How likely is such science fiction to become a reality? And should Americans be concerned about the likely growth of a surveillance state that could threaten freedom and privacy? For many Americans, the 2016 election reignited anxieties about the possibility of government surveillance; these anxieties haven’t abated, fueled as they are by conspiracy theories online and Donald Trump’s many outraged tweets about the supposed “wiretapping” of Trump Tower. Stories about wiretaps, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act procedures, and other forms of government-sponsored snooping are now constant features of our 24/7 news cycle, as Special Counsel Robert Mueller continues to investigate Russian meddling in U.S. elections. No wonder people are feeling slightly paranoid.
After all, you need not reach the highest office in the land to be a potential target of government surveillance. Local law enforcement agencies in the U.S. have for years monitored citizens using sophisticated technology such as Stingray cell phone tower simulators, which are used to track down suspects without getting a warrant, often gathering the data of thousands of innocent Americans in the process. As the privacy watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation has noted, Stingrays “allow the police to conduct indiscriminate, dragnet searches – in some cases on up to 10,000 phones at one time. They are also able to locate people inside traditionally-protected private spaces like homes, doctors’ offices, or places of worship and can be configured to capture the content of communications.” In some countries, ubiquitous surveillance is already a reality. As Anna Mitchell and Larry Diamond recently described in The Atlantic , China is “racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance.” Using a combination of cameras, data mining, and artificial intelligence, Chinese government officials are constructing individual profiles of the country’s citizens, ostensibly to protect against terrorism or crime. The Chinese are innovative about the potential uses of these profiles once they are gathered. Officials are creating “citizen scores,” crafted using information they have gathered about what people buy, how they behave in public, or whether or not they have unpaid parking tickets. Why? The promise of such scoring, according to The Atlantic, is to encourage good behavior by rigorously ranking citizens:
By Christine Rosen
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American Consequences 55
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