Hello Screamers! Not a whole lot of time today, but I DO want to wish everybody a happy Father’s Day. No matter if you’re a father yourself or just have one, today’s a perfect time celebrate the day in classic dad fashion………with some peace and quiet.
Recently, I’ve been rewatching the series “Westworld” in order to catch up before I finally watch the final season, and halfway through the third season a particular storyline jumped out at me. (Apologies for the minor spoilers, but the show is already a few years old. That said, please don’t spoil the final season!)
In the show, a Big Bad Corporation has covertly hoovered up massive amount of data about basically everybody on the planet. This company then feeds all the data into a massive AI program, which spits out predictions for each human in the system. This AI may stop you from reproducing if you have a genetic disease, or refuse to allow you to get a job because you’re likely to commit suicide.
This plays out onscreen (paraphrased):
“They won’t invest in somebody who’s likely to kill themselves, but by not investing they ensure that outcome.”
Creepy, right? Some machine somewhere — run by people you don’t know — has massive control over your life, determining your fate? Condemning you to a life of trying to scrape by, because your machine-generated “score” is too low to get a real job?
Good thing this is fiction and not actually happening in the real world.
In a completely unrelated story from this week, Glenn Greenwald covers the fact that the CIA and NSA — as well as other “security” agencies — have been covertly hoovering up massive amounts of data about basically everybody on the planet.
I often like to talk about how the government suppressing speech through partnerships with “private companies” was simply a way to get around the First Amendment. I often use the analogy of government hiring a private security firm to search your house without a warrant — this is obviously a violation of the Fourth Amendment, even if government didn’t perform the actual search.
It turns out the “big brains” in DC had a different way to get around the Fourth — one that makes it much more difficult to even know your data was searched and stolen: just pay for it. After all, when you say “OK” to having Candy Crush track………whatever it tracks, you’re ALSO saying “OK” to CC’s parent company to sell that data to Uncle Sam.
Now, call me crazy, but me giving information to Company A doesn’t give them the right to give it to Company B — especially when I’ve specifically told Company B to fuck off. If that is my data (and it’s hard to argue otherwise), then Company A should be doing nothing with it other than what I authorize. Yet in today’s world, government argues that when you signed up for Candy Crush, you were waiving all your Fourth Amendment rights and the data is fair game.
And although the full report highlights some of the (many) problems with collecting and cataloguing this “Commercially Available Information” (CAI), the agencies are doing it anyway.
But the dangers go far beyond the initial CAI collection. As we know well, government tends to expand its power whenever possible and could possibly use this information for ‘other’ means. Hell, even just having the data sitting around in a database somewhere is a risk. (When was the last time a government database was hacked, again?)
When I was younger I had a neighbor who was a policeman. He and his wife got divorced, and suddenly he was ‘patrolling’ at the end of her driveway every single day — ostensibly “doing his job” but obviously not actually doing his job. He was simply using his position to intimidate his ex-wife and keep tabs on who was coming and going from the house. Turns out this is not uncommon.
This ex-dispatcher was truly ahead of the times:
This data will be used for nefarious purposes, it will be auctioned off to the highest bidder, it will eventually be leaked. But the security state still thinks the information is important enough to have that they’ll spend your tax money on it.
At least in “Westworld” the evil corporation had to spend its own money.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/anti-charter-school-activists-could-learn-from-orwell/ar-AA1cJYjK?
I sure wish there was a non-religion-oriented Hillsdale, not that I am anti-religion.
In fact, this atheist would rather be in a room full of happy Christians (who *today* tend to be quite anti-Statist), than a room full of typical atheists, who seem to cling to their anti-Capitalism like I might one day cling to my fire-arm.
I always assumed that Elon Musk paid $45 billion for Twitter more for its value as a data collection engine than because of a benevolent wish to promote freedom of speech. He's a businessman, and personal data is big business.