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The Surveillance State 2015- Part 1, by Kass Andrada
The history of liberty is a history of the limitation of governmental power, not the increase of it. Woodrow Wilson, 1912
The question of whether a surveillance society was looming on the horizon has been growing since Justice Douglas remarked in 1966, “We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times; where there are no secrets from government.” [1] Early in the new millenium, only about 33% of Americans were concerned about their online data as of 2009. [2] Just a few years later, in 2015, polls show 54% disapprove of government surveillance of telephone and Internet data.[3] Most seem to feel that they have no control over their personal data, with only nine percent (9%) stating that they feel they have a lot of control over their data.[4] Those who have more knowledge of the degree of surveillance that exists are more likely to indicate that they have no control.[5]
More interesting still, only about half of people responding have anything more than the vaguest notion of just how much surveillance is actually occurring. Many seem to think that their Internet searches are private or can’t be connected to their name, or they believe the retention period for the information is somehow limited, although it is not.[6] About 55% don’t think their search engines or social media should be able to save any information about their activity at all.[7] However, this is divorced from reality. Every element of online activity is fully known to both civil and government entities. This article attempts to compile information about the extent of surveillance in the United States in 2015 in order to provide a snapshot of what is known about privacy in the modern era.
Private surveillance is not a new thing. Google street mappers were actually driving around collecting data from home and network structures including email, passwords, and other personal information for years between 2007 and 2012.[8] They only admitted this practice when sued by 38 states.[9] Google also admitted to bypassing privacy settings in the Safari browser, an action for which the Federal Trade Commission fined Google $22.5 million in 2012.[10]
The practice is not limited to Google.[11] “DropBox, Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, FaceBook, Skype, —and others—all do pretty much the same thing: read user data and grant government access to it.”[12] The trend is accelerating with every generation of software. The new Windows 10 collects a massive amount of user data and sends it to Microsoft:
Cortana will not only remember all of your search history, but it will also collect information on the people you know, the places you go, your calendar details, your emails, IM messages, your text messages, your phone calls, and virtually everything else you do. That’s not to mention that the system sends “speech data”
Source: http://survivalblog.com/the-surveillance-state-2015-part-1-by-kass-andrada/
