Big Data and Big Brother

It’s a project for a “global surveillance network” of colossal, Orwellian ambition that provides government access to the totality of the data contained in the computers of its citizens, data that millions of users are providing “voluntarily” every day as digital information. The information is stored, waiting to be screened by analysis algorithms to which the government reserves the rights. Big Brother Obama and Verizon are in essence mining data, the daily practice of Google, Amazon, Apple and other digital-commercial conglomerates of the Silicon Valley — and not surprisingly when you think that the administration has built two successful election campaigns on databases of votes and has implemented massive exploitation of Big Data for its gain. The shock for Obama’s political base was that this government, while apparently more progressive, has continued to increase the drastic surveillance measures of Bush’s Patriot Act. It is under Obama that all the branching consequences of Sept. 11 syndrome are becoming explicit with their deadly effects on democracy, currently being replaced by secret policies and wars — and now secret surveillance under the nominal authority of federal courts that are themselves secret.

In this instance, it was the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that approved the National Security Agency initiative — a supposedly democratic legitimization, but which instead is added to the unsettling list of secret organs located in the nerve centers of the U.S. security apparatus, from the secret selection of drone targets to the tribunals at Guantanamo to what’s taking place these days at the trial of Bradley Manning. Data mining, the new gospel of the Silicon Valley, and the NSA operation are precisely the adjustment of government to the macro trends of the market. Coincidentally, right in the “digital capital” of San Jose, Obama, visiting California yesterday, countered with incredible ease that, “You can’t have 100-percent security and also have 100-percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”

His subsequent clarification that the surveillance is not meant for U.S. citizens but only foreigners served to alienate the rest of the planet. The justification is the same old defense of the “terrorist threat,” but, by its very nature, data mining is better able to detect mass trends, for example a surge of tweets during a demonstration or occupation of a square, than the individual telephone call of a freelance terrorist in Boston. With this mining they are making it possible to control dissent, using the dark underside of the social networks so often praised as tools of protest. Throughout the whole thing, the task still remains of ascertaining the roles of the companies from which the data were obtained, to clarify whether they were victims or active collaborators in surveillance. After all, the sharing of data could represent a convergence of interest between Washington and the commercial “miners” of information, the digital version of the frequent collaborations of the past between the government and American multinationals — this time with the collaboration of our own monitored selves, who have all been encouraged to upload our personal information onto their servers. The computer monopolies of Silicon Valley have every interest in having good relationships with the government, most of all at this moment when they are playing big games for global control of the computer industry and intellectual property, topics which just happen to be on the agenda of the upcoming meetings between Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping in Palm Springs.