Guest Post by John W. Whitehead
Americans have become easy prey for hackers, scammers, snitches, spies, and con artists.
But don’t be fooled into thinking the government is protecting you.
To the contrary, the U.S. government is selling us (or rather, our data) to the highest bidders.
By the way, those highest bidders also include America’s political class and the politicians aspiring to get elected or re-elected. As the Los Angeles Times reports, “If you have been to a political rally, a town hall, or just fit a demographic a campaign is after, chances are good your movements are being tracked with unnerving accuracy by data vendors on the payroll of campaigns.”
Your phones, televisions and digital devices are selling you out to politicians who want your vote.
“Welcome to the new frontier of campaign tech — a loosely regulated world in which simply downloading a weather app or game, connecting to Wi-Fi at a coffee shop or powering up a home router can allow a data broker to monitor your movements with ease, then compile the location information and sell it to a political candidate who can use it to surround you with messages,” writes journalist Evan Halper.
In this way, “we the people” have been reduced to economic units to be bought, bartered and sold by all and sundry.
On a daily basis, Americans have been made to relinquish the most intimate details of who we are—our biological makeup, our genetic blueprints, and our biometrics (facial characteristics and structure, fingerprints, iris scans, etc.)—in order to navigate an increasingly technologically-enabled world.
Those intimate details, in turn, have become the building blocks of massive databases accessed by the government and its corporate partners in crime, vulnerable to data breaches by hackers, cyberattacks and espionage.
For years now, and with little real oversight or restrictions, the government has been compiling massive databases comprised of all manner of sensitive information on the citizenry.
Biographical information. Biometric information. Criminal backgrounds. Travel records.
There is not a single person in the U.S. who is not in some government database or another, and these databases are increasingly being shared between agencies, fusion centers, and the police.
The government has also, with little oversight and few guidelines, been adding to its massive trove of data on Americans by buying commercially available information (CAI) from third-party sources. As a report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence revealed:
“[Commercially purchased data] can reveal sensitive and intimate information about the personal attributes, private behavior, social connections, and speech of U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons. It can be misused to pry into private lives, ruin reputations, and cause emotional distress and threaten the safety of individuals. Even subject to appropriate controls, CAI can increase the power of the government’s ability to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations.”
In other words, this is the diabolically sneaky way in which the government is attempting to sidestep the Fourth Amendment, which requires that government agents have probable cause and a warrant before spying on Americans or searching and seizing their private property.
It’s bad enough that the government is building massive databases comprised of our personal information without our knowledge or consent, but then they get hacked and we suffer for it.
Earlier this year, for instance, several federal agencies, state governments and universities were targeted in a global cyberattack that compromised the sensitive data of millions of Americans.
Did that stop the government’s quest to keep building these databases which compromise our privacy and security? Of course not.
In fact, the government has also been selling our private information. According to Vice, Departments of Motor Vehicles in states around the country have been selling drivers’ personal information “to thousands of businesses, including private investigators who spy on people for a profit.”
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and the government has become a master at finding loopholes that allow it to exploit the citizenry.
Thus, although Congress passed the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act (DPPA) in 1994 to prevent the disclosure of personal information, it hasn’t stopped state DMVs from raking in millions by selling driver data (names, dates of birth, addresses, and the cars they own) to third parties.
This is just a small part of how the government buys and sells its citizens to the highest bidders.
The why is always the same: for profit and power, of course.
Welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism.
Have you shopped at Whole Foods? Tested out target practice at a gun range? Sipped coffee at Starbucks while surfing the web? Visited an abortion clinic? Watched FOX News or MSNBC? Played Candy Crush on your phone? Walked through a mall? Walked past a government building?
That’s all it takes for your data to be hoovered up, sold and used to target you.
Incredibly, once you’ve been identified and tracked, data brokers can travel back in time, digitally speaking, to discover where you’ve been, who you’ve been with, what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been reading, viewing, buying, etc.
Once you’ve been identified in this way, you can be tracked endlessly.
No one is spared.
In this regard, we are all equals: equally suffering the indignity of having every shred of privacy stripped away and the most intimate details of one’s life turned into fodder for marketers and data profiteers.
This creepy new era of for-profit surveillance capitalism—in which we’re being listened to, watched, tracked, followed, mapped, bought, sold and targeted—is made possible with our cooperation.
All those disclaimers you scroll though without reading them, the ones written in minute font, only to quickly click on the “Agree” button at the end so you can get to the next step—downloading software, opening up a social media account, adding a new app to your phone or computer—those signify your written consent to having your activities monitored, recorded and shared.
Think about it.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to influence and/or control you.
With every smartphone we buy, every GPS device we install, every Twitter, Facebook, and Google account we open, every frequent buyer card we use for purchases—whether at the grocer’s, the yogurt shop, the airlines or the department store—and every credit and debit card we use to pay for our transactions, we’re helping Corporate America build a dossier for its government counterparts on who we know, what we think, how we spend our money, and how we spend our time.
The technology has advanced so far that marketers (political campaigns are among the worst offenders) can actually build “digital fences” around your homes, workplaces, friends and family’s homes and other places you visit in order to bombard you with specially crafted messages aimed at achieving a particular outcome.
If anyone else stalked us in this way—tailing us wherever we go, tapping into our calls, reading our correspondence, ferreting out our secrets, profiling and targeting us based on our interests and activities—we’d call the cops.
Unfortunately, the cops (equipped with Stingray devices and other Peeping Tom technologies) are also in on this particular scam.
It’s not just the surveillance and the buying and selling of your data that is worrisome.
The ramifications of a government—any government—having this much unregulated, unaccountable power to target, track, round up and detain its citizens is beyond chilling.
Imagine what a totalitarian regime such as Nazi Germany could have done with this kind of unadulterated power.
Imagine what the next police state to follow in Germany’s footsteps will do with this kind of power. Society is definitely rapidly moving in that direction.
We’ve made it so easy for the government to stalk us.
Government eyes see your every move: what you read, how much you spend, where you go, with whom you interact, when you wake up in the morning, what you’re watching on television and reading on the internet.
Every move you make is being monitored, mined for data, crunched, and tabulated in order to form a picture of who you are, what makes you tick, and how best to control you when and if it becomes necessary to bring you in line.
Chances are, as the Washington Post has reported, you have already been assigned a color-coded threat assessment score—green, yellow or red—so police are forewarned about your potential inclination to be a troublemaker depending on whether you’ve had a career in the military, posted a comment perceived as threatening on Facebook, suffer from a particular medical condition, or know someone who knows someone who might have committed a crime.
In other words, you might already be flagged as potentially anti-government in a government database somewhere—Main Core, for example—that identifies and tracks individuals (so they can be rounded up and detained in times of distress) who aren’t inclined to march in lockstep to the police state’s dictates.
The government has the know-how.
As The Intercept reported, the FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are increasingly investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies that can mine constitutionally protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to identify potential extremists and predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.
Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people—weapons of compliance and control in the government’s hands, especially when the government can listen in on your phone calls, monitor your driving habits, track your movements, scrutinize your purchases and peer through the walls of your home—add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence.
This is the creepy, calculating yet diabolical genius of the American police state: the very technology we hailed as revolutionary and liberating has become our prison, jailer, probation officer, stalker, Big Brother and Father Knows Best all rolled into one.
It turns out that we are Soylent Green.
The 1973 film of the same name, starring Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson, is set in 2022 in an overpopulated, polluted, starving New York City whose inhabitants depend on synthetic foods manufactured by the Soylent Corporation for survival.
Heston plays a policeman investigating a murder, who discovers the grisly truth about the primary ingredient in the wafer, soylent green, which is the principal source of nourishment for a starved population. “It’s people. Soylent Green is made out of people,” declares Heston’s character. “They’re making our food out of people. Next thing they’ll be breeding us like cattle for food.”
Oh, how right he was.
Soylent Green is indeed people or, in our case, Soylent Green is our own personal data, repossessed, repackaged and used by corporations and the government to entrap us.
We, too, are being bred like cattle but not for food.
Rather, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, we’re being bred, branded, bought and sold for our data.
As the insidious partnership between the U.S. government and Corporate America grows more invasive and more subtle with every passing day, there’s virtually no way to opt out of these assaults on your digital privacy short of being a modern-day Luddite, completely disconnected from all technology.
What we desperately lack and urgently need is an Electronic Bill of Rights that protects “we the people” from predatory surveillance and data-mining business practices.
Without constitutional protections in place to guard against encroachments on our rights in the electronic realm, it won’t be long before we find ourselves, much like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Soylent Green, looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
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And the cure is resistance, beginning with remembering and asserting our humanity::
Thanksgiving Gathering
An Excerpt from my New Book: Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/thanksgiving-gathering?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=676930&post_id=138844548&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=9atnc&utm_medium=email
In November 2022, I traveled to Florida, to do research for a new book. I stayed in a hotel for almost a week, in a modest, touristy town, a few miles from the beach.
We were able to be in Florida at that time because for the second year, we had not been invited to Thanksgiving celebrations with our relatives.
Two years in, I had stopped hoping that we would be, and my pain had scarred over into angry dismissiveness; and anger at myself that I still wanted so badly to rejoin my people, my nearest ones.
I tried not to think about this at all. It never did not hurt.
For anyone who may have forgotten, Florida and New York were, at that time, essentially different countries. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was giving press conferences showcasing the fact that he had not closed down local businesses, and that his economy was thriving. Public health in Florida, as he pointed out, was about the same as in lockdown states. But New York governor Kathy Hochul, on the other hand, was persevering with policies that shocked even some diehard lockdown militants. She sought to create quarantine camps, and when a judge objected and struck down her bid, she appealed. And she insisted on keeping schools and businesses compliant with disabling mRNA injection mandates and with forced COVID measures.
Every day, when I was in the hotel in the friendly, little, whimsically tacky beach town, from the moment I opened my eyes till the moment I settled into my cool hotel sheets, my heart exulted with indescribable happiness.
You know those dreams in which a loved one who is dead appears to you, in full youth and health and vigor? You say to that person, in the dream, with tears of joy streaming down your cheeks, Oh my God—you are not dead! But then you wake up, and that person is still dead.
It was that dream.
But for a nation.
In Florida I was in a delirium of happiness mixed with nostalgia mixed with grief—because it felt like America.
That is, it felt the way I remember America to have felt, pre-2020.
The malls, the cookie-cutter townhouse developments, the chain stores and auto body shops, churches and sports bars, were the same as they were anywhere in the country.
But the people were entirely different. The culture was entirely different.
Everywhere I went I saw people who were—proud, and confident, and relaxed.
It did not matter who they were, or from where they had come. This was a universal birthright, it seemed, in that part of America.
The very young bartender/busboy, who had recently immigrated from Thailand, was proud, confident, and relaxed. The multigenerational family reunion groups, families who had lived for generations in the region, were proud, confident, and relaxed. The suburban moms walking to their vans in the mall parking lot, were proud, confident, and relaxed. My Uber driver, a former special operator whose wife had opened a Filipino food truck in the downtown area, was proud, confident, and relaxed. The pretty forty-something bartender with one side of her head shaved and with a flowering vine tattooed down one arm, who showed me pictures of her two adult sons—one, she explained, who had autism—the young men standing on either side of their mom, hugging her tight, and all of them grinning; she, too, was proud, confident, and relaxed.
And so on. African American, Caucasian, Latino, whatever, male, female, aged, and young; this was a quality that united everyone.
There was a big, colorful sign—a piece of public art—in the little green park flanking the mall. People stood in front of it to take photos for Instagram.
It read, “You Are Deeply Loved.”
Once, when I was walking back to my hotel, I passed a small group of people—three or four of them—with their arms around each other, heads bowed, in a huddle. Colleagues? Friends? A family?
I realized that they were unselfconsciously, publicly, praying.
The pride in themselves, and the calm sense of security of people everywhere around me, simply being who they were, and gladly, openly, showing others who they were, really struck me.
I remembered this quality from the Before Era, as being generally true of Americans.
It was this once-American quality that had formerly so fascinated the rest of the world—the broken, fearful, inhibited rest of the world.
Whether it was the admiration in ravaged 1950s Europe of the proud, relaxed gunslinger John Wayne, or the French marveling in the 1960s at the unabashedly goofy Jerry Lewis, or the appreciation worldwide in the 1970s of beat poet Allen Ginsberg sharing his wild free verse with rapt college audiences while seated on a meditation pillow, Americans were once magnetically attractive because we were once so proud—of ourselves, our speech, our liberties—in a nation in which our individuality was protected by an intact Constitution.
We were relaxed, compared to other peoples, because our rights were inviolable.
The lure of America was not that “the streets were paved with gold” or that one could make a fortune in a generation, though that was attractive, no doubt, to many; the true magnetism of Americans was that we acted like free people.
It was that charismatic quality that everyone still had in Florida, and that had been lost—dramatically in some cases and imperceptibly in others—in the lockdown and mandate states. I did not realize how bad it felt in New York State day by day, till I left it.
Because people in Florida felt relaxed, proud, and confident, and because they had never been held indoors against their will, told where to stand, stripped of their holidays, or forced into submitting to poisonous unchosen injections, there was a rhythm to social life there still. People from all walks of life chatted away with one another; the lady who wrapped up the sandals I bought chatted away with me, she chatted with all who came in; the chiropractor I visited chatted away with his customers; the salad shop workers chatted with the people who dropped off the bagels; the lady moving her grocery cart around me made a jolly, friendly remark. All this complexity took place in a peaceful, almost measurable rhythm.
When social scientists have done stop-motion videos of people moving around a city intersection, they prove that humans move in a perceptible rhythm; by the same token, newborns sync their breathing and nervous systems with their moms’ and vice versa, and happy couples’ respiration and even heartbeats align when they sit near one another.
Whole communities unconsciously align with one another in creating complex rhythms.
READ REST:
https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/thanksgiving-gathering?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=676930&post_id=138844548&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=9atnc&utm_medium=email
RESISTANCE IS NOT FUTILE.
IT IS ESSENTIAL.
“beat poet Allen Ginsberg” You lost me there
Never had you in the first place.
Luckily, most aren’t as easily distracted as you, Mr. Perfect. You’d burn a house down to kill a mosquito on it.
Fuck off, misdirection agent.
Any witless fool on earth who still thinks their government
has their interests in mind deserves the pock marked wall they
will be stood against and shot full of holes.
Your government wants you enslaved or dead.
The LAST thing they want is your interests.
Ammo up and be prepared to go to battle.
This evil cannot be voted away.
James Madison and George Mason saw to it we can fix this.
The rest of the English speaking peoples have surrendered\any chance they had to stop Leviathan by giving up their guns.
Jerry Lewis, the Thai busboy, the Filipino food truck operator, the 40-something presumably white bartender-ess mother with a half-shaved head and tats down her arm…etc, black, Latino, Caucasion …everyone so happy. proud, relaxed, confident…the wonderful Florida culture etc etc.
A bit much. IIRC Desanits won his first gubernatorial election by a very slim margin over a 30-something black gay opponent.
I love Naomi’s writing. Just beautiful. I read it earlier On Lew Rockwell.
Stopped geting spam calls/emails/snailmail when I ended my driver license contract.
That’s correct. Retired now from a legal firm, people who have permenent revocations or cancellations of drivers licenses do NOT get targeted *anything* due to the “record” and financial “ratings”. Yes, courts ROUTINELY reset credit scores, it’s a silver lining in a lot of cases, long term.
Speaking of snitches………………remember this !
Be very careful what you say around democrats this Thanksgiving.
Family-friend………it doesnt matter…………ALL democrats are pathological snitches.
Never confide in them and always have a plan to kill everyone of them in your sphere.
Yikes.
US government = criminals and cowards.
Including infants:
.
Surely fedgov has the general welfare in mind here, as ever.
/s
Pfizer and the usual eugenicist suspects likely have access to it.
Umm no. I don’t believe that. BUT you do vote them in over and over for some reason or another for your own demise and even when we found out they STEAL the offices you still won’t get them out. If you can tell me why, maybe we can have this thing figured out about your LOVE for GODvernment.
It is horrific and outrageous, but, until there are fist to cuffs…it just is…imho
Oh, so you’re new to the game?
Welcome to the system, chump .
Peace, L.