How the insurance sector could become the Trojan Horse for a police state to surveillance you 24 hours per day with your consent

Are we now close to the point to accept full surveillance of our private lives?

globinfo freexchange

Paul Jay of the RealNews spoke with Rana Foroohar on the basis of her book Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business.

According to Jay's description, “Rana is an associate editor and global business columnist for The Financial Times. She’s also CNN’s global economic analyst. Prior to her work at CNN and The Financial Times, Rana spent six years as an assistant managing editor and economic columnist for Time. And before that she spent 13 years at Newsweek as an economic and foreign affairs editor and a foreign correspondent covering Europe and the Middle East.”

So, it's clear that Foroohar is an insider of the current dominant system. During this interesting discussion with Paul Jay, Foroohar made a remarkable firsthand revelation:

AI is already being used in ways that we can’t even begin to imagine. I’ll give you an example.

I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos recently, and I spoke to an insurance executive. And insurance seems like a boring old-line business. He was out acquiring Hong Kong data firms, all kinds of AI technology, in order to, eventually, put sensors in homes and in cars to monitor, say, how you’re taking care of your pipes, or whether or not your 16 year old is smoking weed in his bedroom, or how fast you’re going in your car and how quickly you’re braking.

And the sensors would be relaying all that information in real time, and then they would write you, if you are deserving, a personalized insurance policy.

Now, think about what that does to the collective versus individual. The entire insurance business model has been based on collective aggregation of risk. Suddenly, AI and data and the digital economy allows you to write individualized, personalized policies just for you, just for me. Now, that’s great for some people, but it also might have an entire class of people that would be uninsurable now. Well, who’s going to insure them? Well, the state, probably.

First, what is so "great" in being monitored, in any way, 24 hours per day by a private company? But even if this is done with your consent, this "model" may become the blueprint for a police state to surveillance you full-time under the pretext of "insurance for all".

It's not that hard to imagine such a Dystopia in the close future, considering that under current model, big private companies are actually a significant element of the deep state. Private companies and intelligence agencies are frequently partners in illegally violating and collecting personal data of millions of citizens.

It has been mentioned that, as technology has made it possible to monitor millions of phone calls, the acceptance that any phone can be monitored, comes naturally. Despite the assurances of the head of the NSA, that intercepts refer to governments and not citizens, most of us have been "trained" to view as natural the fact that our telephone conversations, e-mails or any other form of communication with others, such as through social media, can be monitored.

Recall that a mass surveillance operation — code-named KARMA POLICE — was launched by British spies without any public debate or scrutiny. It was just one part of a giant global internet spying apparatus built by the United Kingdom’s electronic eavesdropping agency, Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ.

So, are we now close to the point to accept full surveillance of our private lives?