Back in February 2021 – that was a long time ago, wasn’t it? – the largest national issue we faced was the rapidly growing capability of people, companies, institutions, and our governments to track us. Indeed, that month I wrote a three-part series on electronic surveillance. Since the pandemic started, this concern has almost disappeared from the press. What have been the exceptions?
If it were released when we could deal with it more
comprehensively, Shoshana Zuboff’s January 29th New York Times
“The Coup We Are Not Talking About” would be a good place to start. The author called for an end to the situation
in which “companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material
for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private
property,” as it has been followed by “epistemic inequality, defined as the
difference between what I can know and what can be known about me” and
“coordinated streams of disinformation,” to result in life where “epistemic
dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with
computational governance by private surveillance capital.” Ultimately, “if we are to defeat the epistemic
coup, then democracy must be the protagonist,” through “the democratic rule of
law” and recognizing that “new conditions summon new rights” and “unprecedented
harms demand unprecedented solutions.”
As with the Covid-19 effort, we will probably need to take more chances
with less-than-100%-proven solutions.
Soon afterwards, the Times also published Cade Metz
and Kashmir Hill’s “Here’s a Way to Learn if Facial Recognition Systems Used
Your Photos” (January 31st).
Well, sometimes. Anyone can use the
tool Exposing.AI to determine if specific pictures were involved, but only if
they “were posted to Flickr, and they need a Flickr username, tag or internet
address.” There are of course billions
of photos online, and almost any could, legally or not, be stored for
identification.
Now, near the beginning of anti-surveillance legislation, “Massachusetts
is one of the first states to create rules around facial recognition in
criminal investigations” (The New York Times, March 1st). There, currently, “police first must get a
judge’s permission before running a face recognition search,” and who can do
such is limited. Other cities, though,
including Oakland, Portland, San Francisco, and Minneapolis, already “have
banned police use of the technology” entirely.
Early this month, per “The Lesson to Learn From Apple’s Tool
to Flag Child Sex Abuse” (Brian X. Chen, The New York Times, August 11th),
“Apple introduced a software tool for iPhones to flag cases of child sex abuse”
by tracking uploads from “a database of known child pornography” to that
company’s iCloud storage utility. The
title is inaccurate, though, as child abuse is not the same as viewing or even
moving photos originating from others.
There are easy countermeasures, mainly using “a hybrid approach to
storing your data,” but the issue here, whether people not under investigation
can be electronically surveilled, is at best ripe for a legal challenge and at
worst is clearly against the law. The
slippery slope – what other crimes could people be monitored for, what sources
can be flagged, and in what other ways could activity be examined – is obvious,
and is once again a subject for clarification, discussion, and, with state
boundaries meaningless here, for setting national policy.
At the same time, the coronavirus has resurged, with,
despite over half of Americans fully vaccinated, threats to set new all-time
highs in hospitalizations and new cases.
The seven-day-average of the latter has surged more than 13-fold since
its July 5th low. Everyone is
tired of wearing masks, and few, though some, of those refusing the vaccine
have relented. Even assuming that those
who have had the shots continue to be safe, we could easily be looking at
another six months of national emphasis and distraction. Where will electronic surveillance be when
Covid-19 largely leaves us alone? We
don’t know, but it, instead of the virus, may then be out of control. We need help there quicker – will we get it?