“It is with knowledge of the human being, his tendencies, his desires, his needs, his psychic mechanisms, his automatism as well as knowledge of social psychology and analytical psychology that propaganda refines its techniques.” 

– Propagandes, Jacques Ellul 

What is privacy, and why should we care? More and more, people are comfortable living their lives quite publicly. Social media gave us an avenue to connect with old friends and share, which I happily embraced by posting many pictures of my cats, my kid, and my cooking. 

I’ve been on Facebook for ten years now, and sometimes cringe at the “On This Day” memories. No longer do the actions of the present disappear into the annals of time. Our day-to-day banalities are digitized and exist forever. 

I now know details about people I haven’t seen in years, sometimes quite intimately. And while I love the feeling of community and easy access that technology provides, I find it unsettling that anything I’ve done in the last 15 years can be digitally “remembered” fairly quickly, and by a host of stakeholders. My phone company, my phone manufacturer, any app I’ve downloaded has varying degrees of access, and the National Security Agency all know where I go, who I speak to, the messages I send, and the schedule I keep on my calendar. 

In the early 90’s, my only worry was about my jealous boyfriend looking at my beeper. When I got my first cell phone in 1994, carrying it with me was just a night thing for safety. Today’s tech is sophisticated and collects information about my life that is fueling a multi-billion dollar data industry. Healthcare insurance companies collecting data off the Activity Tracker on my Apple watch are using it to inform how they will treat me as a customer. My 90’s-era boyfriend stalking me drove me nuts but at least he couldn’t refuse to cover my pre-existing condition because I missed three fitness classes last week. 

Devices and apps that geo-locate us have made our lives more convenient in myriad ways which seem innocent enough. But how these conveniences affect us and what we are trading in return for it are another matter entirely. Neither average Americans or Congress are prepared to understand how AI will change us in the years ahead. It has already changed us profoundly. 

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), an arm of the military that develops emerging technologies, has been psychologically profiling Americans and developing specific communication designed to infiltrate and disseminate propaganda to influence public opinion. 

With the passage of the Patriot Act and it’s unholy follow-ups, the Protect America Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, both the Bush and later, the Obama administration, widely expanded government power. 

Take the ironically named Protect America Act, for example. This act was enacted to protect phone companies from being sued by Americans for violating our privacy. All the major phone companies had been secretly giving the Bush administration access to ALL our phone records thousands of times a day, dating back retroactively to 1983. The name of the act itself is a clever piece of propaganda.

Due to the Patriot Act, warrants are no longer necessary for searches. Our 4th Amendment protections are vital to preventing police and military over-reach, yet when they were axed the public bought the yankee-doodle-yackey about needing to capture evil-doers. Today, anyone accused or suspected of being a terrorist can be thrown into jail indefinitely without a trial or due process.

The FBI is constantly introducing new language and expanding their definition of who or what is potentially a threat. In the wake of many mass shootings in the U.S., recent bulletins by the FBI link mental illness with so-called conspiracy theorists as dangerous.

Think about this: because of all the information the NSA has via the PRISM program and others, there are many ways Americans can be targeted via their data. It is not hard to conceive that Google searches and YouTube videos watched will be an easy way to target potentially “dangerous radicals” for police or intelligence agencies to preemptively question or arrest in order to mitigate a future crime. If you knew that your curiosity rabbit-hole at 2AM might win you a knock at the door by the FBI you might think twice about clicking or even searching for certain topics. This is how censorship works. This is how the government could create enough paranoia so we simply police ourselves.

A New York Times journalist reported on the Bush administration and NSA’s widespread spying and data collection of U.S. citizens back in December of 2005. The story was initially due to print in September of 2005, but the Times suppressed the article at the behest of the Bush administration because of the upcoming election. By December, it was clear the story was about to break elsewhere so NYT went ahead and ran it: Bush had already won his second term.

Once the story was out, the propaganda machine began its cleanup. The public was fed the usual rhetoric about patriotism, safety and country at the same time the Protect America Act was being drawn up. It served not only to give AT&T and the rest of their corporate comrades immunity from civil action but also to continue the very spying program in question.

Shady business got even shadier when the Inspector General’s investigation into NSA mass surveillance produced a report that was conducted as a panacea for public outrage. And rather than bore us with the usual redacted glory reserved for declassified documents, they made up a second, shall we say… scrubbed report and passed it off to the public as the real one. 

So today, I give you this requiem, an homage if you will… let’s have a toast to privacy lost, and remember fondly Mr. Bush in his ten-gallon hat at the Crawford Ranch, and Mr. Obama whose beautiful speeches I sorely miss, even if he was a two-timing son-of-a-gun who sold us out with a smile. 

Here are five examples of privacy rights you probably weren’t even aware you’ve lost. Fallen by the wayside, quietly, swiftly… May they forever rest in peace. 

• Privacy of your trash via the Waste Watch Driver Training Program, active in 170+ U.S. cities and towns. 
• Privacy of your DNA: if you were born after 1963 in Massachusetts; 1970 or so elsewhere in the U.S. your DNA is taken by the hospital and is now stored in various government facilities from state to state. The states claim a right to your genetic material and use it for their research. 
• Privacy of transaction: welcome to the darknet, aka Echelon, PRISM, and [X]Keyscore. I’m not sure I could say this better than Andreas Antonopoulos did in his TED presentation: …“The darknet is operated by intelligence agencies because they are on a daily basis committing massive crimes against human rights, they are orchestrating a totalitarian financial surveillance network that monitors everybody’s transactions and as a result everybody’s location, everybody’s purchasing preferences, everybody’s political preferences and what kind of porn you watch, because all of that is tied to your financial life. Because everything is tied to your financial life. This system of totalitarian financial surveillance is the darknet. They don’t fear the darknet, they just don’t want us to have one.” 
• Privacy of location: I touched on this already but it still bears emphasis. Even if you turn your GPS off, your smartphone is a personal tracking device that is constantly triangulating your location via cell towers and WiFi, then sharing your information thousands of times a day with the NSA and likely a host of third-party companies. 
• Privacy of thought : Cue the Orwellian nightmare: researchers at New York University and University of California have created a mind-reading machine. Similar to facial recognition, it’s a software that reconstructs images of a person’s mind using brain scans. We will have commercially available mind-reading technology, presumably to help disabled people type. Google did try to sneak an entire “smart city” facial cam recognition system by the residents of Toronto without public review but hey, I’m sure there’s no reason to worry about anyone using it for nefarious purposes, right? 

References for this story include the following:

How Big Data Is Changing Healthcare: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2015/04/21/how-big-data-is-changing-healthcare/#3764b9a02873 

Privacy and Security in the Era of Digital Health: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4859641/ 

How Businesses are Collecting Data and What They’re Doing With It: https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/10625-businesses-collecting-data.html 

Project Censored: The Homegrown Terrorist Prevention Act: https://www.projectcensored.org/6-the-homegrown-terrorism-prevention-act/ 

MALINTENT: Homeland Security Gets Inside Your Head: https://artificialtelepathy.blogspot.com/2009/01/malintent-homeland-security-gets-inside.html 

Total Information Awareness is Back: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/total_informati.html 

Report: NSA’s Warrantless Spying Resurrects Banned ‘Total Information Awareness’ Project: https://www.wired.com/2008/03/nsas-warrantles/ 

The Cambridge Analytica Files: A Guardian investigative report: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/data-war-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-faceook-nix-bannon-trump 

The Patriot Act:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriot_Act 

Protect America Act of 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_America_Act_of_2007 

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Act 

Bush Lets U.S. Spy Callers Without Courts: https://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-without-courts.html 

James Risen Recalls ‘Game of Chicken’ with NYT Editors to Reveal NSA Spying: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/james-risen-new-york-times_n_5324303 

Snowden Files Declaration in NSA Spying Case Confirming Authenticity of Inspector General’s Report: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/11/snowden-files-declaration-nsa-spying-case-confirming-authenticity-draft-inspector 

How 9/11 Birthed the Modern Surveillance State – YouTube Clip of Edward Snowden interview w/Joe Rogan: (3) Snowden – How 9/11 Birthed the Modern Surveillance State | Joe Rogan – YouTube 

Garbage Men Being Trained to Spy on Customers: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/26485-garbage-men-being-trained-to-spy-on-customers; Waste Management Trains its Drivers in Waste Watch Program: https://citybizlist.com/article/435280/waste-management-trains-its-drivers-in-waste-watch-program; Waste Management’s Waste Watch Program, Reporting Suspicious Activity: https://ccsoblog.org/2018/12/26/waste-watch/ 

Newborn DNA banking: https://www.aclu.org/other/newborn-dna-banking; DNA Collection at Birth – The Death of Genetic Privacy: https://busy.org/@krnel/dna-collection-at-birth-genetic-privacy-is-dead 

Andreas Antonopoulos TED Talk– How Bitcoin is Changing the World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2zH-T_hmLs  

The Robot That Knows When You’re Lying: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5197747/AI-detects-expressions-tell-people-lie-court.html 

How Far Away is Mind Reading Technology?: https://www.em360tech.com/tech-news/microsoft-working-mind-reading-technology/ 

Mind Messaging – Thoughts Transmitted by Brain to Brain Link: https://www.livescience.com/47708-human-brain-link-sends-thoughts.html 

Mind Reading Brain Scans Can Retrieve Images From Human Memory: https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mind-reading-brain-scanner-can-retrieve-images-human-memory-1449043

This New AI System Can See What You’re Thinking: https://interestingengineering.com/this-new-ai-system-can-see-what-you-are-thinking