Silicon
Valley giants like Amazon & Palantir team up with ICE to hunt
down immigrants, pick out the innocent as potential criminals, and
build the cloud for Defense Department and CIA.
Bob
Sheer speaks with Marc Steiner of the Real News. As Sheer says:
As
George Orwel pointed out, and others have, that our own Constitution
points out, if you don’t have private space, if you can’t be
alone with your thoughts, your associations, your books and so forth,
you can’t have freedom. That’s the bottom line.
The
American Revolution was fought over that. And the Internet represents
the best and the worst of worlds. We are connected. We offer a lot of
ourselves. We learn a lot from it. But it’s also the worst in terms
of individual space and privacy.
This has
come to be recognized particularly after Edward Snowden revealed the
extent of cooperation between companies like Facebook and Google and
Apple, and others, and the intelligence agencies and government. The
Defense Department, the CIA, the NSA, and so forth.
So
before Snowden’s revelations, it was possible to minimize all of
that. And these companies would say, ‘hey, we’re private
enterprises. You’re voluntarily giving over your data. And this is
no threat to your freedom, we’re just helping you be better
shoppers.’
Well,
what Snowden revealed is this data was given or stolen by -when Apple
and Google didn’t cooperate, the NSA and CIA just cut into their
cables, went through backdoor access to their computers, and gathered
up the most intimate details of your life. In the case of Amazon, for
example, not only what books you bought, but how far you read in that
book. What you wrote to friends about what you thought about that, or
the movie you saw, or what have you. Your most private thoughts.
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