Top Three Videos – February 28, 2024

Ethical and Privacy Concerns

• There is intentional plan to keep the truth about where commercial data goes inside government away from the public, which is not right in a democracy.
• Total Information Awareness program caused a firestorm on Capitol Hill, with bipartisan lawmakers and civil society uncomfortable with the government acquiring massive amounts of data on innocent people.
• The rise of the digital revolution means that we are increasingly giving intimate details about our lives to third parties, such as our location, communication, and financial information.
• The level of surveillance in the private sector is remarkable, with devices in the house triangulating a person’s location and even which side of the bed they sleep on.
• Ad exchanges are a significant source of data for data brokers, allowing them to collect GPS location data for targeted advertising without the user’s direct knowledge.
• Companies like Premise Data have been accused of using Pokemon Go-like incentive systems for potentially nefarious purposes, including geotagging military sites for bombing.
• The Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act would ban the US government from buying data on Americans, with bipartisan support.
• The totality of our movements, including geolocation data from phones and data from license plate readers, is considered private and personal, raising concerns about government surveillance.

   

Government Surveillance and Data Acquisition

• The US government, working with anonymous companies, has built a surveillance apparatus that can peer into the lives of nearly everyone on the planet, resembling a sci-fi dystopia like an episode out of Black Mirror.
• The phenomenon of governments buying large amounts of data is a massive phenomenon that involves all sorts of government agencies from the military to the intelligence community, to even local law enforcement.
• John Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program aimed to scan data for patterns of terrorist behavior, raising concerns about privacy and government surveillance.
• “So much of what the government does is buy data on the open market, enabling the rise of the surveillance state.”
• Companies like Premise Data and X-Mode Social were distributing software that could monitor Bluetooth devices and wireless signals, resembling government signal gathering rather than true commercial intelligence.

   

Impact of Surveillance on Society

• The surveillance state could lead to a society resembling “Minority Report” where predictions dictate the law.
• Predictive analytics could potentially transition from being predictive to causal, leading to the cultivation of interests and even potential agent provocateurism through advanced systems.
• “We’re in one of those once in 100 year turning points, where technology’s going and our ability to put regulations and laws around it that protect our most basic freedoms and also our conceptions of who we are as human beings.”