you asked the government to do, these companies are regulated by the Federal Communications Commission. Is it really so incomprehensible that with a little twisting of licensees’ corporate arms, government would be given access to this data? Every networking device in the country bears an FCC label, from the Network Interface Card in your computer to the routers and switches through which your Internet traffic passes. These devices and anything like them are all subject to some form of regulation by the FCC. Did you think that would never come back to bite you? You didn’t know? Where have you been?
From the moment government first put its claws into the regulation of communications, it was inevitable that the government would begin the process of controlling, managing, monitoring, and even shaping communications to its own ends. It was a temptation too great to avoid, because those who seek power seek it for a reason: Control. This is the nature of government, but it is the key element in building the sort of command-and-control structures that even now have become too large to be concealed in the shadows. The sad, sickening reality is that in one form or another, you’ve asked for this, and in many cases, you’ve been driven into demanding it.
If you’re alive in 2013, for the span of your entire life, you have been told (and you have mostly accepted) that the government has a natural interest in regulating everything that goes over the air, or through public spaces. You’ve accepted the notion that the Federal Communications Commission should have the unlimited authority to exert control on radio and television programming, and aghast at some of the content you’ve seen on the Internet in the past two decades, you’ve even asked the government to intervene in that medium as well. Seldom does anybody question the primary premise on which all this regulation is based: The government, acting on behalf of the public, must have effective ownership of all means of transmission through the public spaces with users, whether individual or corporate, are merely licensees in some form or fashion. It needn’t have been true, and the fact is that this assumption has caused the aggregation of vast wealth into a few hands when it need not have been. Just as we had “land rushes” sponsored by government to populate our Western landscape, we might just as easily have done something similar with frequencies in well-described locales, conferring ownership of airwaves rather than licensing of them.
Unfortunately, there will be no going back. Every website you’ve ever visited has been recorded. Every phone call you’ve placed or text message you’ve sent has been open to monitoring and recording, and it has grown to such an extent that now your electric meter may well record spikes in usage that denote a pattern of when you are home, when you’re awake, when you’re watching the TV, and when you’re microwaving your supper. In some places, water metering devices can now reliably discern between a quick washing of the hands or a flushing of a toilet, and all of this information being gathered is said to improve the ability to serve customers. Meanwhile, the US government builds alliances with corporations, mostly coercive in nature despite any carrots offered to sooth the blow, and those enticements to businesses include the sharing of government data that will be helpful in marketing to customers. It’s very cozy, but it’s nothing new, and it’s been done this way since the advent of mass mobile communications and Internet access, and in truth, for many years before.
The disclosures provided by Edward Snowden should only really shock you if you’ve been doing as I’ve been accused when I can’t identify a movie actor: “Living under a rock.” For decades now, it has been supposed that anybody who believed all this monitoring is possible was some sort of “conspiracy kook,” but the problem is that those of us in the technology fields have understood that this was a growing reality from which there could be no escape, in part because we have helped to build it. Others imagine that the bulk of information being captured is just so large that it is unmanageable, and that there is no possible way in which any sense can be made of it in a thoroughly threatening way, but if they believe that, I think they’ve significantly underestimated the ability of government to aggregate and correlate data. Vast government server farms exist that are devoted to nothing but the accumulation and storage of this data, for eventual analysis and correlation.
One young woman recently asked me what good it would do the government to have all of this data on all Americans, and how it would constitute a threat to their privacy, since in her view, she doesn’t do anything unusual or threatening. Frankly, knowing all I do about how government collects data, and how corporations are the continual source for so much of that information, I could not fathom how she did not see and understand the threats to her privacy. In order to impress upon her how thoroughly oppressive this could become, I asked her to detail her day, and at each step along her daily course, I explained how that information could be used to build a picture not only of how she lived on a particular day, but would also provide a very good set of red flags that she had an atypical day. How much information do you think is necessary when collected at the level of granularity now available to build a complete picture of your average day? Once your “normal” daily routine is established, spotting anything out of the ordinary is not difficult.
What this means to the average citizen of the United States is that there are few ways to escape the “grid.” Do you work? Do you have a bank account? Credit cards? Cell phone? Smart meter on your electric service? Ditto for water? Cable television? Satellite? Is your car recording driving data that can and will be used against you if there’s a mishap? Now, add to this your medical records that will soon come to be under wall-to-wall Federal management, and then consider retailers able to link your purchases to all of these, and the picture that results should be shocking to every person: There is virtually nothing that you may now do alone, and without company of some spying eye, whether direct governmental watching, or through a third party like your cell-phone company. You can scarcely go to the bathroom without somebody knowing it.
Ladies and gentlemen, I will not pretend to you that I know much about popular culture, but I am intensely aware of technology and its use in tracking human activity. There is virtually nothing we do in this modern frame that isn’t being collected as an event, analyzed, and categorized for later recall. The reason this is possible is because for the most part, when you hear of the details, you shrug and go on, feeling helpless to do anything about it. The truth is, however, that to a larger degree, it is born of our intellectual sloth. To the degree we’re unaware, it’s only because we don’t want to know.
It’s 6am, and a light turns on. It’s 6:05, and a toilet flushes and moments later, there are the connections necessary to check email on some distant server. The email is downloaded and read while a cup of coffee is consumed, the brewing machine having activated at 5:45am sharp in anticipation of your impending alarm, and then the television comes on, and a news channel is selected. There is the running of more water, consistent with a shower, and then a burst of electric demand, indicating something being heated in a standard microwave. There is some flipping of channels, and then there’s the first phone call of the day, and the first three text messages too, the first to the office, the other three in a hurried, playful exchange with a lover. Then there’s another flush, because the spouse has arisen. Another television pops on and another smart phone comes to life, as the earlier riser rushes out the door. The central air kicks in because a door has opened and closed, the exchange of the warmer air outside triggering the thermostat, and thus recording the power spike as the compressor motor turns on.
An engine comes to life. Down the road it goes. Triangulation from the cellular towers in the vicinity record the strength of the signal from the driver’s phone, recording distance. One tower knows only your distance from it. Two towers with overlapping range fix your position to one of two possible points at the intersections of their coverage, and a third tower now finalizes location, permitting your speed and direction of travel to be recorded. Overlaid on a map, this information can tell us if you were speeding, since on that stretch of roadway, the speed is set to 60mph, but you were moving much too quickly for that. More texts come in, again from the lover, to whose home you’re speeding for a quick stop on the way to your job. The conversation is noted, and the exact location of each device is recorded, and as the monitors watch, one device converges on the other.
The spouse calls to say “Don’t forget, we have a PTA meeting tonight.” This too is recorded, and so is the sound of the driver saying, “Okay, talk to you later… Love you too… Bye…” Another text comes in… “How long?” The response: “5.” The driver turns off the highway, and down a side-street, pulls into a gas station, using the ATM. Location for the transaction is recorded, along with the face of the banking customer. No time for gas, have enough until later. Just a minute away now. A warm embrace, cellular networks respectively recording the correlation of locations on distinct devices complete with timestamps. A few painfully short minutes later, back in the car, down the road, now running late for work because the driver tried to steal more minutes from the day than should be possible. The logging device in the car records a near-stop, as the driver artfully rolls a stop-sign. A watching police officer falls in behind, the lights turns on, and a traffic stop is born.
“In a hurry?” asks the officer. “License, insurance, registration, please.” In a dispatch center miles away, the radio traffic between dispatchers and the officer buzzes with information. License, license plate. Warrants? Clean? Okay. The officer compares the picture on his screen to the one on the license to the driver he’s just stopped. Checks out okay – same person. “I’m letting you go with a warning, but watch those stops, okay?” In a records management system, the completed event now registers time, date, location, make, model, driver, infraction, and links to the dash-cam video that would be used in defense against a civil suit if you had been unhappy about your treatment by the officer. As it is, the driver is late, but in the hurry to get to work, a drivers’ license is dropped.
The officer is understanding. People are in a hurry in this economy. When he gets a moment, he sends a terminal message to dispatch to look up the driver again, and see if there’s a listed number. There is, a home phone number, and three seconds later, that phone rings. A person answers, and in the background, the dispatcher can hear the sounds of children getting ready for school, and a breathless parent saying: “Dropped the license where?” Meanwhile, a driver arrives at the office. The missing license is finally noticed, but it’s too late to turn back. It’s probably fallen between the seat and the door anyway. One minute later, after explaining to the boss that except for an unfortunate traffic stop, the driver would have been on time, a cell phone rings. It’s the spouse. “Lose something?” Having dropped the children at school, the spouse’s location is noted by a cellular network, as the car converges with another point on the map: A private investigator’s office.
So it goes. In barely more than two hours, a family is in danger of disintegration, a cheat is revealed, and all of it is recorded somewhere, waiting for somebody to notice the links. If you think this is impossible, think again. If you think that the government hasn’t the capacity to sort and correlate all such data, you don’t understand the technology. Any one of these tiny electronic transactions would be meaningless in most contexts, but in the aggregate, they can be used to build a fairly complete picture of a given subject. Does the government need your cooperation? How can they twist your arm if they do? How can the institutions of government control you? How can they manage you? How much will you take? What will cause you to bend? What can be exchanged for your silence or compliance? This form of unlimited control of a populace has always been a subject of much speculation and fear, but now, we are on the cusp of its birth as a real, ordinary process of daily life. We empower it. We permit it. We feed it, and we give our silent assent to all of it. Mostly, we’ve permitted them to build it in utter contempt of our wishes to the contrary. We’ve listened to the promises of safety and security, and we’ve permitted the governing class to use social programs as a facade behind which to build this vast network of command-and-control structure, with nothing so secret as to avoid detection.
After a brief stop at the PI’s office, it’s time to get on to the doctor. That appointment has been nagging since it was scheduled. Ten years and three children into the marriage, that same feeling is back, and while it’s not certain, somehow, chemistry being what it is, she knows. The doctor beams at her. He’s delivered her three children, and the news is now noted that there is a fourth growing inside her, but the tears into which she bursts are not those of joy. The children at school are going blissfully about their day, but she has a mortal decision to make. She knew her husband was stepping out. That’s why she hadn’t let him touch her in months. The cellphone chimes with a text as her best friend asks: “Well?” She sobs uncontrollably, and rushes from the doctor’s office. She calls him, his number concealed in her phone under “Pool Service,” he answers, not sure who she is, at first. How could he? It was just that once for her, and now she’s faced with what to tell him, whether to tell him anything, or what to do. The phone signal tapers away. He asks her “Well, what do you want to do? I don’t want to be a father…” A few minutes later, her cellular service records her arrival on the seedier side of town. There’s a clinic there, and for an hour, she sits there looking at the clinic, but trying to see her future. She does Internet searches, looking up terms like “abortion, adoption, divorce lawyer, marriage counseling, and Plan B.”
If you think the government can’t learn a great deal about you, even from much less dramatic information, remember that there are only really three things they need to know: Name, time, location. Associating those three attributes with any given event, also fixed in location and time, gives them all they need to know to build the most complete picture. It’s a puzzle made up of multidimensional pixels, where time and location define four, but the color of the pixel reveals one more bit of the overall picture of you. If you’re not frightened, you’re a fool. If you think that you live a perfect, upstanding life, and that you are beyond reproach and much beyond the aims of any extortion or coercion, remember that all of this information is recorded, but there is nothing that says it cannot be modified to invent times, places, and events associated with you for which there had been no factual record. Who would a court or a jury believe? You, or the machine? After all, what possible interest could government have in framing you? What possible interest could any people prone towards freakishly controlling behavior have in managing you in a direction they find more appropriate to their own ends?
This is the searing question raised by Edward Snowden’s disclosures, but I it mystifying that it’s taken this long for the discussion to gain attention in the popular culture. In our popular culture, it’s always the dark and sinister CEO of some corporation driving these monstrous “conspiracies” that now appear uncomfortably too much like the reality we are coming to know. The question we never ask is: “If they’re pulling our strings, who is pulling theirs?” If you’re the head of a multinational corporate entity, why would you cooperate with government? A quid pro quo? This for that? What are these people buying with their cooperation with government? Silence? Coordination? Profit? Whatever your inclination, you can rest assured it will be all of these and more. Do you need to eliminate or hamper a competitor? Do you need to quash a earnings report? Do you wish to preserve your reputation in front of the world? What is your price? How can you help us?
Naturally, such global-scale thinking needn’t be the sole function or motive of such systems as PRISM or those like it. Sometimes, it’s about a broader, more general compliance among the populace, and if you don’t believe you’re the target of that, I can only repeat my earlier question: “Where have you been?”
