Perhaps you do need something as pivotal as “Roe v Wade” being overturned to expose how extensive the U.S. surveillance state has become, and how little protection its citizens have from it.
BY:
Eric De Grasse
Chief Technology Officer
PROJECT COUNSEL MEDIA
8 July 2022 – As we detailed in a long post two weeks ago, the end of “Roe v Wade” and the rise of criminalized abortion stand to usher in a data privacy nightmare that civil liberties advocates have warned about for decades. Simply put, our digital infrastructure has become the infrastructure of authoritarianism. Our existing legal protections (in the U.S. especially) are effectively outdated. The hardest part was always going to be the private selling, trading and merging of personal data. The players are numerous and most are unknown, or very difficult to ascertain.
And I do not begrudge data privacy pundits and “experts”. It is merely commerce for them. It’s a job. Data privacy “experts” and “consultants” all know data privacy is impossible, does not exist. They have but one goal: to sell, be it their services and/or products. Their mantra is that a regulation is afoot and you must comply with these data regulatory acts – and they will help you. What is happening out there in the real world is not material. Their mantra is “Don’t focus on the real world. Stay in The Matrix. Focus on the laws being passed. You don’t want to get caught out and a get a big fine, now, do you?” It’s why it is so amusing to watch data privacy panels at almost any legal conference or data privacy conference, stocked with Big Law attorneys selling the need for data privacy – while their other law firm colleagues are actually doing the exact opposite in their representations of Big Tech and showing them how to dance around regulations. Scan any legaltech event agenda and look at the law firms and you’ll see what I mean.
As to “Row v. Wade“, a Wired magazine article (found by clicking here) continues the parade of articles on the futility of it all:
“Since the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last month, America’s extensive surveillance state could soon be turned against those seeking abortions or providing abortion care.
Currently, nine states have almost entirely banned abortion, and more are expected to follow suit. Many Republican lawmakers in these states are discussing the possibility of preventing people from traveling across state lines to obtain an abortion. If such plans are enacted and withstand legal scrutiny, one of the key technologies that could be deployed to track people trying to cross state lines is automated licence plate readers (ALPRs). They’re employed heavily by police forces across the US, but they’re also used by private actors.
ALPRs are cameras that are mounted on street poles, overpasses, and elsewhere that can identify and capture licence plate numbers on passing cars for the purpose of issuing speeding tickets and tolls, locating stolen cars, and more. State and local police maintain databases of captured licence plates and frequently use those databases in criminal investigations.
The police have access to not only licence plate data collected by their own ALPRs but also data gathered by private companies. Firms like Flock Safety and Motorola Solutions have their own networks of ALPRs that are mounted to the vehicles of private companies and organizations they work with, such as car repossession outfits. Flock, for instance, claims it’s collecting licence plate data in roughly 1,500 cities and can capture data from over a billion vehicles every month.
“They have fleets of cars that have ALPRs on them that just suck up data. They sell that to various clients, including repo firms and government agencies. They also sell them to police departments,” says Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. “It’s a giant, nationwide mass surveillance system. That obviously has serious implications should interstate travel become part of forced-birth enforcement.”
Yep. All that data flies off to police departments, home owner associations, private customers, data brokers – oh, anybody. And as the spokesperson for the Electronic Frontier Foundation notes people can share all of that data without being deliberate about who they’re sharing it with or why.
But “forced-birth enforcement” really got to me. That’s quite a phrase; its Gilead-style echoes are surely intentional, but, equally, not wrong. Perhaps you do need something as pivotal as “Roe v Wade“ being overturned to expose how extensive the US surveillance state is, and how little protection its citizens have from it.
I had chat with our boss, Greg Bufithis, who (reluctantly) provided his views. He’s given up writing about data privacy. As he has said, that train left the station a very long time ago. But I did manage to squeeze out of him a few thoughts. He said the following (the bold bits are my additions):
“I agree with you. Roe v Wade being overturned has exposed how extensive the US surveillance state is, and how little protection its citizens have from it.
But to repeat myself (yet again) you need to understand this structural data framework to understand the politics of platform firms, to understand data’s structural and instrumental power, all stemming from the specific position tech occupies in the economy. Big Tech (and especially data brokers) mediate between producers and consumers of goods, services, and information; in so doing, they create a data ecosystem that depends on them. In this way, platform firms become increasingly relevant and dependent in our economies. This is the source of their power. Data is in perpetual motion, swirling around us, only sometimes touching down long enough for us to make any sense of them. We use data, these numbers, as signs to navigate the world. Data has become a crucial part of our infrastructure, enabling commercial and social interactions. Restrict it? Protect it? We live in a massively intermediated, platform-based environment, with endless network effects, commercial layers, and inference data points.
We . did . this . to . ourselves. For God’s sake, read your technology history!!! Read Charles Arthur, Ugo Bardi, Wendy Chun, Jacques Ellul, Lewis Lapham, Donella Meadows, Maël Renouard, Matt Stoller, Simon Winchester. My four big picture points (for the last time):
1. Data privacy and data sovereignty did not die of natural causes. They were poisoned with a lethal cocktail of incompetence, arrogance, greed, short-sightedness and sociopathic delusion. Technology has become the person in the room with us at all times. By introducing data-based technology so very rapidly into every aspect of the human existence in such a preposterously short historical period of time. Big Tech has thrown a metaphorical person into all our lives.
2. When a technology is introduced into society, unimpeded, through private enterprise, and then quickly adapted and adopted, the game is over. We (they?) have built a data world, a data system, in which physical and social technologies co-evolve. How can we shape a process we don’t control?
3. And all those lawyers who say “we must do something about data privacy!” are … pardon my French … full of merde. Well, most of them (not all) are actually outliers not involved in the game. It’s their legal brethren and cohorts guilty of forming their own logic of informational capitalism in comprehensive detail. Look at the legal foundations of platforms, privacy, data science, etc. which has focused on the scientific and technical accomplishments undergirding the new information economy. Institutions, platforms, “data refineries” that are first and foremost legal and economic institutions. They exist as businesses; they are designed to “extract surplus”. Read Pistor’s ‘The Code of Capital’ to learn how lawyers helped to decimate data privacy.
4. And when a technology is introduced into society, unimpeded, nobody can catch up. With its continuing development and date extortion, it’s impossible. The data privacy idiots are still in an analog world, hung up on data collection and storage. They completely miss where we are at. As these systems became more sophisticated and more ubiquitous, we moved through what Big Tech calls “phase transition” – the transition from collection-and-storage surveillance to mass automated real-time monitoring. At scale.
And the elephant in the room. To escape regulation, Big Tech and advertising and their data are retreating inside silos and 1st part data where nothing is passed around or shared – so will any of these data privacy regulations apply?”
Thanks, Greg. I think.
And so the overturning of Roe has been a brutal technology wake-up call for many – to see what the latest AI, machine learning, and surveillance technology can do. Overnight there was a radical ground shift for millions of women – from “what I did yesterday was legal” to “what I’m doing tomorrow is not, so operationally, what do I change today?” That’s one hell of a difficult swing to make.
