The content argues that a pervasive and deeply integrated surveillance infrastructure, built through a public-private partnership between government agencies and tech companies, has eroded privacy and offers no demonstrable increase in security, instead serving the interests of surveillance capitalism.
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channel okay so there's a building in
Tribeca that we think is an NSA base of
operations let's see how many cameras we
there now there are about 15,000 cameras
in New York and by best estimates you'll
pass about 100 publicly accessible ones
just to get to lower Manhattan here's a
map and you know what here's two random
blocks in Bushwick again 15,000 cameras
15,000 cameras that by some estimates
can identify you from over two blocks
away they're pretty much everywhere and
if cops have access to them you can bet
they'll be combined with automated
facial recognition software just between
2017 and 2021 the NYPD used facial
recognition Tech in
22,000 cases including to track down BLM
protesters back in 2020 that's because
this software according to the intercept
can automatically tag activities like
loitering no chance that's ever
problematic and automatically index
things like People's race and gender
nothing to worry about there either but
cameras are just one part of the Arsenal
of surveillance tools that cops have at
their disposal since they've become much
more common cops have repurposed body
cams for for everyday surveillance sent
out drones to film protests use special
automated license plate readers all over
the city set up fake cell towers to
collect phone call data and a lot more
to keep track of where people are who
they're talking to and what they do at
all times and they're not the only ones
regular apps on your phone have found
crazy ways to track you too a few years
ago a French app for finding hotels and
restaurants was found by the Yale
privacy lab to track its user location
not with the GPS on your phone mind you
but by having speakers in public
locations make a sound that humans can't
hear but our phones can pick up and that
pales in comparison with the mountains
of data companies like Google Facebook
and Amazon have on us Google stores your
search history indefinitely even in
Incognito but even when you're not using
the search function Google tracking
infrastructure is on 92 of the top 100
websites and 923 of the top 1,000 with
how much Google owns or can access
through the websites it has a back door
for the company has data on everything
from your location to your address email
and name all the links you click on how
long you spend on any one page what you
buy and who you talk to and since the
Snowden leaks we know that all that info
can get fed Upstream to surveillance
agencies like the FBI and NSA through
programs like prism boundless informant
and X key score the NSA Taps Microsoft
Google Facebook and Apple servers to
search through emails online messages
and browsing history and if that's not
enough these same programs allow the NSA
to use AT&T and Verizon's records to
collect the time location and people
involved in a phone call for millions of
Americans without any need for prior
authorization just to give you an idea
according to the Brennan Center the FBI
conducted 3.4 million warrantless
searches on Americans phone calls emails
and text messages in 2021 using a law
that on paper can only be used to spy on
foreigners overseas which is already
problematic this is a lot and there's
way more but we'll get to that in a
minute because first I want to know how
we got here the amount of surveillance
we can be subjected to at a moment's
notice is truly dystopian most of us
would rather not think about the public
private partnership between the Police
federal agencies and tech companies
built on collecting millions of hard
drives worth of personal data how did this
this [Music]
[Music]
happen our story starts here in Silicon
Valley here on Sand Hill Road is where
in 1999 the CIA backed the private
nonprofit Venture Capital firm inel
initially inel was a pretty unimportant
little office meant to keep an eye on
Silicon Valley fund a few things here
and there and see if tech companies were
coming up with anything useful for the
intelligence Community an experiment
meant to Last 5 Years nothing more just
down the road about a 20-minute drive
away and less than a year before Google
launched their own little company out of
a garage a search engine meant to
compete with the likes of Yahoo and
altav Vista and for a while neither of
these companies mattered very much
Google was a fledgling company just one
search engine of many and inel was
proving to be somewhat of a failed CIA
experiment a 5-year project that hadn't
really done much of anything neither was
this a great time for Advocates of more
surveillance the scale of the internet
was steadily growing in the late '90s
and Americans started feeling that this
might threaten their privacy so after
years of letting internet companies
self-regulate in 2000 the government
started moving Robert psky the FTC
chairman was in the New York Times
boldly coming after.com companies and
saying e-commerce threatened to intrude
on people's personal lives and
legislation was drafted to protect what
people did on the internet it required
companies to limit what personal details
they could collect as well as make it
clear what they were collecting how it
was used and give people the option to
correct it or delete it entirely so
basically everything Google Amazon and
Facebook do now would have either become
illegal or subjected to a lot of public
scrutiny with the law on the side of
Internet users to give you an idea in
the fall of 2000 the Clinton
Administration wanted to raise the legal
requirement before law enforcement could
access emails and was actually
criticized by Republicans for not doing
enough to protect
privacy and then everything changed after
after
9/11 okay let's go backwards from where
we just ended first the
legislation 45 days after 9/11 Congress
passed the Patriot Act pretty much
overnight all those concerns about
privacy went out the window a state of
emergency was declared and terrorism
became the main mainstream diet of
American Media consumption this neatly
paved the way for the Patriot Act and
the barrage of policies that followed
which all made it much easier for the
government to monitor phone calls and
emails collect Banking and credit
records and keep a closer and closer eye
on what Americans do online through what
are called national security letters for
example the FBI could obtain all sorts
of personal information about Americans
without the approval of a judge they
could hold on to it indefinitely and
prevent those who have been tapped from
even talking about it assuming they ever
found out second Google all those FTC
regulations went out the window too
internet companies had started getting
reasonably worried that the world wild
west and their cattle baren status
within it wasn't going to survive the
anti-surveillance FTC and the American
public's reasonable fear of mass
invasions of privacy after 9/11 though
every regulatory project that could have
threatened them was immediately canned
third in inel after 2001 gone were the
days of the temporary little CIA
experiment in Silicon Valley with 9/11
inel became a permanent fixture in
California and suddenly got a lot of
interest from Valley startups looking to
trade the surveillance Tech they had
developed and the data which they were
suddenly completely justified in
collecting legally speaking for
government cash and in the next decade
no one took greater advantage of that
than Google in late summer 2003 Google
scored a 2 million gig to set up Google
search technology at the NSA and
separately customized software for the
CIA then the next year Google deepened
The Connection by acquiring another CIA
inq fund Adventure called Keyhole a
satellite mapping company that would
become Google Earth in 2007 Google's
Peter norvig gave a presentation at the
pentagon's Highlands Forum an incubator
for SV companies that the intelligence
Community tapped for surveillance ideas
and in 2009 Google took things even
further joining forces with the cia's
inel again to fund a startup called
recorded future that monitored quote
every aspect of the web in real time in
order to predict future events all the
while top people are of course rotating
back and forth between these
intelligence agencies and Google point
is after 911 Google and the intelligence
Community kickstarted a process of
codependent growth if things looked a
little dicey for them in the '90s a
combin ation of close personal
relationships and quote direct
sponsorship and informal networks of
financial influence pushed Google
further and further down the path of
surveillance technology at precisely the
same time as the legal infrastructure
meant to protect privacy was dismantled
relationship intelligence agencies
needed surveillance capitalist companies
and they needed the intelligence
community's financial and institutional
support for companies getting cozy with
intelligence agencies protects their
ability to burrow ever more deeply into
our private data so long as cops can get
warrantless access to ring footage for
example Amazon can feel pretty confident
in its ability to develop what is
essentially become the largest corporate
aggregated network of CCTV cameras on
Earth and if this wasn't clear enough
they've even gone so far as to lay out a
four-part plan specifically for police
departments to follow so they can
increase the number of people in a
neighborhood who will get a ring camera
then on the other side of the
relationship intelligence agencies and
police forces are deeply dependent on
these companies no intelligence agency
can compete with the amount of
information a private company can
collect and store the NSA can't convince
anyone to willingly put a GPS tracker in
their pocket at all times the way Google
can there's another benefit for
intelligence agencies and police
departments though despite the Patriot
Act and the Avalanche of anti-privacy
laws that sailed through Congress after
911 the Constitution still makes it at
least a little difficult for government
agencies to spy on Americans not
impossible but either too slow or not
quite unlimited enough for the likes of
the NSA thankfully for the intelligence
Community there's a loophole to quote
legal scholar Jack Balan because the
Constitution does not reach private
parties government has increasing
incentives to rely on private Enterprise
to collect and generate information for
it in other words by Contracting out
both the labor of developing
surveillance technology and carrying out
the actual work of data collection then
simply partnering with tech companies to
parse that information surveillance can
be as comprehensive and immediate as the
NSA wants without having to contend with
what few legal protections limit
government spying on citizens and this
all perfectly coincided with some
internal developments at Google that
would supercharge this data collection
even further take a look at
this patent in 2005 Google filed a
patent for what it called generating
user information for use in targeted
advertising there's a lot of diagrams in
there that frankly don't make it any
easier to understand what they're
actually patenting but that's not what
really matters what you need to know is
the story behind this patent that for
years and years Google was struggling
they had raised tons of money from
investors and established a pretty
dominant place in the search engine
market now they just needed to figure
out how to actually generate Revenue
doing that Google knew they couldn't
really charge people a fee without
killing the business nor could they
start selling search results that they
had aggregated for free and without
prior consent from website owners so up
to that point Google was making do
running just a few ads related to what
you searched and providing web services
for bigger names like Yahoo nothing
terribly lucrative and when the crash
hit in 2000 investors realized this
wasn't going to make enough money to
justify taking a risk on the brand new
commercial internet they needed
something else it all clicked in April
of 2001 just 5 months before 9/11 Amit
Patel one of the first people to work at
Google found out that every time someone
ran a search through the engine Google
happened to collect information on that
search like quote the number and pattern
of Search terms how Aquarius phrased
spelling punctuation dwell times click
patterns and location data that up to
that point Google didn't really have any
use for and was just sitting in some
server somewhere what Patel and Google's
founder Larry Page realized in April
though is that all this information
could not only be used to improve
Google's public facing service the
search engine but could be of huge
interest to the much more profitable
advertising backend with all this data
at their fingertips Google realized that
they could not only know a lot more
about what people did on the internet
but actively predict and therefore guide
their behavior too making detailed
behavioral profiles that made them
incredibly attractive to a whole new
class of advertisers and financial
institutions desperate to understand and
find new profit opportunities in
people's behavior over the next few
years then Google went from accidentally
stumbling across this extra data to
reorienting its entire project around
acquiring more of it from every possible
Source not just their search engine
faster and in more granular detail than
any of its competitors and crucially
before regulation could catch up and at
the exact same time that 911 brought out
the intelligence community support and
money for massive data mining projects
that same year Larry Page made this new
Direction pretty explicit when asked
what Google was after it discovered all
this behavioral data Paige didn't just
say a search engine he said quote if we
did have a category it would be personal
information communic ations sensors are
really cheap storage is cheap cameras
are cheap people will generate enormous
amounts of data everything you've ever
heard or seen or experienced will become
searchable 20 years ago that probably
seemed impossible today that project has
become a reality now we all know that
Google sells algorithm generated results
results trained on our data to
advertisers but advertising is really
just the tip of the iceberg for example
financial institutions and their Tech
startups have recently started to use
the wave of big data that Google
Unleashed to assign things like
creditworthiness to people on scarily
specific data data like how often you
charge your phone your decision to add
last names to contacts or not what time
of day you make phone calls how many
miles you drive a day and if you send
more text than you receive based on on
this information these companies
calculate with more and more certainty
the risk of lending associated with
individual borrowers and sell that
certainty at a premium with the cost for
a loan going up for consumers the
algorithm has decided can't be trusted
because they save their contacts
wrong but anyway at at this point I
probably need to address something
that's been bothering some of you since
the beginning of this video most of us
already knew a lot of this stuff it's
scary it's dystopian and we don't often
actually think about just how much
companies police forces and intelligence
agencies know about us but we all knew
it was a lot we've seen the needle move
a little bit after Snowden but it's not
like any of this has really stopped so
for years now these tech companies have
told us that this is just the way it has
to be if we want to use their products
for free we have to accept that this
invasion of privacy is the trade-off and
we can trust them that it won't be used
problematically they won't be evil after
all it's that old saying if it's free
then you're the product but that's just
not true it's actually worse we're not
the product for these companies we're
the raw material they're not selling us
to advertisers and credit companies
they're selling the prediction models
they've built using our information as
fuel but it's not like these companies
don't have a choice when Google was
coming up other search engines like the
long gone Overture and inktomi made
money in other ways that still gave us a
free product either collecting revenues
from the pages they indexed or promoting
advertisers pages in the search results
the reason Google made it big isn't
because its mass collection and
re-engineering of our personal data was
the only way to make the service free
it's because it's the most profitable
way to make money when the state is
there to protect and directly Finance
this total disregard for privacy if
anything ring doorbells have made this
point clearer for 50 bucks you add yet
another CCTV to your street and they
still collect massive amounts of
information that can at any point be
turned over to the cops without a
warrant the product isn't free it's not
really clear how much of your privacy
you're handing over or what you can do
to limit it but it's so normalized that
the tired line about if it's free you're
the product doesn't even matter anymore
but okay if it doesn't have to be this
way and the whole free thing is BS at
least all this surveillance makes us
safer right we traded in some of our
privacy sure but at least we get gained
insecurity except that's not true either
we have so much data that shows how
useless the global post 911 surveillance
regime has been a 2014 study with a
sample of 225 terrorist cases found that
the nsa's metadata collection quote had
no discernable impact on preventing acts
of terrorism a 2015 Rand Corporation
analysis of 176 terrorist plots found
that quote plots are most often foiled
through conventional law enforcement
activities and that intelligence efforts
only intervened in a small percentage of
cases Keith Alexander former Chief of
the NSA famously claimed that his agency
had foiled 54 terrorist plots thanks to
the massive amount of data they
collected on Americans after the Patriot
Act then when he was pressed about it
under oath Alexander would only admit
that the NSA surveillance had played an
important role in one instance a case of
a cab driver sending 8500 bucks to
al-shabab surveillance doesn't make us
safe it isn't a trade-off we have to
accept for free products it is one thing
and one thing only an infection the
outcome of an insatiable surveillance
capitalism that took advantage of a
momentary weakness in our immune system
a little Gap in our Collective concern
for the importance of our personal
privacy to settle in and spread and now
that it's here police forces
intelligence agencies and private
corporations all collaborate to increase
its scope no protest is safe from being
tracked by Google's location services or
police drones Walmart calls the FBI at
the drop of a hat when its union workers
start striking tech companies can use
the weather app on your phone to track
when you attend an abortion clinic and
then sell that data to the CDC or anyone
with the cash to doxs people getting a
private medical procedure and with all
these systems in place to track all this
information the truth is that it doesn't
matter if you're actually being watched
or you think you have nothing to hide
the fact that the infrastructure is here
and the threat that it could be turned
on to you at any moment for any reason
is horrifying enough in this neoliberal
dystopia where financial institutions
are desperately looking for more
certainty about the future where
companies evade more and more regulation
that would protect the public and where
governments strip the budgets of every
institution but the Pentagon and the
police there's absolutely no reason for
anyone in power to stop this it's
already impossible to avoid this
invasion of privacy there's not going to
be a market solution to shutting down
this perfect Coalition of interests
between the institutions of the state
and those of capital but the thing is we
need privacy we need it to feel safe and
comfortable in our own homes we need
privacy to be able to organize voice our
discontent and challenge the entrenched
power of the ruling class without it
there's no possibility for change when
you've got Tech and intelligence groups
watching you shop listening to your
calls reading your private messages
actively trying to develop a real life
future crime division there's no safe
way to exist and engage with Society
even if right now your data is just
being used to sell you a more tailored
product realize that it could be used
for a lot more think about that the next
time you do anything online or through
text or under the watchful eye of the security
security [Music]
[Music]
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